Olav asks:

> My previous PC did not even have a c: as a hard drive.  I had two floppy
> drives
>  (one being a:/b: and the other being a 3M Superdisk located at c:).  The
> hard
>  drive was located at d: and e:.  How would your protection scheme, check
for
> this
>  possibility.

It's fairly easy to scan a PC for all of the assigned discs and their types:
fixed, removable, network, etc. We are simply going to take the disc s/n of
the lowest-lettered fixed drive.

We have to do this for other reasons as well. For one of the products in
development, we need to create up to perhaps 60 MB of temporary storage. That
much space may not be available on the boot drive, thus we're planning on
scanning all of the fixed drives and seeing which one has the large free
space at the moment and use that drive for our temporary cache.

The reason for this temporary storage requirement is that using the mp3
codecs has recently become illegal if you don't pay a royalty to Fraunhofer
Laboratories in Germany. That royalty is $0.75 per free player you give away,
plus some substantial charge for every compressed file that you play. We
couldn't begin to pay such a charge for something we're planning on giving
away for free. Fraunhofer, through their agent, RCA/Thomson Multimedia, has
begun aggressively enforcing Fraunhofer's rights and as a consequence every
free mp3 player has now disappeared off of the web.

Instead, we're now going to use the ogg vorbis compression codecs. There are
no native players for this compression scheme in Windows -- and Microsoft
says they're not going to support it in the future, thus we have to
decompress the ogg vorbis files into wave files, the total of which could
become as large as 60MB. These temporary files will exist only as long as the
player is playing; after that, the temporary directory will be purged.

The bottom line is that we have to completely characterize the PC as our
first step in order to do everything that we need to do. Determining which
drive is the boot drive is not all that difficult.

Wirt Atmar

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