Subject: Re: A few questions, Alan Turing and LISP?
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no>
Date: 1999/02/09
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy,comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3127546175760808@naggum.no>

* "Gary H. Merrill" <gmerrill@mindspring.com>
| You still don't get it.

  having worked with an employee to introduce Linux to a company that had a
  similar policy to the one you refer to, I have some solid evidence that I
  understand what kinds of concerns managers have and how to answer them.
  of course, if it suits you to ignore any and all proof that you might
  succeed if you actually tried, that's your problem.  I know how such
  policies come to be and how to change them without scaring managers who
  have legitimate concerns behind their decisions, not just the religious
  edicts you imply that these policies are.  that you don't understand how
  to deal with these things is not my problem.  I'm not trying to change
  your mind, I'm just trying to make you aware that you make invalid claims
  in the interest of making the _real_ concerns explicit.  enough stupid
  people hide behind things they don't _want_ to change to make it
  necessary to figure out what they are frightened of.  you give me a very
  powerful hint that you are indeed afraid of something.  had I had any
  incentive (a lot of money) to convince you and your managers otherwise, I
  would have succeeded in it, even if you can't.

| The fact that Linux is "a fully supported commercial operation system" is
| not sufficient.  What matters is *who* supports it.  Unless it is
| supported by the *vendor* (as is OSF/1 for the Alpha, HP/UX, and Solaris)
| many (if not most, if not all) large IT organizations will *not* have
| anything to do with it.

  you appear to speak without knowledge of the Linux market.  e.g., both
  RedHat and Caldera are vendors of considerable size who support their own
  Linux distributions and are held accountable for the systems they have
  delivered.  I'm not talking about the many hackers around the world who
  make Linux a great system and for which some people have great disdain,
  and who accept money for supporting people.

| Yeah, see ... if you are dealing with just tiny programs than almost any
| hardware will do.

  it seems you have a problem with your assumption-generator: it appears to
  be completely unchecked by facts or other input from the outside world.
  a dual processor with 512M RAM and 40+ G of disk is not a good buy when
  you have "tiny programs" and "almost any hardware will do", it's a waste
  of money because "almost any hardware" is even _cheaper_.

  I don't think further input to you would be anything but a waste, either.
  
#:Erik
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