johnm@trsvax.UUCP (06/17/88)
>>Well, well... Welcome to the wide world of software that doesn't cost you >>anything. I've got about 17 Meg of files that I've gotten from the net, >>CompuServe, and bulletin boards and only about 5% of it gets used by me or >>my friends. You have to go through a lot of crap to find the real pearls. > > I agree with this completely, John. Now, how can we reduce the > crap and keep the pearls? If we could cut 95% of .binaries out, > everyone would be happy. > > You are overlooking the costs of transmission and storage. Maybe > you don't pay the bills, but lots of people aren't so fortunate. All I can say to this is, "One man's meat is another man's poison." Many programs that I've seen lots of requests for (disk backup utils, morse code teachers, children's learning software...) have a utility of absolute zero for me. On the other hand you might not have any call for the astronomy progs. or the Picnix utils (obviously you don't have any for the latter) but I thought they were GREAT! Who should be allowed to decide what is good and what isn't? The crap in my collection is typically different versions of the same application and I've discarded most of them and kept just one (e.g. I have about a dozen term programs to choose from but I only use one). This is not the same as deciding that whole catagories of programs are useless. >> ... We here have no choice but to work >>within a DOS environment and the ability to have things like Emacs, cat ... > > I don't know your particular situation, but if you're not > trying to do software development, then you are an end-user. > > On the other hand, if you "have no choice" and you are doing > development work, please tell us what constrains you and what > the software is. You seem to like Unix pretty well, judging > from the list of prog's that you listed. The constraint is that Un*x WILL NOT RUN on a hell of a lot of Dos machines out there in case you haven't noticed. Tandy 1000's can't run Xenix because they use 8088's (with the exception of the TX which has a 286). >>Ah ha! So this is your solution. If a few of the folks now reading this in >>Norway, Australia, and other foreign contries would just speak up now to >>enlighten this fellow that this is WORLD WIDE not a local neighborhood thing. > > All the more reason to get rid of the 95% junk. Why should > anyone in "Norway, Australia, and other foreign countries" want > junk any more than I? And why would they want to be called > foreign? I doubt they think of themselves as foreign :-). I refer to them as foreign only because they are foreign to me, and to Usenet itself since it originated in the US and still has most of its nodes here. > You under-estimate. We agree nearly everywhere, but we say it > differently. You have supplied your own experiences to support > my conclusions. Hardly. John Munsch