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Microsoft Withdraws Vista's Kill Switch
l-ascorbic writes "In what they are calling a change of tactics, Microsoft has removed the controversial 'kill switch' from Vista in SP1. This feature is designed to disable pirated copies of the OS, but had led to numerous reports of it disabling legitimate copies. It will be replaced with a notice that repeatedly informs the user that their OS is pirated. '[Microsoft corporate vice president Mike Sievert] added: "It's worth re-emphasizing that our fundamental strategy has not changed. All copies of Windows Vista still require activation and the system will continue to validate from time to time to verify that systems are activated properly." Microsoft said it had pursued legal action against more than 1,000 dealers of counterfeit Microsoft products in the last year and taken down more than 50,000 "illegal and improper" online software auctions.'"
If made____you____bitch
Did this____kill____switch
How 'bout__a______pitch
In a_______fine____triptych?
Burma___________Shave
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
They probably hope that pirates will make Vista popular and that a fraction actually will buy Vista in the end ;-)
I guess this is one way to get Vista's adoption rate to go up. Just let it be pirated!
XP?!? Bah! I'm trying to "upgrade" to Windows 3.11 for Workgroups!
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
It's worth re-emphasizing that our fundamental strategy has not changed.
i.e. We're still gonna bend you over. The big guy named Bubba is still employed with us, but now we've taken away his lube.
...until they start counting all pirated version of Vista among those "happily" using it in order to inflate their numbers.
A blog on ZDNet has this interesting bit:
This is software explicitly designed to make your computer less useful. It does nothing else for you. Why would "improving its back-end systems" ever make me trust it the least bit more?
Just so you understand.
If I install a new motherboard in my PC that is not piracy.
If I format my old hard drive and install Vista on a new PC I built that is not piracy.
If I have to call to take down that nag screen then you must hire enough people that I never have to wait more than two minutes to get the nag removed. You must also offer a world wide toll free number so I can call no matter where I am and you must keep that number staffed until the sun goes nova or you go out of business.
Only then will any type of "activation" be acceptable.
Never mind OpenSuse is working just fine as is Ubuntu. Or maybe I will just buy a Mac.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I suppose they realized that it would be just a matter of time before someone outside of Microsoft discovers a way to use the kill switch. And then every Internet-connected computer running Vista will die instantly. Hmm... Doesn't sound like such a bad idea after all...
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
You!=Everyone else :) You have to remember that every bad story about Vista isn't representing the whole truth - that there are thousands of folks out there who are using Vista on a day-to-day basis, and are not having problems.
Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon : Free as in speech, free as in beer comes with about 20000 apps (the number's pulled out of thin air, but there are a lot of apps available), of which most are probably quite simple or outright crap, but there's true quality stuff among them and the pre-selection by the installer is quite good in my book. Oh and I'm part of the Ubuntu community, too.
And I can't really buy games off the shelf, nor printers, or a lot of other hardware, and have it work. Oh, and Linux does have its own problems, weird things breaking, spending hours figuring out what exactly is wrong, and then diving into a text file to change some obsure setting. Most of those 20,000 apps are shit. Sorry.
OS/X : Hereround 155$. Probably nicest user interface, at least at Panther level very stable, rock solid foundation (BSD) a real shell and real scripting. Oh and it gives me fanboy privileges.
People knock Linux / Windows UIs; I find Macs to be infurating. Why exactly would you want to be a fanboy? Fanboy is just another word for zealot.
Vista Ultimate: ~700$. Nothing really to offer, exept maybe this floating waterfall background, which must eat a ton of resources. Requires activation, abuses 30% of my resources for Hollywoods satisfaction. Oh: And by default I'm a criminal software thieve pirate.
Surely you mean only ~$260? Not very computer savy if you can't find Vista at a good price.
I'd wager that if i really chose option three I must be a blistering idiot, too.
The other option is that you're a smart professional that just wants to get things done. Since I ditched my Linux desktop and server, I spent more time doing the things I want on the computer, instead of trying to figure out what text file I got wrong and then being told to RTM (which doesn't exist).
Microsoft has described the new approach as a "change of tactics". It said efforts to tackle piracy had seen numbers of fake copies of Vista at half the level of XP, the previous Windows operating system. Wow, even pirates don't want Vista. Speaks volumes.
Uh oh, I see a shadow heading your way, and
*rubs the crystal ball vigoursly*
Ah, and it is wielding a chair.
Carbon based humanoid in training.
You missed out (in Ubuntu):
(c) click install when firefox prompts you to install flash
(d) automatic updates for all software on the system, not just the OS.
No having to find those downloads buried somewhere on every manufacturers site, occasionally having to locate the right version of additional runtime DLLs, and keep them all up to date yourself.
Windows isn't quite as easy as Linux, eh? When you can do that in Windows, it'll be ready for novices!
Btw, I have been a DOS / Windows user since forever, and I'm now a very happy Linux user too. Some things are better in Windows, some are better in Linux. Your comments just show that you're not really familiar with anything except Windows.
WTF? I thought that the reason windows is so bloated and crappy was 'because it has to maintain backwards compatibility' ?
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
I wanted to download PuTTY so I could SSH into my machine from their house. Simple enough. It doesn't get any simpler than PuTTY - it doesn't even have an installer, you just unzip the files and run them. I'm not exaggerating when I say the whole thing took 10 minutes. For a 2M file.
