Yesterday I was bitten by the "enhanced anti-piracy measures" in the Delphi Seattle IDE. I am a legit, paying customer who has been on subscription for years. I was enjoying Seattle very much until this. Marco Cantù I upvoted
Yesterday I was bitten by the "enhanced anti-piracy measures" in the Delphi Seattle IDE. I am a legit, paying customer who has been on subscription for years. I was enjoying Seattle very much until this. Marco Cantù I upvoted
https://quality.embarcadero.com/browse/RSP-10189 . Also posted this in the forum:
"The IDE shut down WITHOUT SAVING MY WORK, replacing itself with a web browser at Embarcadero's site telling me my license could not be validated. It restarted and worked fine. Thankfully I am neurotic about hitting ctrl-c and was able to put back what I lost easily enough.
It is really hard to understand the mentality that says it is okay to take a chance at ruining a paying customer's workflow by unceremoniously closing the IDE on him. I have no problem with activation, but clearly their "enhanced anti-piracy techniques" are very fallible and it is just foolish to take the chance at harming the work of your customer. Give me a big red warning that says I will lose IDE functionality in a week (HEY, IT'S A WEEKEND AND THE CHAT WINDOW ON THE PIRACY PAGE IS CLOSED!), and let me be sure I can get it worked out. But dumping me out of my project like that? Insane."
https://quality.embarcadero.com/browse/RSP-10189 . Also posted this in the forum:
"The IDE shut down WITHOUT SAVING MY WORK, replacing itself with a web browser at Embarcadero's site telling me my license could not be validated. It restarted and worked fine. Thankfully I am neurotic about hitting ctrl-c and was able to put back what I lost easily enough.
It is really hard to understand the mentality that says it is okay to take a chance at ruining a paying customer's workflow by unceremoniously closing the IDE on him. I have no problem with activation, but clearly their "enhanced anti-piracy techniques" are very fallible and it is just foolish to take the chance at harming the work of your customer. Give me a big red warning that says I will lose IDE functionality in a week (HEY, IT'S A WEEKEND AND THE CHAT WINDOW ON THE PIRACY PAGE IS CLOSED!), and let me be sure I can get it worked out. But dumping me out of my project like that? Insane."
Heh, as a customer, I also have an issue with this kind of thing. However, we do not know the numbers and the trend seems to be going towards that sort of stuff anyway Plus, an IDE such as Delphi isn't just an ordinary piece of software, so I wonder how viable the alternatives would be.
ReplyDeleteMaybe stop the compiler from compiling perhaps - but to just close the app and lose work is very bad behaviour, IMHO. Especially if the process is fallible and legitimate customers can get 'caught' by it :-(
ReplyDeleteShutting down the IDE is not harsh enough: the next protection scheme should encrypt your files and then give you 24h to either get a valid license or your sources and cat photos are dumped on web.
ReplyDeleteThat's the most annoying bug in Delphi - still. I already lost several hours of hard work due to this stupid piracy protection. And there is absolutely no clue what I can do to prevent this problem. I don't change anything on my system while using the IDE - I don't change anything on my system after the IDE got shut down and I re-start Delphi. The problem always gets solved by doing nothing - until the next time when I suddenly become a pirate.
ReplyDeleteUse notepad and the dcc32 compiler?
ReplyDeleteHow common is this problem? I've never encountered it.
ReplyDeleteMilan Vydareny I've had it twice, both in the same week, a year ago. Others seem to see it quite often. I don't know how often so I'm actually rather interested in other people's replies to your question.
ReplyDeleteI've seen this happen in most of the XE versions. Not sure when it started. It highly depends on the quality of an XE version: XE4 for instance seems to have this more than XE7 on my system.
ReplyDeleteI had this once, but cannot remember in which XE version.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand other copy protection introduced issue drove me nuts
IDE Save toolbar button does not work
http://qc.embarcadero.com/wc/qcmain.aspx?d=121676
I really think it's quite indefensible to put the IDE in a state where it won't save work or (worse still) just shuts down without saving - unless they can guarantee that it can't ever possibly happen on a legitimate install.
ReplyDeleteBy all means stop me from compiling code, and refuse to launch next time until whatever needs to be done is done, I'm happy for them to protect their revenue of course; but to stop working partway through and potentially lose the buffer contents of file(s) that I've spent time editing... that's not on, really it isn't.
I'm so glad it hasn't happened to me yet (touches wood, crosses fingers).
