A personal story I created and administer my website using a program called Rapidweaver. It’s a low-cost alternative to Dreamweaver on the Mac; at least, it starts at a low-cost. The application itself retails for $79, and it does a lot of what you need it to do. And then it doesn’t do what you need it to do, as its simplicity makes it rather limited in its scope. You need to purchase plug-ins to do everything else, as well as additional themes. Of course, the Rapidweaver plug-ins require a serial number to activate and use. I reimaged my Mac a few weeks ago, and loaded up Rapidweaver to make some changes to my website. To make all the appropriate changes, in fact to actually load my local copy of the website, I have [+]

A follow-up to my previous Piracy post found at http://mandersoconsulting.com/blog/files/Pirated_Software.html One of the reasons I gave to the reason people pirate was laziness. That’s accurate to a certain degree, but it only goes so far. Some developers that put out software which require an activation scheme, or DRM software, or a license server, have done so to protect their software from being stolen. And I could go into the whole “pirating software is/isn’t stealing” bit, but that’s tired. The point is, the developer put restrictions into the usage of their software so they could get paid for their work. That’s fair. But that crosses the line too often. Case in point, Brady. Brady makes label printing software and hardware for scientific applications, mostly labs. They sell the label printer, they sell the labels, and they sell the software to run the printer. [+]