It went something like this:
Windows: I see you're trying to access the Internet. Would you like to allow this?
Me: yes. [navigate to the PuTTY site and click the zip file download]
Windows: I see you're trying to download a file. Would you like to allow this?
Me: yes. [file downloads. Fine. That's about 1 minute right there.]
Me: [Navigate to the file and drag it to Program Files with the intention of extracting it there.]
Windows: I see you're trying to extract this file. Would you like to allow this?
Me: Yes. [Windows sits. And thinks. 30 seconds later.]
Windows: I can't allow you to do this.
Me: WTF? [Try it again. Same result].
Me: Fine. [I navigate to Program Files and create a directory named PuTTY].
Windows: I see you're trying to create a directory. Are you an administrator?
Me: Yes. [Windows sits. And thinks.]
Windows: This action will require administrative privileges to run. Would you like to allow this?
Me: Yes. [Windows sits. And thinks.]
Windows: You are attempting to create a directory. Would you like to allow this?
Me: Fuck yes. [Windows sits. And thinks. And suddenly there's a new directory! Yeah. I rename it. 5 minutes has gone by.]
Me: [I drag the zip file and attempt to extract it to the folder I just created.]
Windows: I see you're trying to extract a file. This file is unsigned by Windows and may be hazardous to your health. Would you like to allow this?
Me: Yes. [Windows sits. And thinks.]
Windows: This action will require administrative privileges to run. Are you an administrator?
Me: yes. [Windows sits. And thinks.]
Windows: [Starts extracting the first file.]
Windows: This file is unsigned. Would you like to allow it to be extracted?
Me: Yes. [Windows sits. And thinks. And finally extracts the file.]
Windows: [Starts extracting the second file.] This file is unsigned. Would you like to allow it to be extracted?
Me: WTF? Yes. [Windows sits. And thinks.]
Windows: Would you like to apply these privileges to the remaining files?
Me: WTF? Yes. [Windows sits. And thinks.]
Windows: [Starts extracting the 2.2M zip file. AT 2K PER SECOND. FOR A FILE EXTRACTION!!!]
Me: WTFZOMGBBQ?!?
Me: [Click on the PuTTY icon.] Finally...
Windows: I see you're trying to use an application.
Me: BANG!
This is actually one point I *hate* in Windows versus the current generation of Linux systems.
/etc/yum.repos.d, and from then on out, the global system update monitoring process tracks Adobe's software as well as the vendors. I don't know much about non-free software, but I do know that yum in RHEL requires authentication tokens to easily interact with RedHat servers. The framework is simple http, so I presume at the worst, https with http auth would be a viable thing for automated updates even for commercial, for-pay applications. I don't know about flashy layers over yum (I normally use ubuntu) that make yum administration painless, but I do know that Ubuntu wraps up the low-level framework in a mostly clean way. I added the wine repo by opening a terminal and copying and pasting the two lines from the wine repo install directions to the command line. It's not that hard, but a simple GUI tool could wrap even that.
In windows, they have a semi-appfolder oriented design (except most apps either must or choose to dump some crap in system wide directories). As a result, they started out without anything resembling decent package management, and left it to third parties. Now you have a number of InstallAnywhere, MSI (microsoft's eventual 'standard'), Nullsoft installer, dozens of one-off installers for specific applications, and a bunch more I'm forgetting that are semi-standard). Most are moderately to severely anti-unattended and inconsistent. They have the 'add/remove' programs control panel, but largely it's relegated to just remove software, and even then some software ends up mangling the list so that different 'components' appear independently on the list, but uninstalling one breaks the uninstaller for the other, so you should have used the uninstall icon which a lot of programs put right next to running the application. It's horribly mangled and ugly and if the world wasn't so damned used to it, it becomes painfully obvious how piss-poor Windows has dealt with this.
Meanwhile, Linux was 'stuck' with the need to provide an alternative view on which pieces of software owned which binaries that were mixed in with everything else. To get out of a relatively messy situation that was undeniably there, they rolled the most sophisticated package management for a platform ever (mainly deb and rpm). With that, installs *knew* in a standardized way what other programs needed to be installed to work right, and things kind of 'just worked'. It was beautiful.
Then, recognizing the power of the package management, repository management emerged. Apt and Yum are the two prominent things. This above anything else is an *incredible* framework for software installation and, *CRITICALLY* updating. Not only does the *extremely* rich platform 'vendor' provide 99.9% of packages most common people would ever need, the architectures are pluggable so that third-parties can smoothly integrate their updates with your process. Using your flash plugin example and, say, Fedora Core. Adobe provides a yum repository. The low-level mechanics is that a file gets dumped in
Now, compare that to the MS side of things. Well, you got Microsoft update, which generally cares only about the low-level windows stuff (though I can't remember if Office would tag along for the ride or not..), which also wants to WGA the hell out of clients, but we'll put that aside from now. I install Java, and what happens, a freaking java update checker/manager starts (it can't hook into the running MS update architecture). I install quicktime, Apple's software updater starts running (same as Java). I install Half Life, suddenly Steam also needs to run to manage updates for games. I install Warcraft and Blizzards software starts checking for updates independently. Repeat for Bioware, Symantec, etc. Oh, my video driver, well, I'll have to go to a website somewhere and manually check for updates. And that *still* omits a ton of applications for which they never implemented an update management solution. I
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.