Really? That explains why they started selling Apple-branded products
...until there's a Microsoft-based product of equal calibre for portable media playing whereupon any Apple products will be ditched.
There's aboslutely NO WAY that maybe, just maybe, Linux is simply not a good choice in a given situation.
Yes, there are situations where Linux is not suitable - that is not what we are arguing about.
The CORE of this argument is the fact that hardware manufacturers, of which HP is one, are unable (due to Microsoft licensing impositions) or unwilling to offer the customer a choice.
HP is merely VERY WILLING to do Microsoft's bidding constantly.
So people like you immediately turn to name calling and FUD spreading.
With all respect, I based my arguments on personal experience - my experiences with IBM, my missus' experiences at HP, my years working under that tyrant Fiorina at Lucent and what my missus has seen in the deterioration of HP while she's worked there under Fiorina's misrule. Hardly FUD...
I'd bet you a good quid that if this story was reversed (that is, "HP dumps Windows for Linux") I'd be seeing the exact opposite comments from yours, to the tone of "Oh I've always liked HP they're a great company and Fiorina is slowly getting her act together blah blah blah".
How can you or I postulate on a scenario that hasn't happened? This sounds like FUD on your part, not mine.
...there's a vulnerability in Microsoft Vulnerability Notification that causes Microsoft Vulnerability Notification to send out spurious vulnerability notifications?
PS. If you're new to shell-scripting or if you just want a collection of good useful scripts, you cannot IMHO do better than Wicked Cool Shell Scripts which has about 100 example scripts, a couple of which show how to do neat stuff with wget and the Lynx browser in command-line mode.
Assuming this is a serious question, I don't play around with Windows much but I do recall that the Windows updates were available as standard HTTP/FTP downloads somewhere on Microsoft's web site, outside of Windows Update.
Assuming that's still the case and you can find out where they are, you could always use a program like wget on the BASH command-line to retrieve them (or any HTTP/FTP document or file).
Writing a script around that to determine what's available and what's been updated, as well as emailing you or a number of other people, should be fairly straightforward.
Just got handed a Windows Mobile powered phone by my company. It takes about two minutes to boot, it's slow to operate and has crashed a couple of times doing settings changes.
I've now gone back to my Nokia 6310i - it does all I need it to do alongside my Linux-powered Sharp Zaurus PDA so Microsoft can go figure...
When was the last time you saw Linus Torvalds skipping across a stage with sweaty armpits in front of thousands of people manically screaming the word "developers" over and over again?
My missus works at HP and they have always been totally run by the decisions that Microsoft enforces on them anyway, particularly since the Compaq merger.
Through my job it telecoms, I've been to a number of IBM sites in my travels and the Linux presence is openly on show at all of the sites I've visited whereas the missus says she's never heard Linux mentioned at HP, even though she's involved in their internal IT support.
This shouldn't really come as a great shock to anyone - having worked for Lucent in the good old Carly Fiorina days, that woman typifies the role of "corporate whore" and will name drop just about any cool and emerging technology she can just to make her empty speeches sound more impressive.
Digital is no more, Tru64 is dead and HP simply never were and never will be a true Linux player - they're basically just a hardware arm of Microsoft these days.
The money you would save would quickly be swallowed by horrendous training and maintenance costs.
And where's your proof of research into making this statement? Microsoft's "Get The Facts"??? C'mon, this issue's been argued many times on Slashdot and the worst possible case is that's there's not much difference in maintenance costs between Linux and Windows.
As for all your other points, I agree with you 100%.
Last time I looked, we had more than a two-party system here in the UK.
LibDems probably need a chance at government (can't do any worse than the other two have done) with the added bonus we get properly united with Europe and away from the possibility of becoming the 51st state of the USA.
Where's your research for this statement? My wife is a Surgical Matron at a hospital with responsbility for four wards and a lot of staff. She hasn't lost ONE member of staff to the private sector.
