A message from the matrix

Hi Autodesk.

I was strolling through the matrix one day, and I
ran into my good friend Neo. He told me he was
testing a new upgrade that would make him even
more powerful than before, and that the machines
wouldn't stand a chance against him then.

But he told me about a problem he was having
with his "curver". He said that after he enters
the matrix, the following registry key is wrong:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\AutoCAD.Application\CurVer

He said it was supposed to be set to this:

AutoCAD.Application.16.1

But instead, it was set to this:

AutoCAD.Application.16

He wanted me to tell you that you need to fix this before he
goes back into the matrix.

Regards,
Morpheus

 

Knock Knock ... Thank you East Madison Verizon customer, I have notified
your administrator.
-Shaan

<snip>

 

I am not sure you could actually tell the actual state or

Shaan - It is technical issues like this that you need to avoid
taking up with me, as your consistency for error is uncanny.

At least 50 places in the registry dump show the path to the
AutoCAD folder (C:\Program Files\AutoCAD Neo).

The customer has little-to-no understanding of the cause of
the problem, so I don't think you're going to be hearing about
it from them.

 

Tony Tanzillo,
Are you the clandestine Morpheus poster who has knowledge of a possible NDA
breach? Your IP matches exactly that of the poster and you are located in
the same area as the IP traces to in NJ.
So are you?

-Shaan

 

Shaan - You shouldn't have to trace my IP address to
figure out that I'm the poster, it was pretty obvious
from the writing style.

However, there was no NDA breach.

When installing a beta of your product causes my
product to fail with AutoCAD 2004, I have the right to
provide my customer with support. Since I only asked
them to show me the contents of certain registry keys,
and from that deduced that they were using a beta
copy of AutoCAD (which they didn't mention), it didn't
require a PHD to figure out what was going on.

There are lots of other problems that I didn't bother
to mention, but given your behaviour, I probably won't.

 

And by the way, since I wasted about 2 hours of
my time because my customer didn't tell me they
were using Neo, who should I send the invoice to?

 

Tony,

Invoice yourself Morpheus <g>.

-Shaan

<snip>

 

Tony,

Thank you for coming out of the Matrix. Given your past actions and denials
of fact I thought I would at least be above board since you certainly were
not. As for the implied problems, I am not sure you could actually tell the
actual state or cause or if it is not the result of a beta and the names by
a simple registry export as you certainly are not that psychic. Feel free to
ask your customer to send in the issues to prevent any potential for your
other customers from suffering.

Cheers,
-Shaan

<snip>

 

Thank you, but the fact that the name is there still does not provide enough
detail for you to figure any defects or the cause which was my point. I
would politely request that you report the problem with your application
compatibility in a more detailed and straight forward way, not for Autodesk
but think of your customer at least. Would there be defects in a beta, you
bet but reporting them is part of the process in any unreleased application.
I will double check the registry key you mentioned but wont bring myself to
play your in your silly mud fight.

Cheers,
-Shaan

<snipped>

 

Well, actually that's not the case.

On a system with AutoCAD 2002 and 2004 installed,
look at the registry and you will see the following
keys under HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT:

+ AutoCAD.Application
+ AutoCAD.Application.15
+ AutoCAD.Application.16

The first is the "default", and last two are specific
to 2002 and 2004 respectively.

Now, start AutoCAD 2002, and then close it. Then, look
at the following registry key:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\AutoCAD.Application\CurVer

The value will be "AutoCAD.Application.15".

Then, run AutoCAD 2004, close it, and look at the
value of the same registry key (if you keep RegEdit
open, you will need to refresh the view), and you will see
that it has changed to:

"AutoCAD.Application.16"

In the customer's registry dump, there is another
entry in the registry:

"AutoCAD.Application.16.1"

It's pretty obvious what this is (the 2005 beta).

However, regardless of what version of AutoCAD the
customer used last (2004 or the 2005 beta) the value
of the CurVer key is always "AutoCAD.Application.16".

That is a defect, and the only thing I need to know
to deduce that fact, is what version of AutoCAD was
last used, and the registry dump.

Unfortunately, not all "defects" are easily diagnosed
or recognizable as such by the average beta tester.
If that were the case, the customer would certainly
have reported it to you, rather than call me to report
to me that my application was broken.

That's it. I spelled it out for you. Do with it what
you wish.