On May 17, 2006, at 12:55 AM, Evan wrote:
a. This is not a pissing contest. You're unhappy.
This is not a valid reason for annoying other members
on this list.
I posted a note about my dissatisfaction with the nag screen.
People criticized me for it. I responded to that criticism. I
didn't realize that in order to be a member in good standing of
this list, I had to agree with everyone first. I didn't realize
that e-mails devoid of warm and fuzzy praise for Bare Bones were
considered annoying. Go through the e-mails. See who lodged
personal attacks. It wasn't me...I still haven't done that.
Perhaps you should re-read that message. In my opinion,
the tone was rather harsh. And trust me -- I know about
harsh tones in e-mail. (I was actually criticized in an
annual review for 'not communicating effectively through
email', and when I asked for clarification, my manager said
that I sent out something that seemed angry the week before.
I told him I was ready to rip one of my co-worker's heads
off, so if he read anger in it, then I was communicating
my emotions effectively.)
Oh particular interest might be the article in the
Christian Science Monitor from last week, "It's all about
me: Why e-mails are so easily misunderstood":
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0515/p13s01-stct.html
All I did was criticize Bare Bones for what I believe is a short-
sighted, counter-productive policy that penalizes legitimate users
in order to stop OTHER PEOPLE who pirate. Maybe people didn't like
my "tone"...I understand that, and I apologize for it. But please
also understand that treating paying customers like petty criminals
isn't exactly a way to elicit feel-good words from said customers.
If they were treating you like a criminal, they could have
done much, much worse. Like Microsoft, where it shuts down
all copies without warning. Or like some companies have
hinted at -- the ability to remotely disable your license.
b. Being a zealot about an issue is not conducive to
finding a viable solution.
I'm not in a position to find a viable solution. I can only find
work-arounds. By definition, this is something that can only be
solved by Bare Bones. I can suggest solutions, and I have, as have
others, but I have no way of knowing whether those proposals are
under consideration by the powers that be within Bare Bones.
Some nice folks suggested work-arounds, but it still doesn't solve
the underlying problem. As more and more people add computers to
their home networks, I'm sure you will see this problem arise more
frequently. And for every one person like me who speaks up, there
are probably many more customers who simply keep quiet and decide
against upgrading when the next version comes out.
There is some truth to that logic -- however, if the one
person is viewed to not be worth supporting, and a burden
on the company's support staff, they may not be willing to
look at it in that regard.
c. If you were willing to take the time that you spend
in bitching about the software to tell us what you
exact needs are, someone on this list may be able
to give you an alternative.
My exact needs are this: I would like to be able to run the
software I paid for on as many machines as I like. As long as
nobody else is using the software concurrently, what's the harm in
having a BBEdit instance sitting idle on another machine? (I like
the idling solution proposed by another listmember. It addresses
Bare Bones's anti-piracy concerns without being overly punitive
towards paying customers.)
The harms have already been explained -- people with less
ethics than you, who attempt to run the software in corporations
without having the proper licenses. Unfortunately, for any
time that software must make a decision about things, there
are 'alpha' and 'beta' errors -- commonly known as 'false
positives' and 'false negatives'.
To put it simply, the software must try to make an attempt to
determine if (x) is true. In this case, (x) equates to
'is more than one person running the software?'. Now,
if we go to our statistics, we can say (sorry, for those
mathematicians, I'm not using the standard signs)
If 'n' is the number of computers with the same license running
at the same time.
probability of x, given (n=1) : 0
probability of x, given (n=2) : > 0 ; < 1
probability of x, given (n=3) : > 0 ; < 1
Now .. each time (n) increases, p(x) increases. so
p(x given n=3) > p(x given n=2).
Now, odds are, by allowing 2 copies to run, there's a number
of false negatives -- that is, (x) is true, but the system
considers (x) to be false. (ie, two people are sharing a
license). We have to balance that scenario against the
number of false positives for (n>2).
Is it currently set at a good value? I have no idea.
Could there be a better formula for determining p(x)?
Probably. Is it worth the developers time? I don't know.
I like keeping my apps open, with documents in them, so when I am
at the machine, I don't have to start everything up again to get to
my workspace. I like keeping log files in the window, so when I
switch in to BBEdit, they get reloaded and I can keep a quick eye
on them. I like my workspace to be there when I am ready for it. I
like my systems to work the way I want them to, not the way
software vendors want me to. That's why I bought a Mac in the first
place.
I agree with the log files -- I use 'tail -f' to watch them.
They'll constantly update in the Terminal window, and it
doesn't matter if BBEdit is installed or not, nor if I'm at
a given machine.
I'd personally like the ability to 'save' a workspace --
all of the currently open windows, so that if I have to do
an OS update that requires a reboot, I can save my state,
reboot, then re-open all of the files in the same location.
I've mailed support about it, but it seems that this is
another situation where it could come in handy, so you
might want to mail them also.
Unfortunately -- the comment about the software vendors --
it's never about you. If you have a need that the software
developers haven't thought about, you need to tell them about
it (hopefully without pissing them off), and convince them
that it's in their best interest to do it.
