Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!swrinde!ucsd!sdcc6!beowulf!mattson From: mattson@beowulf.ucsd.edu (Jim Mattson) Newsgroups: comp.sys.next Subject: Re: NeXT on Campus -- How's NeXT really doing at your school? Message-ID: Date: 14 Jun 91 15:36:37 GMT References: Sender: news@sdcc6.ucsd.edu Distribution: comp Lines: 56 melling@cs.psu.edu (Michael D Mellinger) writes: >How well does NeXT seem to be gaining acceptance on college campuses? >What is the general attitude of the computing community? And are >people trading in their "Macintoys"(to quote Eric Scott) and PC's for >the NeXT? I've heard different things from several people, and I >would like to know if it is as bleak at other schools as it is at Penn >State. >[stuff deleted] >-Mike Judging by the forum, I'd suspect that you're probably going to get a warped response to a question like this. At campuses where things are even "bleaker" than at Penn, there may not be too many people reading this newsgroup to begin with. Here, in the Computer Science department, we have one (1) NeXT, and I toy with the idea of unsubscribing to comp.sys.next on a daily basis. The traffic is just too high to really make it worthwhile for the support of one machine. I can't speak for all of UCSD, but in this department, at least, I would have to say that NeXT is doing pretty poorly. One major problem is that we have a tremendous amount of "local" software (mostly public domain things for which we have sources, though they weren't actually developed locally), and a disturbingly high percentage of this software won't port to the NeXT or only ports with considerable difficulty. In an environment where every user expects to have every piece of software on every machine, the NeXT has become something of an orphan. Even worse, though, is the problem of support--or rather, the lack thereof. We are used to dealing with Sun, and they are pretty bad about informing end-users about known problems, but once we can identify a problem, in many instances we can at least get a patch (or patch the sources ourselves). With NeXT, on the other hand, our typical experience has been that it takes them at least a week to realize that the problem we are reporting is a known bug, and even then, there is no patch for it. Unfortunately, we don't have sources for the NeXT OS, so that's where the story ends. I know that NeXT is a relatively small company, but you'd think that someone there would be working on patching bugs. Ever since 2.0 came out, I've been waiting for a patch to the netgroups problem, but I'm not holding my breath. Ever since 0.9, we've been using an atom'ed version of Sun's lpd, too. With each new release, I expect the lpd problems to go away, but each time I've been disappointed. When we originally decided to buy this machine, I was all for it, but now I feel like I should have kept my mouth shut. Of course, all of this babble is just my own opinion, and should not be taken to reflect the views of UCSD, the computer science department, or anyone else. --jim -- Jim Mattson Internet: jmattson@ucsd.edu UCSD CSE Dept. 0114 Bitnet: jmattson@ucsd 9500 Gilman Drive UUCP: ...!uunet!ucsd!jmattson La Jolla, CA 92093-0114 Voice: (619) 534-7371