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Bad documentation. The worst documentation is the documentation that looks professional and complete . . . and lies through its teeth. And the support staff at
by kabdib 10y ago
Bad documentation. The worst documentation is the documentation that looks professional and complete . . . and lies through its teeth. And the support staff at $VENDOR is just reading the same documentation that you are trying to decode, and it takes weeks to get a round-trip through their ticket system.
Once I submitted an issue with a workaround that had some rather nasty side-effects, and asked for a better solution. Weeks went by. They were promising a code sample. More weeks, more "Well, we're still working on this." The solution I got back, about a month later, was exactly the workaround I'd included in the support request, with some of the serial numbers filed off.
One issue took months to resolve. We finally told $VENDOR "Look, we've got to ship. But we can't if we can't get this (critical component) working, and we'll be forced to ditch you." That got all kinds of political bullshit out of the way, and in an hour we were talking to the guy who had designed the circuit we were having trouble with.
"Oh," he said, "You have to do (three simple steps)". And I tried it while one of my cow-orkers kept him on the phone, and it worked.
I never want to deal with $VENDOR again.
- dewyatt 10y ago> documentation that looks professional and complete . . . and lies through its teeth Like this 850 page behemoth that I wrote a driver for: http://web.archive.org/web/20110701163842/http://www.broadcom.com/collateral/pg/NetXtremeII-PG203-R.pdf http://web.archive.org/web/20110701163842/http://www.broadco... So many undocumented pieces and workarounds for silicon bugs, etc. Luckily there is a Linux driver to refer to, but still...yuck.
- dwpdwpdwpdwpdwp 10y agoYes, I totally agree with this. I spent weeks debugging some some unexpected behavior with a flash memory chip, only to learn that some crucial information was "explained" in one very cryptic sentence. It turns out the datasheet was originally written in Korean and the translated, poorly, into English.
- jjoonathan 10y agoMy favorite translation blip came from an Advantest calibration manual: "Adjust [setting] until the sun shines most brightly upon the screen." Fortunately, the setting did not have any effect on our friendly neighborhood ball of fusing hydrogen, and a bit of fiddling around eventually revealed that the instrument had turned its gain way up, allowing one to easily determine the zero point by adjusting the bias until the screen filled with noise (rather than pegging at the top or bottom). If one were to squint a bit, I suppose it might look like the sun shining on the screen?