B92 looks into use of illegal software

The most efficient weapon against pirated software is proper marketing and fair price of the original.

As long as $399 bloatware made by M**oft remains popular... pirates have only the (lesser) half of the blame.

I use mostly shareware or freeware... and make my living based on work using FREE compilers since a decade. Before used either $99 Metrowerks or 100% free Apple MPW.

For fun, picture editing I use Gimp. Otherwise people should think Open Office and who is not into Mac OS - there are Linux, BSD, Solaris derivatives out there.

Armed with all that weaponry the "pirated" software is simply a non-issue.

Of course some companies need heavy-weight applications like Autocad, Archicad and such - well, here, too I think better marketing and more innovative pricing would help.

As far as MUP or FBI - usually they really can do NOTHING, only pretend.
Copy-protection is totally useless, too. Our products have the weakest copy-protection (some copyright message embedded in the flash ROM, that's it). In last 10 years it was ONLY A SINGLE case of piracy. Probably because the prices are reasonable...

Well if Süns(hedgehogs,popular name of hungarian policmen since once they tried to use the so called hedgehog formation against protesters)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-NeeagWGb8&NR=1 visited my place I would definately be in trouble.

I guess 99% of those pirated software are Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop and some stupid mail system. Just use Open Office, Gimp and Thunderbird instead and you can sleep good at night.

The next step is to evaluate if it is possible for your company to switch over to GNU/Linux. It is easy and you will not only save on the licensing. You will also save on the IT-support. After we switched over to Ubuntu at my company the IT-support budget has shrunk dramatically. Working computers, no viruses, no problems.

Just do a pre-study first to evaluate if everything you need to do with the computers at the company can be done from GNU/Linux.

Just learned, the USB 3.0 driver of the competition made for Apple was hacked... within 3 days. Now it's all over the 'NET.

http://www.hardmac.com/news/2010/11/07/the-lacie-drivers-hacked

Mine is not there on the market yet. Of course, tried out what the competition (both competitions!) made - and both are still not mature, Kernel Panic instantly under certain circumstances.

Both companies never really wrote a driver yet - relying on 3rd party developers. Now both ventured first time and of course have more things to do than expected.

As for marketing and copy protection: both did the dumbest thing I can imagine: "tied" their own USB boxes entirely (so with "alien" USB boxes no USB 3.0 speed, only USB 2.0). People aren't really happy with such solution. "Removing" or "disabling" existing features of "alien" hardware is never a good idea. Rather have own hardware with features your own software can utilize better.

As the result - people won't hack because there is nothing to hack. Instead, they will buy your boxes bundled with your software having extra features.

If Serbia wants to join the WTO it's not going to be able to ignore software piracy much longer. EU governments use Open Office, so there wouldn't seem to be any reason not to make the switch. (Unless you have a lifetime's accumulation of MS-specific macros. Converting those to the OOo equivalent or AutoIt or something similar could be a pain. There may be a new program waiting to be written, come to think of it.)

"Just learned, the USB 3.0 driver of the competition made for Apple was hacked... within 3 days. Now it's all over the 'NET. "

-- I read last week that Apple will not be using USB 3.0. Instead it is working with Intel to use its Light Peak technology.


Also Ubuntu is not a bad alternative. If you have a MS Office 2007 licence you can run that in Ubuntu through Wine.

-- I read last week that Apple will not be using USB 3.0. Instead it is working with Intel to use its Light Peak technology.


Also Ubuntu is not a bad alternative. If you have a MS Office 2007 licence you can run that in Ubuntu through Wine.
(johny, 8 November 2010 18:37)

Yes, 100% true for Ubuntu, my middle son loves that OS.

As for LightPeak - only few details are known and it seems, it's rather protocol-neutral thing, maybe similar to PCIe-PCIe bridges but do not know much more than that. The bandwidth (10 Gb/Sec) seem to be a bit low if they want to run everything (display, drives) on that. At least USB 3.0 is out there. BTW - Steve J. didn't say that they won't use it, he did say, they won't use it for the time being. I hope you are right tough and they will skip that... so we can sell. Otherwise competing with the "mothership" is pretty tough. Luckily, their USB support has some long-outstanding shortcomings, so hope I can fix one or the other thing.

With Ubuntu you have now a full-featured USB 3.0 support, by the way - and Intel is behind it. It's even more than that, see here:

http://video.linuxfoundation.org/video/9-29-c4-10-45

Well I've been using Ubuntu for the last 3 years. I have a double boot set up. Win7 alongside the latest Ubuntu. I haven't had any need to boot on Win 7 for a few months; although this is not the system where I conduct my professional work. Ubuntu is very good for every day tasks. It avoids you the hassles of viruses and spyware; and its faster on this system than Win 7. However with that said; it is missing software such a Tax software ond other professional software (Matlab didn't install ). It needs to gain a larger user base, both in terms of corporations and in terms of every day users, in order to challenge software makers and hardware manufacturers into making more Linux specific products. Otherwise I am very happy with it and I find myself booting into Ubuntu rather than Win 7.

