jim@baroque.Stanford.EDU (James Helman) (02/14/90)
In response to my note on SGI's hotline and X, I've received both flames for criticizing the hotline and messages from people who related similar frustration with the SGI "Cold"Line (not my phrase). After my posting, I got a polite (more than I deserved) call from the hotline and got to talk with an engineer in the X group! Anyone else remember the time SGI announced it was pulling X out of the next IRIX release, and wouldn't tell us whether it would ever come back or not? Or when it only had one X engineer working on a product used by thousands of people? Well, after talking with an X engineer, I'm convinced that things have changed a lot. Now I know there's at least one engineer, probably more, who is strongly committed to making SGI's X product top notch. It certainly was not at all fair for me to heap up a year and a half's worth of my X frustrations and flame out at the hotline. I apologize to everyone associated with the hotline. My snap judgement of the support engineer was way off base. In the future there may be a better way. I was told that SGI might set up something to provide a target for meta-hotline expressions of praise, criticism, opinion, etc. Hopefully, this will provide a mechanism for a more productive expression of frustrations. If it works, it should be great, because then at least someone will get to hear how much frustration and wasted time bugs and poor hardware QC can cause, and allocate engineering resouces accordingly. No company should be without such a feedback loop. AS FOR X itself, I was told that the clients on the X11R4 release will build on 4D's, but the server won't. As for server bugs, the word is the usual "wait for the next IRIX release." The new server has improvements linked to the new OS, so there's little hope for a fixed server before then. Jim Helman Department of Applied Physics P.O. Box 10494 Stanford University Stanford, CA 94309 (jim@thrush.stanford.edu) (415) 723-4940
dunlap@bigboote.sgi.com (D. Christopher Dunlap) (02/14/90)
In article <JIM.90Feb13171211@baroque.Stanford.EDU> jim@baroque.Stanford.EDU (James Helman) writes: > >In the future there may be a better way. I was told that SGI might >set up something to provide a target for meta-hotline expressions of >praise, criticism, opinion, etc. Hopefully, this will provide a >mechanism for a more productive expression of frustrations. > For now, consider that "target" to be me. Although I read comp.sys.sgi regularly (As does most of the staff here), I always appreciate direct comments. My address is below. thanks, chris ------------------------------------------------------------------------ D. Christopher Dunlap Product Support Customer Support Division email: dunlap@sgi.com Silicon Graphics Computer Systems or: dunlap@csd.sgi.com D. Christopher Dunlap Product Support Customer Support Division email: dunlap@sgi.sgi.com Silicon Graphics Computer Systems
baskett%forest@SGI.COM (02/15/90)
Some of us believe that one of the several useful purposes that info-iris (or comp.sys.sgi) serves is as a sympathetic listener when we want to get some of our frustrations off our chest. Details about problems are desireable to those of us who what to fix them but sometimes they interfere with the release of emotional energy. Of course, apologizing afterward is also nice. Jim Helman is OK. Forest Baskett