[rescue] Re: [geeks] THIS. MAKES. ME. SICK.

[David Cantrell]

Al Potter <apotter at icsa.net> wrote:

> <rant><flame>
> 
> > To be fair, there are numerous people who have had NT machines with that
> > sort of uptime.  It also is a miracle that those people weren't cracked,
> > what with running such an outdated OS and all.
> 
> I call Bull$hit!
> 
> Point them out.
> 
> If they've been up that long (two years), which I seriously doubt, they are 
> obviously not patched to the current service pack, thus aren't even close to 
> safe to use for "real" purposes.

There are still some machines not connected to the Big Bad Internet, you
know :-)  I had an NT box up at home for nine months once, and it only
went down then so I could add another disk.  My internet connection at
the time was sneakernet.

>                                                            I also have a 
> HARD time believing that an NT box which hasn't been patched for TWO YEARS, 
> hasn't memory leaked itself into BSOD land.

To be fair, that is, in my limited experience, usually the fault of
applications and third-party drivers rather than the OS itself.

> > I'm just saying that anyone who is familiar with Windows can set up an NT
> > workgroup server.  Before NT, you had to get a real admin in to set up the
> > new beast.  And workgroup servers don't really NEED 2 year uptimes, even
> > if it is something nice to brag about.
> 
> And this is crap too.

No, you can set one up without much knowledge.  It'll even work.  A bit.
Of course it won't be scalable and won't be secure, but that really doesn't
matter in some circumstances.

> But they seem to have caught on....  is anybody else sick of hearing the 
> Foobar Training Network's ads for "MCSEs make an average of $65k a year"?

I'd better not take an MCSE then - my salary would go down :-)

> NT "sold" well for file server use for a couple of reasons.  First, if you 
> beta'd it, they all but gave it to you.

Oh right, and how many small businesses were on the beta program?  As near
as damnit none.

> And $500 didn't buy very much RAM in the early 90s when this was going on.

So?  I've used a machine with only 20Mb as a small NT fileserver.  And
you know what?  When I left it alone to get on with just doing file
serving, performance was acceptable.  Of course, it blew goats whenever
I tried to do anything on the 'console', but that didn't matter.

-- 
David Cantrell | david at cantrell.org.uk | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david/

      Good advice is always certain to be ignored,
      but that's no reason not to give it            -- Agatha Christie