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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQS);faqs.421 * The Qume Crystal is a private-label version of the Tseng Labs VGA card. S C D E M P U B X Mice ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- c . y c y y y y (Logitech-compatible) 3-button serial mice (C protocol) c . y c c n y (Logitech-compatible) 3-button bus mice (C protocol) . . . c . n . ATI Wonder+ bus-mouse port y . . . . c . ATI Graphics Ultra bus-mouse port c . . . . . . HP C1413A Mouse y . y . . . . IBM PS/2 keyboard mouse c . y y c c n y Logitech MouseMan (M+ protocol) c c y y c c c c . Logitech Trackman (serial, M+ protocol) c c y c c n y Logitech Trackman (bus, M+ protocol) c . . . . . . Logitech hi-res Keyboard Mouse c . y c c c y Microsoft 2-button (serial, M protocol) c . y c c n y Microsoft 2-button (bus, M protocol) c . . . . . . Olivetti Bus Mouse c . . . . . . Olivetti hi-res Keyboard Mouse . . . . . . c SummaMouse c . . . . . . Summagraphics Bitpad Notes: * See the discussion of mice at the beginning of this section for details. * BSD/386 says it supports all 1200-9600 baud serial mice, specifying Logitech as an example. This is probably true of all vendors. * The MouseMan and TrackMan require a patch obtainable from SCO to run under ODT 1.1; they're fully supported in 2.0. * X11R5 (X386 1.2) supports all of the known mice on SVR4 in a native mode, bypassing the mouse driver. This wasn't true with X11R4 (X386 1.1b). So if you're using X386 1.2 exclusively, you can use (say) a MouseMan regardless of which SVR4 you're using. * Dell 2.2 includes an auto-configuring mouse driver that's supposed to work with about anything. Non-factory-installed 2.2s may require a patch from support to handle the Logitech Mouseman. S C D E M P U B X Multi-port serial cards ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- c . . . . . AMI lamb 4 and 8-port . . y c c n Arnet (models not specified) c . y . . . Arnet 2,4 and 8-port and TwinPort c . . c c n AST 4-port . . . . c n Central Data c . . . c n Chase Research c . c . c n Computone (models not specified) c . y . . . Computone Intelliport c . . . . . Computone ATvantage-X 8-port c . . . . . Comtrol Hostess-4 c . . c c n Comtrol Hostess-8 . c . c y n Consensys PowerPorts c . . . . . CTC Versanet 4AT and 8AT c . y . . . Digiboard 4 and 8-port . . y c c n Digiboard DigiChannel PC/8 . . . . . y . Digiboard Digichannel PC/Xe-16 (see note below) y . y . y n Equinox c . . . . . Kimtron Quartet 4-port y . . c c c n Maxpeed c . . . . . Olivetti RS232C Multiport board c . . . . . Quadram QuadPort 1 and 5-port . . . . . c . SDL RISCOM/8 y . y . c n Specialix . . y . c n Stallion OnBoard . . . . c n Stargate (models not specified) c . . . . . Stargate OC4400 (4-port) and OC8000 (8-port) c . . . . . Tandon Quad serial card . . y . c n Technology Concepts c . . . . . Unisys 4-port Notes: * Only SCO, Consensys, Dell, Esix and Microport listed multiport cards at all. As some are `smart' cards which require special device drivers, you should *not* assume that a board is supported on a particular port unless the vendor explicitly says so. * MtXinu says they have *no* multiport support right now. * The Consensys PowerPort card has troubles; see the vendor report on Consensys for details. * The Chase, Computone, Intelliport and Specialix cards will run under SCO using a vendor-supplied driver. * The Maxpeed SS8-UX2 doesn't support RTS/CTS flow control, and requires its own config scripts rather than using inittab and gettydefs. The BSDI people think it works with their config stuff. * Peter Wemm <Peter-Wemm@zeus.dialix.oz.au> writes: "In 2.1, Dell's drivers (direct from Stallion) are flakey. I have been annoying the living daylights out of the developers (Stallion) here in AUS, and their new drivers have an `interaction' problem with the reboot mechanism in dell's kernel. A reboot causes the VGA card to be disabled." Jeremy Chatfield of Dell