Why anyone would bother on the subject of key generation for XP anything is beyond me.
The analysis of Blizzard, who has a very singular and controlled audience and their activation key scheme, has no correlation to MS in all practical pirating sense. Blizzard has one particular audience...the end user. MS has numerous and some very demanding audiences. Of great importance to them are their corporate and developer networks. In these instances, MS has lessened (bulk licenses), and in some instances, eliminated the restrictions (read, no key). A developer would not tolerate having to call MS central each time one of their engineers reinstalled Windows XP...particularly after spending $2K buying the MSDN packages.
The simple fact is that no matter what Uncle Bill releases, he will - unlike Blizzard - gladly, and by contract release an identical, but less restricted copy to the MSDN and corporate license holders. These versions of the product are not constrained to the same activation key/call-Uncle Bill-for-permission-each-time schemes that the comparable the off-the-shelf versions are restricted to.
Anyone who bothers with a pirated retail version of any MS product only begs for any associated hassle...particularly when a perfect good and unrestricted developer version is out there somewhere.
Of course, thats just my opinion...I could be wrong
Slashdot Mirror
Why anyone would bother on the subject of key generation for XP anything is beyond me. The analysis of Blizzard, who has a very singular and controlled audience and their activation key scheme, has no correlation to MS in all practical pirating sense. Blizzard has one particular audience...the end user. MS has numerous and some very demanding audiences. Of great importance to them are their corporate and developer networks. In these instances, MS has lessened (bulk licenses), and in some instances, eliminated the restrictions (read, no key). A developer would not tolerate having to call MS central each time one of their engineers reinstalled Windows XP...particularly after spending $2K buying the MSDN packages. The simple fact is that no matter what Uncle Bill releases, he will - unlike Blizzard - gladly, and by contract release an identical, but less restricted copy to the MSDN and corporate license holders. These versions of the product are not constrained to the same activation key/call-Uncle Bill-for-permission-each-time schemes that the comparable the off-the-shelf versions are restricted to. Anyone who bothers with a pirated retail version of any MS product only begs for any associated hassle...particularly when a perfect good and unrestricted developer version is out there somewhere. Of course, thats just my opinion...I could be wrong