Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!bellcore!faline!thumper!ulysses!andante!princeton!udel!gatech!ncar!ames!amelia!prandtl.nas.nasa.gov!msf
From: msf@prandtl.nas.nasa.gov.UUCP
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: A counter-example for those who would eliminate PC binaries
Message-ID: <708@amelia.nas.nasa.gov>
Date: 1 Jul 88 11:02:15 GMT
References: <264@octopus.UUCP> <8820@netsys.UUCP> <268@octopus.UUCP>
Sender: news@amelia.nas.nasa.gov
Reply-To: msf@prandtl (Michael S. Fischbein)
Organization: NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, VA
Lines: 43

I just wanted to remind a few of the people carrying on about the mahjongg
posting about WHY the source to the tiles was posted, to prevent irrelevant
(to the mahjongg posting) disputes like this:

In article <268@octopus.UUCP> pete@octopus.UUCP (Pete Holzmann) writes:
>In article <8820@netsys.UUCP> len@netsys.UUCP (Len Rose) writes:
>>If the game is not particulary useful,one can still study the code and
>>learn something... Can you study a binary and learn?
>
>As far as the educational value of the Mahjongg tiles goes...
>Did you look at the "source" code for the Mahjongg tiles? I did... page
>after page of stuff like:
>
>0x0000,0xff00,0xffff,0xfff0,0x0000,0xffff,...
>
>I don't find that very educational, informative, or much more useful than
>a binary.

The mahjongg tiles were originally posted in a compressed binary form that
took up much less room (about 66K, total).  Some concern was expressed that
a virius/trojan horse/trapdoor was hidden in this binary distribution, and
the author was asked to post the source.  He complied, after warning the
net that the hex ascii representation of the tiles would be huge.  It was,
and there seemed to be no nasties in the code (I like the game, by the way).

SO, the mahjongg posting was a posting of source AFTER the binary had been
posted.  The only way this should be relevant to the pc.binaries controversy
is if someone proposed passing both source and binary to every program posted.
I haven't heard that proposed yet, and doubt it will be--although now that
I think of it, it might be a good idea for binary posters to indicate
where source is available for uucp or ftp; or for source posters with
machine specific programs to indicate where executables may be ftp'ed from
(you can't uucp executables and I wouldn't want to try to tell people they
ought to keep uuencoded copies of everything available).

Please, people, calm down.  

		mike

Michael Fischbein                 msf@ames-nas.nas.nasa.gov
                                  ...!seismo!decuac!csmunix!icase!msf
These are my opinions and not necessarily official views of any
organization.