re how to the disks copy protected in article c x a h ms uky edu msunde mik uky edu writes in article r sbinnkap flop engr orst edu noeler xanth cs orst edu eric richard noel writes i hate hard copy manuals and would rather have all docs online not because i want to copy the program but because its usually faster and and convenient than sifting through an old book i can t find just mho but i prefer hardcopy books because you can have three or four of them open spread across the bed next to the desk in my dorm and reference them while using the program full screen the windows help things come closest to good on line documentation i ve seen but they generally aren t detailed enough and would probably take a large amount of space even compressed which is at a premium on my system in fact the manuals are the primary reason i bought borland s c compiler instead of using the one the lab licensed in the lab of course i ve got a shelf full of books to help me out when i m stuck to each his own agree personally i cannot flip from page to page on a screen and retain information as easily as in the written page off deeper end why does everyone think they need to be able to make a backup copy almost all new software must be installed to the hard disk so you are left with the originals as your backups i think its a waste of time space and money as well as it makes it to tempting to lend out the backups we ve destroyed about six sets of original microsoft word for mac and word for windows may have been a bad batch of disks don t have the faintest idea what happened to them they just went bad weren t stored near any magnetic fields or otherwise mistreated indeed they were only used once given this and the massive headaches finding a working set of disks to fix some of the machines that periodically go down i d say having working backups is a godsend i sure wish we d had them sometimes i think murphy s law holds true more often than newton s when we needed them i think it s sortof like snake antivenin of the time you have absolutely no use for it but when you need it boy do you ever need it ditto s in fact at work where things are dead if the backup is no good i insist on having at least a level backup system it seems that whenever you have good backups you never need them but if you don t have them murphy guarantees that you ll suffer for it i don t have backups of my originals at home but then my machine doesn t see anywhere near the use abuse of these here at the lab and so i consider it less of a risk still i usually make working copies of them when i install them and then eventually re use these working copies for something else no flames intended just my thoughts just mine too and mine of course richard dell
