Confessions of a SysAdmin

Mr.Fork writes "Scott Merrill from CrunchGear has a confession. He really, really hates computers. He writes: 'No, really, I hate them. I love the communications they facilitate, I love the conveniences they provide to my life, and I love the escapism they sometimes afford; but I actually hate the computers themselves. Computers are fragile, unintuitive things — a hodge-podge of brittle hardware and opaque, restrictive software.' Does his editorial speak to all of us in similar IT-related fields? Do we all silently hate the complexities and idiosyncrasies computers have, like error messages and UI designs that make no sense to the common user, which make our tech professions miserable?"

Help and Sympathy Available

[Anonymous Coward]

at the scary devil monastery. [faqs.org]

Re:Yes.

[Anonymous Coward]

I love computers...
I hate users...

Re:Macs?

[yotto]

Well on the Linux I use (Debian) I type a single command to install most any software package. Sometimes I have to type a couple commands to uninstall, but I generally don't uninstall programs.

I remember the days when installing something on Linux was hard. Those days are gone unless you're holding onto the wrong distro.

Re:Switch to *NIX

[Merc248]

Bah. I'm a Linux sysadmin, but it still sucks the life out of you to maintain them. Someone can still royally fuck up the infrastructure and make maintenance a living hell. But it is more of a joy to work with *nix systems than Windows systems, I'll give you that.

Re:I don't hate computers

[VGR]

I am in hearty agreement. It's the software that's just awful awful awful. Notice every complaint in the article is actually a software complaint.

And most disheartening of all is that we can't write better software, outside of the FOSS world. Just try to write good software. And I mean really good, intuitive software, with useful errors and help messages that actually tell a user what he can do about the problem. Software that behaves well and doesn't act like it owns the computer and doesn't step on all the other software. I've been trying to do it for twenty years, and it's clear no company is interested in paying for that kind of development. Welcome to the world of low-quality everything.

Re:Macs?

[keeboo]

and where do you find which command? how do you know the package name? where is that information. how do you know what's in each package? what happens when your distro doesn't have the package you want?

No need to worry: install Ubuntu.
Since Ubuntu is based on Debian, it has a huge package collection thus chances are it has everything you need.
And use its graphic package manager.

What else do you need?

Re:I don't hate computers

[icebraining]

Time Machine is what software should be. I've used backup programs for years, but they're all a pain. Plug in a drive, turn on time machine, you have a recent backup. Need to restore off it? Find the files and click the button. Need to restore a whole computer? Boot off the OS X disk and press a button. Old mac got crushed by a bulldozer and you need to transfer everything to a new one? During setup plug in your time machine backup, it takes care of everything. I've restored stuff for my parents from weeks before with no effort. No "go pick the correct backup file", no "only the last version was backed up, the stuff from 2 weeks ago is gone", it's just there.

Flexibility vs convenience. Try to do anything more complicated/unexpected with it and you'll hit a brick wall. Can I backup to a NAS running a SMB shared drive with remote file verification? If I can't, it's not good enough for me.