Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!ucsfcgl!cca.ucsf.edu!jst From: jst@cca.ucsf.edu (Joe Stong) Newsgroups: comp.sys.next Subject: Re: Remote NeXT Users, etc. Message-ID: <2422@ucsfcca.ucsf.edu> Date: 25 Sep 89 03:13:33 GMT References: <8248@oregon.uoregon.edu> <5103@ubc-cs.UUCP> Reply-To: jst@cca.ucsf.edu.UUCP (Joe Stong) Organization: Computer Center, UCSF Lines: 89 Ever hear of a problem called "elitism"? Do you know what the word "plutocracy" means? I cannot afford a minimum $6500 for a machine, even if I could, I might buy something else on which I get more work in programming. I help Karpinski, the owner of the NeXT, with administering it, for entertainment, education, and out of the kindness of my heart. I have received some truly helpful and informative mail, that does not tell me: "You cannot do that" "It's in the next release" or insult my intellegence by telling me things that I've already mentioned, like that I know I'm trying to do something difficult. I know that Avadis, in his own way, is trying to be helpful. I appreciate that he wants to help, but I would like to get across to him that some kinds of "help" serve to make me livid. I have done my best not to flame him to death, even though I feel like it. He might do better to be silent, and let people who have answers come through. He probably feels unappreciated. I do appreciate some of the overall technical niceness of the NeXT. I don't like the diety-like attitude of telling me what I can and cannot do with the computer I'm working on, and being asked to work on. I realize that tekkies have a tendency to be gratuitous. I've tried and thought of a lot of things that folks re-suggest to me as if I could never have though of them myself. This particular problem can be overcome a lot by assuming intellegence and some wits on the part of the listening party and suggesting: Have you tried ... ? "I did these things." ("I" is the person making the suggestions) You might find this useful. Rather than suggesting bluntly that I SHOULD do things which they assume that I'm not. There have been some lovely responses here, giving real suggestions, and a couple that seem to amount to "Nyahh, bad boy, you're doing something you ought not be doing." Get the point: I have no choice in doing remote system administration, what I'm doing is asking for help. I also think that it is philosophically wise to maintain the UNIX man page style manuals, with appropriate cross references, so that people don't get lost, not knowing where to go next in documentation. I think there are some real documentation problems on the NeXT. This was never apologized for, or even admitted. the disk commands, when run returns the message: usage: disk [option flags] [action flags] raw-device ... somewhere -i is mentioned in a long list of options ... interactive mode if no action flags specified example: disk -i /dev/rod0a So, one might presume that -i is not an action flag, and that the example is how to run the program in interactive mode since that is what they are talking about on the previous line. It's just a faulty message. Indeed, the program will ask for confirmation, but from a remote terminal, it puts up a dialogue box on the main screen which the remote terminal can't see and hangs. (EEK, I've zeroed the disk) and I can't interrupt it. Since there seems to be no low level re-format command, I thought that bulk might do it, and solve my problems with an overflowing badblock table. Whoopee crasho! But "that's a known bug". It doesn't help me get files backed off the machine. I'm not stupid, all of the stuff on the NeXT is non-critical, and present elsewhere, but it would be awfully convenient not to have to re-load it all after we install the 1.0 release. What about the poor folks who DID do development or put files on the machine since the previous release, and can't do network backup like I can? This is too much of the details. The point is when one is frustrated and trying hard to make it work, it doesn't help for people to say: "Stupid bad boy, you should be doing that" When there are real problems with bugs at critical points. An apology or a gentle reminder that "we weren't expecting people to use the machine that way, sorry" would be more appropriate. I don't know that even USING the window interface would get me any closer to doing a successful local backup, either, that issue just seemed to get slimed over. :-( Teflon, anyone? :-)