CompuServe Messages

Brian: Thinks for your reply to my dongle protest. I'm glad we have this open forum to offer another opinion on your policy. I'm also glad you agree that by adding the dongle you might make your product more of a bother (dongle) to some than what the product will offer. I classified LS as a "little utility" because of what it does. It is not software that is stand alone nor does it affect the major product (3DS) it rides on overall. It only affects the redraw time of the editor a fractional % increase and the Keyframer redraw to a lesser extent as reported by you and your customers. I quickly number crunched the time savings for ME and my typical work projects indicate it would be a greater than one year pay back. I do not disagree that it will save some 3DS users significant amounts of time, however. Those users are ones that spend an improportionate amount of time in the editor. I would guess these animators are doing large complex models. I do not. Most of my time is spent in the Keyframer adjusting motion of simple geometry. Since September, I have only done one project that exceeded 100,000 faces and I did resort to box mode to speed things up. So, Please, Brian I do not mean to suggest LS is not a viable product when I say it is a "little utility" I just don't think it is in the league of other utilities like Norton, PC Tools, QEMM and the like. Vibrant is able to get away with applying the dongle today but the problem as I see it is the proliferation of these things in the future. If I had a dongle for every piece of software, utility, clipart library, font set I have it would be in the hundreds, no, thousands! How does your company plan to deal with this problem in the future? As a customer I plan to stop this proliferation at Scuba Tech now by taking a stand. That is to not purchase any software from now on that contains a Parrallel port dongle, or one with a protection scheme that restricts my system functionality from now on. Regarding your offer to send me LS. I will accept your offer on the following understanding. I will install LS with dongle as a test site only. I will report my findings on this forum to include benchmarks as well as any dongle problems I encounter. I have three different machines with different graphics cards but same 486-66 processors. I will try to be fare in all my testing to the best of my ability by using my typical projects as well as complex models from the 3DS CDROM that is purported to make LS shine. I will operate LS with the other dongles that I presently own 3 total and differentiate LS dongle problems with my known dongle problems. If this is what you are offering and accept this public endorsement of my findings then send me the product. At the end of the testing I will not buy nor use the product unless it is an unlocked version. You may have it back. If I find your product so irresistable that I can't live another second without it I will announce purchase o