Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Admits Targeting Wine Users
Buddha Joe wrote in to mention that the lack of Windows updates for Wine users is the result of a Microsoft's active targeting of Wine users. ZDNet has the story. From the article: "As the most popular third-party translation technology in use, Wine was the first emulator to be specifically tested for via WGA"
We share a lot of Win32 code with Wine as we just build the Wine dlls for Windows and make drop in replacements for ReactOS. The Wine WinMM.dll uses the Wine key and as such ReactOS will fail the check as well.
-sedwards
Free Unix? Free Windows. http://www.reactos.com
If you go to the WineHQ site, they suggest that the downloads will not be needed to run wine in the future, since they will have completed their own versions of things like dcom95.
From the article: "The spokesperson said users who are not running Windows XP or Windows 2000 natively can still download updates for Microsoft Office from the Office Update Web site."
To those who were saying "what about me? I'm only using Office under WINE," you can still get updates.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
(W)ine (I)s (N)ot an (E)mulator
The key point to this is valid. Microsoft will continue to supply Office updates for you if you're using Office on ANY platform that you can make Office run on; what they won't do, however, is provide updates for your non-Microsoft platform.
A legitimate copy of windows, running under a hardware emulator, or a virtual machine (like VMWare or VirtualPC) will continue to be updated.
A piece of software that performs windows-like-functions, like WINE, won't continue to be updated.
WINE can use native Windows DLLs, in case you need one that isn't yet implemented fully by WINE itself, or if there is some particular quirk of the native DLL that you need to have.
Stick Men
I must say, you rock! Honestly, you are awesome and keep up the good work:)
Regards,
Steve
Microsoft is under no obligation to support updates to applications that are not running under the operating system listed on that magical little section on the side of the box that says "System Requirements."
You should get -1 for not RTFA.
You can still update MS software if your running WINE. What you can't do is run windows updater to update said software for you automaticly because windows updater is a windows service. And if your running WINE you obivously don't have windows.
Technology, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems.
Oh, and Office updates *do* work with WINE.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
The ones that emulate everything -- including CPUs, memories, bus's, IDE controlers, etc -- are extremely slow.
The ones that use the native processor and simply choose which calls to translate from the guest API to the Host API work pretty well. The biggest difference is exactly which specific hardwawre components an emulator emulates. Just because Wine chose a different subset than VMWare doesn't mean they shouldn't be targeted.
If Microsoft chose to target VMWare this way (break thing running on VMWare to help VirtualPC) people would have the same objections.
An emulator is not "a device that is built to work like another", at leats when it comes to programming.
An emulator emulates a CPU or platform. VMWare is an emulator, because it emulates an x86 host system.
Wine is not an emulator. Wine is a 3rd party implimentation of the Win32 API. This is partially why Wine only really works well on X86 platforms (although work is being done in this area).
This particular check can be beaten pretty easily. But the opinion of the wine devs is that that would start an "arms race" they can't win. They already know of one way of checking that would be impossible to fool without rewriting large parts of wine, and if they can think of it then MS with its much greater resources has almost certainly found it.
I am trolling
No, no, no, no no.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong!
The spokesperson said users who are not running Windows XP or Windows 2000 natively can still download updates for Microsoft Office from the Office Update Web site.
You can't use WINDOWSupdate to update Office if you're not using WINDOWS. You have to use OFFICEupdate to update Office.
In my experiences with OS/2 Warp, it was able to run 16-bit Windows crap flawlessly.
The problem was, by the mid-90's Microsoft had begun a shift to 32-bit code, with NT and Win95 introducting new APIs beyond those contained in OS/2. IBM never quite managed to keep up compatibility once users started using software more modern than Windows 3.1.
(Internet applications were an especially big nail in OS/2's coffin -- Netscape 2.x for Windows wouldn't run under OS/2, even after you shelled out $99 for the OS/2 native TCP stack, and there were no native OS/2 browsers, except for IBM's own limited-usefulness Web Explorer.)
RTFA. Office users can still use Officeupdate to update Office.
That was DOS, not Windows.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1640917,00.aHow did this get moderated up this high?
A contract most certainly can cancel fair use exceptions to copyright. An example: Editor signs a contract with Author where Author pays Editor $100 for editing services. Editor agrees that they will not disclose a single word of the book. Editor has just signed away their right to quote from the book for review purposes.
Sure, there's still a question of whether the EULA is an enforceable contract. But you can certainly contract away your fair use (and many other) rights.
i wish the /. articles would start correcting misconceptions, so the whole discussion doesn't go like this:
1. microsoft shouldn't have to update wine because they didn't write it
2. the article is about updating office on wine, not wine itself
1. microsoft shouldn't have to update wine because they didn't write it
2. the article is about updating office on wine, not wine itself
etc
-Redundancy Man strikes again!
Office updates are not, and have never been, available to anyone on WindowsUpdate.