In article <47f11b4c@news.povray.org>, <.> says...
> "Patrick Elliott" <sel### [at] rraznet> wrote
> 
> >OK. I am all for IP. I am less for some moron telling me that I, or
> >someone else, can't alter it to make it work right. Mind you, his
> >mistake may have basically been suggesting donations, but the rest of
> >just 100% total and complete BS.
> 
> Almost every single hardware manufacturer (most visible are CPU/GPU
> manufacturers) as well as almost every single software manufacturer sell
> crippled versions of their goods under different SKUs. It's their wares,
> they can not only chose to not develop certain lines for all markets, but
> they can purposefully cripple equipment or software to sell to lower pric
ed
> markets. If reverse engineering is explicitly prohibited, third parties c
an
> not re-market such goods by undoing the crippling or adding more
> functionality. I don't exactly know what he is doing, if he's patching th
eir
> (Creative's) drivers, that's a no-no. If he's writing his own from scratc
h,
> without using any of their protected code (very unlikely, I'd say), then
> Creative has no leg to stand on, except that they are not of course
> obligated to provide free advertising for him on their own forums. It's h
ard
> to feel sympathy for the big guy, but how would you feel if someone was
> reverse engineering the lower priced version of your software to enable i
ts
> advanced features and thus wreaking havoc with your pricing structure? Ho
w
> would you feel if time limits on your shareware version were being patche
d
> out? Business is not charity and businesses are not obligated to provide
> everyone with everything technically possible, to their own detriment.
> 
Ok, 1. Their own EULA only denies the right to modify, etc., *if* its to 
use not as intended. 2. There is no statement made, in any place, which 
implies that any card that he has "fixed" was only "partly" Vista 
compatible, or otherwise intentionally disabled. In point of fact, 
several of them **explicitly** state both that they *are* Vista 
compatible, and *list* the features that they disabled, without any 
disclaimer that they won't work under Vista. Worse, even the ones 
supposedly 100% Vista compatible *do not* properly support all the 
features that they claim on the box.

3. They didn't even bother trying to stop this guy, until he implied 
that some people could donate to him, and then they claimed that this 
constituted **asking** for payment for their IP, which... is just 
totally absurd, since he wasn't demanding payments from people to 
download anything, any more than Creative does when you download their 
broken versions. This is just about as stupid as if someone provided 
downloads of the latest versions, but asked for donations to maintain 
the website. Its real questionable whether intentionally breaking your 
own technology is strictly ethical or legal, when the only reason to do 
so is to force someone to buy a new one. Try that with anything like a 
car. Oh, sorry, but the 2007x isn't intended to drive on Main st., now 
that they upgraded the streets with a new type of painted line, I am 
afraid it won't go faster than 3 MPH or let you listen to the radio 
while on that street. However, for an additional $20,000 you can buy the 
2008q, which is 100% compatible... Yeah, right. That would go over good 
in court.

This isn't a case of them disabling features on a lower priced model. 
This is them disabling nearly every feature on the card you paid the 
highest price they sell them for to get, *if* you happen to be running 
the new version of someone else's software, and doing so, despite the 
fact that their is "no" legitimate reason to do so, including 
incompatibility, other than making people buy the new, even more 
expensive, card. They apparently either think that, yes, they did screw 
up by pissing off thousands of customers that bought the bill of goods 
on their box, only to find out that only the modded version of the 
software from a third party made it work as advertised, or, someone in 
legal pointed out that they *could* be sued over how they handled the 
method of preventing those features working, and how they advertised the 
product, possibly both. Otherwise, they wouldn't have caved so fast, but 
would have tried to make some defense of their position.

-- 
void main () {

    if version = "Vista" {
      call slow_by_half();
      call DRM_everything();
    }
    call functional_code();
  }
  else
    call crash_windows();
}

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