 The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Editorial Ash Nallawalla ash@melbpc.org.au |
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This issue should keep the more technical types happy. It concentrates on aspects of ISSN 1031-8208 hard disks not normally found in user-friendly commercial magazines. I don't pretend to understand it all, but it looked quite interesting and I emailed the principal author Pete Holzmann to get his permission to use it.
That Ratio Again!
If you attended the last monthly meeting you would have heard some emotive discussion about the download:upload ratio. As this threatened to take over the evening's proceedings, a portion of the next monthly meeting will be devoted to further discussion about this topic. I think that the main thrust of the arguments was "We should be able to do what we like during our daily allotted quota as not all of us have programs or messages to contribute". I rarely download software as my main enjoyment is reading echomail and local message areas. I try and answer a few queries and I used to upload articles for this magazine (some were not used - here's my chance!). This gave me a ratio of 8:1 but since I am downloading your articles, it is now about 5:1 and dropping rapidly. I tend to agree with the above quote prima facie, but I have not heard all the facts that led the Sysops to take this decision. So before you decide to vote for a new Australia committee or suggest a new pair of Sysops, remember that in any voluntary organisation capable replacements are difficult to find. We all have our opinions, and sometimes we volunteers are entitled to offer our time on our terms. I have played with Opus as I still fancy running my own BBS one day (probably devoted to desktop publishing), and I can imagine it to be a very time-consuming, thankless task. Only abut 25% of the membership uses the BBS, so I would hate to lose this service if our Sysops quit in disgust. Would you be willing to run the BBS from your home? Anyway, you should attend the next meeting and hear both sides of the story if this topic concerns you.
Humble Pie
I have been humbled. The editorial Wyse 386 came to me from David Jitts via our Secretary and President, but neither Ian nor I could get it to talk to the Laserwriter+. I rang the machine's suppliers MicroHelp and asked to speak to The Boss. After being put on hold for two or three songs' worth of some local noisy station, (I was asked if I cared to wait - I did) I got about 10 seconds with Joe who transferred me to Adrian, their service manager. Now I fancied myself as being fairly PC-literate, being the author or co-author of four MicroBee books, one radio/TV book, several amateurish, forgettable, commercial programs, numerous articles, having built my first MicroBee and a PC clone kit, blah blah (trumpets blaring). In this frame of mind, I thought that Adrian's suggestion that it must be a configuration problem because "serial cards just don't die" sounded more like "is your machine switched on?" and similar condescending remarks that you Gurus must have also heard from computer salesmen.
Well, I thought I would humour him and I tried his suggestions. After all, I had only installed Ventura Publisher at work over twenty times (successfully) and we have only two PostScript printers and one LJII clone - I was an expert! No, it couldn't be a preamble problem because no data seemed to reach the Laserwriter+, so this was the first to be abandoned. I even installed Ventura from scratch on Drive D, but via Melb PC Bulletin Board still it would not work. Surely, the problem must be with the cable or serial card, also considering that none less than Ian Robinson had been equally unsuccessful. I took the machine in to Adrian and it worked! Several things were wrong on my part: I should not have been so full of myself and should have tried all possibilities. David Jitts had said that he thought that COM1 was the port nearest the end, and I didn't question this. (The Wyse has 9 sockets of which two are serial - the manual does not help, as configurations vary). I'm certain I tried to treat COM1 as COM2, and vice versa, but I was also swapping the cable each time, so the printer was always disconnected! To make matters worse, later, whilst looking "under the bonnet" I had forgotten to plug in the cable to 'COM1'. Well, COM2 was really COM1 - where the printer cable was connected most of the time - and vice versa. I also regret that I did not check out the j preamble issue further, because this was another necessity in the PC Update configuration. (I cannot use that speed-saving technique at work for reasons that would make you laugh and make me cry!).
In short, Adrian, I owe you an apology for wasting two hours of your time
and for having doubted you. Some of us are PC Gurus only by default, and the kudos we receive at work for
impressing the illiterati gives us a misleading picture of our own worth. It is becoming more and more
difficult to be an expert because hardware and software is getting more complex. I use or support daily a
Gould PN6080, PDP-11, and boxes containing a 68020, 8088, 80286 and 80386, four operating systems, and
numerous software packages, so I cannot be expert in them all.
Future Issues For the rest of the year I hope to receive articles from you, the members of Melb PC, for the
following suggested themes:
- September - Writing, Documentation, Desktop Publishing, Word Processing etc.
- October - Communications, Networks, Modems, Bulletin Boards etc.
- November - Information Centres in organisations, Office Automation, Product Support from Dealers, Distributors and Manufacturers.
- December - Employment for PC Professionals.
The November issue will have two themes - Information Centres will, subject to your input, cover the experiences of people who provide PC support to other PC users within their organisation. Product Support will include articles from dealers (who will explain why you should not buy from the cheapest source), from distributors, and from you, writing about your views of product support or lack thereof. We want to hear about both the good and the bad sides.
In the December issue I would like to see articles on your experiences on PC-related employment issues. Are you an employer - what advice have you for potential candidates. Are you a job-seeker - do you get responses to your letters? About once a year get despondent and think about tossing in my secure, permanent Commission for the insecurity of the lower aid (PC) private sector. Purely for my own selfish reasons I would like to see PC professionals earn as much as IBM mainframers. This is not likely to happen, but what do you think? I subscribe to the theory that if you pay peanuts you get monkeys. Have you seen jobs advertised for almost half your salary for doing the same work? In general, I think that computers have arrived before people were ready for them - there's perhaps a theme for a Training issue!
Dial Help
As a Dial Help volunteer I get an average of 5-6 calls a week. If you
exclude calls from users who have misplaced their manuals, or from those who want advice in choosing a
product, this must point to some lack of product support. I would appreciate letters (not telephone calls)
from users of this free service. How do you find the service? Are some of the volunteers using it as a form
of free advertising? I do not want to let the column exceed a page unless it is because of additional
categories, rather than because ten people want to be listed in a given category. Some of the crowding occurs
because some people are experts in almost everything. One of these days we may be forced to limit the number
of entries per volunteer. A counter argument is that having many entries per category allows a person with a
problem to speak with many experts. Some people on the list are not experts, but are willing to help
nevertheless. Please comment.
Questionnaire
The Committee is planning to distribute a questionnaire one of these days.
It will probably be anonymous, although I think that few will bother to fill it out unless it is part of a
renewal notice. Do you want to see some pressing question included?
Write Some Articles!
Out of 2000+ financial members only about 20 bother to write regularly, but
they cannot keep writing forever. One of these days they may all have an 'off' month and we may be forced to
have an entire issue based on reprints from other groups' magazines. Letters will also do if you can't write
a full article.
Reprinted from the August 1988 issue of PC Update, the
magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
