Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!ut-sally!utah-cs!utah-gr!stride!l5comp!scotty From: scotty@l5comp.UUCP (Scott Turner) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: AmigaWorld Expo cancelled (Flames ahead) Message-ID: <142@l5comp.UUCP> Date: Sat, 23-May-87 21:09:29 EDT Article-I.D.: l5comp.142 Posted: Sat May 23 21:09:29 1987 Date-Received: Sun, 24-May-87 08:59:48 EDT References: <6648@amdahl.amdahl.com> <306@osupyr.UUCP> <1044@pinney.munsell.UUCP> Reply-To: scotty@l5comp.UUCP (Scott Turner) Distribution: world Organization: L5 Computing, Edmonds, WA Lines: 70 Keywords: self-destruct stupidity narrow-minded management marketing bean-counters Summary: "Ask not what C-A can do for you but what you can do for yourselves" In article <1044@pinney.munsell.UUCP> klm@pinney.UUCP (Kevin McBride) writes: >Maybe it's time that upper (mis)management at C/A be strapped into >chairs and forced to read this news.group all night long! Maybe >then they would realize what a gold mine they really have and what >schmucks they are being! I seriously doubt it. We are for the most part hackers around here. Our opinions on what OTHER NORMAL people will think aren't taken seriously by most upper management types. After all, we're pretty weird people. :) >Who in their right f----ing minds would just throw away the opportunity >to drive their machine right into the forefront of personal computers? My favorite reply to this is "Crazy and Commodore have more in common than the first letter". When I first read about the Amiga I went "Oh BOY!!" then I got to the bottom of the article and read "Commodore", I went "OH NOOOOOO!!!!". So far all my fears except one have come to pass, despite ALL my worry my Amiga has been a solid machine. I've run it 24 hours a day, 7 days a week since Dec '85. I only need to give it a "rest break" overnight every three months or so. (It gets real flakey so I power it off over-night) >Come On Commodore! Get off your asses and get out there and prove to >us loyal owners (and prospective owners as well) that you are deserving >of our continued loyalty! I figured out in November '86 that the only way I was going to get any REAL changes made on my Amiga was if I made them. This was partly triggered by my experiences with getting bugs fixed by C-A tech support (The CATS crowd). I found that if I wanted the bug fixed it was best to fix it myself and then call Andy and say "Andy, there's this move.l d1,... in trackdisk.device you might want to fix". If you called Andy and said "Andy, the UPDATE command in trackdisk.device causes a guru #3 when updateing to a WP'd disk" lord only knows when I would have seen a fix. (The bug had been there since 1.0) So now I don't call CATS when I have a problem. I filed the application for the new developers program in the circular file when it came in. When something bites me again and again and again (like the sorry collection of amigadog library calls) I just knuckle down and find a solution. If the solution will take lots of re-work of code and time is short, well that feature causing the hassle goes bye bye. I lose, the client looses, and the world at large looses. But the cold hard reality of life is that C-A doesn't seem to have it's heart into supporting us. And they do their best to ham string the CATS people. I've seen several episodes where TS people at Commodore got TOO helpful and got called on the carpet for it. Everything has to go through channels, if the channel gobbles up the info you wanted then too bad charlie. I can still remember going down to Cupertino in the early days of the Mac and talking to one of the TS people down there. A comment he made still floats to the top of my mind every so often "We practically give away the shop here when it comes to source code". When was the last time you got any source to some piece of the Amiga from CATS? I don't mean some program they've hacked together, I mean something like serial.device (Apple gave theirs away!) Well now I use MCC's disasm and MAKE my own source code for disk based stuff and make it do what I want (relabel RAM:, tuned parallel.device etc etc etc.) Results come MUCH quicker than begging C-A to make them. How long have we waited to relabel RAM:? Since version 1.0? I wait no longer. Don't ask me to mail it to you either, its clear that C-A is feeling over protective these days. Recoding BCPL object is a bitch, but I expect to have a ram-handler that I can give away that will be smaller, faster(!), and relabelable later this summer that I can give away. You can log into GEnie and grab my tuned/debugged parallel.device though. :) To paraphrase that great American "Ask not what Commodore can do for you, but rather what you can do for yourself". Cause baby, Commodore ain't gonna do JACK for you! Scott Turner -- L5 Computing, the home of Merlin, Arthur, Excalibur and the CRAM. GEnie: JST | UUCP: stride!l5comp!scotty | 12311 Maplewood Ave; Edmonds WA 98020 If Motorola had wanted us to use BPTR's they'd have built in shifts on A regs [ BCPL? Just say *NO*! ] (I don't smoke, send flames to /dev/null)