Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!cmcl2!phri!roy
From: roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: micro-code upgrade (and VMS vs. Unix stats)
Message-ID: <3732@phri.UUCP>
Date: 31 Mar 89 02:50:37 GMT
References: <485@cs.wmich.edu> <916@atanasoff.cs.iastate.edu> <3729@phri.UUCP> <3623@pixar.UUCP>
Reply-To: roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith)
Organization: Public Health Research Inst. (NY, NY)
Lines: 26

In article <3623@pixar.UUCP> rta@pixar.UUCP (Rick Ace) writes:
> It makes no economic sense for a vendor to support previous versions of
> products when the current versions are supersets of their predecessors.
> [...]  Roy, the best thing you could have done was to demand that DEC
> commit to a date (as early as you bargain for) by which they will either
> make Rev 7 work or return you to your previous revision level.

	Rick is, of course, right.  In the end, what happened was
essentially what Rick suggested; I demanded that if they couldn't fix they
they had to put it back to how it was before they started, which eventually
they did (fix it, that is).  For the record, once the bugs were ironed out,
it did work, and has worked fine for years since.  Those of you who have
followed my rantings over the years know that I'm pretty cynical when it
comes to DEC field service; sometimes I get carried away.

	As a case in point, on the AppleTalk network I try to administer, I
don't let anybody plug in a Mac unless they are running the latest version
of the system software (or, in the case of 6.0, the latest version that I
decree to be working properly).  I suppose some people get pissed at me
when I demand that they upgrade their system software when what they are
running now works fine for them.
-- 
Roy Smith, System Administrator
Public Health Research Institute
{allegra,philabs,cmcl2,rutgers,hombre}!phri!roy -or- roy@phri.nyu.edu
"The connector is the network"