Greetings, Jack...

 Jack Stein hastily said to Paul Marwick:

 PM>> It should require little thought to see why companies like IBM
 PM>> (who are only one of many who distribute things in
 PM>> self-extracting archives) do so. It means that they can
 PM>> distrubte code in a compreessed bundle _without_ having to
 PM>> worry about whether the end-user has the necessary extractor,
 PM>> can obtain it if they don't alredy have it, or knows how to use
 PM>> it.

 JS> Yeah, but that is weak.  People have to get all sorts of programs and
 JS> install them themselves, no reason at all they couldn't do the same with
 JS> an archive program.

You seem to be giving the AIHU quite a lot of credit for
intelligence/literacy/common sense....

Most of them don't know how to go about installing ANYTHING without using some 
form of "Wizard"..  (in fact, I might go so far as to say that if it ISN'T
named "setup.exe" they wouldn't know what to do with it..)

I doubt if that type would know what a compressed file is, let alone what an
archiver is, or that there are more than one type.

Yes, ignorance is cureable (I was one of those a few years ago), but
recognition of the condition and a willingness to "take the cure" are both
necessary... ;-)

Neither of which is encouraged by the masters in Redmond..



        -- Bob

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