Here is one place for starters - okay, not just the private sector but also to overseas like the USA.
Incidentally, I have nothing for the utmost admiration for our doctors and nurses and they deserve better treatment in terms of pay and conditions because of the jobs they do. I would happily pay higher taxes if I knew that money was going directly into their pockets.
The private sector is not everything is cracked up to be for medical professionals. The management is often poor, and professional development may be limited for Nursing Staff [not much point in specialising in A&E in a Private Hospital - there isnt any].
I have a female colleague who is a middle-manager in the NHS and travels around the country a lot. She does so always using First Class train or air travel, can expenses rooms in the best hotels, gets a huge mileage allowance and very large salary.
At least in the private sector, it's a matter of choice to pay for it or not - but my friend getting the benefits she gets when your wife (and other healthcare staff) deserve bigger salaries is an absolute travesty in a public-funded institution.
My wife only got her own desktop pc in the last year. For the last 5 years before that she has had to ALL of her paperwork on our pc at home or else beg or borrow access to someone else's at work - and she STILL spent three hours on paperwork at home last night.
This is irrelevant to my argument. I have no problem in anyone choosing to run Windows (assuming that's what she uses) but I do object to my government using my taxes to line Bill Gates' pockets when it is quite clear that high quality free alternatives are available.
The fact that she works hard into the night on paperwork justs earns my admiration even more incidentally.
The NHS IT infrastructure has been neglected on a national level for years - at last something is [hopefully] being done to correct that failing.
Sorry, this doesn't work for me. Why is lining Gates' pockets on IT infrastructure doing something? Surely doing something would be paying workers more, investing in hospital cleanliness, putting more into disease research, etc?
Erm, why would a doctor or a nurse spend time fixing a PC that is provided as part of their job and no doubt supported by the NHS's internal IT department?
So why not do yourself a favour, take some direct positive action and actually voice these opinions to some of the OSS developers who write those applications that lack the features you want?
OSS has no remit to do anything for profit, it's just there to make good software. If you tell the people who write that software what you need it to do, they WILL listen to you.
Otherwise, sit back, do nothing and continue to fund Microsoft's on-going plan of world domination.
And when it gets to the stage, in a few years time, that you pay MS a rental charge to access the documents and files you thought that you previously owned, don't come crying to me then.
Well, the good thing about this is that there's now absolutely NO way I'm going to vote for this government in next year's UK elections.
Whatever anyone else says about the costs of switching to Open Source, the fact is that long term, a Microsoft licensing deal costs a whole lot more than an OSS solution and that is good money that the NHS should be spending on giving better salaries to the nurses, GPs and other health workers that are leaving the NHS in their droves for the private health sector.
Add to that the fact the patient care is still suffering and that people are dying as a result of superbugs due to poor cleaning routines in our hospitals, I don't know how that crook Gates can sleep peacefully at night.
Personally, between Gnome and KDE, my preference would be Gnome purely because I *hate* having to install additional applications that I have no intention of using and Gnome has much less bloat than KDE. (The fact is, if I have the build time, I use Fluxbox as a Window manager and just install the apps I need full stop.)
However, less techie people with PCs have become used to the Microsoft way of doing things and expect to see application menus jammed-packed with shortcut icons to "free" utilities and applications - unfortunate, but it's just the way of the world.
If Linux is to penetrate the desktop market, then it needs to present a single "unified" look to draw people away from Windows and the distro makers are bound to want to capitalise on that as much as possible, in order to make their products viable to users and businesses thinking of making the Windows to Linux desktop change. KDE is therefore the natural choice for that.
Personally, I don't care about Linux desktop penetration unless it means a lot more applications and games are released to run natively on Linux as a result.
However, I do hope that Gnome development will continue because it is still the desktop of choice for more experienced Linux users who want a compromise between lack of bloat and quick installation.