replies: "We haven't seen the problem he reports. Most likely the problem he's seeing is an icky [generic] one for UNIX on a PC." He then proceeds to detail the 8-16 clash described at the beginning of this section. * Digiboard makes an SVr4 UNIX streams driver available via download for the Digichannel PC/Xe-16. S C D E M P U B X Disk controllers ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- c . c c c . . Adaptec 2320/2322 (ESDI) c . c . c . . Adaptec ACB 2730C (RLL) c . y . c . . Adaptec ACB 2732C (RLL) c . . . . . Compag 32-bit Intelligent Drive Array Controller c . . . . . Compag 32-bit Intelligent Drive Array Expansion . . c . c . c CCAT100A (IDE) . . . c . . Chicony 101B y . y c c . . Data Tech Corp 6280 (ESDI) . . . c . c DTG 6282-24 . . c c c . . Everex EV-346 (ST506) . . c c c . . Everex EV-348 (ESDI) . . c c c . . Everex EV-8120 (IDE) y . c . . . . Lark ESDI controller . . c c c . . OMTI 8240 (ST506) . . c . . c . PSI Caching controller (ESDI) c . c . . . . SMS OMTI 8620 and 8627 (ESDI) . . y . . c . Ultrastor 12C, 22F y . y . c c c Ultrastor 12F c . c . . n . Ultrastor 22C (caching EISA version of 12F) . . y . c . . Ultrastor 22CA c c y c c . . Western Digital 1003 (RLL) c . . . . . Western Digital 1005 . . y . . . Western Digital 1006V-MM2 (ST506) y . y y c . c Western Digital 1007 A,SE2 (ESDI) c . . c . . Western Digital 1009 SE1/SE2 Notes: * All these ports should support all standard PC hard-disk controllers (ESDI, IDE,ST-506 in MFM and RLL formats). S C D E M P U B X SCSI controllers ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- c . . . . . . Adaptec 152x (non-bus mastering ISA host adapter) y c y c y y c c y Adaptec 1540, 1542 c . n . . . . . Adaptec 1640 (MicroChannel version of 154x) c . y c y c n c y Adaptec 1740,1742 (EISA) (1542 emulation mode) c . . y . * c . Adaptec 1740,1742 (EISA) (enhanced mode) . . . c . . . Always IN2000 y . c c . . . BusTek BT-542B y . c c . . . BusTek BT-742A (EISA) (mPort specifies Revision F) c . . . . . Compag SCSI Option Adapter and Compression Adapter c . . . . . . Corollary SCSI-CPU . . . c c . . DPT PM2102 caching controller (MFM emulation) c . . c . . . DPT PM2102 caching SCSI controller in SCSI mode . . c . . . . Everex EV8118/8110 c . c . . . . Future Domain 1660, 1680, 885, 860 y . . . . . . IBM HardFile (their SCSI host adapter for MicroChannel) . . . c . . . Mylex DCE (EISA) c . . . . . . Olivetti ESC-1 (EISA) . . . . c . . PSI caching controller c . . . . . . Storage Plus SCSI-AT "Sumo" . . . c . . . Ultrastor 32k 12u c . y c c c . . Western Digital WD7000 c . y . . . . . Western Digital WD7000-EX (EISA version of WD7000) Notes: * UHC started shipping a native-mode 1740/1742 driver in mid-April. It requires a full SCSI-2 tape drive. * The BusTek 542 is a clone of the Adaptec 1542. At least one respondent thinks it works better and faster with the Adaptec drivers than the Adaptecs do! The BusTek 742 has more complicated antecedents; it's an EISA clone of the 1542, not necessarily compatible with the 1742. * There's a known bug in the Adaptec 1742 firmware that produces hangs when it's used with certain SCSI tape drives, including the popular Archive 2150S. * Bill Austin <uunet!baustin!bill> writes: "the 1740 patches on ESIX [4.0.3a] do work but only bring the speed up in enhanced mode by about 15% over standard (643Kb/s vs 535Kb/s) in writing, although the *read* speed has nearly tripled (2,833 Kb/s) (this is using "iozone 16"). This may give some idea of what improvement to expect from native-mode 1740 operation. * Wolfgang Denk <wd@pcsbst.pcs.com> reports that SCO ODT 2.0 running an Adaptec 1542 cannot work with the following Hewlett-Packard drives: HP 97536 SL HP 97536 S HP 97544 A source at SCO says "This problem is known to us. In some not-yet-clearly-understood fashion, these HP drives interact badly with our implementation of scatter/gather disk transfer ordering. There are two different workarounds: you can turn off scatter/gather in the SCSI disk driver, or you can get updated drive control board ROMs from HP." S C D E M P U B X Network cards ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- c . . . . . c y 3COM EtherLink I 3C501 and 3C502 c . c y c . c c 3COM EtherLink II 3C503 c . . . . . c . 