Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!milton!milton.acs.washington.edu!dennis From: dennis@yang.cpac.washington.edu (Dennis Gentry) Newsgroups: comp.sys.next Subject: Re: Remote NeXT Users, etc. Message-ID:Date: 26 Sep 89 02:39:58 GMT References: <8248@oregon.uoregon.edu> <5103@ubc-cs.UUCP> <2422@ucsfcca.ucsf.edu> Sender: news@milton.acs.washington.edu Organization: Center for Process Analytical Chemistry, U of Wash, Seattle Lines: 65 In-reply-to: jst@cca.ucsf.edu's message of 25 Sep 89 03:13:33 GMT Listen, Joe: It's fine if you want to use things in ways in which the designers did not intend them to be used. For example, feel free to drive your car with your only your feet instead of your hands (but not on my street, of course). It's also fine for you to ask for help from the designers, or the company they work for, when you do something like this. For example, it seems reasonable (if a little weird) to write to the Ford Motor Company and say "I can't figure out how to steer my car very well. And by the way, I can't use my hands to do it, either." But it's *not* fine to expect immediate help in this situation. It is perfectly reasonable (if not particularly helpful) for someone from the Ford Motor Company to write back "Well, you'll have to use your hands to steer correctly." At this point, you pretty much have to take them at their word, and either figure it out for yourself, or do it the way they designed it. It's especially *not* fair to broadcast your beef with the company to the world, publishing such statements as "Ford Motor Company has bad PR!" or "Engineer X at Ford Motor Company is an unhelpful person" before you take the problem up with Ford itself. And if you don't get a reasonable response from Engineer X, you should ask to talk to his supervisor, rather than immediately publishing deprecatory statements about X. So please *don't post* your complaints about the company or its people. I (and I think most other) news readers here don't think you're being fair. You're not only trying to drive the brand new car with your feet, you're apparently volunteering to drive the brand new car with your feet for someone else, discovering that you can't do a very good job that way, and then publishing personal complaints to thousands of people when the car company tells you that you currently have to use your hands to drive. To be fair, I (and probably some of the other news readers) are interested in the technical problems you've encountered. I am sure that the people at NeXT are interested in the technical problems you've found, even if they can't give you an immediate workaround. I'm sure the NeXT product could be improved, but it will be improved most quickly if we all send in clear, concise bug reports, rather than personal complaints. I won't go into the gory details of the problems you've brought up, except to choose one example where I think you are being unreasonable. You say that it would be philosophically wise to maintain the Unix man pages. Perhaps it would, if you could automatically generate them from the new documentation. Digital Librarian in combination with the (pretty darn good) on-line documentation is *far* superior to the old man pages from a neophyte's point of view. You say that man pages would keep people from getting lost, not knowing where to go next in documentation. You have apparently never watched a novice user try to use man pages on a Unix system. Most sincerely, Dennis Gentry (dennis@cpac.washington.edu) CPAC Computing Services Manager, and NeXT UW Campus Advocate