[volt-nuts] 845AB Manual & Artekmedia

[Artekmedia]

/ON //Wed Aug 24 02:14:01 UTC 2011/
charles_steinmetz at lavabit.com 
<mailto:volt-nuts%40febo.com?Subject=Re%3A%20%5Bvolt-nuts%5D%20Looking%20for%20Fluke%20845AB%20manual&In-Reply-To=%3C20110824021410.214CC11BAB5%40karen.lavabit.com%3E>/    
Wrote:
/


I have a couple of the Artek manuals.I agree they are nice scans,

but I will never buy another one until they quit maxing out the

password security.The ones I have are screwed down so tight you

can't even rotate the pages to look at sideways schematics right-side

up on the monitor.All I care about is the original manual

contents.I don't care about the added features (OCR, bookmarking,

whatever) -- in fact, I'd prefer that they weren't there, so I didn't

have to close the bookmark window every time I opened the

manual.But you can't even use the basic scans as intended because

of the insane security.Anyone who is that paranoid about his

product can keep it.

  ***********************************************************************************************************

Charles


As my father likes to say  "There are at least two sides to every 
story..often more ". So to be fair since you chose to voice your 
unhappiness in a public matter please allow me let me share with that 
same public forum  some other sides to this story

ArtekMediais not a hobby business but a going commercial concern that 
pays the mortgage, the light bill and more recently the staggering costs 
of my wife's healthcare. We add the copy protection to discourage our 
competition from taking our scans and removing various features so that 
they can sell them as their own thus depriving us of our income and the 
work we put into providing arguably the best after market PDF scans 
available. We know this has happened on several occasions as people have 
sent us copies of scans they bought from two other PDF manual suppliers 
that had our secret mark embedded in them .I was able to prove this fact 
and Ebay suspended one of these sellers for  60 days , the other is now 
deceased so the point in his case is mute. How these copies came into 
the competition's hands we can often only speculate on .

I am not sure what you bought from me in the past but out of over 70,000 
PDF's sold in the 10+ year history of the company so far fewer than 2 
dozen people have written to complain about the password protection. In 
75% of those 2 dozen cases we sent them an unprotected copy . This with 
done with the understanding the unprotected copy was solely for their 
use and not to be forwarded or extracted from for the benefit of 
others.  I could not find any record from the last 5 years (searching on 
steinmetz and lavabit) and I have no personal recollection of our having 
discussed the matter with you in the past as a result of a complaint you 
might have voiced as a result of purchasing anything from us. I will 
however still reserve for you the benefit of the doubt and If you have 
an ArtekMedia scan which you would like unprotected contact me off list 
ad we can certainly discuss it further.

Sideways schematics:

99.9% of the time we make an effort to turn all schematics to the 
orientation they are meant to be read even if they were originally 
printed in 90 degree rotation by the OEM, every now and then one slips  
through un-rotated. Adobe Acrobat Pro has an unpleasant habit of auto 
rotating things when using the auto page straightening feature. Again if 
you havemanual you purchased from us you would like corrected we are 
happy to do so , one simply needs to send us an emailat 
manuals at artekmedia.com <mailto:manuals at artekmedia.com>with the details. 
OCR has absolute no affect on manual readability , Upon opening the file 
one or two clicks will disable the bookmarking. The help files in Adobe 
Reader will explain how to do this if it is not intuitive for you.

In closing Charles we are sorry that you didn't like our service but we 
are still  happy to correct to whatever level you like those items you 
already purchased . To do this a simple and courteous email would gomuch 
farther than venting your personal frustrations in a public forum. AS 
for my being a "paranoid" . I doubt that you are in professional 
capacity to judge my mental state, but if you do have a degree in 
psychology or psychiatry than I will withhold my judgment until you can 
do further clinical testing to back up your allegation. I do have hard 
factual proof that my competition has stolen my copyrighted material , 
and that other well meaning and not so well meaning individuals have 
given copies of our scans away. So If I take steps to protect our 
material from piracy and that is by your definition "paranoia" ...then 
so be it.

As we like to say when I worked for Motorola ..."Paranoia pays ..but the 
hours are hell".

Regards

Dave Henderson

President & Founder

Artekmedia