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Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.development Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!bunyip.cc.uq.oz.au!munnari.oz.au!spool.mu.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!news.sprintlink.net!news.indirect.com!wes From: wes@indirect.com (Barnacle Wes) Subject: Re: Dr. Dobb's 386BSD Reference CD-ROM: Fraud? Message-ID: <D0733J.LpB@indirect.com> Sender: usenet@indirect.com (System Operator) Organization: Internet Direct, indirect.com Date: Fri, 2 Dec 1994 17:54:54 GMT References: <D04Lwp.73z@lemis.de> <thumperD05p4D.I7o@netcom.com> X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2.1 [BP] PL2.1] Lines: 42 Greg Lehey (grog@lemis.de) wrote: > The documentation on the CD is of sufficient interest to Dr. Dobbs > that they don't want it printed in any form. In order to prevent > this, they have embedded it in a toy (MS Windows), which is not > able to print them. Thumper! (thumper@netcom.com) wrote: : I agree, that is not good. If they felt they didn't want the documentation : published, then they should have encoded it and enclosed their own reader : (or multi-os readers) or something. You both seem to have forgotten the fundamental rule "Never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity." I'm sure that Dr. Dobb's was just looking for a hypertext system they could use to link their documentation together, and the Windows help system is the cheapest one they could come up with. It also has generally available authoring tools. Give it a rest. There are plenty of .hlp tools that will allow you to burst the files into MS-Word documents (of course) or plain text files, probably some freely available ones. There is nothing particularly secret or sacred about Windows help files. : ................................... I'm not 100 percent sure of the fraud : position in the US, because I haven't seen the ad itself (or the exact : wording), but it's certainly not ethical, that's for sure, even if it's not : illegal. No fraud exists - they promised text describing the system, and that is what they deliver. Of course, they don't provide any way to read the text using 386BSD, but they didn't promise that, just that you could read it with a PC and CD-ROM. The forgot to mention that you'd have to have DOS and Windows, but for someone like DDJ, they probably couldn't imagine having a PC and not having DOS and Windows on it. How many people were really suprised at getting something like this from DDJ? Get a clue, and then get the 4.4 BSD-Lite book & CD from O'Reilly. Or get a NetBSD 1.0 or FreeBSD 2.0 CD-ROM, when available, and buy the books from O'Reilly. Wes Peters