Lurker's Guide mailto: Link

Note: I'm no longer at SGI, and this copy of the Lurker's guide dates back to 1998, but you could try checking out my consulting site at http://lurkertech.com.
Chris Pirazzi

What It's For

The lurker email alias is for sending corrections, comments, and suggestions for future pages and page enhancements to the various authors of the pages on the Lurker's Guide. We also welcome any new material of yours which is of value to SGI video developers and which you'd like to include.

It's Not for Support

Since most of us are engineers in the trenches busily trying to eliminate as much of the lore described in this document as possible, and also to ship the next products (why are these goals so often in conflict?), we can't responsibly answer technical and support questions. Before we put this message up, we got so many technical and support questions that it was interfering with our ability to fix the problems reported and make new stuff! Plus, the help we could offer was poor, because we didn't have time to ask you all the right questions and go through your code, etc.

Where to get Support

Here are the official sources of help:

For Customer Support, please contact your support provider. In the U.S. or Canada, call the Technical Assistance Center at 1-800-800-4744. Elsewhere, contact your local SGI branch office. For more information, see:

http://www.sgi.com/Support/
For Developer assistance, contact the SGI Developer Response Center at devprogram@sgi.com or 1-800-770-3033. For Developer Program information, go to:

http://www.sgi.com/Support/DevProg/
Some developers have told us that their attempts to get support and technical questions answered through official channels failed, though few of these folks gave us any specific details. We tried "fixing" this by answering your questions on this link, but clearly that failed as well. So together we should go right to the source and fix the official channels. To that end, if you have a specific case where you have given the official channels a thorough try and failed, you can mail us with a complete description of the case history and the problems you encountered and we can forward this to Customer Support and/or Developer Assistance from our side. If there is a problem with official channels, this is the only way they will ever get fixed.

Another source of help is net news. The people on the lurker mail link, as well as many others knowledgeable in SGI audio, video, MIDI, and other products, read and respond to questions on comp.sys.sgi.misc and comp.sys.sgi.audio. There is a proposed addgroup for comp.sys.sgi.video but this has not gone through yet.

RTFM

Many of the questions we received are answered in one of the Lurker's Guide pages, or answered somewhere in the Developer's Toolbox at http://www.sgi.com/Technology/toolbox.html Make double sure your question is not an RTFM; you can often save yourself much time by a second reading.

If you have suggestions about how the material can be better organized (we could try a variety of indexing and searching methods), let us know.

The address

I've read this, and I still want to mail to chris@pirazzi.net