Well ..... today was a day I'll never get back.

[Stinky The Clown]

I have a MacPro. I need to run Windows for two programs. One of them is a CAD program and one is a very specialized industry-specific program.

I have an upgrade of Win from XP to Vista. Previously, XP was on my Mac's Boot Camp, legal and properly authorized. I changed my implementation and now want to run Vista under Parallels on a "virtual" machine. In that my Windows needs are modest and infrequent, it makes sense to me to use a virtual machine and give the Boot Camp disk space back to Mac OS X.

In the past, with Windows, I was able to do a clean install from an upgrade disk by inserting the previous version install disk in a second drive.

Not with Vista. In the end, I was on the phone with Microsoft's support team, punctuated by not infrequent sessions on hold, for nearly two hours to get the stupid program authorized.

Next came the CAD program. It is version that a former employee installed on one of my machines back in 2007. That machine is long dead. I have the original install disk, paperwork, packaging, authorization print-out, etc.

Last week I installed it on a back-up machine here in the office and on my MacPro under BootCamp. Today, I blew away the Boot Camp installation and did the Parallels installation.

I was told I had exceeded the authorized number of installs and would ahve to contact their support team to explain why I was exceeding my authorized number of installs.

I call the 800 number as instructed. They're closed on weekends. I wish I could record the message. It was quite rude, really, and ends abrubptly, with no instructions about what to do. Just "call back later, asshole."

I send an e-mail - the alternate way to get support.

After trading e-mails for almost two hours, I am finally instructed to scan the box and the original disk and send it back. For their part, they'll "escalate" my case and see what can be done.

Finally, I get back an e-mail with an authorization number.

What a pain in the ass to install software for which I have legally and fully paid for the right to use it.





On a side note, my primary CAD vendor (not the bozos I had to deal with today) told my partner and I in a training session we attended a few weeks ago that there are over 5,000 copies of their software, all with the same cracked serial number, in use in Asia. They can see the copies when they scan the internet for copies of their program in use (I never knew software reports back to the mother ship that it is in use, did you?) Unfortunately, the governments in the countries in which the software is in use refuse to cooperate fully. So yeah, I understand the need to guard against piracy, but geeze. There's gotta be a middle ground. Or a faster way to deal with legit owners.

[Occulus]

1. See why gamers complain about DRM schemes?

We're constantly told on Penny Arcade and other sites that if you don't like it, blame the pirates. Problem is, pirates- by the very nature of the activity- don't have to worry about DRM. It is only the legitimately paying public that will experience DRM issues with commercial software.

My favorite problem is the multiple-registration issue you had, and some games have- like Bioshock when it was first released. Bioshock initially had something like three to five lifetime installs allowed. This was an absolute nightmare for some reviewers, who typically install each copy multiple times on multiple machines in order to test the performance of the game on differing hardware.

I feel your pain, really I do, but this is an issue gamers have fought and failed to win on for a long time now. Since pirates don't have to worry about these issues, such a tactic is of dubious value at best.

[RoyGBiv]

2. Completely agreed ...

As I implied in another thread on a similar issue, DRM doesn't "protect" anyone. It simply limits those who wish to be legitimate consumers of content.

I have lost count of the amount of software I've purchased that was so annoying to use because of DRM schemes that I either returned it or found a "workaround." The Sims, to which I am addicted unfortunately, has such a draconian DRM scheme that I have to argue with myself whether I want to sit through it just to install new expansions. It's *easier* to find a pirated copy with all that stripped out than it is to go to the store, find it, then bring it back and fight with the software gods.

And the DRM is the only thing that makes playing it under Linux a chore. Otherwise, the thing would run under a vanilla wine installation reasonably well.