On Thu, May 10, 2001 at 01:24:13PM +0000, Martin Peikert wrote:
"Kurt Seifried" <listuser@seifried.org> wrote:
Martin P.S.: I like your car example. If you want to drive a car, you need a driving license ;-)
Drivers Licenses only cover how to USE the car. Not how to fix it.
Uuh? System administrators has only to know how to _use_ a kernel? I think they should know a little bit more...
... and I'd say that in the car example the *driver* should indeed be compared to the "ordinary sysadmin", while the "ordinary users" would be the passengers. In the same way you could compare the admin of a large multi-user server to a bus driver. To elaborate this further: in the car example the driver should to know quite a lot of things about traffic regulations and related stuff and be able to drive his car without causing too much damage to his environment ;-) and he having at least some ideas of how his car works can help him a lot in many situations: being able to replace a wheel by himself may be a good thing for him, and knowing what to do when that small red light with the little oil can symbol starts flashing could be even more useful. Just recall the old lady who owned a Volkswagen beetle: she thought somebody had stolen her engine when her car wouldn't start and she opened what she thought was the engine bonnet at the front of her car ;-) The longer I look at the car example the more I like it! And the drivers licence for sysadmins also sounds nice as a comparison... Thomas -- Thomas Haeberlen Rechenzentrum Universitaet Stuttgart (RUS) Email: haeberlen@rus.uni-stuttgart.de