Lying by omission (was Re: Does troff work?)

[Dan Barrett]

I wrote:
>>I can't get troff to work under Ultrix 3.1D or 4.0.

farhad at sunburn.stanford.edu (Farhad Shakeri) wrote:
>Do:  file /usr/lib/font/*   and see if they are still VAX binaries!

	Ugh!  Yes they ARE!!!!  No wonder troff isn't working.

>"troff" is an unsupported program in ULTRIX...

	Why the hell do they include a program that is guaranteed not to
work at all?  This isn't the first time, either... though it's the first
time I've seen it in a major application.  (Ultrix 2.0 version of the game
"zork" crashes immediately, due to an illegal instruction.)

FLAME_ON()

	I'm very unhappy about this.  No, make that "furious."  Since we
decided to "upgrade" from a VAX to a network of DECstations, this is the
FIFTH little "surprise" I have encountered.  Software that was supplied with
our VAX Ultrix, software that we DEPEND ON AND USE EVERY DAY, is totally
broken or missing in RISC Ultrix.

	And guess what?  Our network of DECstations is not up and running
yet, over a month since it was delivered.  Why?  Because of one of the
"little surprises", our DS3100's won't boot.  Not only that, but if they
WOULD boot, we could not use them in the configuration we wanted because
(surprise!) DEC's diskless boot environment (DMS) requires an ENORMOUS
amount of server disk space... far more than we can afford to waste on our
server.

	Our salesperson never said a thing about this, of course.  I call
this lying by omission.  This is completely unacceptable.  As systems
administrator for our department, I can say that my experiences with our new
DECstations has brought my opinion of DEC to a new low.

	I have had excellent interaction with DEC hardware service, and a
few notable people in software (Fred Avolio, Jody Patilla), so there is
still hope for DEC in my good graces.  But right now, I am ready to knock
some heads.

FLAME_OFF()

                                                        Dan

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