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From: gsm@mailgsm.mendelson.com (Geoffrey S. Mendelson)
Newsgroups: comp.os.coherent
Subject: Re: tetris and posting sources
Message-ID: <15479153@mailgsm.mendelson.com>
Date: 3 Jun 91 02:17:21 GMT
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This is an explanation, not a flame, so please don't be insulted. :-)

kimmel@umvlsi.ecs.umass.edu (Mathew Kimmel) said:

>I just assumed it wasn't cool to post sources here, since I'd never seen
>any.  But, maybe I was wrong, so I'll give it a shot. 

No, you were right. Posting source files to this group causes problems for
those of us who pay for our news distribution. Since 50k is the equivalent of
SEVERAL WEEKS traffic in c.o.c, posting source files will cause many of us
to have to drop this group.

I am in the U.S. and use UUNET as my feed. I pay about one cent a k-bytes, but
my news feed (which is a small one) still costs me over a hundered dollars a
month. 
  
There are some people on this group (Joachim for example) who have to pay 
government owned telephone companies ridiculous (to us) rates for data
telephone service. I think he pays close to a dollar a k-byte.

Tetris is a nice game, it may be worth the 50 cents I paid to get it. BUT IT
IS NOT WORTH $50.00 or even $5.00. Escpecially since it was not asked for.

So please don't post sources here. If you want files from  a different country
make a personal arangment to email it or (heaven forbid) air-mail a diskette.

You can send 1.2 megabytes of compressed (almost 2 megabytes) of data on one
diskette for about $3.00 (including diskette). And it gets there in a week.

MEA CULPA. I have posted large files to this group too. I am speaking from
experience. :-)

>Here is a shar of my port of Tetris, the popular falling-blocks game.  
>Enjoy, and please send me any questions/comments...

I also have some complaints about how the file was sent:

     1. It is too big to be edited with the STANDARD COHERENT EDITOR "me".

     2. The STANDARD COHERENT MAKE "make" will not make it.

If you are going to post something, please make it usable by everyone. 

And BTW, TETRIS, in any form, is not public domain. It is a copyrighted 
program. This program duplicates the "look and feel" of the copyrighted
program. Also TETRIS is a registered trademark of AcademySoft-ELORG.

Several people have gotten in trouble for having TETRIS clones on 
their bbs's.


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Copyright (C) 1991, Geoffrey S. Mendelson.              All Rights Reserved.
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Geoffrey S. Mendelson           I've written and debugged almost eight thousand 
geoffrey@mendelson.com          LINES of C code under Coherent in the last two
mwcbbs!mailgsm!geoffrey         months.  :-)                     
(215) 242-8712                  And my wife still speaks to me!