-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Joshua Baker-LePain
Sent: Thursday, October 10, 2002 8:29 AM
To: Galen Johnson
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: reply-to in mailing list
Seriously, this is a much debated topic in the world of mailing lists,
with no clear best practice. Rather than start another lengthy OT
discussion, I vote we just leave it as is (which, btw, is the same setting
as the majority of mailing lists out there).
My $.02.
--
Joshua Baker-LePain
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Larry Replies:
I don't know what lists you belong to (I belong to 10 or 12), but this is
the only list I've ever heard of where the default reply goes to the person
who posted the question rather than back to the list. "Reply All" is a
bandwidth waster, since if you click to reply to this message, I'll get a
message from you and the same message from the list...silly huh? My vote is
that all replies by default go back to the list only.
To swing things back on topic, I think some of the frustration felt by
newer users of AMANDA is that there's nothing intuitive about it. Our
organization uses Backup Exec on our NT/2K boxes and I walked in, never
having used it before, and I have never had to ask anyone a question about
configuration or how to setup a backup or change tapes.
AMANDA, like the whole Unix/Linux world, may have a lot of geek appeal, but
frankly, I have an IT department to run; I'm not interested in geek
appeal--I need applications I can set up and run without having to spend all
day searching for arcane answers to basic operational questions.
I'm certainly not the world's biggest Bill Gates fan, and no one is happier
than I that *n*x boxes are giving us an alternative to padding Bill's
wallet, but the OS has a long way to go to become a serious MS competitor in
the business world. Command line business apps went away 10 years ago
because the graphical environment had a learning curve for new employees
that was much shorter, cutting the cost of ownership. Where is the
advantage to using AMANDA? It's "free" but if you spend hundreds of dollars
in lost productivity getting it up and running, what is gained?
Most businesses aren't interested in using *n*x as a political statement
simply to raise a nemesis for MS. It has to work and work efficiently.
Documentation for AMANDA sucks, and for a complex command-line application,
supposedly coming of age for business applications, that just doesn't cut
it.
Larry A. Dunham
Systems Support Specialist
FirsTech, Inc.
Voice (217) 421-7143
Fax (217) 421-7148
