Re: [NTLK] New user question about CF cards

On Dec 15, 2006, at 6:00 AM, Sonny Hung wrote:

> I'm not a programmer, ...

Hi Sonny and the others,

I am a programmer. In my experience, 10% of the work goes into
writing a piece of software, 30% into debugging, and 60% into
documentation, managing sales, answering requests, and keeping the
customer happy. Specifically with the Newton, you have to add another
chunk of wasted time for understanding outdated documentation and
picking up the undocumented pieces to assemble the base for your work.

Software is never finished. Users will always find bugs and missing
features. Again, specifically with ATA support, the Newton was not
designed to manage huge (in 1996 speak) amounts of RAM. So any
driver, be it as good as it will, relies on the underlying operating
system. From how I understand the Newton code, the machine will get
slower when you add RAM, even if you add the fastest RAM available.

Taking all this into account, the price for the software is very low
- think about the hours that Paul must have put into this, and divide
that by the number of copies he might be able to sell. Unless there
are drastic bugs that threaten your data or even your hardware, any
updates, and their pricing, are up to the developer.

Personally, I'd love to see ATA and even more so Einstein going Open
Source, so others could devote time and knowledge to those projects
as well, maybe one day creating the emulator that runs on top of
WindowsCE, but that again is up to the respective developer. Let's
wait and see...

Matthias

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