Pat writes:

> I disagree with the position the other vendors are taking with respect to
> Shawn reviewing their products and then coming up with his own competing
> product - it is up to Interact to decide whether to publish Shawn's reviews
> or not.

Not entirely...the expectation when you send a review copy is that:

   1) it won't be used past the review period;

   2) it won't be given/sold to anyone else;

   3) it won't be used as the springboard to develop a competing product.

   4) it won't be reviewed unfairly.  (I thought Shawn's review was a
      good one, except for one mistake (see end of this note).)

> Isn't it natural for someone to come up with a better solution
> after evaluating existing solutions?

> Shawn is no journalist

Really?  He's published a number of reviews/articles ... I suspect he
wouldn't appreciate you saying that!

> I feel that Shawn
> should provide evaluation copies of TimeWarp to all other vendors who want
> to review his product and post their review of TimeWarp on this list.

thanks!




Note: Shawn's review in Interact (Feb 1998, pp 28-31) says "I think the
software should tell you when your date is out of range and that it should
provide the appropriate range when you go outside of it."  Could this
be from a review of another product?  (Which does (or did) have such a
problem.)  I'm proud of the robust date/time parser and the error
messages it can generate.  Here's a sample:


   :run hourglas

   Welcome to HourGlass 2000 for the HP 3000!
   Version 98C

   ...
   HourGlass: setdate 1/1/2028
   Year of mm/dd/yyyy must be in [1970..2027], not: 2028

   setdate 1/1/2028
               ^

Note that we pointed to the offending value, and told you what
the valid range is!

HourGlass could internally support a larger span of year, but the
CALENDAR intrinsic can't, so we chose to limit the date span
for now.


   HourGlass: setdate 1/41/2000
   Bad date: 1/41/2000 ... day-of-month out of range?

   setdate 1/41/2000
                ^

Hmmm...why is the carat to the right of where it should be?
I'll have to look into that...

Now, we didn't tell you that the proper range of months is
1..12.  This was because (a) we figured most people know that;
and (b) we aren't 100% sure that 41 is a day-of-month ... to
a European, if would appear that the day was 1 and the month
was 41.  (Where possible, we deduce the correct choice
of mm/dd/yy and dd/mm/yy and yy/mm/dd ... and default to mm/dd/yy
if we can't tell (e.g., 1/2/3).)


   HourGlass: setdate 13/13/2000
   Bad date: 13/13/2000 ... month out of range?

   setdate 13/13/2000
                 ^

Hmmm...that darn carat's misplaced again!

--
Stan Sieler                                          [log in to unmask]
                                     http://www.allegro.com/sieler.html