Shenoute wrote:ahd wrote:(...) Nobody is obliged to keep legacy things going forever, just for some go players who won't move on and get with the new bigger picture. (...)
(...)That being said, your characterizetion of myself (and probably others) as dim-witted individuals who are unable to see the light is something I take issue with.
Oh, I *am* one of those legacy customers. I just barely date back to the Actual Disk era. I have been enjoying the more recent innovations of pulling all the untold thousands of man-hours of curated go across to my computer directly and delving through it in my Copious Free Time (tm). Whatever implication you feel I have thrown at you, I have splashed on myself as well.
But the problem I face is this: Mark Hall left it all to John Fairbairn, no strings attached. No promises were made to keep all of the bits, rather than only the ones John felt were convenient to maintain solely by himself. No promises to keep it available in a way that maximised access and flexibility, rather than other criteria. As near as I can tell from over here in the opposite hemisphere, John can and has done with it what John chose to, and this is exactly what Mark wanted.
There are no words I have to persuade John to do otherwise, so from my humble point of view, the thing's gone.
I am *aware* that "delegate the online distribution to a volunteer with no time" is not the only choice he could have made. I'm sure there are any number of people lurking in this thread who would be happy to deliver the standard lectures on what they would do if they were John Fairbairn. We none of us are. Bigger picture has been drawn, we are not in it. What infinitesimal probability exists of that picture being redrawn, won't improve by nagging the owner to do what we want. I note from the lack of such nagging in this thread, that no, we are not dim-witted individuals unable to see the light. We're just sad.
Remaining options are: live with what is in the Summer 2017 edition, buy SmartGo, or become some variety of thief. I'm a Linux user and barely first dan, so the first option it is. When I run out of what the games in the last open edition can teach me, I'll ask AlphaGo For Dummies (2038 edition) for further lessons.