From: NU013809@NDSUVM1.BITNET (Greg Wettstein) Subject: Re: Diamond Stealth 24 VLB and Xfree Date: 21 Mar 1993 06:40:21 GMT
> Last fall we did an email survey, where I had folks mail in a note if they
> were intending to no longer purchase Diamond products, and how many lost
> sales were involved. The grand total was 6-10,000/year. I tabulated all
> of this and sent it to Jeff Orr at Diamond. The official response from
> Diamond was that they did not intend to change their policies. They offered
> to allow us to redistribute relocatables for the clock setting module. We
> refused, as this is not acceptable to the XFree86 Core Team. With so many
> other good products, we are not about to bend over backwards to support
> Diamond.
>
> Anyone who wants to take this up with Diamond can feel free. If they change
> their policies, let us know, because we no longer particularly care to be
> bothered with it.
>
> --
> David Wexelblat <dwex@mtgzfs3.att.com> (908) 957-5871
> AT&T Bell Laboratories, 200 Laurel Ave - 3F-428, Middletown, NJ 07748
I just wanted to add a quick note saying how much I support the stance
taken by the XFree development team regarding Diamond. It is unfortunate
that X users on the ISA platforms have such a small market share because
it is doubtful that we can put much sting in our boycott. This company
deserves a massive go-over with a Stihl chainsaw (my days as a pulp
cutter in the north woods rearing their head here).
First off before I get flamed from Diamond supporters let me say that
those people who got stuck with Diamond products without knowing about
their proprietary philosophies have my sympathies. I have a portion of
my network fleet ($xx,xxx.00's) which got clobbered in the SpeedStar Plus
4.xx -> 5.xx fiasco. I specified SpeedStar PLUS when I bid the network
since the 4.xx cards were almost the board of choice for ISA based X
work.
Despite the dollars that this is costing my research group I would never
advocate support for this companies products and would NEVER try to goad
the XFree team into supporting Diamond products in any way. Our course
of action is to pull the SpeedStar PLUS boards and substitute STB products
as our budget allows. A point of intense personal satisfaction will be
when I pull the last SpeedStar PLUS board. I am going to take the board
down to maintenance and have the boys use a metal cutting bandsaw and
cut the board into 1 inch strips which I will personally mail back to
Diamond.
Companies have a right to proprietary technologies, I fully support any
company which chooses this route. What I do not like is being lied to and
this is what Diamond did. There are a ton of vendors out there and I would
be forsaking my fiduciary responsibility as an administrator if I chose a
company which knowingly lies about their products.
When our new crop of machines came in (with rev 5.xx) boards and our
1024x768 XConfigs stopped working we ended up wasting almost two man weeks
trying to track the problem. The only thing that saved us was that I read
a chance note from David talking about the Stealth boards and his suspicions
that Diamond was moving to programmable oscillators on their PLUS boards as
well. This note and the fact that I noticed that all the equipment with
4.xx boards was still working caused me to become suspicious.
I phoned Gateway (our vendor) and after about 12 phone calls they gave up
trying to come up with a technical solution. In fairness to them they are
a low-margin firm, good machines but you have to be content knowing that
you are pretty much on your own in the support department if you plan on
doing anything other than DOS. To their credit they gave me the name of
a contact person at Diamond.
I called this person (a vice-president) 3-4 times leaving voice mail. He
did not even have the common courtesy to return my phone call. So I
started through their technical support staff. I very explicitly told
them what I thought the problem was. The jockey on the other end told me
that he knew of NO changes in the SpeedStar PLUS cards. Somewhat chagrined
I decided to do some technical sleuthing.
I tore the clock detection code out of the XFree code and holed up for a
weekend with one of our Linux machines to do some testing. A couple of
days of testing pretty clearly indicated that Diamond's vmode program was
causing the #3 dot-clock generator to change values on Rev. 5.xx boards
but not on Rev. 4.xx boards. That was about all the evidence I needed.
Called Diamond technical support back and asked them the same question
again. The reply, 'I know of no changes in the SpeedStar PLUS cards.'
I told him my findings and sounding somewhat nervous he said that he would
talk to the technical support supervisor. The technical 'supervisor' came
back on the phone 5 minutes later (my dime) and told me quite curtly that
he knew the guys that designed the boards and could assure me that there
were no changes in the boards. We started ordering STB PowerGraph ERGO
cards the next day.
My two cents on why we should not support Diamond. They are unethical,
unprofessional and they lie. I would choose not to trust my organization
or my professional reputation on the type of support that can be expected
from people who engage in such practices. Margins and profits are getting
thin everywhere, bidding major network purchases can make or break budgets
and self-preservation demands that companies like this don't even get
consideration in the bidding process.
Interestingly I talked to our sales representative at Gateway 2000 about
what happened. Diamond wouldn't return phone calls to them either. If
Diamond doesn't respect a 1 billion dollar a year consumer I would guess
that they probably are not going to respect consumers in a niche market,
ergo we should not respect them. After this incident our sales rep. never
even asks us, they just ship our machines without video. Incidently they
now use ATI products rather than Diamond...
For those who think that Diamond products should be supported ask yourself
these questions:
Where would Linux be if all information about programming IDE disk
controllers was considered 'proprietary'???
Considering the current legal climate and this companies demonstrated
behavior would you, as a member of the XFree core team, use reverse-
engineered code to support these products???
Speak with your pocketbooks. Support companies that support their users.
Before people are quick to point out that they are poor and my company is
rich and can afford to cut up their cards let me point something out. This
note is being written on my home machine, running Linux and XFree 1.2
at 640x480 on a 5.02 SpeedStar PLUS as I patiently save my money and
wait to see what type of accelerated chipsets Dave and the boys find that
they can support. Yeah, my wife decided to surprise me, called Gateway
and told them to send the same type of machine as we ordered for work as
an early Christmas present.... ;-)
As always,
Dr. G.W. Wettstein Oncology Research Div. Computing Facility
Roger Maris Cancer Center UUCP: uunet!plains!wind!greg
Fargo, ND 58122 INTERNET: greg%wind.UUCP@plains.nodak.edu
Phone: 701-234-2833
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`The truest mark of a man's wisdom is his ability to listen to other
men expound their wisdom.' -- GWW