source=
http://www.piclist.com/postbot.asp?id=piclist\2002\08\18\163548a

Guys, I'm on the point of loosing patience with this...

The CUMP group at least had the good sense to move the discussion
off this list and thereby avoided clogging up the [PIC]: topic
with all this talk, before it went dormant (for life?).

Please: Either come to a consensis, move the discussion to [OT]:
or go yahoo for a while until you have it together.

Sean, your offer, taken at face value, is very generous. But the
depth and breadth of experience, ideas, and design direction
offered by the PICList combined with the lack of organization is
unlikly to produce anything as well tested and proven as Tony
Nixon's learning tools or Myke's books or Wouters boot loader or
JAL or Scott Dattalos work on porting SDCC for the PIC or Fred
Maher's excellent Bike Computer tutorial or Roman Black (and
others) excellent answers to question on this list. If you really
want to make a difference, pay Tony to update his course and/or
offer to produce it at lower cost for him... or sponser a contest
to give away Mykes books to the newbies who ask the funniest
newbie question each month (special catagory for a new spelling
of "unsubscribble")... or make WISP kits for Wouter at cost and
finance the extension of JAL... or send Fred a book contract and
a Spanish to English translator... or collect Romans answers and
publish them.

Not only are these other options more likely to return an
investment in new PIC users, but they will also have a better
chance of turning a dollar for you AND their authors.

In fact, I've been spending a lot of time thinking about why this
project bothers me so much and others have not....

Everything you are trying to do already exists... perhaps not in
finished form or perhaps not totally up to date, but they are
there, and other people have put a lot of work into them already
with little or no reward and without a hope of getting rich.

When we started the CUMP project, there were only a few "close to
universal" programmers out there and they cost a LOT of money.
Everything else seemed to be available, the only missing element
was enough people from enough different backgrounds to provide
the programming algorithems. And I expected when Tony Nixon
donated his Engine programmer (which was again, just about what
we wanted to build, but without algorithms for other than a few
PICs) I figured people would start building them or buying the
kit from Tony (as others have build the "free"ICD or purchased
one from Mchip) and work to add their programming algorithms for
other target chips to the web site via the form at the bottom of
the page.

Instead, we got hung up in re-design after re-design, trying to
compensate for every little possible problem that we percieved
with the Engine. If we had started by just building Engines and
publishing (SHAREING) the algorithms that we got to work, we
would be far ahead of where we are now.

This project is doing the same thing... but worse... because our
OWN MEMBERS, Tony, Wouter, Myke and others, are the ones
provideing the "almost" perfect products. And they are NOT
charging a lot of money. And rather than offering to help them do
more or cost less or improve what they have, we are now starting
over again and, frankly WASTEING MIT's bandwidth with rediculous
arguments over how many processors are in a PC and what the legal
department at MChip might do (mia culpa).

I sold another pocket programmer last week, and another few
dollars goes into the account to build up a fund to pay Tony to
add the ability to program parallel devices. The pocket can do
everything and MORE that the Picstart programmer can do EXCEPT
for program parallel devices... And Tony gave up hope of selling
it and released it to me (at least) to produce and to anyone to
modify the open source code. Result: Hours spent trying to design
"Yet another programmer"/"Yet another development board"/"Yet
another..."

Until the PICList community is willing to put aside ego, and
contribute to improve the work of others, we will not reach our
personal potential for growth and enlightenment. What I have done
with the PICList.com site was to gather the words of others,
place them in a nice setting and show them to be the jewels that
they are. Not my words, but the words of others... I could not
hope to do better. And my achievement (of which I am very proud)
came only after I was willing to admit that I could not optimize
a math routine better than Scott, or write an easy to use
language better than Wouter, or put out a better book than Myke,
or build a programmer better than Tony, or explain more than
Roman.

Stop squabiling (sp?), admit that there are leaders here, and
offer to help THEM.

---
James Newton: PICList.com webmaster, former Admin #3
mailto:jamesnewton@piclist.com  1-619-652-0593 phone
http://www.piclist.com/member/JMN-EFP-786
PIC/PICList FAQ: http://www.piclist.com

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