Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!rbthomas
From: rbthomas@athos.rutgers.edu (Rick Thomas)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: Suggestion regarding Minix distribution
Message-ID: 
Date: 29 Sep 89 04:02:53 GMT
References: <24806@louie.udel.EDU> <3376@ast.cs.vu.nl>
Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.
Lines: 34

> From: ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum)
>           An advantage of having P-H doing it is that despite the numerous
> complaints about them, by-and-large they get it right, and they are set up
> to distributed packages.  The 20 times they screwed up, we have heard about
> it at great length on the net, but the thousand times they didn't, of
> course nobody said anything.

My experience has been that P-H gets it right if you give them the
right ISBN number and they get it wrong if you give them the wrong ISBN
number (arguably they got it right -- you got it wrong -- but in either
case, you didn't get what you wanted) and they get it right/wrong
(depending on your persuasion -- optimist/pessimist) about 1/2 the time
if you give them no ISBN number at all.  This seems to be because their
order-taking people are trained to look at ISBN numbers and not trained
to look at (to them) insignificant things like "version numbers".
Frankly, I wouldn't expect anything different, if I were in the
publishing biz...


Moral,

Andy Please! -- the next time there is a release from P-H -- please post the
correct *new* ISBN number to the net and encourage people to order
by that number and accept no substitutes.  That way we can avoid a lot
of grief and flamage.

Rick
-- 

Rick Thomas
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