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About the Chipdir

Syntax used in this ChipDir

Some remarks about the syntax and other rules used on this site.

General rule

As little as possible upper case characters are used since they are less easy to read.
As little as possible abbrev's are used since using the full words often only adds 0.1 % to the total volume of the site.

Address notation

Addresses are typed as internationally oriented as possible so we're not using abbreviations like av., hl., mt., str., sq. etc.
Telephone numbers are typed with all their international access codes. People that want to use shortcuts easily understand how to do so.
Formerly I used the full 'www.' names but I tought my site compiler to translate 'www.' to the former and since it saves a lot of space in the horizontal direction especially in tables I went for it, but not whole heartedly...
Email addresses don't need a 'email:' in front of it, since the '@' in the email address already is clear enough. Generally the email address is also linked and therefore highlighted.
Address parts like street name and city also don't need a prefix.
Telephone numbers however do, since they can be regular telephone numbers, fax numbers and BBS's. It's a shame that all those functions aren't integrated into one number. :-(

Date notation

Dates are noted as follows:

19980102	This is the second day of januari of the year 1998.
199801	Somewhere in januari of 1998
1998h1	Somewhere in the first halve of 1998
1998q2	Somewhere in the second quarter of 1998

The time of the day is generally removed from emails (for example).

Editing texts from others

Obvious textual errors form others are edited out and in this respect considerable liberties are taken. The philosophy is that a lot of the writers are no syntax experts and won't mind to be corrected when it's in their advantage. Obviously having a unified style all over the ChipDir makes reading it easier.
Email and other Internet addresses are kept up to date as much as possible in order to reduce dead links as much as possible.
I'm thinking of removing all the 'signatures' of email and link all authors to their own spot with their latest 'signatures' which that way is much easier to keep up to date. The 'hidden' ad's in these sigs very easily get outdated... And they distract from reading email-threads.

Copyrights

This site tries to be very sensitive about copyrights, but it isn't in some respects, although it's not fully legally correct.
Email that was send to the author of this site and clearly has the purpose of transmitting commercial info may be put literally on the site or be converted in whatever way the author of this site seems fit (and has time to do...)
Email that was send to the author with some sort of tip or correction or whatever and of which the truth contents couldn't easily be checked or of which the ChipDir author thinks that the tipper deserves some credit or if he thinks that a lot of people can be helped by the possibility to contact the tipper may be included.
As soon as any author wishes that his contribution be anonymised (or removed which hasn't happened yet) it's done as soon as possible (but plan to be patient for 3 months...)
For postings on mailing lists and news groups the old USA system of copyright is still being practised, which says that if you don't explicitly claim copyright on your message it's used here without mercy.
Some mailing lists (like that of the ChipDir) state explicitly in their welcoming message that your mails may be archived and used on the WWW.
The rationale for this is, that once you offered your 'pearls of wisdom' to over 200 people that you didn't know, you must have thought about your contribution. Furthermore the editor of the Chipdir will have selected it on it's merits and will have removed most of it's textual mistakes.
I never had any problems in this respect since most technicians know how hard it is to get REAL info (info with insight and sometimes an emotional contents) and appreciate that the ChipDir gives so much of it of others that they gladly see their own inserted and perhaps even consider it an honor to be quoted in such a heavenly body of knowledge. (..Sorry have to read this sentence back... ;-)
Not all parts in the ChipDir are copyrighted by me. The GIICM is still fully owned by Frank Vorstenbosch (also known as Falstaff). In principle every email is owned by whoever wrote it. And the soon to be added Russian chip data is co-owned by Christoph Zingg.
For other parts that are contributed by companies, the copyright issue is not relevant since every information given here is generally free advertising for them. (Or turn it around: When they start to complain I would suggest that I might remove all hints to their existence from the ChipDir. ;-)
I don't include generally accessible FAQ*'s in the ChipDir, but this is a storage, updating frequency and statistics issue.
Oh and there is no copyright on factual data like company addresses, URLs, interface definitions etc. There is copyright however on compositions of data and possibly also on spelling and spelling mistakes etc.
Burke, Gray Craeger and I have a kind of agreement to copy each others URL data by the way and therefore (besides that we respect each other immensily ;-) we link to each others site. But finding the time to do the actual copying is most prohibitive. :-(

OK, this text is copyrighted! And don't ever mention to anybody ever that you read anything interesting on this site! Don't quote anything from this site on mailing lists and news groups! As soon as you give this excellent site any free publicity my pack of bloodthirsty (haven't been fed for over a year) corporate lawyers will track you and hunt you down!
Just kidding of course...
And corporate lawyers have mothers too! I think. (Unless they have sold them of course.)

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