1. Teenagers and those under or around the age of 25 do most of the file-sharing.
2. The same age-group buy all the formulaic "music-by-numbers" trash that infests the music charts.
3. The record companies make their profits from plastic, injection-moulded pop star clones because those are the "musicians" (term used loosely) who they can pay to spit out a few MOBO ballads and then ditch them when they start demanding too much money after a couple of successful soulless singles.
So, either the BPI wins in which case spotty teenager can no longer download his music and has to be a lot more discerning in his musical tastes...
or
spotty teenager wins and it no longer becomes productive for record companies to churn out Britney Sucks clones or boy bands...
Hell, I don't know about you guys but I'm getting a front row seat with my Led Zeppelin CDs, a bag of popcorn and a big bucket of coke!
I agree with you 100% - just at long as those fat thieves in record company boardrooms stop lining their own pockets and start giving the consumer quality, value-for-money products.
Also, while they are at it, they can also spend some money from their fat vaults on doing a little more to preserve old master tapes from musical recordings rather than hoarding them away like squirrels and letting them rot away.
I understand that even master tape recordings as recent as some of REM's albums have now deteriorated to the point where they are now just about unusable - not that losing anything by REM would be a great loss to the music world.
I don't agree with illegal downloading but I agree even less with price-fixing. I never buy anything from rip-off merchant stores like HMV and Virgin in the UK, I support second-hand stores and Ebay for my music and will continue to do so until the greedy bastards in Sony, Time Warner, etc. stop ripping us off.
I actually agree with you but from entirely the opposite perspective.
A technically proficient geek will tell you that operating systems and the applications that you install on them are very complex bundles of libraries and processes, all intercommunicating with each other and controlling hardware. That's the same whether you use OS X, Windows or Linux.
A marketing person will get a pretty looking front end put onto the whole thing to give the appearance of simplicity to the end user. However, in reality, the whole thing has become a lot more complex just to hide having to manually edit configuration files behind a few mouse clicks.
In my experience, most Linux users can fix any problems they encounter on their Linux boxes, the same cannot be said for Windows users - worse still, if the Registry corrupts and you don't have a backup, the whole Windows installation has to blown away.
My personal feeling is that if you don't understand a bit about how a computer works, you don't use one, end of story. No different to driving a car, understanding how the controls work and how you need to change the oil and pump up the tyres occasionally.
The fact is that NO computer is easy to use and maintain - Microsoft have chosen to use "ease of use" as marketing hype to sell more of their products which the general cattle populace has fallen for hook, line and sinker.
And just to give you a final example, I'm Red Hat Certified, I'm UNIX certified, I've worked with both and with Windows for years. Last weekend I had a look at an XP problem on a friend's machine and I found the whole interface cluttered and totally unusable. IMHO, XP is a bloated, confusing excuse for an operating system that has proven just how off-track Microsoft are, when Windows 2000 actually started to give the impression they were finally beginning to get things right.
I'm a Linux user and Open Source proponent but I don't want unknowledgeable people using it - the UNIX mentality is to treat all users like adults and make them responsible for their actions; Windows is like an alcoholic parent that holds the users hands some of the time but then suddenly lashes them about the head when it feels like it.
All I need now is for the Joe Public users to be given their own virus-infested part of the Internet to run their Windows boxes on so that I don't suffer slow downs because of their stupidity and I'll be happy.
I find that Smirnoff Ice makes a great drain cleaner and is great for keeping the British youth in their plastic disco bars away from the rest of us in the proper pubs drinking the proper beer.
If I want vodka and fizzy pop, I'll mix my own, thanks very much.
Anybody who knows anything about beer knows that "less is more".
I wish marketing companies would stop trying to make "beer" fashionable by throwing all sorts of rubbish into it to get the "alco-pop sheep" to start drinking it.
Compared to some of the good micro-brews I've tasted out in the US, anything produced by Anheiser Busch is urine - and British real ale beats the who lot of them hands down.
