The MSFT apologist sys admin



  • Overheard at my company's library-cum-'facilities management team'. Please note that this is not Accenture.

    Librarian: "This person wants Netscape Navigator installed on his system. Some customer is having problems using Netscape."

    System Administrator (generously used like the term 'architect' in Accenture): "Oh no!!! Netscape will corrupt Internet Explorer and Windows. It will completely destroy all the files and we will have to reformat the system to make it work again!!"

    Librarian: "So what do I tell this person?"

    Sys admin: "Ask him to wait for a day."

    Good job matey. You just drove a customer away because you dont like the look and feel of Netscape.



  • Sadly I've this kind of lunacy quite a lot. I've known quite a few people who are keen to over exaggerate the harmful effects of a pet-hate technology that they go to illogical extremes. OpenOffice.org will delete all your documents! Apache 1.3 will format your hard drive! KDE will physically damage your keyboard!

    Then, there's this ...

    A guy I have known (self-titled Linux consultant) was asked about the use of Linux in a small business. Red Hat had already been installed and mostly configured, but some Samba particulars were proving troublesome.

    In goes the 'consultant' and says "Oh, you don't want to use Red Hat. It's completely unreliable and will delete itself in a few days. It will also corrupt your motherboard." and procedes (without permission) to install Debian over the top. Unfortunately, he then can't get it to work and so leaves the poor guy whose server just got trashed with the task of starting again from scratch, and still no solution to his problem.




  • Now if I say that the customer was Tokyo Marine or Lloyds, you will say "WTF!!! That guy drove away a customer willing to pay millions just because he didnt like Netscape?"



  • I was recently read the riot act for using Thunderbird while everyone else uses Outlook.  The only problem that I ever had was accessing the ldap server - but I didn't complain.  That was my problem, nobody else's.  People just got pissed off because I was sending them text-only emails, and it very obviously looked differently than the emails that the outlook people send.  So what? 

    I still don't get it what the big deal was. They just felt that I wasn't being a team player I guess.



  • @byte_lancer said:

    Good job matey. You just drove a customer away because you dont like the look and feel of Netscape.


    Surely not Netscape 4.7 or 4.8?

    You can't use that!

    It'd be like driving a Ford T.

    If he likes the look and feel of NS, he should get Mozilla (not FFX, but Mozilla).



  • @tofu said:

    I was recently read the riot act for using Thunderbird while everyone else uses Outlook.  The only problem that I ever had was accessing the ldap server - but I didn't complain.  That was my problem, nobody else's.  People just got pissed off because I was sending them text-only emails, and it very obviously looked differently than the emails that the outlook people send.  So what? 

    I still don't get it what the big deal was. They just felt that I wasn't being a team player I guess.

    So, why not just send HTML e-mails?



  • Even better: Send one of those HTML e-mails where the font size and color varies between, respectively, 18pt-36pt and all the colors of the rainbow, every paragraph. That's usually enough to make anyone appreciate plain-text. :D



  • @craiga said:

    Sadly I've this kind of lunacy quite a lot. I've
    known quite a few people who are keen to over exaggerate the harmful
    effects of a pet-hate technology that they go to illogical extremes.
    OpenOffice.org will delete all your documents! Apache 1.3 will format
    your hard drive! KDE will physically damage your keyboard!

    Then, there's this ...

    A
    guy I have known (self-titled Linux consultant) was asked about the use
    of Linux in a small business. Red Hat had already been installed and
    mostly configured, but some Samba particulars were proving troublesome.

    In
    goes the 'consultant' and says "Oh, you don't want to use Red Hat. It's
    completely unreliable and will delete itself in a few days. It will
    also corrupt your motherboard." and procedes (without permission) to
    install Debian over the top. Unfortunately, he then can't get it to
    work and so leaves the poor guy whose server just got trashed with the
    task of starting again from scratch, and still no solution to his
    problem.




    So, how much did the 'consultant' charge :)



  • @Arancaytar said:

    Even better: Send one of those HTML e-mails where the font size and color varies between, respectively, 18pt-36pt and all the colors of the rainbow, every paragraph. That's usually enough to make anyone appreciate plain-text. :D


    Too bad those
    <input type="crash">

    mails no longer work, this was a safe way to convince people of the advantages of Thunderbird ;-)



  • @craiga said:

    A guy I have known (self-titled Linux consultant)
    was asked about the use of Linux in a small business. Red Hat had
    already been installed and mostly configured, but some Samba
    particulars were proving troublesome.

    In goes the 'consultant'
    and says "Oh, you don't want to use Red Hat. It's completely unreliable
    and will delete itself in a few days. It will also corrupt your
    motherboard." and procedes (without permission) to install Debian over
    the top. Unfortunately, he then can't get it to work and so leaves the
    poor guy whose server just got trashed with the task of starting again
    from scratch, and still no solution to his problem.




    Strip for Mar 01, 1999



  • Yep, exactly like that :-) I don't think any money changed hands ...



  • just imho but html email promotes laziness.  Lots of copying useless graphics, and crap like that.  Then there's the "me too!" and 'thanks!" replies with all the graphics included.  Wonder how many resources it takes to store and clean up that stuff.....

    It still warms the sys admin part of me when I see "delete after reading" in an email memo. (do we REALLY need 30,000 copies of all these memos on the email servers?  NO!)   That's thinking....

    the smarter organizations  have plain text by default.  If somebody needs to send web content, let 'em send a link.

    OG



  • "Oh no!!! Netscape will corrupt Internet Explorer and Windows. It will completely destroy all the files and we will have to reformat the system to make it work again!!"

    I encounter a little bit of that where I work.  They don't go so far as to claim that Netscape, FireFox, Opera, and the like will hurt anything, but they just don't give a damn if our web stuff only works with IE.  This stems from the fact that the group of developers I'm in used to produce intranet applications primarily.  Currently, however, a lot of the stuff we do ends up on the interwebs, and some of my coworkers are convinced that IE-only = just fine, because only those weird linux people use FireFox anyway*.


    *Of course, it doesn't help that Visual Studio 2003 makes it so damn difficult not to produce IE-only websites.



  • @tofu said:

    People just got pissed off because I was sending them text-only emails, and it very obviously looked differently than the emails that the outlook people send.  So what? 


    When I was using Outlook, I always used text only emails. If I got an email that wasn't in plain-text to which I replied, usually the first thing I did was change format to plain text.



  • @RoKe said:

    @tofu said:
    People just got pissed off because I was sending them text-only emails, and it very obviously looked differently than the emails that the outlook people send.  So what? 


    When I was using Outlook, I always used text only emails. If I got an email that wasn't in plain-text to which I replied, usually the first thing I did was change format to plain text.

    HTML E-mail is considered evil and harmful.  I always loved the various VPs that think that they need to send 100K bitmaps of their signatures, and another 100K picture of themselves with each e-mail...  WTF - I need 202K to buffer 1K of content (and that is VP content so it is in the order of 1kbit in reality)


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