BSD is dying

Paul Richards paul at originative.co.uk
Thu Jul 28 12:06:20 BST 2005


On Thu, Jul 28, 2005 at 11:40:32AM +0100, Paul Robinson wrote:
> I think if we attempted a UK meetup, we'd get a few dozen showing up,
> many of whom would be there for reasons of nostalgia. At 27 (next
> week), I would likely be one of the youngest people there. We'd all
> still end up talking OS X.

Two things I agree with:

1) A lot of people are switching to Mac OS X because if you just
want a computer to use and you like Unix then it's ideal. Hacking
the OS is much nicer on FreeBSD but very few IT people actually
care about the OS, most people do application stuff. My desktop
machine is now a Mac mini, it does everything I need if I'm not in
a kernel hacking mood and is quiet enough to be permanently on in
my lounge.

> very little time worrying about operating systems. In fact, I'm one of
> the many I've spoken to who are trying to get out of IT altogether.

2) A lot of people are trying to get out of IT, it's in the back
of my own mind but I've not come up with an idea of something else
to do yet. Why? Well the industry is flooded by marginally competent
people who have little interest in doing things properly. Wages are
now down to semi-skilled levels because there are so many barely
qualified people willing to take jobs on low salaries. These people
don't really see themselves as engineers, it's just another "office"
job to them. Too much of the industry seems to think someone who
can knock up a website is actually competent to implement complex
infrastructure systems. Some of the work I've seen over the last
few years is of abysmal quality and no-one really cares.

One of my pet peeves at the moment is broken mail systems. The number
of websites that don't accept a + in an email address is staggering,
then there are those who uppercase everything because they think email
addresses are not case sensitive. Never mind all the broken smtp
servers that don't have proper DNS etc so you can't effectively
tighten UCE settings on your server unless you want to stop receiving
mail from most places!!!

Paul.




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