Beer brewing has been done for thousands of years and has been pretty successful just by combining hops, yeast, sugar and water in different combinations and with different roasting processes of the hops. IT DOES NOT NEED TO BE CHANGED!!!
Anheiser Busch can go brew what they like and how they like but I hope they give it a name other than "beer"
I recently logged into a customer's UNIX-based voicemail system to be told it's uptime was 853 days.
Also about 4 years ago, I experienced for myself the urban myth of forgotten Novell Netware servers. I had to go to a customer's site to update a DLL on our telephony application on the server - it took the customer over an hour to find the machine which was a 386 in a forgotten corner of the comms room beneath about an inch of dust - it was still happily running and had been up for who knows how long.
Microsoft has a LOOOOONNNGGG way to go before it gets anywhere near those types of uptimes for Windows.
They do so because for them to buy legit copies of Windows would simply be too damn expensive.
Sorry, but by your logic it would be perfectly okay for me to go and steal a car from the nearest Porsche dealership purely because I cannot afford to buy one.
What people who pirate software fail to realise is that they are making bad for both themselves and legitimate users. Perhaps you should consider the possibility that when software is priced, factored in are assumptions (by the producer of the software) that X number of copies will be pirated - therefore legitimate users pay more as a result.
The best course of action is simply not to buy it at that price and/or tell the manufacturer you are not buying it because it is too expensive.
The problem is that far too many "sheep" in our society take the path of least resistance - rather than vesting their financial power as the consumer and voting with their wallets, they simply accept overpriced underperforming products without a word of complaint.
I fully support Microsoft in taking any action they can to track down illegal users - because then people will be forced to look at Free Software alternatives and to climb out of the Microsoft "comfort zone" by having to adjust to the better but different functionality of Linux, BSD, etc.
The migration to Linux has been slowed by the fact that most people have in the back of their minds that Microsoft products are "free", usually because it came with their PC or they copied CDs from someone.
Now Microsoft forcing people to pay (or at least giving signs of that) $200+ for Windows XP (a horrendous operating system that is a step down from Windows 2000 IMHO) will let Linux compete on the proper footing - namely that the latter is free while the former is very expensive.
I still maintain that corporations essentially bleed an economy dry purely for profits and that the skills issue is something they need to address.
Sure, as individuals, if we want to work and have wealth, we have to steer our education in paths where there is a job demand - however, corporations do not do enough to finance training and education initiatives because, in the short term, this harms profits.
I'm not suggesting that the government tells you what job to take. I am suggesting that the government taxes the profits of businesses that rely too heavily on outsourcing, thus making it less "economical" to move jobs offshore.
To offset this a little, tax breaks for companies that invest in training and skilling their workforce should also be given much more than they are currently.
Slashdot Mirror
There's aboslutely NO WAY that maybe, just maybe, Linux is simply not a good choice in a given situation.
Yes, there are situations where Linux is not suitable - that is not what we are arguing about. The CORE of this argument is the fact that hardware manufacturers, of which HP is one, are unable (due to Microsoft licensing impositions) or unwilling to offer the customer a choice.
HP is merely VERY WILLING to do Microsoft's bidding constantly.
So people like you immediately turn to name calling and FUD spreading.
With all respect, I based my arguments on personal experience - my experiences with IBM, my missus' experiences at HP, my years working under that tyrant Fiorina at Lucent and what my missus has seen in the deterioration of HP while she's worked there under Fiorina's misrule. Hardly FUD...
I'd bet you a good quid that if this story was reversed (that is, "HP dumps Windows for Linux") I'd be seeing the exact opposite comments from yours, to the tone of "Oh I've always liked HP they're a great company and Fiorina is slowly getting her act together blah blah blah".
How can you or I postulate on a scenario that hasn't happened? This sounds like FUD on your part, not mine.
...there's a vulnerability in Microsoft Vulnerability Notification that causes Microsoft Vulnerability Notification to send out spurious vulnerability notifications?
