Thanks for the thoughts. The people who use my software are retailers, I expect they
will rarely if ever upgrade their PC. The software continues to work on the 'wrong
drive', except that new clients cant be added. Therefore the owner will have time to
contact the vendor without too much disruption to the business.
As to the argument of 'what if the vendor goes away', that is a something I dont
consider relevant. The greatest part of my lifes software output runs on DOS and
Win3.1, and are thus obsolete. I dont expect my Win95 applications will be relevant
after a couple more years, and the prospect of losing vendor support on goods is a
feature of modern commerce. However I plan to be around for decades hence.
I am therefore not convinced that tagging to an HDD serial number is a bad idea.
thanks
Leo
Rohit Gupta wrote:
> Leo,
>
> you can always the idiotic Lotus method of the past. WHere the
> instalaltion floppy was self modifying (repalce that with exe) and
> could only be used once to install. If you wanted to move it to a
> new pc, you uninstalled it which fixed the floppy and then re-
> installed it.
>
> The problem was, we had a disk crash and Lotus refused to replace the
> floppy. Which was the last Lotus s/w the company ever used.
>
> On 1 Sep 99 at 9:52, Leo Ramakers wrote:
>
> > > | Network card ID - apparently this is definitely a unique Serial
> > > | number but it requires a network card in the PC
> > >
> > > Are you talking about the MAC address? I so, this is no longer unique (well
> > > it must be within any one network of course) because many of the clone cards
> > > allow the MAC address to be changed.
> >
> > Yes, the unique network ID. The idea came up in discussion on this group last
> > year, I discounted it because few of my target market PCs was networked.
> >
> > > | Hardware Dongle - expensive
> > >
> > > Not really - in the range of $15-30 in quantity. We bring them in from
> > > Aladdin for the security software that we sell in most countries but lease
> > > in the USA. Aladdin are most helpful to deal with too.
> >
> > Thanks for clearing up my assumption. The catch is the 'in quantity' bit though,
> > for speculative ventures the hard disk ID is a valid copy protect scheme. Do you
> > onsell dongles to developers?
> >
> >
> > ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > New Zealand Delphi Users group - Delphi List - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> > Website: http://www.delphi.org.nz
> >
> Rohit
>
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