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?  :-)