Activate THIS!
Tuesday, October 04, 2005
I'm still using Microsoft Office 2000, even though at least two major versions of the tool has been released since I originally bought it. I don't really know what the major differences between the versions are, but for most things I've wanted to do, the older version is just fine.
The university has a licensing agreement with Microsoft, which enables mainline MS software to be available to students, faculty and staff for the cost of media (around $5 per disc.) When the program started, the justification was something like wanting to get students into the habit of getting Microsoft software through a legitimate distribution channel. I believe the original licensing terms were for up to two computers per copy, though the software was basically identical to the volume-licensed versions.
Since then, they've changed their licensing agreement to restrict the software to a single computer and added Product Activation to enforce that policy. I have two computers, a desktop and a laptop, and since there is no means to buy a second license under the university licensing agreement, I would have to pay full price for a second license. Alternately, I could just crack the Product Activation.
So you see, Microsoft is basically asking me to pay for less functionality or steal.
I tried using OpenOffice for a while, and it's a fine tool, but it suffers from general compatibility (i.e, nobody else on the planet is using it, so they can't read my files), as well as incomplete functionality for cross-references and endnotes.
What I really needed is for Office 2000 to support ruby text. For some reason, I thought that Office 2000 required an international add-on pack to make ruby (as well as alternate text flow) work properly. Fortunately, I figured out how to turn on the feature in Office 2000 by installing additional language kits from the installation CD. Office 2000 (and Word in particular) still doesn't support a reasonable genkoyoshi format like OpenOffice, but for international word processing, it now does everything I could reasonably hope for.
For now, I've kept from having to upgrade.
The university has a licensing agreement with Microsoft, which enables mainline MS software to be available to students, faculty and staff for the cost of media (around $5 per disc.) When the program started, the justification was something like wanting to get students into the habit of getting Microsoft software through a legitimate distribution channel. I believe the original licensing terms were for up to two computers per copy, though the software was basically identical to the volume-licensed versions.
Since then, they've changed their licensing agreement to restrict the software to a single computer and added Product Activation to enforce that policy. I have two computers, a desktop and a laptop, and since there is no means to buy a second license under the university licensing agreement, I would have to pay full price for a second license. Alternately, I could just crack the Product Activation.
So you see, Microsoft is basically asking me to pay for less functionality or steal.
I tried using OpenOffice for a while, and it's a fine tool, but it suffers from general compatibility (i.e, nobody else on the planet is using it, so they can't read my files), as well as incomplete functionality for cross-references and endnotes.
What I really needed is for Office 2000 to support ruby text. For some reason, I thought that Office 2000 required an international add-on pack to make ruby (as well as alternate text flow) work properly. Fortunately, I figured out how to turn on the feature in Office 2000 by installing additional language kits from the installation CD. Office 2000 (and Word in particular) still doesn't support a reasonable genkoyoshi format like OpenOffice, but for international word processing, it now does everything I could reasonably hope for.
For now, I've kept from having to upgrade.
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