[recycledelectron]

Now for tonight's exciting installment of:
"DRM users are either ignorant (and don't know they will be screwed) or are ticked off because they have been screwed!"

I teach computer programming classes using Microsoft's Visual Studio .NET (when the University makes me use it.)

The first challenge is when students want to order the S/W and take forever to get it to work.

I took a poll:

Question: Who has gotten VS.NET 2005 to work on their laptop / home computer?
Answer: About half the class, the rest are living in the computer lab.

Question: Who bought a legitimate copy?
Answer: About half the class, but it seemed like there were a lot of students in this group that were not in the previous group, and vice versa.

Question: Who had a pirated copy not work?
Answer: Nobody. Not one hand. (Maybe they don't want to admit trying to pirate the s/w.)

Question: Who got a pirated copy, and has it working?
Answer: About half the class.

Question: Who has a legit copy, and has it working?
Answer: One student, who puts up his hand until his friend pulls his errant hand down and says "no, I lied to you - that's a warez copy I put on your laptop."

Question: Who has a legit copy, and has not gotten it to work?
Answer: About half the class.

The moral of the story is this: Don't buy Microsoft software and expect it to work. Cracked copies are much more likely to work on the versions of Microsoft Windows that are included on new laptops.

I got a free copy of VS.NET 2005 from Microsoft at their "Rock the Launch" event, which worked on 1 out of 7 PCs that I tried to install it on. It never stated it would not work on certain licenses or vrsions of Windows, but it has severe limitations. Looking over my students' shoulders, it seems that cracked copies work everywhere.

Andy