(Excerpts from a message dated 10-16-99, Roy J. Tellason to Bat Lang)

Hi Roy--

 BL> Recently down the filebone came a new version of UniMaint. 
 BL> Unfortunately, it was distributed as a  selfex archive. 
 BL> Since it is 2.4Mb+, and has very skimpy text material in the 
 BL> archive, there is no way to determine what I want to know, 
 BL> short of installing it 

RT>I just *hate* it when they do that...

    Why?  It saves a lot of trouble for those who haven't learned to
keep an Unzip utility at hand, and doesn't do any harm that I can
understand.  Its only drawback that I can see is that you cannot see
what is in the file unless you execute it.  Of course, not even this is
a drawback if you make it a practice never to download an application
that you don't know what it does.  At least, the likelihood of an OS/2
virus being transmitted this way is exceedingly small.

    As I mentioned to Bat, it isn't hard to clean up unwanted
application files if you know what you are doing.  However, none of the
UniMaint files I have downloaded from this BBS have been self-extracting
files, and all of them for over four years have been CSDs (FixPaks) with
names that identified themselves as such, so there is no way that they
could self-install.  I wonder where BAT got his stranger from.

    Regards,

        --Murray

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 * MR/2 2.25 #120 * Nothing is so uncommon as common sense

--- Maximus/2 2.02