Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!bu-cs!encore!bzs@encore.com
From: bzs@encore.com (Barry Shein)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: NeXT's BIG 3.5" mistake.
Message-ID: <4027@encore.UUCP>
Date: 27 Oct 88 18:25:50 GMT
References: <4192@pitt.UUCP> <12670005@eecs.nwu.edu>
Sender: news@encore.UUCP
Reply-To: bzs@encore.com (Barry Shein)
Organization: Encore Computer Corp
Lines: 28
In-reply-to: gore@eecs.nwu.edu (Jacob Gore)

From: gore@eecs.nwu.edu (Jacob Gore)
>Not only is the Ethernet address relevant, it's the key point in my
>objection.
>
>Sure, you'll be charged for the software -- for activating one copy of it.
>What the software vendors don't want you to do then is be able to use that
>copy more than once at a time.  At least the more reasonable software
>vendors have this attitude.

My apologies, I thought everyone was speculating but it's starting to
look like they really will use the ethernet address as part of the
verification, thus it may only run on one machine in the universe (eg.
you can't use your friend's when yours is in the shop, with your
software.)

If that's true (and I still find it a little hard to believe) then it
doesn't even qualify as idiotic, it would have to be improved to
qualify at that high a level.

The only out I see is that the O/S sets the "hardware" ethernet
address on boot, so it's really just keyed into your disk (and that
means that disk copies won't work unless you copy the whole disk and
don't share an ethernet with the same disk, usually an easy thing to
do.) DecNot required that ability cuz it calculated an enet address
out of its node address, and everyone in the networking community
agreed the idea was stupid as a rock.

	-Barry Shein, ||Encore||