3COM EtherLink 16 (3C507) c . . . . . . . 3Com 3C523 & 523B EtherLink/MC c . . . . . . . 3Com 3C523 EtherLink/MC TP . . . c . . . . Everex EV-2015, EV-2016, EV-2026, EV-2027 c . . . . . . . HP 27245A EtherTwist Adapter Card/8 ISA TP c . . . . . . . HP 27247A EtherTwist Adapter Card/16 ISA TP c . . . . . . . HP 27250A ThinLAN Adapter Card/8 ISA BNC c . . . . . . . HP 27248A EtherTwist EISA Adapter Card/32 c . . . . . . . IBM Token-Ring Network Adapter c . . . . . . . IBM Token-Ring Network Adapter II (short and long card) c . . . . . . . IBM Token-Ring Network Adapter 4/16 c . . . . . . . IBM Token-Ring Network Adapter/A c . c . . . . . IBM Token-Ring Network 16/4 Adapter/A c . . . . . . . Microdyne (Excelan) EXOS 205, 205T, 205T/16 c . . . . . . . Racal Datacomm NI6510 ISA and ES3210 EISA . . y c c c . c Intel PC-586 aka iMX-LAN/586 . . . . . . c . Novell NE1000 . . . . . . c . Novell NE2000 y c y y c c c c c SMC & Western Digital 8003 and 8013 and variations . . y . . . . . WD TokenRing card Notes: * SCO support of SMC EtherCards and the 3C507 requires a patch available from their BBS. * Dick Dunn <rcd@raven.eklektix.com> opines "Somewhere along here, somebody needs to note that the 3C501 is a miserable-misbegotten-son-of-a-lame-she- camel-and-a-desperate-jackal Ethernet card, at least in UNIXland. It has serious problems in any serious multi-user system because of various hardware idiosyncrasies which are on the order of can't-walk-down-the- street-and-chew-gum." Do tell, Dick! S C D E M P U B X Tape drives ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- c y y c y . c . Archive 2150S or Viper 150 21247 (SCSI, QIC-150) c . c c . . c Archive Viper VP150E c . . c c . . Archive Viper 60 21116 c . . c c . . Archive Viper 150 25099 c . . c c . . Archive Viper 2525 25462. y . . c . . . Archive 60 - 525MB (QIC-02 and SCI) c . . c . . . Archive 4mm 4520 DAT c . . c c . . Archive Python models 25501-003, -005 and -008 (SCSI) c . . . . . . Archive Python DDS 4520NT and 4521NT DAT drives c c * c c . c Archive XL (5580 & friends) . . . c c . . Archive 3800 . . . . c . . AT&T KS22762 and KS23495 (SCSI) c . . . . . . Bell Technologies XTC-60 . . c . . . . Caliper CP150 c . . . . . . Cipher CP-60B, CP-125B . . c . . . . Cipher ST150S-II c . . . c . . Cipher ST150S2/90 (SCSI) n . . c . . . CMS Jumbo - 60MB QIC-40 n . . . c . . Emulex MT02/S1 +CCS INQ (SCSI) . . c c . . . Everex Excel Stream 60, 125, 150 . . c c . . . Everex5525ES (SCSI) . . c c . y . Everex EV-811, EV-831, EV-833 c . . c c c . Exabyte EXB-8200 (SCSI) c . . . . c . Exabyte EXB-8500 (SCSI) c . . . . . . HP 35450A (SCSI) . . . . c . . HP 88780 (SCSI) . . . . c . . HPCIPHER M990 (SCSI) . . . . c . . NCR H6210-STD1-01-46C632 (SCSI) c . . . . . . Mountain 8mm Cartridge y . . . n . . Mountain FileSafe 150MB (QIC-02) c . . . . . . Mountain FileSafe 60-300MB (QIC-02) c . y . . . . . Sankyo 525ES (SCSI) . . . . c . . Sony SDT-1000 (SCSI) . . . c . . . Tallgrass 150 - 525MB SCSI c . . . . . . Tandberg DQIC (SCSI) . . . . . . c TUV DAT c . y . c . . . Wangtek 150SE (SCSI) c . c c y . . Wangtek 5150ES (SCSI) c . . c . . . Wangtek 60 - 525MB (QIC 02 and SCSI) c . . c . . . Wangtek 6130 - HS 4mm DAT. c . . y c . . Wangtek 5125ES ES41, 5150ES ES41, 5150ES FA0 (SCSI) c . . c c c . Wangtek 5150ES SCSI-3 (SCSI) c . . c . c . WangTek 5150PK QIC-02 (QIC-150) c . y . . . . . Wangtek 5525 (SCSI) c . . c c . . Wangtek 6130-F (SCSI) c . . c c . . Wangtek KS23417, KS23465, KS24569 (SCSI) Notes: * All SVr4s inherit USL support for QIC-02, QIC-36 1/4", or SCSI tape interfaces, using QIC-24 (9-track, 60MB), QIC-120 (15-track, 125MB) or QIC-150 (18-track, 150MB) formats. * A user says of Dell: