Two of the machines I support are used for accessing datasets from a
sizable collection of cdroms. These cds generally cost a few hundred
dollars each and come with the data wrapped up in a propreitary brinary
format which requires a poorly written custom application to extract.
Complaints about the usability of these applications (which is almost
always poor) will be saved for another day. My complaint today is the
number of companies that clearly don't wish to waste money on
programmers.
We have a collection of CensusCD
products from GeoLytics. The
installer defaults to wanting to install to a
c:\CDIDENTIFIER, changing it to c:\program
files\censuscd\CDIDENTIFIER, the installer completes succesfully.
Thinking the program is installed, I run the program and all appears
happy. Setting up a query to extract some data works goes smoothly.
Actually extracting the data however creates a cryptic error message.
A little experimentation and reading the manual (heaven forbid) show
that the program needs to be installed to a path that has no spaces and no
part of the path is more then 8 characters. Why then did the installer
allow me to install to that directory? I know testing for this is
possible in the installer, in fact while working out possible solutions I
found that the ArcView installer did
exactly this. This type of silliness was acceptable from small software
companies when we were still transitioning from DOS to Windows (I would
say up until about 1998), but it is completely unacceptable from a product
released in 2002, even from a company that does not have a multi-person
software development team.
