Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen From: davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.COM (Wm E Davidsen Jr) Newsgroups: comp.unix.i386 Subject: Re: Using UNIX to control experiments with a 386 box Keywords: VENIX,LynxOS,drivers,IEEE488,video capture cards Message-ID: <764@crdos1.crd.ge.COM> Date: 3 Oct 89 16:37:11 GMT References: <33152@beta.lanl.gov> Reply-To: davidsen@crdos1.UUCP (bill davidsen) Organization: GE Corp R&D Center Lines: 28 In article <33152@beta.lanl.gov>, tss@beta.lanl.gov (Timothy S Sullivan) writes: | card. That they coudn't guarentee it would work is not surprising | considering the large number of boards out there. But they also | wouldn't let me have a no-risk trial. I can't afford anything like | $1600 without assurances that it will even run. Can anyone explain why | this is a sensible policy? Seems to me that they would want to know | of additional systems that the software would work with? (ISC said no | problem for 386/ix, but I didn't get the impression that the person I | talked to thought about it very much and the hardware is not on their | 386/ix compatible devices list I got from VenturCom. Has anyone used | either of these boards with 386/ix?) Consider it from their point of view. Once you get the software they have no way of knowing if you will keep a copy of the disks or not. You could make the copies and return the product, buy a cheap set of SysV manuals to go with photocopies of the changes in their manual... In general companies will do something like that for a large company byt not an individual. There is less chance of theft and more chance of a big order with the big company. I'm not defending it, you wanted to know why it was a sensible policy, and I gave you my opinion. -- bill davidsen (davidsen@crdos1.crd.GE.COM -or- uunet!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen) "The world is filled with fools. They blindly follow their so-called 'reason' in the face of the church and common sense. Any fool can see that the world is flat!" - anon