Slashdot Mirror
Paul Thurrott Bitten by WGA
suntory writes "Paul Thurrott, one of the most important Microsoft advocates, has been bitten by Windows Genuine Advantage. As some Slashdot users have reported, Paul installed a bunch of updates in his machine and now Microsoft thinks that he is using pirated software." From the post: "Truthfully, I can only imagine what triggered these alerts. The software was installed to a VM a long time ago and archived on my server. I no doubt used a copy of XP MCE 2005 that I had received as part of my MSDN subscription. If the WGA alerts are to be believed, it's possible that Microsoft thinks I've installed this software on too many machines, though that seems unlikely to me. I can't really say. Anyway, that's what it looks like to be a suspected pirate. Like many people who will see these alerts, I don't believe I did anything wrong. I'm sure that's going to be a common refrain in this new era of untrusting software and companies. Ah well."
Apple, for example, does not burden users with Product Activation or any similar anti-piracy technologies in its Mac OS X operating system
Hoo-ray for Apple
Yeah... way to slip in the rumor that WGA disables a PC it thinks is pirated. It does no such thing. It is by all standards very annoying to legitimate users (it has caused several problems with my network at work) but it doesn't go around "breaking" computers left and right, Paul's situation is the first time I have heard of a false positive (and I am sure we would hear about it). I hate having to deal with Microsoft products to do my job (not the products really but the "support" that comes with them) but going around and falsely accusing them of what may in some countries be considered a crime is a little much.
I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.
Mark Twain
I got the same alert on my Gatway laptop with the origional factory installed XP Home. I'm too cheap to use MS Office, so I use OpenOffice & other Openish type software. Suspiciously, the second time I rebooted after this "Update," I also found that a six month old 1 GB memory chip (that had been working properly) went bad. (As in can't boot to windows & a linux bootable cd memory test said the memory was fubared.)
When I replaced the memory & reinstalled the system from the restore CD, well then the same copy of XPHome was just fine with WGA.
Kudos Microsoft;)
as long as they let me know about it before I buy it.
The best way to avoid it is to get rid of windows.
The second-best way is to reinstall from scratch, disable product activation (reset5setup.exe - Reset 5.02), and update using AutoPatcher.
'Ah well'. I'm getting screwed over by a company whose products I paid money for. 'Ah well'. This is just another way it goes in day to day life, guess I'll just live with it. 'Ah well'. Who am I to question the way things are? 'Ah well'.
Or how about not using some very suspiciously weird looking website that requires you to install a plugin, and use autopatcher which you can take from computer to computer and update them as you go along?
http://autopatcher.com/
For people without that zenity thing:
kdialog --msgbox "Your copy of KDE is valid.\nPlease share it\!"
It's more like "mainly if you're a gamer."
The vast majority of people out there are not doing anything remotely "important" with their computers, and most are just surfing and emailing and chatting an so forth. In other words, no difference.
I run Windows at home, but then I play a lot of games, and like most people when it's my leisure time I don't want to spend half of it getting Linux to play a game I can "just play" on Windows.
I would argue it's almost exclusively gamers who need to suffer Windows.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
No, that's Charles Petzold, the guy who wrote the early Windows Programming books.
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
Sorry, but the going to Apple argument is a weak one at best. A Mac-mini or hell, even an iMac or Macbook are reasonably priced enough and can get you going with little to no downtime for the switch to be that painful. I use both macs and PCs and can easily jump between the two. Hell, I'm doing it right now in fact.
1. You are lucky. When I called them about my wifes computer they basically told me "Go away you theif". When I explained that I have at least 3 valid XP licenses (I hate being forced to buy MS garbage on computers), she told me I would have to reinstall/reactivate. So...their only solution was "Sucks to be you...reinstall everything, haha!" Now this is also the same goon squad that I have called countless times, read off the CD number and they read me a working key over the phone...I wonder how many of their own product keys they have ruined with that? 2. "as long as they let me know about it before I buy it" Well lets look at the release dates. Oct 2001 for Windows XP, Mar 2006 for WGA. I think that pretty much covers the fact that they didn't let anyone know before they bought it. Most people were irritated enough with the stupid activation crap they pulled.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
This doesn't really affect your stand about boycotting Best Buy, but just in case you're not aware, you should know that having your bags searched as you leave Best Buy, or any other store that does that, is a purely voluntary thing. You can politely refuse and just keep walking. They have no legal right to require you to submit to a bag search, and they know it (the guards are trained to understand that). There's an article about it here.
if you are a home user that is a total newbie to linux i would say anyone you ask will tell you to try Ubuntu. its the most advanced distro in terms of integration, polish and ease of use.
give it a try, it can't hurt. (you probably want 512mbs to run the live cd or it'll be painful).
