Control standards and initiatives, was ALL: An (open) announcement

  • Thread starter Matthew da Silva
  • Start date
M
Please allow me to point out the correct URL for the Embedded Linux Consortium, which was incorrectly listed in this exchange. We are very new, so LinuxPLC and Automation List subscribers may want to take a look:

http://www.embedded-linux.org/

Thanks,

Murry Shohat
Executive Director
Embedded Linux Consortium
 
R
It is not a mistake, www.linux-embedded.org is a real site that has been around for a couple of years, and is not so much of an organisation but a goodie bag plus lots of links. I think both sites are of interest, as are the other sites
that are linked to.

>
> Please allow me to point out the correct URL for the Embedded Linux Consortium,
> which was incorrectly listed in this exchange. We are very new, so LinuxPLC and
> Automation List subscribers may want to take a look:
>
> http://www.embedded-linux.org/
>

> > > For links, you may like to start looking at http://www.linux-embedded.org
> > ...<clip>
 
R

Robert Raesemann

The reinstall it thing is mostly a result of intellectual laziness. I doubt that people who take that approach would be very successful with Linux or any other OS, no matter how open it is. For the most part, these people don't know what they are doing and don't bother to try to learn when they encounter a problem. It is much easier to reinstall and hope the problem goes away. The scary thing is that a lot of these folks think that they are hot stuff and have no idea the depth of their incompetence (as I often put
it: They don't have a clue and they don't realize that they don't have a clue so they aren't even looking for one). Everyone that I have ever met who is really good at anything has a healthy respect for the subject and a good idea that there are still many things that they do not know. They are essentially lifetime students.

Your mileage can very greatly when you deal with MCSE's. It is far too easy for someone to memorize the plug and chug procedures and buzzwords and get an MCSE. There are a lot of very knowledgeable folks out there with the
certification but there also seem to be a lot of boneheads. The MS tests are geared toward book knowledge and don't really require a great deal of
practical experience. There are a lot of folks with very little computer background who sign up for the crash certification courses and get the
certification in a few months with very little prior computer experience. I definitely don't consider someone with an MCSE to be a knowledgeable guru from the start. The certification just means that they have enough of the basic knowledge to become good if they apply themselves for a few years.

Microsoft needs to introduce a more tiered structure for their certifications. I would consider the Cisco approach to certification.
There are the basic certifications that let you know that someone has gotten started with the learning process and has the aptitude and background to do the basic job. This progresses all the way up to the CCIE certification. My neighbor has just passed the written part of the exam and is studying for the lab exam before he is finally certified. He already has years of
network experience, studies very hard, and has a genuine passion for his work. He is a lifetime student and loves to learn and deepen his
understanding. He still finds it very challenging to obtain the certification and is really sweating the final lab exam which has a very low first try pass rate (I hear about 15-20% at $1000/try and there are limits to how many tries you get). If someone has their CCIE, they generally really know their stuff and have a great deal of background and practical experience. This is where MS needs to head.

I think that generally the cost of admission is very low in NT. It does not take a great deal of time or discipline to get up to speed on the basics. I can teach someone to install NT and put it on a network in an afternoon. As a result there are a lot of "experts" out there. Contrast this to Unix which tends to take a good deal of study and tenacity to get up to speed on.
I think that in general, many of the meatheads and intellectually lazy folks never get past the first couple of hurdles.

I would agree that in general the quality of documentation for NT and MS OS's tends to be very low. There are a lot of the "for dummies" kind of
books out there but I have really had to dig to find the technical details needed to solve some of the more challenging problems. The information is out there if you look for it though. I don't think that you can pick up a
few examples and conclude that there isn't anything out there. Using NT in an enterprise environment is very complicated and there is a lot to learn. I would say though that someone with a healthy respect for the task and the
right attitudes toward learning and methodically organizing and administering their systems can successfully deploy reliable NT systems. I
have systems running for months without problems. I say months because in the environment the machines run there seems to be a lot of network upgrades, UPS upgrades, breaker tests, shutdowns when hurricanes are coming,
and everything else imaginable to prevent the machines from running longer. I am able to rival the up times of the HP-UX boxes which makes me pretty happy and it gets the job done. I have picked high quality hardware and use redundant power supplies, hard drives, and a lot of the other techniques that the Unix systems use. I would not say(and so would the users) that
availability in no way limits the usefulness of the systems.

NT still has a long way to go and I would definitely like to see things opened up as a result of the recent court rulings. MS has gotten away with closed systems for far too long and it is holding everybody back now. I would like to see the source code made available. Unix has a long way to go also. The kinds of systems that we are building today simply didn't exist a
few years ago. Everyone is struggling to keep up. I would say that people with the right "can do" attitudes, intellectual curiousity, and the proper discipline are the most important part of the equation. I see that a lot of the people who are slamming NT have put a lot of time and effort into learning Unix but have not made a similar investment in NT. It seems like they get mad when they can't just go to an NT system and be a proficient as they are in Unix. They are two different animals and knowledge of one does not necessarily pay dividends in the other.


On Wed, 03 May 2000, "root" wrote:

> > If your team is trained in Unix, POSIX-like, C, and that tool-set, you
> > will probably have better up-time with Linux and QNX.
> >
> > Teams composed of MSCE, MS-DBA, and MSCD (Microsoft certification
> > designations), can achieve the same result with Windows-NT.

I can almost agree with this, in the sense that the expertise of the team counts for a lot. But I feel you cannot put them on equel terms because you can only go so far with NT. Just read MS certifaction matererial to find out why.....it is all:

To achieve this you do this......

The concept that one should actually know or understand the workings or logic behind it all is alien to the NT world, so when things do not go as per the book, you are left with the option of re-installing, trying different hardware configs etc. until something does work.

Let me give a recent pair of NT examples ...<clip>
 
B
Hello,

I'm in Jacksonville Florida. I have a customer who is having this exact same issue and received a &lt;very odd> workaround from tech support at either AOL or NEC and has had it work twice.

Now, however, we are unable to reproduce the fix. I was wondering if you (or anyone reading this) have managed a better solution.

I would be happy to share with you the solution she received.

Bud Alverson
MCP
Jacksonville FL
 
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