Re: OT: short but sweet story

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It is a general rule around here that if you have probs with a Windows PC, reboot it first before calling for help. :-)

Ben Yau wrote:
Hey all

something entertaining for you guys... off topic. Hope no one minds.

While I still remain quite technologically agnostic (most of the time), I
still maintain that for most cases windows is better kept on the desktop and
out of the data center.

So there's a programmer here I joke around with.  He has a laptop and
desktop both running XP Pro and he's programming a java mail client to talk
to our redhat linux mail server port 25.  It stopped working this afternoon
(around 3pm) and around 4:30pm he asks me what we did to the mail server.
Short debugging shows that laptop and desktop both can ping the mail server.
Desktop gets a connection telnetting to port 25 on mail server.  Laptop
doesn't get the connection.

I'm confident the mail server is fine, we had no reason to touch it this
afternoon.

"Oh come on you guys changed something-..."

(At this time I was reading the SAMBA how-to collection with the nice quote
about Microsoft from Linus Torvalds so you can tell what kind of mindset I'm
in )  (P.S.  I will append the quote at the bottom. It's quite LONG but good
reading)


"Hey, isn't your laptop Windows?"


"Yeah."

"Reboot it."

"What? Come on."

"No seriously."

"Give me a legit reason."

"You're running on windows.. that's legit."

And I get to feeling a little daring.

"Come on, I'll give you even odds it'll be fixed when you reboot"

Moral of the story.. if you do want to make money, try to sucker them in
with better odds.  Like 3 to 1 or something. :)  Maybe that way they'll take
the bet.  Yes, for some reason it worked after rebooting.


Cheers- Ben Yau Here's the quote (it is in the SAMBA How-To Collection.pdf in chapter 1)

**

What's fundamentally wrong is that nobody ever had any taste when they has
been very much into making the user interface look good, but internally
complete mess. And even people who program for Microsoft and who have had
experience, just don't know how it works internally. Worse, nobody dares
change dares to fix bugs because it's such a mess that fixing one bug might
just programs that depend on that bug. And Microsoft isn't interested in
anyone they're interested in making money. They don't have anybody who takes
pride 95 as an operating system.

People inside Microsoft know it's a bad operating system and they still
continue working on it because they want to get the next version out because
they these new features to sell more copies of the system.

The problem with that is that over time, when you have this kind of
approach, nobody understands it, because nobody REALLY fixes bugs (other
than when obvious), the end result is really messy. You can't trust it
because under circumstances it just spontaneously reboots or just halts in
the middle of something strange. Normally it works fine and then once in a
blue moon for some completely reason, it's dead, and nobody knows why. Not
Microsoft, not the experienced certainly not the completely clueless user
who probably sits there shivering thinking I do wrong?" when they didn't do
anything wrong at all.

That's what's really irritating to me."
- Linus Torvalds, from an interview with BOOT Magazine, Sept 1998

**






-----------
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-- Samuel Adams, During the Massachusetts U.S. Constitution ratification convention, 1788


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