Eric Hines wrote:
At 12/25/05 19:24, James Knott wrote:
It's true that there comes a time when it's necessary--or at least more efficient--to update. But updating just because there's something new available isn't always appropriate. Two extreme examples: MS is trying to force "just because" updates with their new licensing procedure for their OS and their office suite. You "must" buy the upgrade every few (three?) years because they won't support the newly created legacy versions beyond those three years. Updating here benefits only the vendor, not the user. Along those lines, I work for a defense contractor, and we were using Office97 as recently as 2003--the bells and whistles in the newer versions just weren't useful to us, especially at the upgrade cost/license. We build simulators; "officing" just isn't that complex for us. Even so, when someone in our front office decided we needed to join the 20th century and upgrade to Office2000, it took us another year to do so because one of our major customers also used Office97, and they felt less of a need to upgrade their suite than we did.
In the present example, the question of bouncing ethx only bothered one of us--the newbie with his newbie ignorance. That wasn't a problem for the others in this discussion. It's expensive to upgrade, even in an open source environment. If the added goodies in the newer thing aren't central to what one is doing, then it's a waste of money to upgrade. One man's must-have is another's bell and whistle. And being able to recognize the difference, and to recognize when one has become the other, puts a premium not on being stuck in the past and unwilling to learn, but on just the opposite. Then the decision to upgrade, or not, is informed rather than blindly automatic.
As for updating MS Office, it's obvious who's benifit that's for. Most people would have been happy with Word 6 etc. However in this case, the change was made for technical reasons and actually eliminates some problems that occured the old way. For example in your case, with 3 NICs, there was no way for you to know, when you built your system, whether a NIC was going to be eth0 or eth2 etc. You simply built it and then found out where they were. Even having it consistent, wouldn't have changed that. Now, you can decide, even before you plug in the NICs, which one will be used for what connection. It doesn't matter what order it's plugged in or what type of physical connection it has. As long as you know the MAC, you can specify how it'll be used.