The BSD Certification Group Inc. is pleased to announce the availability of the Summer 2006 Edition of the BSDA Study DVD. The contents of the DVD are listed here:
http://www.bsdcertification.org/index.php?NAV=Store&Product=P01 This is a trial run to determine if such a resource is valuable to the community. Your feedback on how to improve both the DVD and its distribution is important to us and we will work to incorporate your suggestions into future versions of the DVD. Here are the current parameters: The DVD is a thank-you gift for a $40 USD donation to BSD Certification Group Inc. and the donations will be used to pay for the psychometric analysis and the initial setup fees required to deliver the BSDA exam. A small shipping fee is added to help cover shipping costs and the amount of this fee varies by geographic region. Several volunteer distributors have offered, at their expense, to purchase the required media, cases, printing, shipping envelopes, unexpected shipping costs over the estimate, and to burn and ship the DVDs on an as-requested basis. The initial distributors are: Axel Gruner for Germany and Europe, Matt Olander for the US, and Dru Lavigne for the rest of the world. These volunteers will endeavour to ship fully functional DVDs to arrive quickly and at a reasonable shipping cost. We anticipate that we may discover parts of the world where shipping takes longer than expected or DVDs arrive damaged. If you have a problem with your order, please send an email explaining the situation to either your distributor or [EMAIL PROTECTED] and we will try to rectify the issue. For this first run we chose to use the burn as-required method as it allows us to learn the amount of interest (i.e. number of DVDs) and where in the world that interest lies. Once we have a better idea of numbers, we can consider doing a proper pressed run or put out a call for more local distributors to reduce shipping costs. Currently, if you click on the link to order a DVD the only accepted payment method is Paypal. We can accept cheques, but that will add several weeks before shipping occurs as the cheque needs to arrive and clear the bank. If people express interest in using cheques, we'll put up an order form on the site which you can fill in and send with your cheque. We won't be able to consider creating the necessary merchant accounts to directly accept credit cards until after the exam has gone live and we have a reliable revenue stream. As to the contents of the DVD, we tried to include existing information that is relevant to the BSDA exam objectives. This obviously includes the four tested operating systems, each at their most recent stable version when the DVD iso was produced. In addition to the BSDA exam objectives and command reference, pdf versions of the guides, handbooks, and faqs for the operating systems are also included, as well as their ports/packages/pkgsrc collections. Assuming there is sufficient interest, our current plan is to release summer and winter editions (i.e. once every 6 months) and upgrade the operating systems and pdfs to current stable versions. Suggestions for additional pdfs are most welcome; please ensure that they address at least one BSDA exam objective. We also would like to know if there is a desire for translated versions of the DVD resources and if existing translations already exist. If they do not, this may prove a good opportunity to contribute translated documentation to the *BSD projects' doc teams. Finally, this resource is meant to be a "everything in one place" resource of existing materials as an interim measure until the official BSDA exam study guide has been created and published. While private comments are always welcome, we also encourage that suggestions be sent to this mailing list so others can join in the discussion. Cheers, Dru _______________________________________________ BSDCert mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nycbug.org/mailman/listinfo/bsdcert
