failed posts

[jmk3@crux3.cit.cornell.edu (Jay Krell)]

Now that posting is working again, here are my failed posts from the
past few days:

Subject: more on ORCA manuals
Subject: Re: Programming Question
Subject: Re: animation skip problem
Subject: bsc and sciibin on ULTRIX


Subject: bsc and sciibin on ULTRIX

To get bsc to link under Ultrix, I had to use version 1.2. cco.caltech.edu
only had 1.1. I uploaded 1.2 a few minutes ago. Thanks to
ddkilzer@iastate.edu (David Kilzer).

I had a minor problem with sciibin. It hung if passed no arguments. I put
an "if (argc == 1) fprintf ..."(same as for default case) exit before the
switch on the parameters.


Subject: Re: animation skip problem

>Actually no, instead I call HideCursor() so QD2 is NOT drawing a pointer.
>Then in the event loop, I call GetMouse() to get the current mouse position
>and send those coordinates to my updateSprite() routine which in turn calls
>my erase/draw code.  Therefore, right now, I got a cool spaceship where my
>mouse pointer would be, and it doesn't flicker (yessss! :).

Two things to watch our for: GetMouse returns local coordinates and I read a 
while ago that there is a bug re:cursors that are too big (width, I think).


Subject: Re: Programming Question

>What are you complaining about?  I'll have bought REZ four times when
>I get ORCA/C 2.0.  I bought the APW 1.1 update, the System 6 Golden
>Master CD-ROM, ORCA/M 2.0 and finally ORCA/C 2.0.  What's the bet that
>we'll also get it with ORCA/Pascal 2.0?

Yes, I know what you mean. I'll end up with 3 copies of the Shell, Editor, and
Rez docs, from assembly, C, and Pascal, and buying Rez 3 times plus snagging it
off of the CD.

ORCA/Pascal 2 will have Rez.

Subject: more on ORCA manuals

 ------------
Category 36,  Topic 31
Message 1         Thu Apr 08, 1993
BYTEWORKS                    at 13:30 EDT

There have been some questions about our manuals, so I wanted to explain
exactly what is happening, and where the delays are comming from.

First, a bit of history.  A couple of years ago, we started doing some courses
for the Apple IIGS.  The first few versions of our first courses were
serialized, and were not sent to many people, so we copied them instead of
printing them.  That worked well, so we kept right on copying when the book
form of the courses came out.  Looking around, we found we weren't alone.
Apple, APDA, and a lot of other companies were using copied pages for short -
run products or products that changed frequently.

Last year, we ended up reprinting ORCA/M manuals.  There were two things that
bothered us about this process.  The first is that the print quality, while
not bad, wasn't as good as we were getting from copiers. True, a good printer
can outperform a copier -- but we weren't able to pay for the very best
printers.  In addition, we had to buy 1000 books to get even a modestly good
price break.  It ended up costing about $13,000 for the print run -- and we
may never sell all of those books.  For a company our size, tying up $13,000
per product in inventory cost just doesn't work.  (Incidentally, we've checked
around.  Most printers would charge us $17,000 to $25,000 for the same job.
For the quantity and quality, we got a good price.)

Well, to make a long story short, by cutting the height of the manual by 1/2
inch, we could copy it.  We checked, and found two places that would copy the
books for a very good price.  We're still using printed covers. We switched
back to spiral bindings, since you can do a few of those, where perfect
binding (like on a paperback book) is somethign that has  to be done to a lot
of books at one time.  In addition, most of the people we talk to like the new
spiral binding better than our old wire binding, and almost everyone liked
that better than perfect binding. The printing is better quality.  We can even
order 10 books and still get a good price.  Our inventory price dropped to
about $400 for the covers. The price per book dropped to about $9 to $10,
depending on the book. And, even better, I can publish programs like Modula-2,
which I'm not at all sure will sell 1000 copies, and would not normally be
able to risk $13,000 on.

The disadvantage is that printing books is tricky.  It takes a good operator
and a good copier in perfect repair. It also takes time.  We're getting a
fairly steady stream of books back, but the quantity doesn't keep up with the
orders.  We've worked out most of the kinks, and have two suppliers, now, but
it's going to take some time to get caught up. Since we could no longer afford
to produce GS software with 500 page  books the old way, though, there wasn't
much choice.  Still, once the system runs smoothly, we can publish products
profitably that couldn't be released at a profit, even on a Mac.  You'll see
several of those this summer, I'm happy to say.  In fact, the changes we've
made will allow us to continue producing GS products even if we start creating
programs for other computers, too, and I'm pretty happy about that -- I like
my GS!

Mike Westerfield
 ------------

Btw, I agree about the binding. I have a wire spiral ORCA/Pascal,
perfect ORCA/M and plastic spiral ORCA/C manual; I like the plastic
spiral best.


--
  --Jay, jay.krell@cornell.edu