Bell Tech W.G.E. use with "sissy" unix

[Richard J. Greco]

In article  <446 at l5comp.UUCP>, scotty at l5comp.UUCP (Scott Turner)
writes:

>Pearls of wisdom from Deep-X:
>
>1. X10R4 driver source IS available from Bell. Call your sales person and
>have a cashier's check for $10,000 ready.

Actually Bell Technologies did not do the port to the WGE card, this
was done by Manticore Inc who owns the source code and as liscenced it
to Bell Technologies.  The $10,000 price tag is probably Manticore's
and not Bell's since this is the pricing I recieved from Manticore.

>My thoughts on the $10,000 price tag:

>Seeing how simple X10R4 ddx is, and how cheap programmers are ("Send more
>machine guns, we can't manage the programmers without them"), it would seem
>less expensive to just write your own X10R4 ddx. (In all seriousness, it
>looks like a 1 or 2 man month project at most for X10R4. $5K tops, and you
>get "free" training of a person to support/upgrade it)

I think you are underestimating the difficulty of duplicating
Manticore's driver.  If you do not do the client to server
communication in exactly the same way, you loose all of the clients.
The second difficulty here is what you need to duplicate are the
routines in the kernel.  The user side X process is device
independent.  It would be extremely difficult to decode the data
stream between the kernel and user sides of the kernel without knowing
how it is being done.

[stuff deleted]

>4. The mouse pointer flickers during scrolling because the X10R4 driver
>doesn't use the built in hardware bitmap cursor. The 82786 only supports
>16x16 bitmaps for the cursor.

The real reason for not using the native 82786 cursor is that it is
XOR only.  Have you ever seen an XOR cursor move across a dither
pattern (such as the one X uses for the background of the root
window)?  It is very easy to loose the cursor in a dither pattern.  I
can live with the flicker on a cursor I can see.  I find playing hunt
for the cursor very aggrivating.

Just an aside, I am not a completely happy Bell Tech Customer either.
We have managed to solve most of our problems ourselves out of
necessity.  All that happens with their technical support is they
record my phone number and promise that someone will call me back.  I
have yet to receive a return call from technical support.  My
salesperson has been the only person at Bell who has actually given me
after the sale service.

-- 
Richard J. Greco
rjg at ruby.TEK.COM                   {hplabs|uw-beaver|decvax}!tektronix!ruby!rjg

"Nonsense!  You're only saying that because no one ever has."