peterd@cs.mcgill.ca (Peter Deutsch) (01/14/91)
In article <4850@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> lacsap@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU (Pascal Chesnais) writes: >In article <F64hb774@cs.psu.edu>, melling@cs.psu.edu (Michael D Mellinger) writes: >> In article <1117@toaster.SFSU.EDU> eps@toaster.SFSU.EDU (Eric P. Scott) writes: >Here I have to go on record, the MIT effort had FULL cooperation from NeXT >including sending the group to California to work with the NeXT software >engineers... The problem was that MIT sent students who are free agents >and went on to other things (including one working for NeXT). The same is >true with the McGill effort, Mike is a student hacker, not guaranteed to >be around n-months down the line. . . . This is not correct. Mike is a research associate with the McGill Research Centre for Intelligent Machines. He's a paid, full-time worker (in fact, some days I wish I had _his_ job ;-) Neither NeXT nor I should have any reason to believe Mike will be anywhere but right here "n-months down the line". > . . As posted in an earlier message, Pencomm >is getting the full cooperation from NeXT... I suppose this has to do with >the assumption (maybe a false one) that the guys working on the Pencomm effort >will not graduate in 3 months. . . Well, I'm glad to here that Pencomm is happy with NeXT's cooperation, but I was lead to believe that NeXT had decided not to endorse their final product. In fact, the NeXT person I spoke to mentioned the name of another company who would get the "endorsed by NeXT" title. If this is not fact, don't blame me. It's what I was told by a NeXT representative. From this I assumed they were doubtful starters. I'm really glad they're not. > . . . The other problem is that neither the MIT >group or the McGill effort had the benefit of doing the NeXT Developer >course prior to their ports... Having gone through it I can see how things >would have been done differently in both ports, and both would have worked >in 2.0... As I pointed out in a previsou post, we are supposed to hold a NeXT Deveoper course here at McGill (it's in our contract with them) but had to put it on hold as it requires access to our lab, which only shipped last month. If NeXT wanted to make this a condition of their helping us, no one said so. >Enough flaming, who has a neat hack to share??? Sorry about the signal to noise ratio of this debate. Let me say once again - I really like their machines, I'm still really glad we bought them, and I think we will be happy with them in most ways. If I can get X running under 2.0 in the next few weeks I'll be ecstatic and change that to "all ways". I just think anyone contemplating a workstation purchase is entitled to know the experience of others who've been there. After all, it was seeing postings in sun-managers that told me my own problems with Sun service were not isolated incidents. This helped sway me to recommend NeXTen. If you want me to tell you about _Sun_, send me email!! - peterd -------------------------------------------------------------------------- +-------+ Peter Deutsch McGill University | u # u | peterd@cs.mcgill.ca School of Computer Science |/\/\/\/| | a a | \ a / Go ahead, flame me. I have a /dev/null on my machine... \___/ --------------------------------------------------------------------------