it appears that anything using Wangtek QIC02/QIC36 controllers works; this should include the Wangtek 525MB, Cipher ST150S2, and Archive 2150S drives. * UHC specifies the following tape controller/drive combinations: Wangtek PC-36 + Wangtek 5099-EN, Everex 811 + Wangtek 5150-EN, Bell Tech + Wangtek 5150-EN, Archive SC499-R + Archive External FT-60, Archive VP402 + Archive Viper 2150L, Everex 811 + Archive Viper 2150L, Bell Tech + Archive Viper 2150L, Archive VP402 + Archive Viper 2150L. * UHC claims that Any floppy tape supporting the QIC-107 physical and QIC-117 logical interface specs and QIC-80 or QIC-40 recording formats should work. This is probably true of other vendors as well. * BSDI says it supports almost any Wangtek 1/4" standard 3M streamer with a QIC-02 or QIC-36 interface. However, they admit that the Archive SC402 QIC-02 controller will not work. BSDI says it will support almost any SCSI tape unit, as well. * Floppy tapes don't work on Dell; USL provides the support, but it collides with Dell's code for auto-detecting the density of a diskette. * SCO's tape compatibility table lists drive/controller pairs; not all drives listed have been included here. They allege that any QIC-02 drive should work. Unofficial sources inside SCO claim any SCSI drive ought to work. * A source at SCO says the CMS Jumbo is neither compatible with QIC40/QIC80 nor Irwin "standards", vendor supplies their own driver which SCO does not support. He also said "CMS is in general fairly UNIX-hostile; don't buy their stuff if you have a choice." On the other hand, Jerry Rocteur <jerry @lncc.com> praises their hardware and says he found them quite helpful and knowledgeable. Your editor has no experience on which to base an opinion. * The Emulex MT02 is a QIC02 bridge controller for the SCSI bus -- lets you take an old QIC02 drive and run it on a SCSI bus. It is said to use a very old version of the SCSI spec; caveat emptor. * John Plate <plate@infotek.dk> writes: "According to a fax from the Archive manufacturer Maynard, [the XL 5580 drive only works with ESIX 4.0.3] if the tape drive is "drive" two! Which is the same as disabling the second floppy drive and then set a jumper on the tape drive." S C D E M P U B X Non-Winchester mass storage ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- . c . . . Bernoulli 90MB exchangeable SCSI . . c . Hitachi, Toshiba (models not specified) . . . c Maxtor RXT-800HS . c c . Storage Dimensions XSE1-1000S1 optical disk . y c . SyQuest cartridge media . c . . . Tandata . c c c Toshiba TXM-3201A1 CD-ROM . c y c c Toshiba TXM-3301B CD-ROM . . c c Toshiba WM-C050 . c c c Toshiba WM-D070 WORM drive VII. FREEWARE ACCESS FOR SVR4 SYSTEMS. US4BINR is an archive dedicated to binaries (executable compiled program) for UNIX System V Release 4 (SVR4) on 386/486 PC computer. Our goal is to provide easy access to precompiled programs. Those programs are (hopefully): Up to date. Documented. Useful or fun. Uploads annoucement are made in comp.unix.sysv386 and comp.unix.sys5.r4. US4BINR carries PD, Freeware, shareware, games, etc... US4BINR is a non profit organisation. To get more info, email the following message to request@us4binr.uucp or request%us4binr.uucp@uunet.uu.net reply Put_your_email_address_here help quit VIII. FREE ADVICE TO VENDORS: As a potential customer for one of the SVr4 ports, it's to my advantage to have everybody in this market competing against one another as hard as possible. Accordingly, some free advice to vendors, which I'm broadcasting to all of them and the public so as to put just that much more pressure on each vendor. :-) SCO: You have a serious image problem with many hackers which you've exacerbated recently by falling behind the SVr4 leading edge and then engaging in what certainly appears to be an attempt to sucker careless buyers with deceptive product naming. But the reaction to this wouldn't be nearly so vehement if it didn't come on top of years of