micromux

Nero Licensing Nightmares

There are a lot of versions of Nero for Windows. This is suppose to be an application to burn both CD-RW and DVD+R/-R discs, so using Nero it is possible to create everything from an audio disc to a DVD movie. Unfortunately, there are some stringent licensing requirements that you may be unaware of. Allow me to describe a typical scenario and the kinds of results you can expect.

Imagine if you purchase a CD-RW burner that includes Nero Express 5. After adding the new hardware to your computer, you reboot and install the Nero software. When this is complete, you test the CD burner and everything works fine.

A few years later you decide to upgrade the Sony CD burner to a AOpen DVD burner. With this new device, it should be possible to continue to author CD’s in addition to the DVD discs the new burner is capable of creating. Your DVD/+R/-R includes Nero 6 software to author DVD discs, so you simply install the new Nero and start using this software to author DVD discs. Fortunately, everything seems to work fine until you return to your Nero Express that you were using with the Sony CD/RW and try to make a CD data disc.

This does not work. In fact, you are unable to burn any kind of CD media with either your Nero Express 5 software or your new Nero 6 package. You then attempt to uninstall all of your Nero applications and start over; however, the Nero Express 5 refuses to uninstall because it claims to require an MSI installer that was not bundled on your original installation media.

What happened? Why is it now easier to boot Knoppix to burn my CD and DVD discs?

As it turns out, Nero distributions are licensed to the hardware they ship with. When your new AOpen burner includes Nero 6 this is really a version of Nero that will only work with burners of that exact make and model. Thus, after adding the new DVD burner to our system the Nero Express 5 will prevent us from burning CD discs since our CD hardware is no longer in this computer.

Do yourself a favor and spend a few minutes on the Nero website. In the Support section there are “Clean Tools” to remove old versions of Nero from your computer once the hardware has been upgraded. This is the only way your will be able to uninstall a Nero package once the hardware has been removed. Maybe this is something Nero can fix in a future release, it would be nice not to have this same problem after installing my new dual-layer dual-sided blu-ray DVD burner.

Windows Product Activation

It appears that quite a few Windows XP installations have been activated using FCKGW. These are the first few letters of a popular Windows Product Key that was suppose to be used by a major PC maker for volume licensing and was instead leaked to the public domain.

This may not sound like a major problem, but many unsuspecting users have illegal installs of XP that have been activated using this key. Microsoft has banned this particular product key from downloading updates at the Microsoft website, which will make it impossible for a user to maintain their system. One option is to buy a legitimate copy of XP and follow the instructions from Microsoft but it is quite likely that even this will not work. After you have exhausted this avenue, you can either spend $200 to get the full retail version of XP or visit Dell and pickup a new Dimension for $299.

Of course, it may be that you already have a legitimate copy of Windows, but that your OEM install has been polluted by one of these rogue licenses. Hopefully you still have your original Windows media, or the partition on your hard drive with the media has not been lost yet.

While it is understandable that Microsoft wants to protect itself from piracy, the wide assortment of XP key generators seems to make this implausible. These kinds of restrictions only make it difficult for unsuspecting users that are victims of these pirates. Not only do the victims get robbed when they buy their system, but they are then forced to spend another $200 on a legitimate copy of XP when they discover the version they have won’t work.

Of course, there is nothing in the registration mechanism to prevent Microsoft from restricting more product keys in the future. How safe does that make you feel? There is no need to take this out on the consumer, the focus should be on distributors and resellers to enforce these stringent licensing requirements.

Massachusetts Should Close Down Office 12

The next version of Microsoft Office is going to rely on XML file formats. Anyone using Office 2000/2003 will be able to install an update that will support the new Microsoft format but upgrades are required. For those who are not using Microsoft Office, a new set of import filters will be needed to access files stored in this new format.

As a preemptive response, the state of Massachusetts has adopted the OpenDocument format. This is an extensible XML document format that has been developed with a steering committee that includes Adobe, Corel (WordPerfect), IBM and Sun. In addition, the open source OpenOffice.org is already capable of authoring documents in this format and it can be freely downloaded for anyone who needs access to OpenDocument files.

