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WGA Under Vista SP1 Is Kinder and Nags More
DaMan writes in with a ZDNet blog entry on Windows Genuine Advantage under Vista SP1. It seems that the draconian features present in Vista RTM have been replaced by nag screens and annoyances such as repeatedly changing the desktop background to black. But WGA no longer turns off Aero and ReadyBoost or logs you out after an hour."
Besides, it only shows one of these factors, none of which are good:
In either case, none of this addresses the underlying bloat, bugs, and obviously creaking NT architecture, on an OS version that was allegedly rebuilt from the ground up. With most corporate folks likely holding off now for "Windows 7", and home users nursing XP. Vista likely won't make much difference now in either case...
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
If you bought something, activate it, and boom! (steve jobs anyone?!?) you're done. No annoyance! All this screaming about DRM could be easily read as, "I want access to tools and products that you made for free so that i can enjoy myself or make a living using your work because i have a high-speed internet connection and you charge for your products." If most of us were content creators that did this for a living we'd probably look at the issue a lot differently. Full-time developers are not gonna dev for free, and the common tools in the industry arent available for free, neither are the laptops, workstations, and space in which we work. Red bull, caffeine, twinkies, venti latte's all cost money, and if the product isn't protected well where o where does this magical product come from?
No professional product could afford to do something like WGA, kinder now or not. WGA illustrates what Windows really is: A tpy, that you cannot depend on and that, incidentially, is not intended to be dependable in the first place. Anybody relying on it gets what they deserve for gross incompetence.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
WGA should at least give the option to back up its state of that its activated to a certain machine, similar to how one in XP can back up the wpa.bak and wpa.dbl files. Then, in case the machine has to be reinstalled again, Windows can prompt for a copy of these files, and not have to ask for a CD key on future installs.
I come from a UNIX background where the OS is a critical part of not just the computer, but likely the company where its installed, and downtime on a upper end AIX or Solaris production machine or cluster is money lost every second. The OS should have -zero- licensing because its such a critical part of the infrastructure. Applications, licensing is understandable, but the OS itself should just install immediately. This is similar to Tolis BRU's philosophy of allowing access to backed up data regardless of if a license key is entered.
Another possibility, but this is a can of worms, is using a TPM chip to store a certificate. Once the machine is activated to use a certain edition and OS, a certificate is stored in the TPM, similar to how Apple stores a certificate for MacOS. Then, on subsequent installs, the OS just checks to see if its licensed via the TPM for that feature set, and goes on its merry way, never requiring activation again.
Microsoft at least has done a step in the right direction in this case, so I applaud this.
I run Vista in a bootcamp partition and also use that partition as a virtual machine in parallels. Well, I "TRY" to do this.... What happened was, the hardware looks so different between the two that Microsoft deactivated both of them, I believe. I'm a little fuzzy on what happened really because I wasn't aware that it "would" happen, since Parallels advertises this feature pretty heavily. I thought they could treat it like a laptop, with a docked and undocked mode. Anyway, it took about an hour or more to fix the boot camp side, and the parallels side doesn't work, it is still inactivated. For the record, I legitimately own a Vista license. I had to first muck around with some crappy UI trying to reestablish a network connection in some rubbish single user mode (using a wired mouse since my mighty mouse bluetooth no longer had the drivers loaded.) I finally got it reconnected and then it said that it couldn't activate me online. So I had to call someone at what I suppose to be an offshore call center. I had to read this guy like 40 characters off my screen, and he read back a bunch of characters that I had to key in. This part was tedious and it was way more characters that what would seem necessary. In the end I felt like a total criminal. After buying Vista Ultimate, I felt like a criminal. I can install Ubuntu for free and not feel like a criminal, and I can donate $20 to Ubuntu or another distro and really feel good about myself. I don't believe the Bootcamp/VM setup violates the EULA for Ultimate because they are just different ways of launching the same image. If this is a violation, certainly a docked and undocked laptop violates it. ANYWAY, now that I'm done ranting (sorry), my question. Does RC1 fix all this?
My complaint isn't activation. My complaint is that I can't take my retail box copy of any MS product and uninstall it and put it on a new/different computer.
Each MS product comes with a limited number of activations, and that activation ties the copy to a particular computer. It isn't possible, without calling and begging Microsoft for permission, to:
a) Deactivate a piece of software;
b) Register that deactivation with MS's activation servers;
c) Uninstall the software;
d) Install the software on another machine;
e) Activate the software on that other machine.
I'm not even talking about OEM versions, which are tied to hardware by their license. No, this is fully-independent retail products you'd buy at .