Andrea Raimondi I don't know their numbers, but I know they need to focus on quality. Deliberately introducing conditions that will destroy someone's workflow can't be defended with concern over IP. I am all for them protecting their IP. I pay for the software I use. But in the end, I need to be able to USE what I pay for, so I have no sympathy when it comes to reckless things like dumping me out of my project when some esoteric anti-piracy method can't verify the license for some unknown and un-diagnosable reason. Why would they do this and not even give me a chance to save my work? What is to be gained from this behavior? The pirates will still have their cracks and in the meantime I am frustrated and unhappy with their product.
ReplyDeleteEric Grange Shush Eric - don't give them ideas :(
ReplyDeleteBrandon Staggs I would generally agree with you and, I am sure, on a personal level, quite a few individuals in dev at EMB understand your pain. A topic closely related to this came up some years ago and I can tell you that some are fully sympathetic to this kind of thing and said so "publicly", even though not at centre stage.
ReplyDeleteIf this has been done deliberately, you can be 100% sure this has come from upstairs.
It is unimaginable that experienced developers such as David I, Allen, Malcom, Marco and many others have thought "Oh, you know what? That's a really jolly idea!".
However, I don't think it's been done deliberately. These things are usually quite difficult to configure properly (that's the keyword) and they are incredibly complicated because of the need to keep up
with crackers. Complexity breeds bugs, which is likely what happened to you.
A
I told them that they should just corrupt the Master Boot Record on all local drives and delete everything else... But would they listen to me, no!
ReplyDeleteSeriously, I got bitten by this when attempting to debug a plug-in I was writing under XE (I think). I lodged a tech support issue but nothing came of it (not that I really expecting anything). To this day, I still avoid stepping through my plugin code, just in case this happens again.
It happens to me semi-regularly. The only thing I can relate it to is opening units that don't belong to the project. Along with AVs in my code while debugging (which is surely normal when developing), it almost seems that the IDE can only swallow so much, gets corrupt memory perhaps, and then it shows as a licence validation error.
ReplyDeleteIt happens in XE6, and happened XE5, XE4, and earlier XE releases. XE6 does seem a bit better than the earlier ones. Haven't done enough with 10 to know compare.
I have auto save on compile set, so don't generally lose much, but sometimes I haven't compiled for a while and I get annoyed :(
I had this very same problem at least for 3 times years ago with XE4
ReplyDeleteAndrea Raimondi Issue with save button that does not work was bug introduced on purpose, later on there was similar issue where open and exit actions in IDE were swapped. Closing IDE and directing you to web page was not accidental bug either.
ReplyDeleteThe only real bug there is that validity check is detecting valid licenses as invalid. Everything else is made on purpose.
My standpoint on those issues is: do not fix license check algorithms - no matter how good you think they are they will fail at some point on valid licenses... Just don't do random license checks based on some obscure algorithms at all...
Delphi activation is connected to my hardware... I cannot bump my license count alone and I have to contact support for that. Surely that should be more than enough to prevent casual (not thinking) license abuse. The rest falls into I really want to pirate category and no matter how hard you try you cannot prevent those people from using pirated software, you can only make things slightly harder but that is all. They are hurting their valid customers way more than pirates.
Andrea Raimondi In war against crackers, crackers win all the time... Instead of focusing on copy protection that will never really protect them, they should focus on providing quality and features their customers need... nothing more, nothing less.
ReplyDeleteI never experienced this, but on one of my machines, my XE7 regularly won't start and can only be fixed with a repair install.
ReplyDeleteThis error can bite you with every version since at least D2010.
ReplyDeleteOne possible reason for that sort of error and the solution in my case:
https://plus.google.com/100455031543468216739/posts/cT1FHbQkBC8
I haven't run into this issue but I have XE7 / XE8 / #10Seattle on one machine, looking to get a new machine with the next install. It is pretty sad that EMB may have these issues on developers that are legit, this is inexcusable since the amount of money paid is extremely high.
ReplyDeleteThat being said, I hope it never happens to me nor others and I personally think that the 3x installation count is stupid at this point.
Both things should never happen.
What bugs me about this the most, is that despite their best intentions, those using pirated versions are not disadvantaged in the same way that paying customers are.. net result, pissed off customers, happy crackers...
ReplyDeleteIf Embarcadero want a better licensing scheme, I'll happily show them my code, it's not perfect, won't stop it being cracked (but will stop keygens, using public/private keys and signature testing). There will still be cracks out there that circumvent the licensing altogether, but customers would not be subjected to measures not intended for them, and having a license file that can be applied makes for a much nicer customer experience. In FinalBuilder 8 we made it possible for customers to log into their store account and retrieve licenses directly inside the application. Marco Cantù happy to discuss.
This problem is known for YEARS. It's just a part of overall bad customer experience.
ReplyDelete