cim2@pyuxv.UUCP (Robert L. Fair) (10/13/87)
* various flames on Fastback being a piece of shit Well, I've been using Fastback on my Turbo-XT clone (2x20MB drives) for a year or so now with absolutely NO problems, including backing up PKARC, ARC520 files etc. The few times I have needed to restore anything Fastback worked flawlessly. I bought the product following many recommendations, including a long discussion on the net, and have been very happy. FLAME ON It makes me really sad that people wildly say a product is no good when they have some unknown problem (which often comes down to hardware or is an easily fixed bug) The worst/best example I can think of is Phil Katz's 'pkarc' which had a small bug with a certain byte sequence getting lost. Within a short time of the bug becoming known Katz had posted an explanation of the bug, and a patch to fix it. Yet people still went on as if pkarc was a trojan trashing their hard disks (If I were Katz - which I'm not - I would throw up my hands in disgust and say "Write your own d**n archiver") Similar things go for Microsoft-C, which compared to many mainframe compilers is *amazingly* bug free, yet people flame it as if it barfed on every other line (like old Lattice ;-) ) Get real folks ! There has probably never been a program written which has absolutly *no* bugs whatsoever - the real test is a) How often do bugs show up. b) How quickly does the author fix them. (Microsoft loses here, Katz wins) FLAME OFF. Bob Fair pyuxww!pyuxv!cim2