[ale] bout me company

[David Corbin]

Jeff, I agree with nearly all that you say here.  However, the odds are 
against you.  While there is this tremendous tendency toward 
"pay-for-training" in the Windows world, the biggest reason for this 
tendency is because for the most part, People are Stupid.  If they have 
to learn something, they want it spoon-fed to them.  I've been working 
in this industry for nearly 20 years, and for every bright and motivated 
techie I've met, I've met 20 that won't pick up a technical magazine, or 
book.  Nor will they spend their own time to install and play with 
software.  The vast majority of people treat Microsoft Word like 
Notepad, because they haven't been to a class on how to use it's 
"advanced features" like "styles".

Now, like somone else said, people that don't want to learn are in the 
wrong industry, but these people still get hired.  And companies even 
pay in excess of $1000 a day for them to learn about 2 hours worth of 
material to have them spoon fed.

Now, I admit that I have no proof that WinMan is part of this group, but 
the odds indicate it is likely even without have heard his attitude.

(Sorry, but these people really pull my strings)

Jeff Hubbs wrote:

> Stephen -
>
> You have an interesting opportunity here.  Your Win2K Manager (WinMan 
> for short) appears to have been conditioned to believe that OSses are 
> something you have to go to school to learn how to utilize.  The whole 
> of Windows World has been set up to encourage this sort of thinking. 
> Your WinMan might very well feel threatened by you and the things the 
> CFO said.  He would probably feel less threatened if he understood 
> that the kind of money-sucking "gatekeeper" system that has built 
> itself up around NT/2K/XP is not a core feature of the Linux world.  
> /Even if you decide to teach yourself Win2K/, there's the issue of 
> actually getting access to a legal copy.  You can probably get 
> time-limited or otherwise crippled 2K versions with training books 
> that are quite expensive, but to actually legally set up a 2K instance 
> will cost hundreds of dollars. Oh, yeah, and you can only do it on one 
> machine at a time, so if you want to legally set up a tabletop 
> enterprise operation to learn on - with more than one server and a 
> couple of workstations - you'd better have a lot of money to spend.
>
> Working for the Government as I did at the time I began working with 
> NT, I could buy a few NT licenses without a whole lot of hassle.  But, 
> in the two private-industry places I've worked, spending a few hundred 
> dollars on /anything/, no matter how justifiable, was a big deal. 
> Buying a handful of NT/2K licenses "to mess with" under those 
> circumstances would have been quite a hard sell.  With Linux, 
> "gatekeepers" are pretty much nonexistent.  It's a meritocracy; what 
> /you are able to figure out how to do/ is the overarching limiting 
> factor.  As I have become fond of saying, Linux rewards your time and 
> effort in pretty much direct proportion. 
> Your WinMan is going to regard you with a lot of turmoil and conflict. 
> If he went to someplace like Gwinnett Tech and took a lot of courses 
> having to do with Win2K, he invested a whole lot of time, money, and 
> effort into being able to support this one company's one operating 
> system.  If he sees you flying around trying to do magical things with 
> Linux, he's got two conclusions he can make:  either your work and 
> knowledge is illegitimate because you didn't come by it by way of a 
> gatekeeper the way he did, or he was foolish to have put all his eggs 
> in Bill's basket.  If it were me, I would tell him that it was 
> admirable and valid to have gone through the gatekeeper system and 
> that with the perspective that the industry works hard to enforce - 
> that you must go through the gatekeeper - one could hardly find fault 
> with taking such a path as opposed to some alternative.  I mean, pick 
> up a copy of / Computer User/ sometime and just look at the pages of 
> training ads.  How could a person look at that and NOT feel like, 
> well, this is what I must do to work with operating systems (my 
> excessive generalization here is deliberate).
>
> Once this guy realizes how low the barriers to entry are for Linux and 
> Open Source software, he might feel more encouraged.  Now, his 
> resistance is going to be greater if he has simply never worked with 
> any non-MS OS before because he won't have a broad enough context with 
> which to regard Linux.  I worked with VMS quite extensively for a 
> number of years before I first saw NT or Linux, so my initial regard 
> for both those OSses were shaped by my comfort with and understanding 
> of VMS.  In a lot of ways, I was seeing NT as an attempt to create 
> something like a VAX with a GUI running on Intel hardware.
>
> Hey, man, burn the guy some distro CDs (he'll probably flinch at the 
> idea of actually accepting them from you; Bill trains his grasshoppers 
> well)!
>
> - Jeff
>
>
>
> Stephen Turner wrote:
>
>> well i found out why the win2k network admin doesnt
>> like me much but the IT manager is my friend, the cfo
>> said the first thing since i been here that made
>> since, "linux is certainly the future" scares the crap
>> out of win2k manager cause hes the one that said "i
>> dont have time to go back to school to learn it." :)
>> looks like i might have a future here ;) no wonder the
>> cfo is friendly to me... well maybe its cause its his
>> job but, id like to think more ;)
>>
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