Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!nuchat!splut!jay From: jay@splut.UUCP (Jay Maynard) Newsgroups: news.admin Subject: Re: Can something be done about 770K waste of time postings... Message-ID: <508@splut.UUCP> Date: 7 May 88 11:44:19 GMT References: <1574@looking.UUCP> <22099@bu-cs.BU.EDU> <392@pan.UUCP> Reply-To: jay@splut.UUCP (Jay Maynard) Organization: Confederate Microsystems, League City, TX Lines: 39 Summary: Binaries are both necessary and desirable. In article <392@pan.UUCP> jw@pan.UUCP (Jamie Watson) writes: >[...] How >can anyone even DREAM of posting a megabyte of BINARY, for a DEMO which is of >interest to perhaps 1% of the net? And of that 1%, how many are actually >going to be foolish enough to run a binary-only program of unknown origin >on their computers? I'm watching for the posting that says "Whoops, I guess >I made a mistake. That wasn't PSPICE that I posted, it was a program that >will wipe your entire hard disk". Careful...you're letting your Unix bigotry show again. In the real (read: non-Unix) world, binary-only distributions are common. This is so that authors can be more assured that their work isn't swiped and used for someone else's profit. The vast majority of binary-only programs are not trojans or viruses, but useful programs that do (more or less) what they're supposed to. Literally hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of BBS users download binaries and run them without a single problem - and about half of the contents of my DOS partition were gotten that way. Unix software is distributed as souce not because it's such a wonderful idea, but because it must be: my 80286 won't run a VAX binary. PCs don't have that problem. People who argue for source-only distributions don't believe in letting an author do as he likes with HIS work. >I like your mentioning of talk.bizarre, though - perhaps we should get the >entire comp.binaries.* hierarchy aliased to talk.bizarre, which is not (thank >God) carried in Europe, so we wouldn't have to pay for future lunacy >like this. Please don't do that...we're doing something serious in there. (See .signature below.) -- Jay Maynard, EMT-P, K5ZC...>splut!< | GEnie: JAYMAYNARD CI$: 71036,1603 uucp: {uunet!nuchat,hoptoad!academ!uhnix1,{ihnp4,bellcore}!tness1}!splut!jay Never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity. Let's rename it talk.bizarre.Kent.Paul.Dolan.for.President.in.88!