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
The "average user" tends to not use any programs that didn't come with the computer. Seriously. My brother's hard disk died about 2 years ago. He was too cheap to buy a new one. I burned him a Knoppix CD and he used that just fine for over a year before I finally broke down and just gave him an extra hard drive I had. He's a drywall worker (construction) with only high school education, and he used Linux just fine after about 2-3 minutes of tutoring (which basically involed saying "Here's your 'start' menu, click on this to start GAIM, and click on this to start your web browser.").
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Please, I've tried Windows on my desktop. It's no where close to 'being there' as a good system, in terms of having a good user-friendly interface, usable software, stability, and easy install. I can't count the number of times I've been asked computer questions as to what they're doing wrong on a computer, and the problem is in the MS software is broken (Anyone understand Outlook and .dat attachments?). Linux is very rapidly evolving, and you should check out some of the live CD's and DVD's before dismissing it as a piece of junk (I think you can even save your files and settings on some of them, making them a full OS). I can't imagine why someone would want to deal with a system that requires 2 to 4 different media players to play all your videos; requires two web browsers to surf the internet; requires you to pay for upgrades to get your bug fixes (my Win2000 will never have a working copy of IE); costs $300 for a bare OS (XP Pro -- would have spent ~$1700 for 95, 98, NT4.0, 2000 to support games and dual processors), $400 for some office software (Office 2003 Standard), as much as $3500 for a compiler (Visual Studio® 2005 Team Suite with MSDN Premium Subscription), $65-$650 for photo editing (Digital Image Pro, Photoshop), ...; requires you to click a second button to see all the options when you open a menu; runs a little sluggish on a 3GHz machine (on something that fast, I want the menu open now, not in .2 seconds); you tell to shut down and come back in the morning to find it asking you if you want to close a program (if I didn't want to close it, then why would I tell the machine to shut down?); don't get me started on the mess that opens up when you click on programs in the start menu (they had to add a search!!!!!!! linux usually has them categorized); and it accuses you of stealing after you've spent countless hours dealing with your power supply frying your motherboard. I'm waiting for someone to sue the software for slander :-D.
...
Linux is a great OS for games. Every review I've heard involves people getting higher frame rates under Linux. The problem is that MS in there monopoly wrote a proprietary graphics API (Direct-3D), when there was a much better alternative (OpenGL). Many companies can't port their games now, and most companies don't care. Personally, I think Windows is HORRIBLE for games. I stopped playing them after I couldn't keep it from resetting my refresh rate to 60Hz and almost giving me a seizure. Can't I tell it that my CRT doesn't support anything less than 85Hz?
P.S. I'm sick of people saying it won't due for hypothetical Grandma because of its difficulty. She has to invite you over and write down a list of instructions to open her email. She can't even think in terms of administering a system, and the system trying to think for itself, adapt, and do stuff on its own (a web pop-up) will baffle her. My linux box running e17 is just 1 or 2 settings away from being great for someone like that. Click the speaker to play music, click the globe to go online, click the movie film to play a movie
P.P.S. I guess you're right. Linux is nowhere close to 'being there' as an average user desktop OS. That would be an insult to the system's beauty.
It's funny you should mention video editing, as that was one of the things that was keeping me tied somewhat to Windows. Early in the Linux transition, I got apps such as DVD Decrypter, TMPGEnc, and VirtualDub working under Wine. Now, though, I've found that native apps such as vobcopy, mencoder, and avidemux offer comparable (or even better) functionality. In particular, avidemux combines into one Linux app functionality (editing of both AVI and MPEG files, effects, compression in multiple formats) that would take multiple Windows apps to duplicate...and the Windows apps probably won't even be free-as-in-beer, let alone free-as-in-speech.
There will be a learning curve for the Linux video-editing apps, but there'll be a learning curve associated with most non-trivial apps on any platform. There was a learning curve associated with the Windows video-editing apps I used, and I've been working with computers in one way or another for 25 years now.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.