X & hotline

[James Helman]

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 at thrush.stanford.edu) 			(415) 723-4940