Some of us already do... but the "stop working" part? When did that happen? And you forgot to mention no meetings, office gossip, dealing with chatty people..

I have never once been down to OSU/High street in fifteen years, and have no reason to do so, ever. If you let the Buckeye fever media frenzy color your judgement, you're missing out on a lot of stuff. There _is_ a hell of a lot more than just football, you know! If you want crowded city blocks with lots of towering buildings, bums on the street, then sure, Columbus isn't for you, but maybe NYC is. I looked into the research triangle area a few years back, and wasn't impressed with the cost of living.

This really depends on where you live and where you work. I don't have any problems, and neither do most people I deal with - but then again, adding an extra 10 minutes to your commute is a real killer, isn't it?. Compared to what LA and NY are like, Cowlumbus (ahem) is a dream-drive

Columbus, Ohio. No earthquakes, hurricans, floods, fires, etc. Cost of living is much lower than Calif, and has real weather (and snow). No beaches, tho. New Zealand looks wonderful, but has that nasty ozone hole..

Sounds like you have an ax to grind for some reason. Care to elaborate on why you hate everything but what you know how to use

Actually, pretty lame. See www.gamecopyworld.com for the crack. These "methods" are so trivial to break any more the cracks are calling them the "scratch and sniff" method

First off, I'm a veteran of shareware, both as a programmer and a user, having been "doing it" since the C64 days, and have done it for C64, Apple ][, Macintosh, Win3.1 and Win32. I’ve been around this issue for a very long while, and have done a lot of research into it. The bad news: As others have put it, if it's on the computer, it can be cracked, given enough time. Doing separate builds - one for trial, one for full - doesn't really solve anything. It may make your “manager” types happy, but someone will still buy it, get the full version, demand a refund, and then post the program everywhere. Yes, this has happened to me. Using a 3rd party protection tool is a SERIOUS waste of money - they all have a formulistic crack or patching method, and I haven't seen any pass a half-assed attempt. Examples: www.gamecopyworld.com, astalavista.box.sk, crackstore.com, suddendischarge.com, and w3.to/protocols - you can sadly find lots and lots of others. Anytime I hear about a game that’s “gone gold” on avault, almost always there is a crack ALREADY UP on gamecopyworld.com – and the thing hasn’t even hit my local MicroCenter’s shelves yet! As for people willing to use development tools and other stuff without paying for them: yes they do - check ANY of the binaries newsgroups if your ISP carries them. Borland 5 C++ compiler is free, yet people seem willing to trade VC++ and Metrowerks. Now, the good news: Generally, the reason people pay for a product is less than trialware and being forced to buy, than actually getting something for the money, be it continual upgrades, or helpful tech support (of course, if you did a good job on code and docs, tech support is probably minimal). If you find that people are ripping you off for a $30 program, try dropping the price to $20 - if they are still doing it then, then there is nothing you can do, and perhaps your program needs a re-write, if it's irritating people that much. Combating the cracks or keygens falls into two groups: if it's a patch (crack) to your program, simply make a new version. Hell, make one a week. I recommend using something like UPX or Shrinker to compress/encode the exe if this is a continual patching problem – this causes the exe image to change more than normal. If the problem is a keygen (making a new key), the crackers usually use something like "UpN Phrac-e" or “TNO-LamerBeach” or some such stupid thing. Gather all the keygens, and lock out the names. If you can det

There are lots and lots of ways to do this, and every single one can be broken by crackers (why would one want to bust a $20 product is beyond me... ). In any case, setting this up is pretty trivial. Stick a registry key in your profile that indicates the time when the product was first ran - GetSystemTime is good enough for this. Then check aganst this stored-off value and if the different is greater than your limit, stop the product. Also check for it going less than the start to see if someone has diddled with the clock. Extensions and variations: keep a running tally of the total number of time used by the program and shut off after that time. Or use it to validate the above value. Watch for people setting the clock while the program is running - les than 90 minutes is probably ok, but more than that (esp a full 24 hours) is probably cheating. Check and make sure that when you write the registry key that the value is still there; under NT you can prevent a key from being modified, so this can trap for that. Again, none of this will prevent a determined cracker, or even a half-good one.