The most efficient weapon against pirated software is proper marketing and fair price of the original.

As long as $399 bloatware made by M**oft remains popular... pirates have only the (lesser) half of the blame.

I use mostly shareware or freeware... and make my living based on work using FREE compilers since a decade. Before used either $99 Metrowerks or 100% free Apple MPW.

For fun, picture editing I use Gimp. Otherwise people should think Open Office and who is not into Mac OS - there are Linux, BSD, Solaris derivatives out there.

Armed with all that weaponry the "pirated" software is simply a non-issue.

Of course some companies need heavy-weight applications like Autocad, Archicad and such - well, here, too I think better marketing and more innovative pricing would help.

As far as MUP or FBI - usually they really can do NOTHING, only pretend.
Copy-protection is totally useless, too. Our products have the weakest copy-protection (some copyright message embedded in the flash ROM, that's it). In last 10 years it was ONLY A SINGLE case of piracy. Probably because the prices are reasonable...

Well if Süns(hedgehogs,popular name of hungarian policmen since once they tried to use the so called hedgehog formation against protesters)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-NeeagWGb8&NR=1 visited my place I would definately be in trouble.

Just learned, the USB 3.0 driver of the competition made for Apple was hacked... within 3 days. Now it's all over the 'NET.

http://www.hardmac.com/news/2010/11/07/the-lacie-drivers-hacked

Mine is not there on the market yet. Of course, tried out what the competition (both competitions!) made - and both are still not mature, Kernel Panic instantly under certain circumstances.

Both companies never really wrote a driver yet - relying on 3rd party developers. Now both ventured first time and of course have more things to do than expected.

As for marketing and copy protection: both did the dumbest thing I can imagine: "tied" their own USB boxes entirely (so with "alien" USB boxes no USB 3.0 speed, only USB 2.0). People aren't really happy with such solution. "Removing" or "disabling" existing features of "alien" hardware is never a good idea. Rather have own hardware with features your own software can utilize better.

As the result - people won't hack because there is nothing to hack. Instead, they will buy your boxes bundled with your software having extra features.

I guess 99% of those pirated software are Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop and some stupid mail system. Just use Open Office, Gimp and Thunderbird instead and you can sleep good at night.

The next step is to evaluate if it is possible for your company to switch over to GNU/Linux. It is easy and you will not only save on the licensing. You will also save on the IT-support. After we switched over to Ubuntu at my company the IT-support budget has shrunk dramatically. Working computers, no viruses, no problems.

Just do a pre-study first to evaluate if everything you need to do with the computers at the company can be done from GNU/Linux.

If Serbia wants to join the WTO it's not going to be able to ignore software piracy much longer. EU governments use Open Office, so there wouldn't seem to be any reason not to make the switch. (Unless you have a lifetime's accumulation of MS-specific macros. Converting those to the OOo equivalent or AutoIt or something similar could be a pain. There may be a new program waiting to be written, come to think of it.)

"Just learned, the USB 3.0 driver of the competition made for Apple was hacked... within 3 days. Now it's all over the 'NET. "

-- I read last week that Apple will not be using USB 3.0. Instead it is working with Intel to use its Light Peak technology.


Also Ubuntu is not a bad alternative. If you have a MS Office 2007 licence you can run that in Ubuntu through Wine.

-- I read last week that Apple will not be using USB 3.0. Instead it is working with Intel to use its Light Peak technology.


Also Ubuntu is not a bad alternative. If you have a MS Office 2007 licence you can run that in Ubuntu through Wine.
(johny, 8 November 2010 18:37)

Yes, 100% true for Ubuntu, my middle son loves that OS.

As for LightPeak - only few details are known and it seems, it's rather protocol-neutral thing, maybe similar to PCIe-PCIe bridges but do not know much more than that. The bandwidth (10 Gb/Sec) seem to be a bit low if they want to run everything (display, drives) on that. At least USB 3.0 is out there. BTW - Steve J. didn't say that they won't use it, he did say, they won't use it for the time being. I hope you are right tough and they will skip that... so we can sell. Otherwise competing with the "mothership" is pretty tough. Luckily, their USB support has some long-outstanding shortcomings, so hope I can fix one or the other thing.

With Ubuntu you have now a full-featured USB 3.0 support, by the way - and Intel is behind it. It's even more than that, see here:

http://video.linuxfoundation.org/video/9-29-c4-10-45

Well I've been using Ubuntu for the last 3 years. I have a double boot set up. Win7 alongside the latest Ubuntu. I haven't had any need to boot on Win 7 for a few months; although this is not the system where I conduct my professional work. Ubuntu is very good for every day tasks. It avoids you the hassles of viruses and spyware; and its faster on this system than Win 7. However with that said; it is missing software such a Tax software ond other professional software (Matlab didn't install ). It needs to gain a larger user base, both in terms of corporations and in terms of every day users, in order to challenge software makers and hardware manufacturers into making more Linux specific products. Otherwise I am very happy with it and I find myself booting into Ubuntu rather than Win 7.