Re: sysadmin qualifications (Re: apt-get vs. aptitude)
Le 19.10.2013 01:10, Miles Fidelman a écrit :
berenger.morel@neutralite.org wrote:
Le 18.10.2013 16:22, Miles Fidelman a écrit :
(though it's pretty hard to get hired for anything in the US
without a bachelorate in something)
I do not think it can be worse than in France.
Ok. I wasn't sure about that, though France does seem as credential
crazy as the US.
It seem, as I can read on various forums (so, no really reliable
sources), that things in France about pieces of official papers are
really crazy. It seem we like bureaucracy a lot here :/ (but on the
other hand, there are nice things -depending on your opinion, of course-
here that are not in other countries)
I was under the impression that European schools tended to have a
more clearly defined, and distinct "trades school track" (not sure
the
right term to use) than we do in the US - with direction set by
testing somewhere along the way.
You can not really speak about European schools as if they were united.
EU is far to be a single country, and considering the damages which have
been done since the arrival of the euro (the 1st change I was old enough
to understand the implications), I hope that it will not go too far on
that so wrong way. I do not like the idea of the unified europe our
politicians want to sell us. I feel like if peoples will have less and
less powers on laws which rules us. More power to people with enough
money, that's what the EU means to me. I do not want that.
I sure wouldn't trust a self-taught doctor performing surgery on me
-
That's why some professions have needs for legal stuff. We can not
really compare a doctor with the usual computer scientist, right?
And I said "usual", because most of us do not, and will never work,
on stuff which can kill someone. And when we do, verification
processes are quite important ( I hope, at least! ), unlike for
doctors which have to be careful while they are doing their job,
because they can not try things and then copy/paste on a real human.
Actually, I would make that comparison. A doctor's mistakes kill one
person at a time. In a lot of situations, mis-behaving software can
cause 100s, 1000s, maybe 100s of 1000s of lives - airplane crash,
power outage, bug in a piece of medical equiptment (say a class of
pacemakers), flaws in equipment as a result of faulty design
software,
failure in a weapons system, etc. Software failures can also cause
huge financial losses - ranging from spacecraft that go off course
(remember the case a few years ago where someone used meters instead
of feet, or vice versa in some critical navigational calculation?),
to
outages of stock exchanges (a week or so ago), and so forth.
But doctor's can not take as much time as he would want, and can not be
helped by as many people as us. We can simply open our source code, and
we can be reviewed by lot of pairs.
We can also set-up automated tests, to ensure that we are not doing
stupid things.
And, yes, there are highly critical softwares were people have to pay
lot of attention. But those are not the vast majority. Yes, some
softwares can makes a company losing money. But I can not give any
amount of money to the life of only one person. Money does not magically
disappear. It moves (at least, when the economy is in good health, and
when there are nobody to play with it...).
Life can not be bought (well, at least, in theory, since some people
have no problem killing people for money).
What I see in some of your samples is a lack of testing. It is obvious
that if you do not take enough time to made quality, you will never have
it, and if software programming can kill people, then even bakery can
do. Imagine what would happen if your baker did not paid enough
attention and used some cleaning liquid instead of water? That could
kill, but I hope they take their job seriously enough. Oh, I said baker,
but it is true for all kind of works. Building houses, creating cars,
etc. Will you compare those to the doctor's job?
Especially on the feet/meter problem (one that I would not have thought
about I admit, since we only use units from SI - strange, is it true
that the French acronym is used? Wikipedia says it, but it seems really
strange to me - in France, since many decades, so I tend to forgot that
other countries can have that problem :/ ). Converting units is not
hard, and in strong typed languages, such error could never happen if
correct types have been defined.
Ok, but now we're talking an apples to oranges comparison.
Installing
developers tools is a pain, no matter what environment. For fancy,
non-standard stuff, "apt-get install foo" beats everything out
there,
and "./configure; make install" is pretty straightforward (assuming
you have the pre-requisites installed).
But when it comes to packaging up software for delivery to
users/customers; it sure seems like it's easier to install
something
on Windows or a Mac than anything else. Slip in the installation
CD
and click start.
You mean, something like that ?
http://packages.debian.org/fr/squeeze/gdebi
http://packages.debian.org/fr/wheezy/gdebi
Seems to be that there's a huge difference between:
- buy a laptop pre-loaded with Windows,
Pre-loaded, so you did not made the install. You can not use that to
say that the install is easier: you did not made it. Plus, it is
possible to buy computers with a linux distribution installed on it.
and slip in an MS Office DVD, and
That's exactly what allows GDebi, installed by default by the gnome
package, which is the default DE for Debian.
- buy a laptop, download debian onto a DVD, run the installer,
Unrelated. There are computers sold with Debian.
get all the non-free drivers installed,
I never bought any, but I would bet that they have all necessary
drivers installed. Including non-free ones.
then apt-get install openoffice
Actually, I have seen lot of computers with windows not having MS
office installed by default.
and wade through all the recommended and suggested optional packages
-
That's useless. For a lambda user, he will only install, and never care
about the recommended stuff. The difference here against windows is,
that you can trust the Debian repo to not having malwares installed with
them. Plus, you won't have to enter *any* security key. Those are a real
pain... and are very common on Windows' softwares.
and then, maybe, have to deal with issues around which JRE you have
installed?
I do not know, I never install Java. Are there really lot of issues
with JRE, or is it simply fud?
I will not even speak about the fact that selling only computers with
MS-Windows pre-installed is illegal in France ( to be more exact, it is
illegal to sell hardware stuff and force the client to buy services, and
software licences are considered services here. ), but MS just do not
care about our laws. I have nothing against windows, but I really
dislike MS for their law disdain. I have nothing against the technical
product, really. It's only their attitude that I hate.
Oh, and if I did not mentioned wine, it is because I do not think it is
very relevant, but I could argue that it makes things as "simple" as on
windows ;)
Just for reference, I use a Mac and mostly commercial software for
office kinds of stuff
Never used any mac, can't judge. I do not really intend to buy one
anyway, they are far too expensive for what they do, and more closed
than windows. Do not fit my needs, in short.
I will
note, that for a lot of server-side stuff (particularly my mail
processing and list manager) I find I get much better results (and
newer code) by compiling from source, than by using the package
system.
Maybe you should take a look at gentoo, then. If you use official repos
of softwares, use an OS made to compile every softwares you have. I
think I'll take time to install it one day, when I'll finally be
successful in understanding how to compile an efficient kernel. Not
tomorrow...
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