Post by MikeI feel a need to weigh in on this issue... First, let me correct a
misimpression. I am Mike Harvey... I founded Nibble and wrote many of
the articles and programs that appeared in it over the 12 1/2 years. I
am the publisher and I own the copyright on everything published. So I
am not a thief... I have given myself permission because I own the
copyright.
Second, when the scanning project began, Call APPLE had undertaken the
project and they set the pricing for individual issues.... not me.
When it became clear that the project was MASSIVE, Call APPLE backed
off, having scanned only some of the books and the issues from 1992. I
retrieved my library from them and took up the challenge of scanning
everything. It took many months of tediously sitting by the scanner
and processing one page at a time ... 16,332 times.
I estimated the amount of time to do this. If we assume it takes one
minute to scan each page, it will take almost 7 weeks assuming you
spend 40 hrs/week doing this. Since you say it took "many months"
it seems like you did this less than 40 hrs/week during these months.
Actually this reminds me of a project I did myself a long time ago:
http://stjarnhimlen.se/zc/zc.html
I did this to get a machine readable version of that catalog to later
enable me to predict lunar occultations of stars as seen from any
place of my choice. I still make these predictions based on these
data. And this project was actually one of my major reasons to get
an Apple II at all in 1980. I never got anything really working on
Apple DOS, it had to await until I started with Apple CP/M, which
provided a more decent selection of programming languages for this
purposes - I ended up using Fortran-80. Later (when I had moved on
to the PC) the software was translated to C.
Typing in a lot of digits from a book, and making sure you type it
all right is boring. Outright boring. Sitting and waiting for a
scanner is probably boring too, but at least you can do other stuff
while waiting (listen to the radio, reading a book, or whatever).
But when you type digits off a book, you'll have to focus on it, or
else the typing will slow down so much and there'll be so many errors
that you might as well stop. So why did I do it? Because I wanted
the data in machine readable form. Scanners were then not easily
available, and OCR software mostly belonged to the future (I actually
tried an early version of some OCR software - but it produced so many
errors that I found it easier to type it in by hand). And those
data were not available digitally, only in printed form.
When you've typed in it all, you've done perhaps some 50-60% of the
total work. Now comes the less boring but more challenging part: did
you type it all right? Of course not - there are a lot of typing
errors there! So you'll have to locate, and correct, all these
errors. This meant printing it out on paper and manually proofread
it all. But you can do mistakes when proofreading too - so I also
wrote test programs which alerted on inconsistencies in the data.
And here having typed in three versions of the same catalog was
really useful: I wrote, and ran, software which compared the three
versions to one another, and probably found the last(?) remaining
typing errors that way.
Of course this took a long time - how long time? Don't really know
since I did no bookkeeping on the time I spent on this, but it was a
few hours almost every evening for perhaps a year. Plus more in the
weekends when I had more spare time. OTOH I had no Internet access
then, and therefore I didn't spend any time babbling on the Net,
which perhaps gave me the time needed for this project..... :-)
Anyway, I think the time I spent on this is of the same order of
magnitude as the time you spent scanning all those Nibble magazines.
It's not uncommon that people spend that much time on something they
feel enthusiastic about -- we see organisations and associations
all around when people spend this much time, or even much more time,
on something they're enthusiastic about.
I ended up distributing the digital versions of this catalog for
free on the Net, and it's now available for download from several
sites. That was of course very stupid of me considering how much
time I put into this project - how much do you think I should have
charged for these data? <g>
Post by MikeI set the price based on Call APPLE's original price of $14.95/year and
discounted for the full library. This is not a "throwaway freebie" and
for someone who is a true enthusiast, it's a small price to pay for
capturing a piece of history.
Frankly, if you don't like the price, don't buy the DVD... but not
liking the price is not an excuse or justification for pirating the
DVD. I don't like the price of a Jaguar sports car, but it's not an
excuse for stealing one... It's an exaggerated example, but the
principle is the same.
If you've been to the www.nibblemagazine.com website recently, you'll
see that a number of users have contributed disk images of the original
programs, which are offered as downloads for no charge. They were
willing to contribute the disk images free, and so am I.
So stop congratulating yourself for pirating stuff that doesn't belong
to you... that just doesn't cut it.
Mike Harvey
Founder and Publisher of Nibble and Nibble Mac
Post by A DudeThe thief is Mike for taking the Magazines, Scanning them and selling
them with out the permision of the publisher!!
Post by ApprenticePost by BluPhoenyxYou know, I was trying to ignore this thread but this really saddens
me. Mike Harvey put a lot of effort into this project. So few people
support our Apple II's today. Is it too much to ask that we respect
those few who do? I do!
Thieves have always existed and that is exactly what this guy is. You
don't have to agree with Mike Harvey's pricing of the DVD set but
since it is his to do with as he pleases then you have to abide by it.
A Dude's attitude saddens me too but I'm not going to lose any sleep
over it. He's a thief, plain and simple.
--Mark
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e-mail: pausch at stockholm dot bostream dot se
WWW: http://stjarnhimlen.se/