[OS X TeX] OT: TeX for windows

[Bruno Voisin]

Le 14 août 04, à 17:21, Joseph C. Slater a écrit :

> On Aug 14, 2004, at 9:31 AM, Stephan Hochhaus wrote:
>
>>  Besides that installing software would require a lot of persuasion 
>> on the sys admin who a) doesn't want to install anything for me and 
>> b) doesn't really like the idea of anyone but him being able to 
>> install anything.
>
> Oh, and I think it's important to let your tech support person know 
> that they are there to support the mission of the 
> school/college/university (depending on which part of the structure 
> they work for), so whether they want to or not, it's their job to 
> actually make the computers useful, and YOU define that, not them. 
> I've run into this in the past. There often seems to be some confusion 
> that just having computers sitting there running what the sys admin 
> wants is success. It's not. What the sys admin wants is secondary to 
> the needs of the instructors and the students. I'd raise hell over 
> that attitude. If that's how they do their job, it's time to get rid 
> of the sys admin. Think of the opportunity... with Macs, you could 
> even do it yourself!

I don't exactly know what the situation of Stephan is, so maybe I'm 
completely off-base, but I would say the situation that Stephan is 
facing is something specifically European. Think bureaucracy, big 
scale. Think you're working in an administration (research, 
educational), the sysadmin is not somebody you hired, he/she's somebody 
appointed by some other governmental office, you can't do anything if 
you're not happy with what's done, you have have to cope with the 
person that is sent to fill this job.

I've been faced with exactly the same kind of sysadmin as Stephan. A 
person believing truly his mission was to take over all the computers 
in my department. Uninstalling XP, for example, on all Windows 
desktops, to replace it by Win 2000, because he had Linux tools to work 
with 2000, not XP. Waiting for him to leave (which he finally did one 
year ago) was the only way we could get the problem solved.

Bruno Voisin
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