Date: Wed, 21 Nov 2001 13:47:18 -0600 From: Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> To: "Anthony Atkielski" <anthony@atkielski.com> Cc: <questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: home pc use Message-ID: <15356.1222.239067.221091@guru.mired.org> In-Reply-To: <005001c17288$c17d0800$0a00000a@atkielski.com> References: <15354.60877.44081.17515@guru.mired.org> <019701c17224$013e6520$0a00000a@atkielski.com> <15355.2770.644343.846234@guru.mired.org> <01e201c17234$24bc2360$0a00000a@atkielski.com> <15355.6508.841314.798412@guru.mired.org> <005001c17288$c17d0800$0a00000a@atkielski.com>
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Anthony Atkielski <anthony@atkielski.com> types: > Mike writes: > > I've never had a client or manager open-minded > > enough to use free software and stupid enough > > to need that particular comfort blanket. > Or smart enough to understand the importance of support and yet stupid enough to > put mission-critical applications on unsupported freeware. > > The fact is, with all but the most trivial freeware, you need competent in-house > support if you plan to use it for any critical applications. If something > critical crashes, you will not have time to go searching for pro bono support > somewhere on the Net. That depends on how you define "competent in-house support". If you mean someone who knows the insides of the product and is competent to fix it and apply customizations, you're wrong. If you mean someone who knows where the pro bono support is and how to use it, you're right. On the other hand, the same is true for all applications. Anyone who just calls the vendors support line for help with a problem doesn't qualify as "competent in-house support". I've as yet to see a support contract that guarantees a "fix" in some time interval; they all guarantee a "response", which typically means you get to talk to the engineer the first time then. If you're lucky, they'll know a fix. If not, they'll search the inhouse bug databases and get back to you. Even at the highest support levels, this isn't good enough for critical applications. All of which is probably why I've as yet to encounter a major software product that didn't have some form of pro-bono support available. That support often works better than the customer support line. I know employees who watched the pro bono support for their companies product, and were encouraged to do so by the company on company time, though that is unusual. In at least one such case, the people watching the pro bono support knew the product better than the ones answering the support lines. The only support I've seen that was much better than the better pro bono support was from Cray. That's because they put an engineer on site who knew the inside of the product and was competent to work there. On the other hand, the monthly support fee was about the same as the yearly salary for hiring someone to do that for free products. > > There are certainly better tools than ftp for > > maintaining file structure. Personally, I use > > Perforce. > Does it require X? No. > > Yes, it autoindents for HTML, XML, C and Perl. > > Sounds good. > > > It doesn't pretend to be a WYSIWYG HTML editor, > > but it can format HTML and follow links on the > > fly. > Uh-oh. Does it require X? No, but it will use it if it's available. > > MSIE 4.x may have been better than Netscape 4.x, > > but trying to get something that did anything > > complicated, worked in both of them, and followed > > the standards was a nightmare. > That was Netscape's problem, not Microsoft's. No, it was both of them. The standard would dictate one behavior, Netscape did something different, and MSIE did yet a third thing. > I stopped supporting Netscape 4.x > over a year ago because the browser has so many bugs that it at least doubles > development time for any page or site, and because virtually no one is using > Netscape browsers today, anyway (less than 2% of visitors to my site). In order > to support Netscape 4.x, you have to write two versions of every page: one for > Netscape, and one for all the other browsers in the world that adhere to W3C > standards. Either that, or you have to create pages so lame that people fall > asleep reading them. I voted to just drop Netscape support, and write for all > the other browsers. The poor CSS support was one of the worst problems with > that version of Netscape. In which case, the pages should look the same in Netscape the way I configured it as it did for other browsers. I disable the CSS support in Netscape. Much as I detest browser sniffing, there are tricks you can use in CSS to hide the CSS from Netscape v4 - and from MSIE v3, which was almost as bad. If your pages were unusable if the user disabled CSS, then they're in Sturgeon's 90 percent. <mike -- Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/ Q: How do you make the gods laugh? A: Tell them your plans. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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