Re: Calling Customer Service for bad sectors

[Kenneth Forbus <forbus@P.CS.UIUC.EDU>]

>It is true that it didn't have SI:FIX-FEP-BLOCK; there was a version that
>ran in 6.1 that was buggy.  The version released in 7.2 is considerably
>cleaned up; that's why we decided to release it.

That's good.  The version of FIX-FILE I got from customer support did
the job for me, so I was pretty happy with it.

Well, sure Symbolics machines are more complicated than PC's.  But
even dumb PC's have clever tools that let people fix things up without
knowing much at all about the internals.  Surely with the power of the
Symbolics environment one could write something at least as powerful
and user friendly as the Norton Utilities?  I understand Unix being
needlessly obscure, I'm less happy about it in a lispm environment.

	[..board swap story..]


>This is distressing, it has happened to me, and I was similarly annoyed.
>However, in my opinion, calling or writing Symbolics management in
>a position to do something about it would be a better way to improve this
>situation than complaining at/to SLUG.

You think we haven't?  Good heavens, we have complained over and over
again.  We have been promised better service, and have yet to see that
promise carried out.  Part of the problem on the Symbolics side has
been high turnover: We have had several reps in the last year, due to
layoffs, and by the time you explain the problem to someone, he's
gone.  Not much fun the nth time it happens.

BTW, complaining to SLUG in this instance has helped: I have received
a very helpful message from someone in Symbolics who is sincerely
interested in debugging these problems.  Kind of restores one's faith
a bit...