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The following notices explain a few important points...
...to ensure that you download the software that will best meet your needs. circle-of-excellence Notices Use of any of our software is predicated on you both reading and agreeing to the following notes. It's all pretty straight forward, the kind of agreement you see before installing most software, but it lets us all know where we stand, and what to expect. What we mean by the word 'free' The word 'free' is often misused on The Web, and more often than not the word is used in a way that is totally misleading. Here, we use the word 'free' to mean you pay nothing, and to mean that you do not have to fill out any forms, nor do you need to agree to adverts covering half your screen the whole time you are working. However, the word 'free' does not mean that you can do what you like, we still retain copyright on all our work. Thus our permission to make free use of our work is predicated on our expectation that our work will be used in a reasonable fashion, to undertake legal activities, as defined both by UK Law and the law of the country in which the user resides. And, we reserve the right to withdraw permission for the use of our work, if any of our resources are used to further a criminal or terrorist activities, or are used to intentionally cause offense to others. Why we are giving this work away for free We can make our work available for free because someone else has paid for the time and effort that has gone into our work. In essence, our resources evolved out of UK government funded postgraduate research by myself (pete), which was later continued under small research grants from the Open University, the College of St Mark & St John, and the European Union Social Fund. Plus, privately funded time contributed by both myself (Pete) and my wife (Linda). Currently, we are able to continue to distribute freely our work freely because of some kind sponsorship provided by our friends at gutdoctor.co.uk. And because we have some web folder space allocated to us, as a part of the modules on which we teach at the College of St Mark & St John. Now. Obviously both the college and gutdoctor are keen to assess how much our work is being used, so they can determine whether distribution is helping to raise the profile of both. Gutdoctor hope for ne customers, and the college hope that our work will attract interest from potential students on courses, and clients for the college innovationsLab. Which means that we do need to ask you to activate any software that you install, so that we can gauge the degree of interest in our work.But beyond counting installations, we do not ask for any information that could identify you, and for most people, activation is a one-click process. Hence, it is as easy as unobtrusive, as we could make it. Specifications With regard Operating Systems, we have tested our work on the following Microsoft Operating Systems: Windows 98, Windows ME and Windows XP. We have not had direct experience of our work on any Windows 2000 machines. A couple of people have provided feedback that our applications work under Windows 2000, but we cannot quantify this, because the anonymity of respirations makes it difficult to follow up. With regard technical specifications, our test machines range in speed from 333 mhz to 1.7 ghz, and they range in terms of RAM from 128 megabytes to 512 megabytes. All our applications run on all our test machines, so if you have anything faster, they will should run even better. The only stringent requirement is that the monitor on your machine needs to be able to run in XGA mode (1028x768). XGA resolution is now pretty standard, but may not be possible on some older / smaller monitors, so you might want to check this out before downloading our files. And all our work looks best when your machine is running its display in Classic Mode, because the larger Windows frames associated with XP Themes affect the sizing and presentation of some of our dialogs. Reliability Almost all the software described on this page was developed in a series of research and development projects, either for ourselves, our colleagues, or for specific clients. We are more than happy to share the results of our work, but we underline that we are NOT a commercial software company, and do not possess a commercial software company's test facilities. While we can report that the software presented on this page works well on the machines for which it was developed, and for the purposes for which we use it, and while we have every reason to be confident that it will perform as well on your machines, we can make no guarantees. Always test all software thoroughly before relying on it for any mission critical task - and always back up work on a regular basis. Even software from major companies, such as Microsoft is known to fail - sometimes on a regular basis - so ultimately, reliability (for any piece of software) must be determined on a machine-by-machine basis. Copyright Issues In essence, our work can be considered to be freeware. Having said that, we retain copyright of the work, and are simply giving you permission to use it. This means that you can freely copy any of our resources, providing you are not doing so for profit. No-one is going to quibble about (i) anyone recouping the cost of copying a disk for a friend or colleague, or (ii) if anyone distributes disks along with other training materials as part of a recognised course of study. We are even happy (iii) for the complete set of our resources to be distributed inside a book or a magazine related to business, education or computing. We are also happy for workbooks, printouts and posters to be widely distributed, and for attributed extracts from materials to be used in handouts by teachers, trainers and business consultants, with the proviso that you credit us, circle-of-excellence.com, as authors, and you credit gutdoctor.co.uk as sponsors. ...However... We would be less than impressed by anyone (i) copying parts of our work, doing some minor editing and selling the new work on to others. We would also take a dim view of anyone who (ii) tries to re-engineer, backward engineer or steal any of the intellectual property rights inherent in the texts, posters and software.And, we are likely to react very assertively towards anyone who (iii) deletes the identifying marks from our work and passes it off as their own. ...In such cases, we would expect you to seek a commercial license to make use of those parts of our work which are integral to your product(s) or service(s). You should also be aware that the clipart in many of the posters and presentations is the property of the clipart companies who created those work. It is only licensed to be copied as part of the pictures that we distribute. So, anyone attempting to de-compose, edit or re-use any of the graphics from within our work will be infringing the copyright of some very large companies ...enough said... |
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