Oxymoron 2: We use Open Source because we have no money. Therefore how could we pay you to use it?
Oxymoron 3: Even if we could pay you to use it, we could not do do because you've posted anonymously. We therefore do not know who to send it to.
Oxymoron 4: A troll that doesn't write in crayon.
PS. If you're new to shell-scripting or if you just want a collection of good useful scripts, you cannot IMHO do better than Wicked Cool Shell Scripts which has about 100 example scripts, a couple of which show how to do neat stuff with wget and the Lynx browser in command-line mode.
Assuming that's still the case and you can find out where they are, you could always use a program like wget on the BASH command-line to retrieve them (or any HTTP/FTP document or file).
Writing a script around that to determine what's available and what's been updated, as well as emailing you or a number of other people, should be fairly straightforward.
I've now gone back to my Nokia 6310i - it does all I need it to do alongside my Linux-powered Sharp Zaurus PDA so Microsoft can go figure...
I rest my case...
Through my job it telecoms, I've been to a number of IBM sites in my travels and the Linux presence is openly on show at all of the sites I've visited whereas the missus says she's never heard Linux mentioned at HP, even though she's involved in their internal IT support.
This shouldn't really come as a great shock to anyone - having worked for Lucent in the good old Carly Fiorina days, that woman typifies the role of "corporate whore" and will name drop just about any cool and emerging technology she can just to make her empty speeches sound more impressive.
Digital is no more, Tru64 is dead and HP simply never were and never will be a true Linux player - they're basically just a hardware arm of Microsoft these days.
And where's your proof of research into making this statement? Microsoft's "Get The Facts"??? C'mon, this issue's been argued many times on Slashdot and the worst possible case is that's there's not much difference in maintenance costs between Linux and Windows.
As for all your other points, I agree with you 100%.
LibDems probably need a chance at government (can't do any worse than the other two have done) with the added bonus we get properly united with Europe and away from the possibility of becoming the 51st state of the USA.
Here is one place for starters - okay, not just the private sector but also to overseas like the USA.
Incidentally, I have nothing for the utmost admiration for our doctors and nurses and they deserve better treatment in terms of pay and conditions because of the jobs they do. I would happily pay higher taxes if I knew that money was going directly into their pockets.
The private sector is not everything is cracked up to be for medical professionals. The management is often poor, and professional development may be limited for Nursing Staff [not much point in specialising in A&E in a Private Hospital - there isnt any].
I have a female colleague who is a middle-manager in the NHS and travels around the country a lot. She does so always using First Class train or air travel, can expenses rooms in the best hotels, gets a huge mileage allowance and very large salary.
At least in the private sector, it's a matter of choice to pay for it or not - but my friend getting the benefits she gets when your wife (and other healthcare staff) deserve bigger salaries is an absolute travesty in a public-funded institution.
My wife only got her own desktop pc in the last year. For the last 5 years before that she has had to ALL of her paperwork on our pc at home or else beg or borrow access to someone else's at work - and she STILL spent three hours on paperwork at home last night.
This is irrelevant to my argument. I have no problem in anyone choosing to run Windows (assuming that's what she uses) but I do object to my government using my taxes to line Bill Gates' pockets when it is quite clear that high quality free alternatives are available.
The fact that she works hard into the night on paperwork justs earns my admiration even more incidentally.
The NHS IT infrastructure has been neglected on a national level for years - at last something is [hopefully] being done to correct that failing.
Sorry, this doesn't work for me. Why is lining Gates' pockets on IT infrastructure doing something? Surely doing something would be paying workers more, investing in hospital cleanliness, putting more into disease research, etc?
The Child Support Agency was another huge wasted IT budget also.
Erm, why would a doctor or a nurse spend time fixing a PC that is provided as part of their job and no doubt supported by the NHS's internal IT department?
