[eli_gottlieb]

>The second worst characteristic I find is code that doesn't actually work unless it is placed exactly in the right directory of a now non-existent server. They send me code (in a zip file, of course), no instructions, no configuration. And, then I spend several days or even weeks just trying to get it to work the way that they said it worked back at their research 'demo' a year ago. 'It worked last year', they say. And, then imply that I'm some sort of hack because I can't understand what they're doing.

As a graduate student who has had to deal with this kind of code, and finally joined together with another grad-student to fight back and make our software retargettable... I'm so, so sorry.