Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Path: utzoo!utgpu!utstat!philip
From: philip@utstat.uucp (Philip McDunnough)
Subject: Next docs, printing, nonsense
Message-ID: <1990Dec10.022935.20133@utstat.uucp>
Date: Mon, 10 Dec 90 02:29:35 GMT
Distribution: na
Reply-To: philip@utstat.uucp (Philip McDunnough)
Organization: Statistics, U. of Toronto


In article <1990Dec7.154713.27005@cs.umu.se> dvljhg@cs.umu.se (J|rgen Holmberg) writes:

[quoting arguments for and against the Amiga, NeXT,etc...]

Look, I have a NeXT cube, a Mac, GS  and maybe one day an Amiga or a PC. The
point is that software and the reasons for usage drives puchases( and         
finances obviously). Could all of this nonsense w.r.t. the Amiga and the
NeXT please stop? If it doesn't I'll get rid of the NeXT and never buy an
Amiga! In short it would be nice if people on both sides would stop acting
like 2 year olds.

On another note, does anyone know of a printer driver to any of the HP inkjet
printers, especially the Painjet. Printing to an Apple ImageWriter is not my
idea of anything wothwhile. Where are the drivers?

Also, I really have this beef about the documentation which comes with the
NeXT. Or perhaps I should say lack of documentation. I'm not a computer guru,
but I didn't appreciate having to rebuild a 330meg HD in a mad quest to try
to get rid of a demo program( FrameMaker) after I had installed the version
I bought.
                                                                
Nowhere in the manuals does it tell you how to logon as root once you are on
the system. Once you set up a password for yourself and reboot the computer
it is easily done as the login dialog box is presented. However, I don't want
to use the NeXT as a Unix workstation. I got it to replace my Macs, and I
don't want to worry about passwords. Presumably there may be some way of
changing the file protections using Netinfo, but I'm not going to spend years
trying to figure that one out( I tried for a couple of hours).

Another issue is on booting from the optical, is there any way of seeing the
330meg hard disk? This is not discussed anywhere. Anyway I haven't the
patience to become a systems' programmer. Either this thing turns into a
more user friendly system soon( am still waiting for 2.0, 040, floppy) or
it'll be sold.

By the way, I do think the NeXT is really nice and it could be a great system.
But I'm not going to wait until I'm 50 to find out.

Philip McDunnough
Professor of Statistics
University of Toronto-> philip@utstat.toronto.edu
[my opinions]