If I buy a new computer, I not only have to buy the box and the hardware-tied OS, I also have to buy Office again.
I can move my retail copy of Adobe Creative Suite from computer to computer using a deactivation feature -- and I don't even have to uninstall the software, which saves me time later if I want to move my license back. Why can't I do it with my retail copy of Office?
Remove the caps and hold to a mirror.
Either my phone (a blackberry) or one of the smart cards in my wallet will very often set off those alarms entering and leaving stores. I ignore it, but often the clerks freak out. I never even stop at the sound anymore, and it upsets some of the shopkeepers. You can see them scramble after me as I walk down the street or mall. I only had one merchant press the issue with me, I told them they have faulty theft alarms and continued on. I don't have time for nonsense like that, and I won't be treated like a thief by anyone.
Do those alarms even do anything? I mean, if I'm a thief, I would just ignore them anyway. And since I'm not a thief.... I just ignore them anyway. Is their value in deterrence? Their for the nervous shoplifter who screams "I'm guilty" when they hear the beep?
I've had this argument with so many managerial types over so many years...
The big problem with Windows is not whether it's good or whether it's bad, it's that it's a pig in a poke. There are no stable specifications for what Windows is or isn't, and what's in Windows and what isn't. People make business decisions on things like the "fact" that Windows "comes with Toolbook" (yes, no kidding). It comes with Toolbook for as long as Microsoft thinks it should, then it doesn't. You can repeat this ad nauseam for any important characteristic of Windows, without even getting into questions of what kinds of DRM are actually enforced to what degree.
There is no specification for Windows. As a simple technical matter we have even had problems determining which DLLs and OCXes are "part of" Windows: there does not seem to be a standard list of what a full directory listing of a "standard" Windows installation is supposed to look like. The same Windows CD will install slightly different sets of files on different PCs.
This is equally true of the Mac OS. It comes with HyperCard, until it doesn't. The characteristics of what QuickTime will and won't do, how many Macs can be "authorized" under iTunes changes, etc.
This is not necessarily a characteristic of proprietary software in general. I grew up in an environment where the word "specifications" meant a document that was written by a buyer, often the government or the military, but in any case an entity with the clout to say "we are interesting in buying something that does X, Y, and Z." And software vendors would either pass up the business, which they could not afford to do, or supply a known product that met known specifications. The FORTRAN compiler darn well better meet the FORTRAN spec...
I've tried to get people that make business decisions to understand that if they go with Microsoft, they cannot make their judgement not solely on the basis of what Microsoft is delivering today: they are committing their company's future to their guesses about what Microsoft will be doing in the future.
As long as the people who make purchasing decisions about Windows don't care about having a real set of specs and holding Microsoft to them, Windows will continue to be a pig in a poke.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Isn't Windows licensed on almost every PC sold before I even get it out of the factory door? I was under the impression that most OEMs have a licensing agreement with Microsoft that pretty much puts a Windows license on every computer sold -- whether or not it actually has Windows on it.
So, why all the hoopla about WGA? Is Microsoft so worried about a few people who are upgrading from XP to Vista? In a few years, these people will be buying a new computer and will end up with a new Vista license anyway. This was the same company a decade ago worried about Windows penetration into the Chinese market because not enough people were pirating their software in China!
It sounds like for the few pennies that Microsoft might be losing to unlicensed copies of Windows Vista, they're busy making legitimate user lives miserable.
It's only an expensive product because people have tricked themselves into believing there are no alternatives.
It's not an expensive product. Especially for the vast majority of people, who get it "free".
Windows 3.1 was $130 and commonly discounted to $80. That was for the whole OS, not split up so you have 4 different versions. The top price was $80. The cost was low because Microsoft had competition.
Ignoring for a second just how much more functionality Vista delivers over Windows 3.1, you need to a) include the price of DOS, and b) account for inflation. Windows 3.1 ("Full Version" retailed at US$150. I couldn't find a price for DOS 5.0 in 1991 with a cursory search, so I'll estimate it at about US$50.
US$200 in 1992, is worth about US$300 today. Looking at Microsoft's site, we see that Vista Home Premium ("Full Version") is US$239. Heck, even if you leave DOS out completely, US$150 inflates to US$225, only a hair cheaper.
Now that the installed based is two orders of magnitude greater, the price should be cheaper or maybe the same. Even the cost of Apple's computers dropped significantly. But for MS Windows, the cost doubled or tripled.
Utter crap. It's actually less (or, at worst, basically the same). Take into account the additional functionality (media player, movie maker, networking, web browser, media centre, etc) and it's massively cheaper. It's certainly not within a bull's roar of having "doubled or tripled".
