Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!decwrl!petunia!news
From: jdudeck@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU (John R. Dudeck)
Newsgroups: comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d
Subject: Re: v08i108: checktd, check time and date (part 01/01)
Message-ID: <270cab08.18c7@petunia.CalPoly.EDU>
Date: 5 Oct 90 15:47:20 GMT
References: <1990Oct5.103423.8051@uwasa.fi> <9010051213.AA01056@thep.lu.se>
Organization: Cal Poly State Univ,CSC Dept,San Luis Obispo,CA 93407
Lines: 32



In an article magnus@THEP.LU.SE (Magnus Olsson) wrote:
>I see it as almost an insult to the users to send out small, almost trivial
>programs (with some - not all - of the programs mentioned above,
>any programmer worth his salt could hack together an equivalent Turbo Pascal 
>program in 20 minutes), *withouth documentation* and with just the note 
>"Shareware $20" attached.
>This somehow gives me the feeling that the author sees his program just as
>a simple way of making money, not as a service to other people (and that's
>after all what software distribution via Usenet really should be!)

I suspect that the author is a novice, and after all the work he put
into hacking together the programs, he didn't have an objcetive picture
as to what they are worth to the average user.

>I normally move such programs directly to /dev/null ! 

I added them to my collection of stuff.  Maybe someday they might be useful.

>BUT - if you ask me to pay $20 for it, you should AT LEAST
>have the courtesy to include some proper documentation. And this is
>true even if your program is "self-documenting" - I'd like to know
>what it does *before* I run it! 

Agreed!  But I was just thinking, wasn't the author from Australia?
Aussie dollars are only worth US$0.82 or so...

-- 
John Dudeck                                  "Nothing is foolproof, because
jdudeck@Polyslo.CalPoly.Edu                        fools are so ingenious."
ESL: 62013975 Tel: 805-545-9549                       -- quote from PC Mag.