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Never tested to milliseconds. Tested to a few seconds. Probably useless feedback. But...

I've been using Tardis95 for many years. (Since Win95, about '97 or so)

Link goes to a somewhat later copy that place pretty nicely with Windows NT kernel. I don't know of a later release that was licensed such that you could freely copy/share it.

Just unzip and run the little installer - it pops up down on the system tray at the bottom left. If you have a favorite NTP server, you can specify it, otherwise you can pick from a predefined list. It works almost as simply and cleanly for me as ntp on *nix does.

(Oh, and go easy on that link - it's a DSL circuit)

thanks. It's fixed now - but the product in quesiton was not Contact Manager, but Report Writer, hosted on the same server.

As the standard K-12 school system has deteriorated into a simmering bath of babysitters, many parents have taken notice.

I can't speak for other locations, but in California, the home-school and charter-school movement has been mushrooming.

Go to a local karate studio or gymnastics stadium, and you find probably greater than 75% of everybody is involved in some form of alternative educational system.

Parents really do want the best for their children, and a surprising number have decided that the standard school system is just no longer good enough.

In California, there's a very powerful teacher's union which largely has a deadlock on what's done in public schools. This has crushed California's once dominant educational system into something despised by intelligent adults.

And the jail break is on, in full force. I see it every day - my company now works with dozens of charter and alternative education schools to facilitate 100% funding of these alternative programs.

It's exciting, exhilerating, and loads of fun - and every night I sleep with the peaceful satisfaction of knowing that thousands of children across my state have an improved education due, in some small part, to my efforts for the day.

I am terrified of the implications of the declining scientific and educational standards amongst my people, and I'm doing what I can to help.

By supporting organizations such as Julian Charter School, HSC, and of course, my own company, CharterWorks, I'm doing my part to help.

Anybody can post on slashdot, but some people are doing something about it. Are you?

I have prooved to myself so many times how very worth it it is to have activation in my product.

I find your post quite interesting and if I had mod points, you'd get one of them.

For our product, we chose Internet-based activation, but rather than hide it and try make it as "convenient" as possible, we chose instead to make it blatant, and try to sell it as a feature.

Yes, it sounds crazy - but it's actually working quite well! We sell a product that lets teachers fill out and turn in official education forms in compliance with numerous CA state leglated standards. Our product can save a teacher 20 hours a month or more in time filling out forms and meeting various legislated requirements.

School districts pay us by how many students are managed with our ReportWriter product. At first, we used keys (much like you describe) that were called in. But, when we decided to put it on the web, we decided (based on my past history with web-based products) to integrate everything together into a "synch protocol" that also distributes updates to the program, new information, their student data, as well as the certificates needed to activate the product.

So, once a month, the teachers "synch" their ReportWriter installs, and all their information is backed up on our servers in an encrypted format. If their computer crashes or is stolen, we have a backup of all their information which we can restore in minutes.

And, when we come out with updates to either the program or to the data, we publish it on our server and the teachers get it next time they synch.

It's typical for teachers to synch daily. It takes just a few minutes even by modem - think rsync - and gives them *alot* of peace of mind.

My $0.02 - hope you find this as interesting as I found your post!

1. 4,637 lines for the website and related administration tools.
   
2. 6,073 lines for the server side data accumulation system. (not web-based)
   
3. 25,173 lines for the PHP-GTK client application and GUI.
   

... And often an OSS solution simply isn't feasible. For example, why is there no Turbo Tax replacement? Nor will there be for some time... the reason is that the software is really a means of delivering the intelligence and knowledge of the accountants and lawyers that decide how the software should work. It's really software as a means of delivering a service, rather than a product in its own right.

I'm part of a company much like this - Charterworks which automates much of the process of tracking and meeting CA educational standards.

While I'd love to take all the credit for writing the software, the software is just the vehicle used to deliver a massive amount of information carefully entered and maintained by qualified educational professionals about the state educational standards. (of which there are thousands)

This is a situation and product inherently incompatible with OSS - which is why I've used OSS in the construction of the software, but we certainly won't be giving away the educational standards information!