All you people who keep saying Windows is getting more expensive over time are either a) stupid (because you haven't bothered to actually check), or b) liars (because you have worked it out and chose to ignore what you found). But, then again, 99% of the criticism levelled at Vista falls into the same cateogories, so its to be expected.
Granted, a lack of internet is a rarity these days
In my last job, I worked in areas with no Internet connection at all, most of the time. The last thing you want is to have Windows playing silly buggers because it's decided that the multi-million pound radio link you've just plugged into the management port of is some new device, and then demanded to re-register itself, when you're standing in horizontal sleet on the top of a mountain.
WGA is Microsoft securing their product. How do you suggest it figure out who stole it and who didn't without bothering you but still preventing pirates from getting their product for free?
Because you know pirates can't crack the software to circumvent WGA or anything like that. WGA only annoys the legit-user, pirates just shut it off.
Hey, I paid for Vista too. Twice, so far, WGA has gone fubar on me. I don't know why -- I didn't change hardware or anything. Th first time, while talking to tech support in Bangalore, I went through one of the most frustrating experiences ever with a computer company where the woman was insisting there were options on my screen that didn't exist. I'd read the list of options, and she'd say "No, sir, use the other option" (this dance repeated four times before she transfered me to a department that was not answering their phone). I was unable to get the system working until the next day, when that department re-opened, and someone could give me what he called a "onetime reauthorization code."
The second time, a few weeks later, the problem returned. Tech support walked me through it again. I used the "MGADiag" program that told me I was using a genuine copy, meanwhile WGA popups were calling me a thief and shutting me down. Again, it took hours on the phone to resolve.
So far, it's been OK since that second episode. But I'm out about four hours of phone time, and one evening of no Windows computer. As I said to the tech support people - if I had just been dishonest and gotten a cracked version, I wouldn't have had those problems. Why they were insistent on punishing their legit customers, I don't know.
My Mac OS and Linux machines may have their annoyances too, but they have never called me "thief!"
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
I personally know of two incidents of legal Windows XP (not Vista) installations failing WGA tests. Google it, it seems to be not unusual. Now, I freely admit that I'm a Linux slut, but I can objectively say that WGA will flag a legal system as counterfeit. And this was not after some hardware change. One is a neighbor, who still has her original disk, and hasn't pulled the computer out from under the desk in maybe four years. The other is family.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Why should I have to, especially for an OS that takes so much hardware to do so little? What is there about Windows iCandy that is so much better than anything else out there that I'd want to have it?
Good, inexpensive web hosting
"Why wouldn't you be able to comply with the request? Is your mouse and keyboard broken? How hard is it to hit "Validate"?"
From Iraq? Where my personal notebook has no connectivity? (I'm posting from my work machine, of course.) Not to mention where I'm only allowed 15 minute phone calls, so sitting on hold with their Indian call-center is out of the question?
It's pretty damn fucking hard to "validate" the software I own. So, I had to borrow a pirated version from a friend just to get my system working correctly. Brilliant strategy, Microsoft... "Let's force our legitimate customers to run pirated versions of our software so they see that there's really no point in buying it in the future!"
Um, no. OS X will not normally boot on a regular EFI machine. The Apple-supplied bootloader is an EFI program but it is located in the HFS+ volume, not the little EFI FAT partition. Even if you were to copy the boot.efi program to an EFI system's EFI partition you still wouldn't be able to boot OS X because boot.efi requires that it be able to read HFS+ volumes using Apple's HFS+ EFI service. You might have luck extracting the HFS+ driver from an Apple's ROM and putting it into that same little EFI FAT partition.
Netkas's "PC EFI" booter is nothing more than the Darwin/x86 bootloader with a few enhancements. Basically he took a source release I had made months earlier, fixed a few bugs, and released it (binary only) a few days before I finally got the gumption to do a new source release with the bugs fixed. Since then he's added a few things like GPT support and the ability to hard-code a device-properties blob to help with graphics card issues. Neither my booter nor his has anything at all to do with EFI. The OS X kernel does not really care much about EFI aside from needing a couple of simple data structures and a handful of stub functions.
Of course, even with my booter or his booter or using Apple's own boot.efi and HFS+ EFI driver on an EFI system you still run into the issue that Apple's binaries are encrypted. Granted it's trivial to write an alternative decryption routine that provides its own keys instead of grabbing them from the machine. Code to do this is widely available so OS X is for the most part fully hacked.
Still, once you hack it it theoretically works indefinitely. It doesn't go checking with Apple. It doesn't disable itself after a few days. It cannot do this because a real Mac does not do this.