[CentOS] Another Fedora decision

Wed Feb 4 16:49:30 UTC 2015
Lamar Owen <lowen at pari.edu>

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.