[ale] IE for Linux

[Jason Boyles]

On Fri, 7 Nov 1997, Josh Murrah wrote:

> Not that I'm
> against M$ building IE for linux, maybe more ignorant IS managers will say
> "what's this -linux- thing?  I see that M$ supprts it, it must be good"

	There is perhaps some truth to this. Some of the management I work
with see Microsoft as the source of all computing innovation. In their
eyes Windows NT is fresh, exciting technology, and Unix is old, stale, and
destined for the trash bin.

	Several times I've spoken to managers at my place of employment
who, upon reading Microsoft's NT white papers, were aglow with excitement
about all these new technologies MS is putting in NT. Like demand paging
of executables, virtual memory, memory mapped files, dynamic linking,
pre-emptive multi-tasking, &c.

	If it weren't so depressing I'd laugh.

	Many of the database application developers with whom I work have
unrealistic expectations of NT. They have begun to blame their problems
with database lock contention (and anything else) on the OS upon which the
database runs, namely UNIX. "If our server were on NT we wouldn't have
these problems!"  has become their mantra. Their management believes them,
despite lack of evidence.  The hype is working. 

	While Linux has been extremely useful in my job, my management
views it askance, even though they are among the most stable machines we
have, with uptimes of hundreds of days, compared to tens of days, which is
the record for our NT servers. 

Do any folks here have any experiences with Linux in the workplace?
Is Linux accepted in many workplaces? Or outlawed, for that matter.

-----
Jason Boyles <jason at alltel.net>