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From: rfengineer55 on 10 Jun 2010 12:10
<You posted in our user forum yesterday at 7:47PM ET and had a
response
<to your specific question just a few hours later. I'm not sure I
<understand what your expectations are.

<As I indicated in a group posting yesterday, it is usually not
required
<to "put the compiler in VMS mode", and nothing I have seen here so
far
<would require that for your code.

That would have been a good thing to post to the tread. I have yet to
get the Intel compiler to properly compile AMDIST.FOR at this time.

What do I expect? OK, since you asked. I expect documentation that is
sussinct. I also expect a phone mumber for resolving installation and
startup problems. it is not possible to email and post to list servers
in less time than it takes to talk.

When I follow the documentation the best I can and run a knownn good
Fortran program in Visual Studio 2008 and it comes back with many
errors. gfortran does not generate these errors. Instead, I get an
exe file. So I'm probably doing something wrong.

<I understand that you are frustrated, but people have been helping
you.

And these kinds of comments are of no help.

Where do you get the notion that I think that people here have not
been helping me? I
So Steve, let's stick to the problem at hand. I'm having trouble
getting my Intel compiler up and running in general, and hopefully the
postings on the Forum will help me do that.
The responsibility of solving those startup problems with the Intel
compiler sits with Intel, and not with the membershipo here.

Jeff
RF ENGINEER55


From: Richard Maine on 10 Jun 2010 13:14
rfengineer55 <rfengineer55(a)aol.com> wrote:

> What do I expect? OK, since you asked. I expect documentation that is
> sussinct. I also expect a phone mumber for resolving installation and
> startup problems. it is not possible to email and post to list servers
> in less time than it takes to talk.

A little patience might be in order. One might even maintain that lack
of adequate patience, foresight, and planning by the original author of
the code was the major cause of your current situation.

I don't happen to have a copy of the Intel compiler, so I don't offhand
know things like the exact spelling of various options (though I have at
least a notion of what some of the relevant options are). I'm quite
confident that they are documented, and I'm even fairly confident that I
could find appropriate documentation online, but that goes beyond the
work I tend to volunteer for (perhaps particularly when it is for
someone exhibitting such impatience).

I'd say you appear to be expecting a degree of handholding from the
vendor that is unrealistic for a product at the price point of that one.
Things like good phone support are quite expensive to provide and very
rare. (Typical phone support from vendors of many products gets you
someone who can't speak English intelligibly, doesn't really know
anything about the product, and doesn't listen to what you say other
than to try to guess which script he should read from; that's not what I
mean by "good." I'll avoid going off on all the tales of that I could
relate.) None of the problems you report sound like ones I would
normally expect a vendor to be providing. I've heard ones that would be
answered by a fairly casual glance through the manuals and others that
are more basic questions about the Fortran language more than about the
vendor's product.

As an additional note, phone is a *HORRIBLE* medium to do computer
programming support by. I know, as I've been there. Not that I've worked
on a vendor's support staff, but I've done lots of helping people with
my programs, or general helping people with random computer problems.
You mentioned frustration more than once. Try providing computer support
by phone and you'll get a rather large dose of it. More than once I have
talked to someone on the phone for over an hour before breaking down and
going over to see them... and could then see their problem before I even
sat down, because they hadn't mentioned some hugely important thing even
though I had asked... or maybe they gave me a flatly wrong answer
because they misunderstood the question. (For example, there was the
fellow, even a friend, who just "could not get my program to do
anything, even though it worked yesterday". When I finally went to see
him, I found him at the login prompt for the computer. Seems that he had
forgotten his user name for the system; as my program was mostly what he
used the system for, he tended to conflate the two.)

--
Richard Maine | Good judgment comes from experience;
email: last name at domain . net | experience comes from bad judgment.
domain: summertriangle | -- Mark Twain
From: glen herrmannsfeldt on 10 Jun 2010 13:59
Richard Maine <nospam(a)see.signature> wrote:
(snip)

> I'd say you appear to be expecting a degree of handholding from the
> vendor that is unrealistic for a product at the price point of that one.

I was thinking that, too, but in the past compilers came with at
least some kind of manual that you could easily look up the easy
questions. Lately that manual is on a CD, and sometimes not so
easy to use. One might print out a 500 page manual, but that
usually isn't so convenient, either.

> Things like good phone support are quite expensive to provide and very
> rare. (Typical phone support from vendors of many products gets you
> someone who can't speak English intelligibly, doesn't really know
> anything about the product, and doesn't listen to what you say other
> than to try to guess which script he should read from; that's not what I
> mean by "good." I'll avoid going off on all the tales of that I could
> relate.)

Reminds me of a story about phone support for networking hardware.

One of the questions to ask the client is to check that the power
plug is not in backwards. Now, in most cases it can't be in
backwards, but this question usually gets the person to actually
look at the power plug. Asking to check that the device is actually
plugged in doesn't always have that result.

-- glen
From: Richard Maine on 10 Jun 2010 15:21
glen herrmannsfeldt <gah(a)ugcs.caltech.edu> wrote:

> One of the questions to ask the client is to check that the power
> plug is not in backwards. Now, in most cases it can't be in
> backwards, but this question usually gets the person to actually
> look at the power plug. Asking to check that the device is actually
> plugged in doesn't always have that result.

I was once embassingly on the user end of one of those "does it have
power?" type of support calls. I was more used to fielding support calls
than making them, but if the site routers were down, I couldn't get into
where they were. The routers being down was quite common after power
outages, and the network folk were never proactive enough to check until
someone called in a trouble ticket.

So after one outage, when I couldn't get on the net, I called in a
trouble ticket for it. Went through the usual questions with the help
desk. Yes, I had reset the surge protectors and had power to my
computer. (We deliberately had surge protectors that required a manual
reset after an outage.) Yes, my network cable was plugged in. But just
as I was answering that, I remembered about the powered hub in our
office to provide more connections that were wired in... the powered hub
that was on a separate surge protector that I had not reset.... "Oops.
Sorry for wasting your time with the call."

--
Richard Maine | Good judgment comes from experience;
email: last name at domain . net | experience comes from bad judgment.
domain: summertriangle | -- Mark Twain
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