Wednesday, December 26, 2007

Part Two: the Fly in the Oitment

All of the bootleg software has little peculiarities. I had Sound Forge, a four hundred dollar program, I paid 139 Baht. It was a teaser version, set to stop working after a certain number of saves. All I had to do at that point was uninstall it and reinstall it, and I got the certain number of saves all over again. I repeated this process many times.

On this computer, this one here in front of me, all of the Microsoft is bootleg. When you bring up Word, it takes about four minutes. First it says, like, this feature did not install properly, please insert CD now, then it kind of fools around like, Word is looking for your settings or something. After you close a few dialog boxes and wait for it to think a little you can get started. The program seems to run okay.

My last computer wouldn't run MS Word Help, the Help files weren't on the bootleg.

There's a good reason Thai's put up with these software imperfections:

Thai's don't have the money for the real stuff. They don't buy bootlegs because they are evil. Thai's, like most people around the world with limited wherewithal, are masters of the backdoor acquisition, especially if that is the only way that they are going to watch bootleg DVD's on their computers.

If the price was in line with reality, maybe they'd get in line

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