Linked by snydeq on Tue 8th Mar 2011 23:54 UTC
Grizzled Unix vet Paul Venezia tips his cap to the Windows Server crew, suggesting that the lessons of Unix history have not been lost on Microsoft -- and that's one reason why Windows Server has become so complex. 'The Windows Server of today has more in common with Unix than many people want to admit. The upside: more stable servers, greater scope of services, better adherence to standards, and Microsoft's newfound willingness to work with its competition. The downside is that Windows has become more complex than Unix from a management and administration point of view,' Venezia writes, even if he still sees some Windows admin practices as prime examples of how not to administer servers.
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Member since:2006-10-08
Well, we're talking about sysadmin, there.
If you have to poke around and click haphazardly to find out how to set up your server, you probably should stop immediatly.
If you have to poke around and click haphazardly to find out how to set up your server, you probably should stop immediatly.
"Trial & error" is not how a sysadmin should work. :-)
In relations to RTFM: UNIX administrators traditionally know certain terminology, they know how things are named, even if the name on system A differs from the name of system B. The same is true for locations of files, or even for maintenance procedures. It's their job to know them, and the differences.
In "Windows" land, you can't apply established terminology as MICROS~1 invented own words for things. Technical terms are standardizes even among totalls different operating systems. In "Windows", they are replaced by abstractions ("symbol for", "represents a", "is a picture of"). Procedures and locations chance with every release of "Windows", sometimes there is a "legacy way", sometimes not. The picture-centric interface emphasizes how things look like instead of what they are and therefore are called. A pictural search cannot be automated, like "dear computer, find me the icon with the blue ball and the upside-down letter 'i' on a yellow towel with a bunny next to it". The only search that works is the "pop-out phenomenon" that works by visual recognition - and has nothing to do with the cognitive concepts that make you remember and locate a certain word. Of course this pictural approach is a no-go for blind system administrators as they rely on information that is presented as text, either by synthetical voice output or Braille readouts.
A good sysadmin would follow the advice "think first, then act", so poking around with a stick in a pile of garbage simply looks wrong. :-)
Member since:2009-09-04
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Member since:
2007-10-11
Well, we're talking about sysadmin, there.
If you have to poke around and click haphazardly to find out how to set up your server, you probably should stop immediatly.
Administration of a server is exactly the kind of situation where you should RTFM. There is no doing it otherwise.
Edited 2011-03-09 13:57 UTC