Date: Mon, 29 Sep 1997 12:45:06 -0700 (PDT) From: Sean Eric Fagan <sef@Kithrup.COM> To: chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Funny interview with Mr Gates Message-ID: <199709291945.MAA15652@kithrup.com> In-Reply-To: <342FF248.167EB0E7.kithrup.freebsd.chat@mdstud.chalmers.se>
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In article <342FF248.167EB0E7.kithrup.freebsd.chat@mdstud.chalmers.se> you write: >Gates: Actually, that's about five percent. Most of them call to get >advice on how to do a certain thing >with the software. I have called uSoft three times. The first time was about Windows NT -- networking did not work, after I installed it. After spending nearly an hour on the phone to their 900 number, I was told to manually install an ethernet driver from the CD-ROM. That fixed it. The second and third times were both about Win95. When I installed win95, it would not work on the network, *and* would not recognize my CD-ROM drive off of the SCSi card (adaptec 2940U). After an hour or so on the phone for the CD-ROM problem, I had no help from them. I asked elsewhere, and ended up installing a later driver from Adaptec's ftp site. That caused it to work -- it seems that Win95 was not using the 2940 as a SCSI card, but just as a generic disk (i.e., BIOS support). Aftrer an hour on the phone for the network problem, I had no help from them (and paid for it, too *grumble*). It turns out the problem *there* was that I needed to disable auto media-select for the driver; once I did that, it worked. (And then I ftp'd the SCSI driver as stated above.) All three of those were calls "to get advice on how to do a certain thing with the software." I would not necessarily classify them as bugs; I would call them "installation issues" or "problems." So... I can believe the figures. I think that describing them that way is extremely misleading -- it makes it sound like most people are calling up to ask how they can do something unusual with the software (e.g., "How can I get Word 6 to print page numbers alternatively in roman and arabic numerals?"), when I was just trying to find out how to get it to work with features they had heavily advertised it as having. I suspect that most of the support that WC does for FreeBSD are similar -- installation issues, mostly, or how to make it work with specific hardware. But Jordan would know more about that than I would. Reply to me, or to the list, but not both, please.
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