In stark contrast, Microsoft Office 12 has adopted a homebrew XML format for the next version of Office without any significant collaboration. As such, there will not be a consolidated effort to release tools or applications that can recognize Microsoft Office Open XML, and at least initially only users of Office 12 will be able to work with these file formats.

Industry pundit James Prendergast claims that Massachusetts is jeopardizing taxpayer dollars by migrating to the OpenDocument format. Ultimately, taxpayer dollars will need to be “wasted” to retool for Microsoft Office Open XML. Maybe we should avoid standardization and require that everyone is capable of reading every file format? Obviously, this is an unrealistic expectation. Organizations should be able to standardize on whatever formats they wish, and government should provide access to content in a documented format that can be easily accessed by its constituency.

Legacy Soft Modem Support

A recent attempt to recommission a Compaq Presario 5062 has left me with a workstation that cannot communicate using the modem.

While this might seem like a trivial problem, the driver download page offers both a Conexant HCF V.90 and an Integrated Modem V.90 Upgrade yet neither of these drivers work with this system. Since the modem has a chip on it the the label Conexant, it seems most likely this is the proper driver. However, the driver updates from Compaq immediately remove TURBOVCD.VXD and any attempt to replace it result in a request for my Windows 95 disc.

Unfortunately, this is a Windows 98 install and of course Compaq never bothered to include an actual operating system CD. The entire computer is restored using a Quick Restore disc, while this is suppose to return the PC to the factory installed state it actually does everything except make the modem work.

While at this point one might assume the modem is bad, an attempt to drop in another soft modem produces no result. In order for a soft modem (aka: WinModem) to function correctly you need a driver for the device itself along with the Hayes-style modem command set it can interpret. Is there any benefit to this style of device? While the manufacturer can save money with a piece of hardware that has fewer components, the user is left with a kludgy device that requires multiple drivers to operate correctly. To make matters worse, this is a underperforming PC that really doesn’t have memory or CPU to spare for this kind of device.

Although HP/Compaq did offer me technical support, it really is a lost cause at this point. Beware of simple hardware that requires a complex software driver to operate, especially when this device can run over a standard parrallel or serial communications port.

Another great example of this is the Lexmark 7200V, but more on that some other time.

Finding Something In MSN Search

Microsoft has recently unveiled a revamped MSN Search that is clearly targeted at unseating the industry leading Google search engine. MSN Search is a pleasant interface that is very capable of returning comparable results, but is it a Google-killer?

There is some history to web oriented search technology that is worth reviewing at this point.

Before Google the search engine of choice was AltaVista. To some extent, this was a showcase for Digital to demonstrate the capability of the DEC Alpha platform, but ultimately they were able to finance enough hard drive storage to index millions of pages. Since WebCrawler was without money, they simply couldn’t compete and AltaVista became the engine of choice.

So AltaVista improved on WebCrawler by indexing enough sites to make the search interesting, and Google improved on this again by providing enough relevancy in the results. So one might wonder, what improvement is MSN Search trying to implement? Maybe there are no problems left to solve and web search engines are without room for improvement. The modern full-text indexing engine is adept at finding relevant results, and both of these companies have enough money to buy the computing resources they might need to index the entire web.

Needless to say, there are similar arguments that can be made for other computing applications. For example, after the advent of the modern wordprocessor there has since been very little motivation for consumers to pursue upgrades. In the beginning, document processors like WordStar provided ASCII storage with inline commands for formatting your document. This made the documents very difficult to read, and the user was further confounded by the complex series of keystrokes that had to be learned. The WordPerfect product was an incremental improvement to this, all of the formatting characters could be hidden from the user and the function keys were used to provide access to the necessary functions.

So has Microsoft provided an incremental improvement with the new MSN Search? Not really, they are attempting to compete with Google with similar functionality. The search results produced by both sites is quite good, they are both indexing the majority of the visible web and are nearly equal in the relevancy of the results.

This kind of scenario is not an incremental improvement, and as such this is not the area where companies will generally find consumer traction. It seems more likely that this is the first assault of the Microsoft technology, and this is generally when they embrace the competition. The second prong of this attack will be when Microsoft extends the technology and does something a little bit better.