Time-Stamping Demo programs #2

[Kay C Lan]

On Wed, Apr 25, 2012 at 12:11 AM, J. Landman Gay
<jacque at hyperactivesw.com>wrote:

> He just inserts a 10 second wait after every launch before the program
> becomes useable. Like most people, I used the free version for a couple of
> years until the ten seconds got so annoying I paid up. I've been paying for
> updates ever since.
>
> It isn't quite as simple as that; there must be some kind of date stamping
because that pop-up dialogue tells you how many days you've been using the
software and the more you used it, without registering, the longer the wait
became. I can be a very patient person so I eventually ended up with a 99
sec countdown - it was probably longer than that but the numbers only went
up to 99 - before I relented and bought two licenses and eventually a
family license.

Note, date stamping doesn't necessarily need to know the 'real' date and
time. It could be as simple as keeping a tally of how many times the
programme is started to more complex recording of the time at start and the
time at quit and basing a days use on 8 hrs, or any other arbitrary figure.
Yes, you are never going to beat all the cheats but by the same token you
could really mess up someone's system if they thought they could simply
extend their license by resetting the date to 30 days earlier. I wonder how
successful archival/synchronisation/iCloud are on a system that suddenly
becomes 30 days younger?

I agree with the others though, I despise time limited apps because I never
have 30 days to test them, I only have a day here and a day there and I
spend half of it recapping what I learnt before.