Re: Ask Mr. Know-it-All

[Pat Wilson <paw@noh.ucsd.edu>]

"Daniel E. Singer" <des@cs.duke.edu> writes:

	 > OTOH, another way to give added weight to "system administrator" over
	 > "systems administrator" comes from Sun's slogan "the network is the
	 > computer." These days, I consider "system" to mean the interconnected
	 > ...

	On yet another hand, it sometimes occurs to me that there are _all_
	_kinds_ of `systems'.  Perhaps it's a bit myopic of us to assume that
	to the whole world, a "system" is automatically a "computer system"
	or a computer network.  I wonder if we should call ourselves "Computer
	System(s)  Administrator".  (Sometimes I get around both of these
	issues with the way I have it in my .sig below.)  Maybe that's why the
	MS people are going for "network administrator", since "network" is a
	_little_ less ambiguous.

Ooo - I *strongly* disagree that "network administrator", as
adopted by M$ folks, is (a) less ambiguous or (b) correct -
_network_ administrators are folks who do routing.  "Distributed
systems administrators" might be closer to the truth (and I'll
avoid the cheap shot here...).

The "Network" in my title below really _does_ indicate that my
reach stops (for some value of "stops") at the wall.


--paw

Pat Wilson
Network Security Manager
UCSD ACS/Network Operations
paw@ucsd.edu