On 02/04/2015 10:17 AM, James B. Byrne wrote:
I had a friend, now deceased, who worked as an RCA colour TV technician when he was very young. In the 1950s he would be sent to the homes of people having trouble adjusting the colour settings on their new RCA's. That was system administration then. Who needs them now?
Broadcasters. You still need color balance chops in the TV station or other video production facility; you still need sysadmins in the content delivery facilities, even if they are a bit redundant in the content consumer area.
We are dinosaurs. People do not hate us. They just do not understand why we are still around. ... Sometimes I just cannot bear to think about this stuff anymore.
Hey, James, go get a cookie, a cup of hot tea, and relax a spell....maybe fire up the old Altix box for a space heater and get nice and toasty warm or something....
Sysadmins are still around; the areas in which sysadmins are needed and the skills sysadmins need to have are just changing, that's all. TV repairmen still exist; their skillset just is very different today than what it was a few years back. High-end LED/LCD and plasma TV's are still expensive enough to merit servicing, which most of the time involves module changing, service-remote-driven diagnostic menus, and similar. I still remember needing diddlesticks to do a full convergence job; the equivalent job today involves service menus and diagnostic single-board-computers that talk to the service port.