Why should I have to go through the rigamarole of working around
the anti-piracy measures which are obviously geared towards NON-
PAYING users. I am a paying user, and I don't appreciate being
treated like a crook.
it's just a measure of probabilities. Dealing with the
edge cases are always a problem. It's like trying to stop
spam -- yes, it's possible. But if you set the rules too
aggressive, you'll lose real e-mail that isn't spam, as well.
Some people are playing linguistic tricks with the word "user", and
others are defending the practice by saying that other companies
are worse. Well, where I come from, a user is a person, and I am
one person, therefore I am one user, and a single-user license
should allow me to use it however I see fit. And other companies
may have found worse solutions, which is precisely why I will never
buy from them. Headaches like this are one of the reasons more
people are being driven to open source solutions.
It's called a 'norm'. The problem is that words get used
different depending on the context, and even when the word
means rather similar things, it can have slightly different
connotations to different groups.
Typically in computer software, from what I've seen, 'person'
is used to refer to a single human being (a personal use copy),
and 'user' refers to a single instance of the software running.
You're correct, however, in that on Barebones' storefront,
they have a specific section called 'License' for Yojimbo, and
yet not one for BBEdit. They also offer a family pack for
Yojimbo, and not for BBEdit.
I personally don't care for the term 'user', not because it
has some negative connotations (ie, '[drug] user'), but because
it has so many problems in the English language. It also
is really an action -- if you're not in front of the software,
and it's running -- are you 'using' the software, and therefore,
are you a 'user' ?
To reiterate previously proposed solutions, so that this
conversation might become more productive:
1. GREAT SOLUTION - Use the same licensing rules as Yojimbo.
2. GOOD SOLUTION - Add the idle-checking to the nag boxes so that
if people aren't using the instances on other machines (which is
pretty hard to do physically anyway), people don't get pestered by
the software. Nag the people who are breaking the rules, not those
who aren't.
3. OK SOLUTION - Add the ability to save all & quit a remote
instance from the nag box of another machine.
I would _love_ to see #3. It's possible that it might be
scriptable through AppleScript, but there's a problem --
if you're opening log files that are being written to,
BBEdit doesn't refresh it 'till you click the window, so
you might end up losing lines, depending on just what's
implemented.
Here's another possibility to consider:
4. Run in a degraded mode when it senses a conflict -- turn
off all of the features that differentiate BBEdit and
TextWrangler.
Of course, if you're not using the BBEdit specific features,
on some of the machines you're using, especially if it's
looking at logs, you might be able to switch to TextWrangler
there.
d. There's a solution that works in this situation, that
worked with Adobe software 10+ years ago. I'm not
sure that I'm in the frame of mind that I want to tell
you what that workaround is, though.
Well, if you should ever find yourself in that frame of mind, I
would appreciate hearing it. (I'm assuming it requires shutting
down the network or a portion thereof...not really an option for me
since I have all sorts of automated cron-based syncing happening
between machines for backups, etc.) But telling paying customers--
yes, I am apparently the only chump who paid full price--that you
have a solution but you aren't in the mood to give it to them is
not exactly the best way to engender goodwill with an already-
pissed-off customer.
Correct - disconnect the network.
If you think
about what the software is doing, I think it's rather
obvious.
I'm guessing some UDP packet broadcasting. Unfortunately, Little
Snitch doesn't seem to report the network activity BBEdit is
initiating. Apparently, the network traffic isn't initiated by the
BBEdit process itself. It looks like BBEdit is piggybacking on some
OS-level service, like Bonjour, but I haven't yet been able to
figure out how to get around it without shutting down ALL of
Bonjour and knocking out all my other Bonjour services like iTunes
sharing and AirPort Express's remote speaker capability.
I'm guessing it's Bonjour / Rendezvous, as we have to go through
regular security scans at work, and I've never had complaints
from the security folks. It also makes sense w/ the comment
about implemented about 3 yrs ago, and given BareBone's use
of other Apple component.
Oh -- and I much prefer BBEdit's 'check on startup' to
MS Office's 'check all the time, and when I think there's
something else on the network, because Virtual PC is
flaking out, I'm going to dump you out of the app'.
BBEdit does NOT just check on startup. It checks all the time. How
do I know? Because if I start a third instance on any machine, ALL
the machines start putting up the nag boxes. And the nag boxes keep
coming up until one instance is shut down. So, it IS checking all
the time.
Not necessarily. I'm not in a position to check right now
(already should have left for work long ago), but it
might not have a regular timer triggered until the 'problem'
is detected. So -- third copy starting up triggers the
heartbeat that looks to see if things get shut off or not.
Anyway -- I'm surprised that you've taken this as far as you
have. Either you're an amazingly fast typist, or you've
already spent more than what I would consider to be $200 of
my time in sending e-mail.
So -- a little note about this list -- it's not considered
normal to reply to every last message in a thread that isn't
your own. It gives people more work to read through them all.
Read through the list, read the messages, and if there are
particular messages that raise points that you want to debate,
reply to those, but the signal/noise ratio goes way down when
you keep stating basically the same thing over and over again.
-----
Joe Hourcle
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