Social Experiment

[Brian Fahrlander]

Alex Janssen wrote:
> I was having a little trouble figuring out what to do fix the refresh 
> rate, as the monitor was not recognized, when my factory engineer 
> stopped by and commented "must be that damn linux you were telling me 
> about". 

    Interesting how people can hate something that's good for them, huh?

> I setup putty to telnet to the accounting server, an old sco unix 
> installation, and had a little trouble getting the character set and 
> translation right for the line drawing characters around the menus and 
> screens,  but finally found a combination that worked, the 
> lucidatypewriter font and CP437 translation table. 

     Just curious; was it attempting to do "wyse60"? There's a tool that 
runs, under the terminal, that will translate all those codes, and does 
a really good job, too.  I noticed it at a failed installation a while 
ago. (It wouldn't have failed if I'd actually been a PART of the design, 
instead of the afterthought...)

     There are a TON of SCO situations where, since the company's going 
under, we could take their place; it's not 1-to-1, but so very close 
it's not funny.  It not like, translating a Windows/Mac/etc program from 
fresh.  Most of the time those programs are stuck with serial lines for 
printers, completely oblivious to the lp program since....1980?

> I had prep'd everybody for this eventual change by switching, 2 years 
> ago, to all open source apps, i.e.; Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org 
> ...  those are the main ones.  A number of people have taken those apps 
> home on CD's I've given them.  People are always surprised to hear that 
> they are FREE.

     THIS is a good plan...cause they really *don't* care, as long as 
the apps are supported. In one case in Chicago. I took the least 
computer savvy person I could find, in accounting, and set'er up on 
Linux.  With telnet/etc for the main app (which was SCO) and a VMWare 
instance to replace a special program she had, she was actually DEFINANT 
in keeping it- she loved it.  And when the other machines were hit with 
slammer/sobig/mailissa, etc, she was able to smile.

> I'll post results back here as they come in.

    As much as I'd LOVE to hear more about this, yeah, it's probably 
best done in sounder.

    Does anyone have the URL for that mailing list?  I might try it for 
a while...

-- 
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  Brian Fahrländer                 Christian, Conservative, and Technomad
  Evansville, IN                              http://Fahrlander.net/brian
  ICQ: 5119262                         AOL/Yahoo/GoogleTalk: WheelDweller
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