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From: "Ian Clarkson" <ian.clarkson@gesturetek.com>
Newsgroups: comp.soft-sys.matlab
Subject: Re: how to make a time limited stand alone application to distribute for demo purpose?
Date: Fri, 11 Jan 2008 14:48:02 +0000 (UTC)
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"Vihang Patil" <vihang_patil@yahoo.com> wrote in message 
<fm7h5r$2hb$1@fred.mathworks.com>...
> Any suggestions?

The only thing I could think is that if you only supported 
versions of MATLAB that could make internet requests (which 
I think new ones can?), you could activate the program each 
time it tried to run -- call a remote server with a key and 
authenticate if your record for that user has not run out. 
That way you only need to make sure that the receiving 
computer keeps an accurate date. You'd have to be quite 
obvious about the fact that you were doing that though -- I 
don't think people like it when their computers call out 
onto the internet without their knowledge. And it would 
also force users to have the internet.

However, given that they could likely see the .m code, I'm 
not sure how helpful that would be. Maybe it'd be possible 
to make a compiled .mex file instead that would be harder 
to open up?

Another thing I just thought of was that you could do a 
file search and get the date of the most recently modified 
file. Assuming they tried to switch their date back, they'd 
have to switch the modified dates on all of their files to 
get the software to work? This depends on the fact that 
files get modified on the computer. Not sure how well that 
would work, but maybe also worth a shot instead of going 
the internet route. There is software on the file exchange 
for doing file searches. Would also be taxing on the 
computer to enumerate all files! Maybe you could find a 
specific file that you know gets updated/modified very 
often and just reference that one.

Hope this helps!