> Fine, I thought - it is only $20. but the new version only ran on
> Windows XP, and I was running Windows 2000 Professional. So now, to
> work around *INTENTIONALLY CRIPPLED* software, I had to install a
> completely new version of the operating system, with newer features I
> neither needed nor wanted and which did nothing but slow down my old
> but in-perfect-working-order hardware.
>
> Such a situation completely offends my geek sensibility, because if
> this was a bug in a linux program, I could have googled for the fix
> and been back to balancing my bank account in a matter of minutes.
And that only in the worst case, if the application in question had been abandoned by the original developers. More likely you simply wouldn't run into this problem, because there's no incentive to cripple the application in the first place.
The wife of a friend of mine ran into this kind of thing in Apple-land: she couldn't use some feature of her iPhone unless she installed some sort of software for her Mac that required her to buy an OS upgrade. It's the kind of thing that spawns sites like this:
At first glance it sounds kind of ranty and stick-it-to-the-Man, but it starts making sense when you start feeling their tractor beams of vertical integration.
-- Andy