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New York Extortion Fees
We just returned from a trip back east and as part of that trip, we went into Brooklyn twice from New Jersey. I almost fell out of the driver's seat when I had to pay $15 in tolls for each roundtrip. I can understand paying tolls to maintain the roadway, but one bridge was $6 and the other was $9. That's completely outrageous.
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Software Piracy on the Mac
One of the recurring themes in the shareware industry is how to best protect our work from people that don't want to pay. I know I've written on this topic before, but the recent release of Leopard has brought this back to the forefront of my mind. Another blogger wrote about how many people had pre-ordered the Leopard family pack via his Amazon link and was amazed. The family pack is simply the same as the single user pack (same CD), but the license agreement differs slightly in that it says it can be installed on up to 5 machines in the same household. Why would people do this? It seems to me that Mac users are generally honest people willing to pay for good software. I've seen this with my own software where people purchase multiple licenses and I only send 1 serial number (I'll send more than one if I'm asked, but my automated system only sends 1) and people have asked about installing on more than one machine.
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Frustration with Windows
Yesterday I had to install some maps onto my Garmin iQue 3600 for a trip back east. I had everything installed on my Windows machine, but wanted to put it in VMWare on my Mac so I could finally get rid of the Windows machine. I downloaded all the installers from the web and tried to install, but kept getting an error message that it couldn't connect to installengine.com to download some component. After searching and futzing for several hours, I finally gave up and installed from the original CD which worked fine. I then did all the upgrades and live was fine. For some stupid reason, InstallShield (one of the most popular installer technologies for Windows), has the install engine separate from the installer. While this sounds like a great idea so that the engine can be installed separately, it isn't if you're dealing with an installer that is several years old. Apple's Installer on Mac OS X does something similar, but the difference is backwards compatibility and the engine is built into the OS. Why is everything so much harder on Windows? Is it simply that I'm not familiar with it or does it really suck?
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Frozen in New Jersey
This past week's trip to New Jersey/New York reminded me why I live in San Diego. The lows in San Diego were higher than the highs in New Jersey. 40-50 degrees Fahrenheit is just too cold too live for me. While the trees changing colors was pretty, I'll take San Diego seasons any day.