OSS has no remit to do anything for profit, it's just there to make good software. If you tell the people who write that software what you need it to do, they WILL listen to you.
Otherwise, sit back, do nothing and continue to fund Microsoft's on-going plan of world domination.
And when it gets to the stage, in a few years time, that you pay MS a rental charge to access the documents and files you thought that you previously owned, don't come crying to me then.
Whatever anyone else says about the costs of switching to Open Source, the fact is that long term, a Microsoft licensing deal costs a whole lot more than an OSS solution and that is good money that the NHS should be spending on giving better salaries to the nurses, GPs and other health workers that are leaving the NHS in their droves for the private health sector.
Add to that the fact the patient care is still suffering and that people are dying as a result of superbugs due to poor cleaning routines in our hospitals, I don't know how that crook Gates can sleep peacefully at night.
I am absoultely disgusted with my government.
However, less techie people with PCs have become used to the Microsoft way of doing things and expect to see application menus jammed-packed with shortcut icons to "free" utilities and applications - unfortunate, but it's just the way of the world.
If Linux is to penetrate the desktop market, then it needs to present a single "unified" look to draw people away from Windows and the distro makers are bound to want to capitalise on that as much as possible, in order to make their products viable to users and businesses thinking of making the Windows to Linux desktop change. KDE is therefore the natural choice for that.
Personally, I don't care about Linux desktop penetration unless it means a lot more applications and games are released to run natively on Linux as a result.
However, I do hope that Gnome development will continue because it is still the desktop of choice for more experienced Linux users who want a compromise between lack of bloat and quick installation.
How about you stop downloading and stop buying CDs?
How about we ALL do that?
What do you think happens after all the record stores can't shift their stocks of CDs and Sony's profits start falling?
You stop feeding them money, they have to get off their backsides and do something about it...
Let's look at the facts:
1. Teenagers and those under or around the age of 25 do most of the file-sharing.
2. The same age-group buy all the formulaic "music-by-numbers" trash that infests the music charts.
3. The record companies make their profits from plastic, injection-moulded pop star clones because those are the "musicians" (term used loosely) who they can pay to spit out a few MOBO ballads and then ditch them when they start demanding too much money after a couple of successful soulless singles.
So, either the BPI wins in which case spotty teenager can no longer download his music and has to be a lot more discerning in his musical tastes...
or
spotty teenager wins and it no longer becomes productive for record companies to churn out Britney Sucks clones or boy bands...
Hell, I don't know about you guys but I'm getting a front row seat with my Led Zeppelin CDs, a bag of popcorn and a big bucket of coke!
Also, while they are at it, they can also spend some money from their fat vaults on doing a little more to preserve old master tapes from musical recordings rather than hoarding them away like squirrels and letting them rot away.
I understand that even master tape recordings as recent as some of REM's albums have now deteriorated to the point where they are now just about unusable - not that losing anything by REM would be a great loss to the music world.
I don't agree with illegal downloading but I agree even less with price-fixing. I never buy anything from rip-off merchant stores like HMV and Virgin in the UK, I support second-hand stores and Ebay for my music and will continue to do so until the greedy bastards in Sony, Time Warner, etc. stop ripping us off.
A technically proficient geek will tell you that operating systems and the applications that you install on them are very complex bundles of libraries and processes, all intercommunicating with each other and controlling hardware. That's the same whether you use OS X, Windows or Linux.
A marketing person will get a pretty looking front end put onto the whole thing to give the appearance of simplicity to the end user. However, in reality, the whole thing has become a lot more complex just to hide having to manually edit configuration files behind a few mouse clicks.
In my experience, most Linux users can fix any problems they encounter on their Linux boxes, the same cannot be said for Windows users - worse still, if the Registry corrupts and you don't have a backup, the whole Windows installation has to blown away.
My personal feeling is that if you don't understand a bit about how a computer works, you don't use one, end of story. No different to driving a car, understanding how the controls work and how you need to change the oil and pump up the tyres occasionally.