discontent with more technical choices. There's too much stuff in the SCO kernel and admin tools that's different from USL and *not better*; too much stuff that raises weird little compatibility problems that shouldn't be there. Verbum sap. This different-but-not-better problem is perfectly reflected by the one thing about the otherwise-excellent SCO documentation that sucks moldy moose droppings; the rearrangement and renaming of the reference manual sections. Your technical writers entertain a fond delusion that this helps nontechnical users, but all it really does is confuse and frustrate techies with experience on other UNIXes. Lose it. Everybody but SCO: SCO's documentation set is to die for (except in the one respect noted above), and they add a lot of value over the base UNIX with things like ODT DOS and CodeView. Only Dell comes even close to matching SCO in the nifty add-ons department, and even they have a lot of room for improvement. If you want to outcompete SCO, you have to be *better*; this means (at minimum) supporting a windowing debugger and ISAM libraries and DOS support that goes beyond 2.0. Consensys: Fix the Powerports bugs everyone is reporting. They're doing you real damage. Nobody expects real support from an outfit selling at $1000 below market average, but you've *got* to make your own hardware work right or look like idiots. Beyond this, I think you have a serious attitude problem. So far, you're the only outfit out of nine to refuse to divulge information for the comparison tables. While you have a perfect right to do so, it smells bad --- as though you think you have weaknesses to hide. I tried to discuss this with your VP of sales (Gary Anderson) and got back very little but evasions, suit-speak, defensiveness, and attempts to divert me from the issues (and I don't mind admitting that the conversation made me pretty angry and didn't end very pleasantly). This man's behavior is all too consistent with reports of Consensys's dismissive behavior towards customers and continued refusal to acknowledge technical problems. In this corner of the industry we have a tradition of collegiality, mutual trust, informality, and candor. If you plan to be here for the long haul, you need to learn how to work with that rather than fighting it. Behaving like IBM will only get you hammered. Consensys and Esix: Get a real support address. Bang-path accessibility doesn't impress anyone any more --- in fact, it looks faintly quaint. You guys ought to be support@everex.com and support@consensys.com to follow the simple and logical convention SCO and Dell and Microport and UHC have established. Dell: Don't get fat and lazy. You've got the lead in the SVr4 market at the moment and you've got the money and resources to keep it, *if* you use them. If you staff up your UNIX support operation so customers don't get pissed off by infinite hold, *and* keep your prices the lowest in the upper tier, no one will be able to touch you. Don't let Microport et al. get ahead of you in releases and new technology, and try to reverse that creeping corporatitis (the no-comment-on-unreleased-products policy is a bad sign). Everybody but Dell: Offer all the free software Dell does --- and *more*. All it will cost you is the media, right? Even if you have to plaster CONTRIBUTED SOFTWARE, NOT SUPPORTED on it, include perl, elm, bison, gcc, emacs, gdb, mush, patch, compress, etc on your distribution tapes. Heck, include some *games* (SCO includes games with UNIX but not the full ODT product; and makes some games available for download on their BBS). Nethack, empire, zork, stuff like that. Your engineers use and play with all this in-house anyhow, yes? And you're selling to guys just like your engineers. They'll love you for it. Trust me. Set up a `sales' address to take product queries if you don't already have one. Everybody but Dell and SCO: A Dell person warns that the kinds of tweaks to the source made by porting houses can