2 Nov
2011
2 Nov
'11
4:32 p.m.
On 2 Nov 2011, at 21:39, Tony Duell wrote:
>> From reading their forums to turn the
resulting data into an image you have
>> to send it to them and they have to process it. Their explination is
>> that the software and knowledge is beyond the pricepoint of most people
>> (software) and most people don't have the knowledge to decode a flux
>> recording....
Firstly, please note that this above paragraph is almost completely incorrect.
1) You don't have to send anything to KryoFlux or SPS to use the KryoFlux hardware
& software. It can create a raw (documented) flux transition stream for you that you
can decode yourself (and a few people have done so). You can also get it to create one of
many sector-based formats the KryoFlux software supports out of the box.
2) Sending stuff to "us" (meaning SPS I assume), I think refers to creating IPF
files. This has nothing to do with KryoFlux. People, until recently, couldn't create
IPF files themselves. The IPF library source is now available, so people now can do it if
they want, so the comment doesn't really apply anyway.
3) The bit about saying that "most people don't have the knowledge to decode flux
recording" - I am not sure why we would say that - since people have already done it
using our documentation. Perhaps this refers to a conversation on opening IPF (again,
nothing to do with KryoFlux), where we said we didn't make it a priority because we
didn't think it would be very much use to most people (but we always said it was an
absolutely necessary). It's now open anyway.
There are few quicker ways to lose me as a potential
customer than to
insult me. And I consider telling me that I am not clever enough to do
something to be doing just that (it may be true that I can't work out how
to decode the data, but I'll decider that for myself...
The data is pretty simple to decode really. It's just a flux transition stream,
slightly encoded for bandwidth efficiency (but completely documented). So again, I
don't think we would have said that (I welcome being proved wrong, somebody please
post a link).
Anyway, I'm not trying to sell you anything, you may decide it just isn't right
for you. I just want to put the record straight.
I admit that we (SPS) have taken too long to do some things - stuff now rectified. But we
seem to get bashed in here whenever we or KryoFlux is mentioned for reasons I don't
really understand. All we wanted to do when we started SPS 10 years ago was to preserve
software, we created some very nice tools to help us to that, and one year ago we started
a company with the exact purpose of using those tools to help fund our preservation
efforts - and it doesn't currently do any more than that (in fact, it doesn't help
very much) - the KryoFlux personal edition is in fact sold at a massive loss when you
factor in the time we spend on it. Anyway, I am not complaining, I am just interested find
out why this might be the case, and what we can do to improve things. If anybody has ideas
on that, I would be very interested to know...
Thanks,
Kieron