Requiem

[Trevor Smith]

On Thu, 15 Jun 2000 10:55:09 +0100 (BST), Simon Bowring wrote:

>I think people underestimate the effort required to write software
>(especially GUI software).

LOL! :-)

I got a new hardware DVD/MP3 player the other day and I've been
experimenting with ripping/encoding/burning some of my CDs. I've been
using Windows 98 (sigh) and a combination of Exact Audio Copy and
Lame (because my research satisfied me that they were the best tools,
but unfortunately were not available on OS/2 in their latest
incarnations).

Lame is a command line program. I set up some arguments for it in
E.A.C. and E.A.C. (which is a GUI app) calls it for me so I don't
need to tinker with it. However, when Lame is called, an MS-DOS
window opens in Win98.

I have a good friend. The majority of the population considers him
"really good at computers". :-) Frankly, he doesn't have a clue about
computers, but has a reasonable familiarity with Win98. However, like
another friend of mine who is very familiar with Win98, he probably
doesn't know how to *start* a command line, let alone use one.

He saw Lame pop up on my system and said, "Why is Lame a command line
program? Why didn't they just make it a GUI program?" :-)

Lame = ~130 kbytes
Lame w/ a GUI front end? Probably ~500 kbytes - 1 megabyte (just a
guess).

In fact, every other file that came with Lame was documentation, of
which there is 100,907 bytes -- almost as much Text and HTML
documentation as the program code itself. Imagine if it had a GUI!


-- 
 Trevor Smith          |          trevor@haligonian.com
 PGP public key available at: www.haligonian.com/trevor

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