The joys of being a honest software customer

I am using computers for 14 years now and I have seen quite a few copy protection and liscencing systems. Of course they don’t bring any benefit since they can be bipassed, but some were at least fun like the legendary “dial a pirate” that came with Monkey Island 1 to evoke a smile by the honestly paying customer.

Now while Monkey Island deserves the price for the funniest piracy protection, SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) clearly rates on the other end of the scale – it’s a yearly nightmare that haunts you.

SPSS has a proprietary licence and knows a variety of registration codes to validate your product. The cheaper ones allow you to run SPSS for a year, the more expensive ones ($619.00) for a lifetime, and the cheapest (“Student edition”) ones simply disable a couple functions that are essential for research, so you have to buy the whole thing anyway as soon as you get into the second semester of statistics.

Since SPSS is an industry standard, universities buy site licences and pay a lot to get them. They usually buy the yearly licences so they can upgrade pretty much as soon as a new version of SPSS ships. In other words, as an employee of higher education you have to repeat the entire mess once a year just to receive the mercy to continue looking at and working with your very own data.

At the University of Bern, the new SPSS licence code was a yearly ritual that got first announced in the group meeting, then it was passed down to a selected number of persons, who in return were allowed to give you the code if SPSS was considedered necessary for your research. Once you got the code you had to look for some EXE file in Windows Explorer to run an update program where you could enter the code. Then SPSS realized they could build the renew function into the Help menu tree and the whole ritual became sort of painless, despite still being rather silly.

Now life at the ETH is different. Since the Federal Government has tons of money, the ETH has site licences for pretty much every software package. You download it from a central server, copy the licence code from a attached textfile and within ten minutes you do what you actually want to do: getting some work done.

Of course, it can’t be that simple for SPSS 13. Attached to the installation program are two text files, one with an authentication code and one with a licence code (it takes a while to figure out the difference first). Of course, the given licence code doesn’t work and fails with some cryptic error message. However, even if it did work, the text file cheerfully informs me that it would only work until the end of April 2007 anyway.
Seeing this obstacle as a challenge rather than an annoyance we have the ability to use the authentication code in combination with the lock code to retrieve a new licence code from the internet. To my surprise, the connection to the SPSS server actually works and the program informs me that the changes will be applied once I restart the program. I close and restart the program – just to be greeted again with the notification that my licence has expired.

Repeat after me: proprietary software is bad for the customer. And use R instead of SPSS – it’s more powerful anway.

Update

Newton was so kind to forward two interesting links that compare R and other statistical software:

R, SPSS and SAS comparison (Englisch)
R and SPSS comparison (German)

By the way, if you’re in Switzerland and need support for R or would like to bring in your own ideas and resources, you may talk to the guys who have their offices one floor above mine. They support and mirror R: http://stat.ethz.ch/CRAN/

Discordian Teaching #00010

Parcival says:

You know you’re getting old when the cute 17 year old on the seat next to you adresses you with the more formal “Sie”.

Climbing high

Vowe, lucky fellow he usually is, is off to Valencia for this year’s Louis Vuitton Cup that serves to determine the challenger for the current holder of the America’s Cup.

The NZZ reasoned in yesterday’s Sunday edition that the Swiss syndicate Alinghi will be very hard to beat because

• they kept finetuning the boat,
• now they have not only one, but two winnings teams that are interchangeable, and
• they have made only few minor managment errors, usually the biggest threat to a defender.

However, despite Alinghi’s professionalism and the past excitement for the team that surely will heat up again, there’s a team that’s also winning many hearts in Switzerland, namely Team Shosholoza from the rainbow nation of South Africa. Based on the Royal Cape Yacht Club, Team Shosholoza (“Move Forward”) is affiliated with Izivunguvungu, a project aimed to let poor children sail and thus have a meaningful and challenging activity and education that serves them later in life. In the current line-up for the Luis Vuitton Cup, Team Shosholoza features members from their sailing school.

More videos:
Alinghi 2007 UBS commercial
Team Shosholoza
Team Oracle/BMW

Hank Shizzoe @ Casino Zug

Last Friday (the 13th) me and a couple friends went to see the Hank Shizzoe & The Directors concert at the Casino Ballroom in Zug.

It was highly entertaining despite the bad luck of this day had one of the strings snap on his Stratocaster. Along with the concert they served American food so both the mind and the body got a treat.

After the concert I bought the CD “Hank Shizzoe” and updated the relevant entries (1, 2) on last.fm. You can listen to music samples on Hank’s website. His music can be bought without DRM protection over at soundmedia.

Reggae @ Sechseläuten

Traditionally, there are two Swiss indicators for weather change:

(1) Me wearing shorts. According to my mom, summer has definitely arrived when I wear shorts since I’m always one of the latest to adapt.

(2) The Sechseläuten, a traditional holiday in Zurich, is used to ban winter.

Today I have been standing in shorts at the train station – at 07:00 a.m., at the day of the Sechseläuten, after two weeks of wonderful weather – and din’t feel any cold. On my iPod I had Famara’s music so I was softly rocking back and forth to some Jamaican tune. Maybe they will play beach volleyball on the Sechseläutewiese in 10 years.