break X/Open (XPG3) conformance. Dell and SCO test every build with VSX (the X/Open-approved XPG3 test suite) and Dell reports that it often finds places where seemingly innocuous bug fixes cause XPG3 violations. Other UNIX vendors would be well advised to do likewise. Set up an 800 number for tech support. Support customers hate spending time on hold, and they hate it like poison when they have to *pay* for the hold time. The more overloaded your support staff is, the more important this gets. Verbum sap. Esix: You're *boring*. You seem to make a decent product, but there's nothing I've seen about ESIX that'd make me say "I might want to buy ESIX because...". Position yourselves; pick something like price or support quality or reliability or add-on features and push it hard. Warning: if you decide to push support, *hire more engineers*. Your rep for following up on support problems is bad enough that your "unlimited free support" ain't much of a draw; especially now that your two best support guys have quit. Esix, MST, UHC: Get 800 numbers for product info, too. MST: Set up a support@mst.com alias to your cs address, see above. What would that take, a whole five minutes? :-) If you don't start planning for 4.0.4 now, you'll get left behind this spring and early summer whan all the other vendors move to it. On present trends, your software prices are cheap enough; you'd probably get more sales mileage out of pulling down the hardware prices for your pre-configured systems. Everybody but MST and Microport: Set up a `sales' alias to your info and orders email address. A universal convention for this means just one less detail prospective customers need to remember. Microport: Your complete system is way overpriced relative to what other vendors in the top tier are selling. If I were a corporate customer, there is no *way* I could justify spending the $1K or $2K premium over Dell's price --- not when Dell has the rep it does for quality and features. You aren't offering anything but a crippled copy of JSB Multiview to justify that premium and that ain't enough. There's some evidence that you've got a technical lead on the competition. Push it; push it *hard*. You're first off the blocks with 4.0.4; keep that up, be first out with a stable 4.0.5. Market yourselves as the leading-edge outfit, court the hard-core wizards as their natural ally, detail somebody who's fluent in English as well as C to listen and speak for you on USENET, and keep the promises you make there. UHC: You've decided to push support; that's good, but follow through by getting that 800 number. Don't lose those small-company virtues of candor and flexibility, trade on them. Your policy of having all techs clear up to the product manager take turns on the support lines is a damned good idea, stick with it. And I'm sufficiently impressed with what I've heard from your guys that I think you might be able to fight Microport for the friend-to-wizards mantle, too. Maybe you should try. Everybody except BSDI: BSD/386 includes *sources*. For *everything*. Be afraid; be very afraid. In effect, this recruits hundreds of eager hackers as uncompensated development and support engineers for BSDI. Don't fool yourselves that the results are necessarily going to be unfocused, amateur-quality and safe to ignore --- it sure didn't work that way for gcc or Emacs. The rest of you will have to work that much harder and smarter to stay ahead of their game. BSDI: Don't you get complacent either. The 386BSD distribution is breathing down *your* neck... The most effective things you can do to to seriously compete with SVr4 vendors are: a) emphasize standards conformance --- POSIX, FIPS, XPG3, etc., and b) follow through on your support promises. Just another flaky BSDoid system isn't really very interesting except to hobbyists, even with sources --- but if it were proven a reliable cross-development platform it could capture a lot of hearts and minds among commercial