Tuesday, December 20, 2005

where is the common sense ?

Today I downloaded a program that allows you to design reports with data extracted from an SQL database. About 600MBytes. Then the received file was indeed just self-extracting itself in a setup directory of roughly another 600MBytes. Then from this second directory you can install the program that it takes around 600 MBytes.
Oh... and just after downloading the file (only minutes later) you may want to download the service pack 1... about 140Mb.
I'm the only one that finds this just outrageous ?
Why downloading a program that then unzips in a bunch of files that then can be used for setup? Is this passage really needed ? Why asking your users to download a big outdated program from the site and then asking them to download another big chunk of corrections ? wouldn't be better to have just the version patched on the first download ? And the size itself of the program is IMO an offense to the art of programming.

Bah.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Maybe because .exe files get automatically blocked by security settings and the average person doesnt know how to disable the blocking?

6502 said...

may be... or may be they're just idiots. Note that the first download wasn't a zip, but a self extracting exe and I got the usual warning about running exes coming from the internet.

Anyway the exe blocking especially on mail is getting annoying. Yesterday I sent a patch to one of our customers just to see it bouncing because it was an exe. So we zipped and sent it just to see it bounced because it was an exe in a zip. The guy that normally handles those issuses said that sometimes it works to just rename it as .txt and send it (providing info about how to get back an exe). I suspect that the geniuses that write mail servers are going to handle that soon, however.
May be we should just store patches on our private web servers, so that web browsers and firewalls may have fun preventing our customers to get them.

The real issue is that if someone blocks your email (wether it has asked to do it or not) is not personally liable for doing so. Punish false positives with fines and jail and may be things will begin working again.

So far anti-spam and anti-virus is doing quite a damage to us. For example with increasing frequencies we get even just pure text mail bounced because our server gets listed in one of the thousands of different RBL lists. The real reason is however that an internet service provider cannot be sued if blocks a legitimate mail message.
Wouldn't be fun having your mailman to throw away messages directed to you because he doesn't like the color of the envelope or the location the mail is from ?