Write Access

DVD Case

I'm sorry to see you have decided to drop the DVD case and have decided to include the DVD within the magazine. I think that it is a bit of a con trick to advertise this as a "green" decision, when we all know that it is purely a cost cutting exercise on your part.

I have been a subscriber for some time now and I have all your DVDs stored in my collection, so I do not like this change.

Ian Pawson

LM

We assure you that this change to an internal DVD wasn't a light-hearted decision. We can imagine that readers who keep a complete set our our DVDs in a collection might see this as a disruption. You are correct that this change to the DVD was, in part, a cost-cutting measure; however, the same can be said for the entire Green IT movement. Part of the point of Green IT is that saving resources also saves money.

In this case, the savings allow us to protect our subscription rate and cover price in a time of fluctuating exchange rates and rising shipping costs, but this change is also something we have had on our minds for a long time because, yes, we really are concerned about conservation. Many readers might not be aware of the waste endemic in the magazine distribution process. As a result of newsstand returns, a large portion of magazines sent to the newsstand aren't even sold (nearly half in our case, and we actually perform better than the industry standard return rate, which is more like 2/3).

Consider, also, that some of our readers buy the magazine for reading only and don't even keep the DVDs. Some readers install the DVD and dispose of the disc; other readers keep the DVD in the case for a few months (until a new version comes out) and then throw it out. The result is that, although the DVDs themselves are widely used and appreciated by our readers, according to our estimates, only about 10-20 percent of the DVD cases are actually permanently employed for their intended purpose.

Bookmarks

I read with great interest the Workspace column titled "Saved For Later" in the September, 2008 issue of Linux Magazine. The article describes the OpenOffice Bookmarks Menu extension.

On page 86, Dmitri writes, "After pressing OK twice and creating a dialog called Bookmark Dialog (..), you are done." He could just as well have said, "After building your own whitebox, you are done."

The instructions need a more step-by-step approach. I eventually figured out this cryptic instruction.

Then, I typed in Listing 1 and 2 and ran into a show-stopping error. Line 21 in Listing 1 gives an error that says the object is not defined.

I presume that this is because of some kind of editing mistake.

Rob Solomon