software designers. Everybody: Do something about your product names! Even the cases that don't appear to be deliberate deception are very confusing to the customer. If you're releasing an enhanced 4.0.3 or 4.0.4 that's what you ought to *call* it. I recommend: Consensys UNIX Version 1.2 --> Consensys UNIX 4.0.3 revision 1.2 Dell UNIX Issue 2.1 --> Dell UNIX 4.0.3 revision 2.1 ESIX System V Release 4.0.4 --> Esix UNIX 4.0.4 revision 4 MST SVr4 UNIX --> MST UNIX 4.0.3 Microport System V/4 version 4 --> Microport UNIX 4.0.4 UHC Version 3.6 --> UHC UNIX 4.0.3 revision 6 The fact is, all these idiosyncratic version-numbering systems do you no good and considerable harm. At worst, they make it look like you're trying to pull a scam by deceiving people about the level of the base technology. At best, they parade your internal revision number (which conveys no useful information unless one is an existing customer considering an upgrade already) and obscure the really important information. Do your product differentiation elsewhere, in substance rather than nomenclature; it's not useful here. You're *all* badly understaffed in support engineering, and it shows. Boy does it show --- in poor followup, long hold times, and user gripes. The first outfit to invest enough to offer really first-class quick-response support is going to eat everyone else's lunch. Wouldn't you like to be it? IX. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND ENVOI Some of the material in this posting was originally assembled by Jason Levitt <jason@cs.utexas.edu> of "Open Systems Today". Grateful acknowledgement is made to him for permission to re-distribute and update this information. Many netters sent me email contributing technical information, feedback, and comment. Thanks to all. It's in combinations of individual mission and collective cooperation like this one that the net really shines, and I'm grateful to everybody who's worked with me to improve the signal/noise ratio. The level of cooperation I've experienced from vendors' program managers, techies and marketing people since the first issue has generally been outstanding. Particular high marks go to Jeremy Chatfield at Dell, Kristen Axline at Microport, John Prothro and Sam Nataros at UHC and Bela Lubkin at SCO, with very honorable mentions to Jeff Ellis at Esix and Rob Kolstad at BSDI. By cooperating intelligently with this FAQ, they've done a great job of serving the market and representing their corporate interests. One dishonorable mention goes to Gary Anderson, V.P of sales at Consensys and the only person I've encountered who's behaved like the classic stereotype of the slippery, stonewalling marketroid. An impression of this kind is exactly what Consensys needs to solve their credibility problems...NOT! So far, I've found that the technical merit of each of these eight products (insofar as I have data to judge; I haven't actually used any of them yet) seems to correlate pretty well with the degree of cooperation I've received. I wasn't explicitly expecting this result, but I'm not surprised by it either. -- Send your feedback to: Eric Raymond = esr@snark.thyrsus.com Xref: bloom-picayune.mit.edu news.lists:2203 news.announce.newusers:943 news.answers:4444 Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!enterpoop.mit.edu!senator-bedfellow.mit.edu!athena.mit.edu!jik From: jik@athena.mit.edu (Jonathan I. Kamens) Newsgroups: news.lists,news.announce.newusers,news.answers Subject: Changes to List of Periodic Informational Postings Supersedes: <periodic-postings/diff_721030482@athena.mit.edu> Followup-To: poster Date: 6 Dec 1992 06:12:08 GMT Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lines: 513 Approved: news-answers-request@MIT.Edu Expires: 19 Jan 1993 06:11:39 GMT Message-ID: <periodic-postings/diff_723622299@athena.mit.edu> References: <periodic-postings_723622299@athena.mit.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: pit-manager.mit.edu