Thank you Tagxedo and Peace Centre.
Day: December 21, 2010
Not Feeling Like a Crook Anymore
There was great news for the Windows using community this week. Microsoft has discontinued its Office Genuine Advantage program.
It was a program with good Microsoft intent. It was a way to ensure that you were using legitimate software. In an effort to stem software piracy, you had to prove that the software that you’re running was legitimate. If not, you might see a message like this.
I suppose it is great in theory but it always bothered me. I legitimately purchase a copy of the software and carefully type in the serial number after I installed it and then shortly thereafter, I’d have to authenticate that the software was actually legitimate. It was too bad that I couldn’t just hold my receipt up to the web cam.
It was only an annoyance to those who actually purchased the product. For those who pirate it, they’d just have to do a search and find what they wanted.
The worst thing is that the validation didn’t always work. Messages would pop up at the most inopportune times informing me that there were problems and I would have to re-validate. Hey, I’m in education – I can’t afford to do anything like software piracy. We are supposed to lead by example. I do remember an instance with Microsoft Powerpoint all of a sudden deciding that I needed to re-validate. I can’t recall the specifics but I wasn’t alone and it was an embarrassing moment – haha, you have a pirated copy. It made an OpenOffice user of me on the spot.
The whole premise really bothered me. A copy of Microsoft Office isn’t cheap but then you have to go through this additional step? I don’t blame Microsoft for protecting their product but it never seemed right to force legitimate owners to have to prove again and again that they were legitimate.
I’m all for keeping things on the up and up. The net result should be lower prices for all of us. But, let’s go after the pirates, not the legitimate users. I won’t miss this program a bit.
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links for 2010-12-20
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Get a free copy of "Take Control of iPad Basics"
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Collection of online plagiarism Tools
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It has been fairly amazing to watch this Yahoo “sunsetting” news over the past 48 hours. It seemed to go from a bad leak, to huge backlash, to PR disaster, to confusion, to worse PR disaster. Now Yahoo, by way of Delicious (the most prominent service being “sunset”), has responded by lashing out at all the press for the coverage of the fiasco
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My HTML5 Game Engine Impact is now ready. It took some time, but I think it was worth it. I'm proud of what I have achieved and I hope you'll like it too.
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Screencasting via the iPad
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A browser extension that stops major third parties and search engines
from tracking the webpages you go to and searches you do -
As polls will show in 2010…we dumb.
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WordPress Plugins to solve your common blogging problems.
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Google has announced that Gmail users will be able to make free phone calls to the U.S. and Canada through 2011.
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TONIGHT’S LUNAR ECLIPSE EXPLAINED
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Did you ever believe it was possible to send your love on the internets and receive a reward for it? Oh, yes – this is now possible with the Loved.by plugin from the Seesmic Desktop Marketplace.
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Lesson plans…Browse and add lesson plans
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Marketers are tracking smartphone users through "apps" – games and other software on their phones. Some apps collect information including location, unique serial-number-like identifiers for the phone, and personal details such as age and sex
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Glossary of Instructional Strategies Current number of strategies and methods: 12
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Google Shared Spaces – Click the "Create a Space" button next to each gadget to get started with your shared space.
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The shortest solution to focus the Internet.
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Discussion about the future of Delicious from a former developer