Copyright on HP service manuals

Well, notwithstanding the extraneous apostrophe, the whole thing was a gag. Its name, LIRPA, is "April" spelled backwards, a la "April Fools!"

(to be fair, they didn't say just "Lirpa," they said "Lirpa 1".) :-)

--
Cheers!
Rich
 ------
 "Flappity, floppity, flip 
  The mouse on the Mobius strip;
  The strip revolved,
  The mouse dissolved
 In a chronodimensional skip."

Unfortunately the restriction of documentation for obsolete equipment is a profit motive by Agilent as it promotes the planned obsolescence of older equipment which competes with new equipment on the market.

Joe

W>Stepan, snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com wrote...

--
Joe Leikhim K4SAT
"The RFI-EMI-GUY"

The Lost Deep Thoughts                        By: Jack Handey
     Before a mad scientist goes mad, there's probably a time
when he's only partially mad.  And this is the time when he's
going to throw his best parties.

Compression used to be necessary when HDDs were under a GB, but not anymore. Compress your .JPGs, .MPGs and .WAVs, but don't try to compress something that doesn't take up much room to begin with. HDD space is a half buck per GB, fer crying out loud! Use it! Instead of compressing the data, get a bigger HDD!

is

That sounds like Marketing-Speak to me. You can put it where the sun don't shine.

[snip]

I wish I could afford more space. I've got a 250GB drive in my server, and then I have two more 250GB drives that I use for rotating backups. Once a year I freeze the backup to DVD. What I need is four 250GB drives in a RAID5 in my server, but then I have to buy more drives for backup too. The price quickly becomes prohibitive, and I'm not even taking the cost of a SATA RAID5 controller (3ware?) into account.

Ouch!

"Flappity, floppity, flip The mouse on the Mobius strip; The strip revolved, The mouse dissolved In a chronodimensional skip."

If you planted grass on a mobius strip, then your mouse could never say that the grass is always greener on the other side.

Stepan

Wow. 1T byte. What are you storing, if I may ask?

--
Joe Leikhim K4SAT
"The RFI-EMI-GUY"

The Lost Deep Thoughts                        By: Jack Handey
     Before a mad scientist goes mad, there's probably a time
when he's only partially mad.  And this is the time when he's
going to throw his best parties.

I read in sci.electronics.design that snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com wrote (in ) about 'Copyright on HP service manuals', on Sun, 24 Apr 2005:

The grass wouldn't grow, because it wouldn't be able to work up which way was 'up'.

--
Regards, John Woodgate, OOO - Own Opinions Only.
There are two sides to every question, except
'What is a Moebius strip?'
http://www.jmwa.demon.co.uk Also see http://www.isce.org.uk

The Moebius strip was inspired after observing that politicians wander all over the place, never get anywhere, and always end up where they started! ;-)

--
Former professional electron wrangler.

Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida

Well, it's easy to fill a big drive up when you use computers in place of your TV/VCR and Stereo, and when you scan everything in, digital camera which takes movie clips, the wife and two kids, a home network with 7 computers on it, and software for both windows and linux, a full set of MAME ROMS and disk images, bla bla bla.

We have 37 terrabytes worth of x-rays, CT scans etc at the hospital where I work, all online in spinning disk, so a measly 250GB at home doesn't look like a lot in comparison. A few more years and we'll all have terrabyte hard drives at home.

Stepan

of

Gimme a stinkin' break! It's all that crap - music and movies - that's taking up all your space. Get rid of them! Or put them on CDs or DVDs.

Thanks for that. I have in fact been offered the loan of a manaul.

No. If the equipment makers have to sell newer equipment by making it difficult for used equipment, instead of adding features and performance to the newer equipment to make it sell itself, then they're just a bunch of marketers and should be in the 'selling sugar water' business, as Jobs once put it.

equipment

of

What about convenience Watson? I really *like* having everything online and centrally accessible, instead of having to dig for it. Hey I can even pull my stuff up at work and at other peoples homes. That's really nice one-stop shopping! Plus if my house burns down or I get robbed, then I can just restore a backup. I'm actually serious. It's not that I'm just trying to get a rise out of you....

Stepan

["Followup-To:" header set to sci.electronics.design.] On 23 Apr 2005 09:01:48 -0700, Winfield Hill wrote in Msg.

When shopping for expensive lab equipment for my employer I've always made the purchase dependent on the vendor's willingness to supply full schematics. Not only for repair, but also for modifications that are sometimes necessary for research use.

Some of our best STM data aquisition systems were purchased from a company that was very hard-ass about releasing the schematics (a British company named "WA", later aquired by Oxford Instruments). If it weren't for the schematics that we forced them to turn over those systems would now be useless. Ironically the company went out of business, whereas another one in the same market that always ships equipment with full schematics (Omicron) is still doing fine.

--Daniel

["Followup-To:" header set to sci.electronics.design.] On Sat, 23 Apr 2005 16:53:08 -0500, John Fields wrote in Msg.

I don't think they should _have_ to, but at least they should refrain from enforcing copyrights on the manuals (i.e., keeping customers from sharing copies).

Bad marketing. I at least am much more likely to purchase some new equipment from company X if I know that they are actively or passively supporting out-of-date equipment.

Lynx Robotics, for example, is such a company: Although they have long ago shifted their line of business to something else, you can still download the old DOS software for their motion control equipment made in the 80's from their website. For free, without registration. In my eyes, as a potential customer, that makes them _very_ attractive.

--Daniel

I can't even access that website. A real pity. It appears I have misplaced the PDF file with the service manual of my HP3466A multi-meter.

--
Reply to nico@nctdevpuntnl (punt=.)
Bedrijven en winkels vindt U op www.adresboekje.nl

The military is screening IP addresses, trying to match them to geographic locations, and blocking access from outside the US.

The screening isn't perfect, BTW. Sometimes real USAians cannot get to it, sometimes foreigners can...

Tim.