The fact is that NO computer is easy to use and maintain - Microsoft have chosen to use "ease of use" as marketing hype to sell more of their products which the general cattle populace has fallen for hook, line and sinker.
And just to give you a final example, I'm Red Hat Certified, I'm UNIX certified, I've worked with both and with Windows for years. Last weekend I had a look at an XP problem on a friend's machine and I found the whole interface cluttered and totally unusable. IMHO, XP is a bloated, confusing excuse for an operating system that has proven just how off-track Microsoft are, when Windows 2000 actually started to give the impression they were finally beginning to get things right.
I'm a Linux user and Open Source proponent but I don't want unknowledgeable people using it - the UNIX mentality is to treat all users like adults and make them responsible for their actions; Windows is like an alcoholic parent that holds the users hands some of the time but then suddenly lashes them about the head when it feels like it.
All I need now is for the Joe Public users to be given their own virus-infested part of the Internet to run their Windows boxes on so that I don't suffer slow downs because of their stupidity and I'll be happy.
If I want vodka and fizzy pop, I'll mix my own, thanks very much.
I wish marketing companies would stop trying to make "beer" fashionable by throwing all sorts of rubbish into it to get the "alco-pop sheep" to start drinking it.
Compared to some of the good micro-brews I've tasted out in the US, anything produced by Anheiser Busch is urine - and British real ale beats the who lot of them hands down.
Beer brewing has been done for thousands of years and has been pretty successful just by combining hops, yeast, sugar and water in different combinations and with different roasting processes of the hops. IT DOES NOT NEED TO BE CHANGED!!!
Anheiser Busch can go brew what they like and how they like but I hope they give it a name other than "beer"
Also about 4 years ago, I experienced for myself the urban myth of forgotten Novell Netware servers. I had to go to a customer's site to update a DLL on our telephony application on the server - it took the customer over an hour to find the machine which was a 386 in a forgotten corner of the comms room beneath about an inch of dust - it was still happily running and had been up for who knows how long.
Microsoft has a LOOOOONNNGGG way to go before it gets anywhere near those types of uptimes for Windows.
Sorry, but by your logic it would be perfectly okay for me to go and steal a car from the nearest Porsche dealership purely because I cannot afford to buy one.
What people who pirate software fail to realise is that they are making bad for both themselves and legitimate users. Perhaps you should consider the possibility that when software is priced, factored in are assumptions (by the producer of the software) that X number of copies will be pirated - therefore legitimate users pay more as a result.
The best course of action is simply not to buy it at that price and/or tell the manufacturer you are not buying it because it is too expensive.
The problem is that far too many "sheep" in our society take the path of least resistance - rather than vesting their financial power as the consumer and voting with their wallets, they simply accept overpriced underperforming products without a word of complaint.
I fully support Microsoft in taking any action they can to track down illegal users - because then people will be forced to look at Free Software alternatives and to climb out of the Microsoft "comfort zone" by having to adjust to the better but different functionality of Linux, BSD, etc.
The migration to Linux has been slowed by the fact that most people have in the back of their minds that Microsoft products are "free", usually because it came with their PC or they copied CDs from someone.
Now Microsoft forcing people to pay (or at least giving signs of that) $200+ for Windows XP (a horrendous operating system that is a step down from Windows 2000 IMHO) will let Linux compete on the proper footing - namely that the latter is free while the former is very expensive.
Sure, as individuals, if we want to work and have wealth, we have to steer our education in paths where there is a job demand - however, corporations do not do enough to finance training and education initiatives because, in the short term, this harms profits.
I'm not suggesting that the government tells you what job to take. I am suggesting that the government taxes the profits of businesses that rely too heavily on outsourcing, thus making it less "economical" to move jobs offshore.
To offset this a little, tax breaks for companies that invest in training and skilling their workforce should also be given much more than they are currently.