Path: utzoo!yunexus!ists!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!ucsd!swrinde!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!ames!skipper!shafer From: shafer@elxsi.dfrf.nasa.gov (Mary Shafer) Newsgroups: news.groups Subject: Changing Nature of Usenet Message-ID: Date: 17 Nov 89 19:37:59 GMT Article-I.D.: drynix.SHAFER.89Nov17113759 Sender: news@skipper.dfrf.nasa.gov Distribution: news Organization: NASA Dryden, Edwards, Cal. Lines: 62 Somewhere in the discussion of the sci.aquaria vote, someone wrote that Usenet is a computer network, in the context that computer system administrators should be the final judges on all issues. I disagree with this for two reasons. First, I don't think that Usenet is a _computer_ network; rather it's a communication network, implemented on computers. Usenet isn't a community composed exclusively of computer people any more. There are more and more people on it that don't subscribe to comp.anything. I'm one of these people. I do get comp.text and comp.risks, but I spend most of my time in sci.aeronautics and sci.military, with a digression into rec.food.cooking at lunch. I do have computer credentials--I wrote my first program in FORTRAN on the IBM 7094/7044 DCS in 1966, I've written assembler code on the XDS 9300, I took a class from "The Art of Computer Programming, Vol I" (Knuth) when it was still in typescript, I've written self-modifying code, and so on. Sometimes I miss assigned gotos and punched cards. To me, however, the computer is just a tool, like the telephone, the fax, the copier. This leads into my second reason for disagreeing, the nature of the system administrator's job. The system administrator isn't the person to formulate policy. We users don't want to be told that our system administrator knows best what we should read or do or use. Our system administrators are here to make the computer work for us, not to control what we do on it. Support, not policy. Maybe a system administrator doesn't like FORTRAN77, but if that's what the users want, the system had better have FORTRAN77. When I see system administrators saying "Not on _my_ system, you don't" I can only ask "Whose system?" If the computer is the end-all and be-all of the organization, than maybe it is your system. But if it's a tool used by others to produce the end product of the organization, then you're wrong, it's not _your_ system, it's _our_ system, and our voices will be heard. I'm not saying that the system administrator is the user's servant, but the administrator isn't the user's master, either. We're all in this together. Both groups want the best system we can have and we work together to reach that goal. But the system isn't the end product, whatever we use the system to produce is. I don't think that some of you system administrators feel this way. Rather, I think that some of you wish the users would just go away and quit messing up your lovely systems. The nerve of some people! Wanting to use the computer for something other than hacking! -- Mary Shafer shafer@elxsi.dfrf.nasa.gov ames!elxsi.dfrf.nasa.gov!shafer NASA Ames-Dryden Flight Research Facility, Edwards, CA Of course I don't speak for NASA