RE: Pissed off (one last time)

Just a brief (and, I promise, final) response to Ed Sweetman's
response .....

Firstly, my apologies to Brian and Ed for getting confused as to
who the developers are.

Secondly: EMusic.com is a commercial outfit with paying customers
and recommends Zinf for downloading full albums. I'll wager that many
- most, even? - of EMusic customers are plain Windows users and
not skilled in programming. Zinf clearly has problems under Windows.
It is hardly surprising that some Emusic customers (me, for instance)
feel short-changed. It seems to me that:

(i) EMusic should not be recommending a product which - from what
Ed himself says - seems to be less than ideal at the moment for a good
proportion of their clients (and I will be saying as much to
them)

and

(ii) You, Ed, should not be allowing EMusic to do so unless you
are at least willing to show a bare minimum of politeness to their
customers who would like to have a solution to the problems that they
are encountering. Ill-tempered responses like 'this stupid thread',
'otherwise they can shut up' and the like are an unhelpful
self-indulgence on your part. I do appreciate that there is a limit to
the amount of work that three developers can do. Do yourselves a
favour and tell EMusic to take the Zinf link off their download
page.

Me - I'll stick to Zinfandel from here on in .....

Fergus

Ed Sweetman wrote:

I didn't want to have to dignify this
stupid thread with any more of a response but i wanted to clear up
some things.

1. the developers aren't blaming the victim. Brian is not a
developer of zinf and his opinions aren't ours.

2. Zinf is open source gnu software, not just freeware. If
someone has a problem with it they can give a bug report or give a
patch or patch it themselves and not care about anyone else, otherwise
they can shut up. 3. We understand that there are still a lot of
issues with zinf, and everyone else needs to understand that we just
underwent a rather big change along with the name change in the code
base and there are basically only 3 developers to this project.
That means between the three of us, we have to fix all the bugs and
redo the coding to clean up this project, if anyone has a problem with
the amount of time this is taking us three to do it they can come join
the team.

I'm tired of hearing people bitch about problems and not do anything.
We have a huge userbase and nobody seems to want to help. If you
feel the need to bitch just send your email to /dev/null, because
that's where it's going from now on. We're going to make zinf a
very good audio player eventually but with three people that
eventually could be anytime in the future. If you dont
feel like waiting you can blame everyone using it and not contributing
or you can be quiet.

Also zinf is primarily developed under
unix. The win32 port is only worked on primarily by the third
developer in our little team. I don't really develop on win32
... maybe robert does a little on both when he needs to i'm sure.
Either way win32 is always playing catch up with bug fixes and gets
far less work done to it than the unix version simply due to the
difficulties associated with developing in win32. We get much more
help from the unix world than the win32 world so that's why many
issues remain in win32 land. We accept patches for fixes when we
get them, we just don't get that many for windows and we seem to have
a lot of windows users who dont program. That's how the
cookie crumbles for you guys.

--

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Dr. Fergus Lalor, Senior Lecturer, Chemistry Dept., University

College, Cork, IRELAND.

Telephone: 353-(0)21-4902317. Fax: 353-(0)21-4274097

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