Re: dongle licence problems

[Bruce Bowler <bbowler(at)bigelow.org>]

Justin Ashmall wrote:
> One final dongle moan (whilst I'm on the subject) - if the dongle stops
> working (pulled out by accident, printer turned off, etc.) IDL gives me a
> "seven minutes to save work" warning and the application title changes to
> "demo mode". If I correct the problem the "demo mode" text disappears but 7
> mins later IDL terminates.
> And I can't push my computer right back against the wall either.

I'll see that moan and raise you another...  (and I realize that this is
off topic and probably not even really appropriate for this forum but
that never stopped me before :-).

IDL for PC's is way over priced.  come on, $1500 for a single user
license?  And dongled at that???  I've was looking at a catalog of other
scientific software for PC's the other day (sorry it's not here but I
think the company name ScienceTech or something like that) and most
packages were in the $200-300 range with very few over $600.  I don't
recall seeing any that mentioned hardware keys (but then again, I wasn't
looking for that so who knows).  RSI should be flooding the market with
a $250 full blown, non-dongled, product and giving the student version
away.  OK, maybe not giving it away but it costs less the $1.00 to make
a CD these days and if you include the PDF docs on the CD along with
acrobat reader, you don't need more than about 5 pages on how to install
the software and how to get to the documentation.  Heck for that matter,
the downloadable/demo version could be the student version, then you
don't even need to burn the CDs...  It is, after all, the students of
today who will be making decisions on what software the companies of
tomorrow will be using.  If they've seen and used IDL, they're more
likely to recommend it in the future.  

I for one, would *gladly* pay $250 to have it on my PC at home, but I'm
a) not even close to willing to pay $1500 and b) I won't use a dongle...

consider the above $0.02 from a raving mad man...

Now back to your regularly scheduled discussion.

Bruce