[H-GEN] Re: Unix vs NT [long; both informative and then religious]

[Raymond Smith]

(Note reply-to: being general at humbug.org.au vs Raymond Smith <raymonds at uq.net.au>)

On Mon, 2 Aug 1999, James C. McPherson wrote:
>  > Department still uses DOS / Wordperfect 5 and from what I hear they badly
>  > need someone who appreciates command line stuff  :)


> Yes, I did see the smiley above, but I also saw your other posts before I read 
> that one. As it happens, there are _good_ reasons why people and government
> departments stick with technology like Dos+WordPerfect. How about
>     1) it has worked before, and will work for some time in the future too,
>     2) there are an _awful_ lot of secretaries and other para-legal staff out
>        there who are incredibly productive with WordPerfect - training and
>        learning curves cost a lot of money you know,

And a surprisingly large number of legal professionals. Believe it or not,
a great many of them had learnt the WordPerfect Macro language and had
their own customisations and quite complex macros for preparing documents
the way they liked. (Caveat: Crown Law anyway...)

>     3) WordPerfect was (and probably still is) the mainstay of the legal
>        profession because of the features that were written into it from the
>        beginning, and quite possibly,

Office is making inroads in the government arena, not sure about private
practice.

>     4) the Qld Justice Department amongst others faces budget cuts or
>        financial rearrangement of one sort or another on a yearly basis. Why
>        would they want to try to implement an NT "solution" (or even a unix
>        solution, since WP runs on a large variety of unices, including linux)
>        when they may well not have the money in their budget for it?

Indeed. They have stayed with their Novell solution for the backend and
their CITEC provided mail/intranet is "powered by the UNIX Team -- Unix,
we do while others dream of mediocrity".
 
The main change from a users perspective is that the SysAdmins are using
remote management features of Windows to play God by setting user
preferences like which button bar Word displays, deleting "non-standard"
macros, and other such NAZI-esque[1] tactics.

Raymond

[1] Hey this is a Holy War! It is not as if mentioning the war will bring
    its academic content down a notch.

---
raymond at humbug.org.au              The early bird catches the worm, 
                                       but the second mouse eats the cheese


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