Xref: utzoo news.groups:4755 comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d:465 Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!ihlpa!ihnp4!arizona!gudeman From: gudeman@arizona.edu (David Gudeman) Newsgroups: news.groups,comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d Subject: Re: What to do about binaries Message-ID: <6010@megaron.arizona.edu> Date: 26 Jun 88 20:04:58 GMT Organization: U of Arizona CS Dept, Tucson Lines: 151 In article <1128@csccat.UUCP> loci@csccat.UUCP (Chuck Brunow) writes: ] ] What do we do about .binaries? Boy, are you ignorant. Not that ignorance is always something to be ashamed of, but posting ignorant messages to a network is. My reply is really to the various people who may have been mislead by your stupid article, so you don't have to read the rest. You have already proven to my satisfaction that you don't learn from experience. ] Something that would make a big difference would be to completely ] ban SHAREWARE, as it represents 95% of the traffic in the group ] comp.binaries.ibm.pc. Or we could ban aritlces by you, since they account for 95% of the stupidity in comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d. I'm really curious about your irrational hatred of binaries. Did you have a bad experience with a binary as a child? Why don't you just stop reading binary groups? Then you can pretend they don't exist, and they won't bother you at all. ] There are several reasons why SHAREWARE ] is not desirable ... ] SHAREWARE is commercial software... ] Lots of people are happy to see these things on the net. Who do you think you are to tell us what kind of information we are allowed to post and recieve? ] SHAREWARE quality is frequently low. Shareware quality is frequently high also. This can be said about almost any group of products. ] Following every program ] there are floods of postings regarding bugs, and some of the ] programs have been denounced by the net users for problems. Following some programs there are floods of such postings. The same can be said of postings in comp.sources.* ] One distributor of SHAREWARE on the net was contacted about ] problems and he got pretty flame-y, saying "If it trashed your ] file system and ate your favorite program, hey, don't use it". ] Clearly, you get what you pay for. I suppose you are refering to the flushot problem. Why don't we eliminate every newsgroup that ever contained a flame? The author of flushot seems a triffle high-spirited, but he was provoked, and you are misquoting him. ] Unfortunately, SHAREWARE ] has the effect of crowding higher quality software out of ] the market so that there is no viable alternative to it, ] despite the bugs. Gee, I would be embarassed to make such a stupid, far-reaching, undocumented statement. It also presupposes your bogus assumption that shareware is inherently lower quality than other software. ] There is also a considerable amount of re-posting. You get the same thing in comp.sources.*. ] SHAREWARE is recursive because it uses SHAREWARE archivers. The vast majority of binaries for PC's use shareware archivers. Just goes to show how important shareware is. ] The selection of archivers features an old IBM trick of ] "be nasty to the user", by being incompatible. Choke! New heights of stupidity! I didn't think think it was possible. Just what dreamworld do you come from where everything is compatible with everything else? There are a few naive users out there complaining about a new archiver that unarchives files in a certain format, but sometimes produces incompatible archives of its own. This sort of thing happens so frequently, that I can't believe anyone with any experience at all would complain about it. It's called evolution, and usually leads to better products. ] ... And yet the user must have ] several to decode the various forms that SHAREWARE can take. Wrong. The user only needs pkarc. ] The archives have ] been LZW'd before they are sent and they won't compress ] again for news. This puts a 3:1 size factor on the archived ] SHAREWARE as compared to text. Huh? This topic has been discussed a lot, and the general concencus seems to be that arc'ed _may_ under some circumstances cause a very minor (<5%) increase in the size of news batches. Where in the world did 3:1 come from? And -- you'd better sit down for this -- this holds for _any_ archived file, not just that evil shareware. ] SHAREWARE frequently only runs on specific hardware, ie. those ] semi-intelligent terminals that IBM calls the PC. This is no more common for shareware than for other binaries. ] The actual ] number of people who use any particular package is quite ] small, on the order of a few dozen, at best;... Neat! Statistics by declaration. If you don't know something, make up a vague number. ] SHAREWARE has carried the dreaded disk disease, the virus, into ] the world on at least one occasion that is known. Any binaries or sources can carry viruses. If you don't believe that a source can carry a virus, maybe I ought to prove it to you... ] There is no ] positive way to protest against such nasties as trojans and ] virii except to ban binary executables. Or, we could take the totally unexpected tact of letting users make up their own minds what sort of risks they want to take. ] Hopes that a moderator ] would provide some measure of quality assurance have been dashed, The moderator was never intended to give quality assurance, he was supposed to keep non-binaries out of the binaries group. ] and SHAREWARE has been given top priority over the cries of ] net users. This is a deliberate commercial distribution at the ] expense of the net being perpetrated by the moderator. These poor helpless users must be sending their cries directly to you, because I haven't seen them. Maybe we ought to investigate the possiblity that the moderator is being paid off by these fortune 500 shareware companies. ] If we're not going to ban SHAREWARE, I want to know because ] I've got a few meg's of stuff that I'll sell. Up till now I've ] thought it improper, so tell me I'm wrong and here it comes. We're not going to ban shareware. Post away, it's a free net, even though there are some like you who don't want it to be. ] Or how about the complete Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory ] (SAO) star catalog?... Well, you have to be reasonable, but I guess that's asking too much of some people.