[QUOTE=MacTech]
Xerox, just like Apple & Commodore did? 
Jim
Sorry, didn’t mean that, just that Microsoft sucked last year, they are going to suck next year, and they suck right now. I mean, it’s not like they suddenly became evil. I suppose this is your final straw, but I was bewildered how this was worse than anything else. Not seeking to cast doubts upon you as a person or a computer user or anything. Sorry.
I haven’t voluntarily given Microsoft any of my money since DOS 6.22, except for a keyboard and mouse once. Oh, and an X-Box, and some games, but not a single penny beyond that! Well, FlightSim one time, but that’s all! And the OS that came on my wife’s laptop, but that was preinstalled. I can quit anytime I want!
I’m a loser 
. I’m going to go put Solaris on my laptop, that’ll make me feel better.
Ain’t it a bitch?
Back before Win32 I used OS/2, which ran Windows (including NT) and DOS programs better than Windows and DOS combined, not to mention it could use NTFS and its own HPFS was better and handled NT stuff just fine. Never even thought about switching back to Windows.
Until Win95…
No apologies needed, Bobotheoptimist. All tongue-in-cheek, although my last post sure didn’t sound like it, looking back.
Not really. My final straw was about 5 years ago, which is why I switched to Linux and OS/2 (again) almost exclusively. But now I’m stuck in the Windows world again.
It really isn’t, it’s the symbolism. I’ve learned to put up with everything else. I’ve built up enough tolerance that most of the poisons don’t even affect me anymore. It’s just that this is an Orwellian thing that upsets the status quo.
Considering Apple paid Xerox $1 million in stock options for the GUI IP, it could hardly constitute “stealing.”
I have to admit that I haven’t, but the little I’ve read about them suggests that I’d still have headaches with some Linux-unfriendly hardware.
You know, if I wasn’t vaguely certain that there was a copyright infringement in that, I’d totally make a T-shirt or bumper sticker with that on it. Just for shits and giggles.
~Tasha
I’ve installed, lessee, one of the BSDs, the latest Mandriva distro and currently have Fedora Core 5 running perfectly happily on VMWare Workstation 5.5. The virtualisation means it doesn’t matter what exotic hardware you have; the VM will just “see” the standard devices that VMWare emulates, which (because it’s so heavily used and because they’re not particularly exotic) tend to be supported in most things. It’s simply the best app I’ve discovered for years. It can even bridge on to your existing network adapter so it will appear as a completely separate machine on your network. I never expected anything so powerful to just work so smoothly, but it really really does. You can make the VM ‘capture’ whatever hardware on your local machine that you choose (optical drives, serial ports, etc.). You can run an X server on your Windows install (eXceed for example) and ssh into your VM so that Windows can handle any X Windows graphics natively (the VM doesn’t emulate a very powerful video card). It’s really cool, and I love not having to reboot my system every time I want to do a bit of development work. They also do a free “Player” version which lets you run, but not create, virtual machines. You can download different pre-prepared virtual machines to play with, so it’s a good option for testing the thing out.
Virtual PC was a little less powerful last I used it; getting the networking operational proved pretty tricky, and not nearly as elegant as VMWare’s system.
Another link to look at to try to figure out what might cause false positives: Microsoft responds to Windows Genuine Advantage false positive accusations | Ars Technica Note that about 20% of the positives are false, as someone else noted.
(It may have been mentioned, but) IIRC, MS queries your hardware to find out what computer the installation is on. If you change something significant, I’m assuming like the motherboard, it’s a “different” computer. Because of course, Windows doesn’t have a significant customer base that upgrades by hand and in stages :rolleyes:
Been there, done that, bought the shirt.
(The following will piss off any teachers enjoying the summer off and still conplaining about pay. If you’re actually working, trust me, you’re a select few.)
The local high schools here literally throw out computers. I mean they throw them in the Dumpsters and let them go. I salvaged 2 and bought an extra router to hook up. I have XP running on one, Ubuntu on another, and eLive on the third. (The last 2 are Linux boxes.)
Everything is integrated (better have the password if you want to get past the routers 
)
I taunt the guys at work that know more about this than I, and they haven’t gotten close to breaking in. The wager is 2 kegs should they get access. I’m not worried about budgeting, they aren’t getting in, regardless of any programs to crack them.
Linux, I can tell you, isn’t the Utopia you (nor I) thought it was.
Here’s why Windows is so vulnerable in the minds of some.
First, you can set up password-protected accounts. It’s so simple, but people just don’t care to learn about the OS and security. Without setting accounts (users) anyone with access to a port on your system can use it like you can.
If you use a router for broadband connectivity, you better protect that. Routers have insanely easy access. From there you can control ports being used.
And have you tried to install drivers as basic as something to get your printer operating? It’s getting better depending on your Linux distro, but nothing close to PnP on a Windows box.
Windows isn’t teh evillll some make it out to be. Half the effort spent on installing Linux would be enough to secure a Windows machine.
I’ll run both OS’s, but Windows is the one I use 99% of the time.
If you read the story you linked closely, you’ll see that “false positive” refers to someone who believes in good faith to have a legal copy of Windows, but may still nonetheless have a mismatched version and key for one of several reasons; IOW, the person has a mis-licensed copy through either error or someone else’s carelessness or deliberate misuse. This is why if you explain to Microsoft how you came by your copy and key they will in many cases simply send you a replacement key and fix utility for free.
Before you download anything on Patch Tuesday it behooves you to check the Reg or the trade rags to see what they screwed up this time. Most of my daughter’s floor at college wasn’t able to open stuff in Office because of that bug - she was okay because I had loaded Open Office on her laptop - then I showed her the wonders of system restore. My old Star Office stuff stopped working. For WGA, I saw the problem, so I never downloaded that patch. They may force it on you soon, though.
In the same vein, Computerworld reported how MS people were calling companies and claiming they needed a license audit. It turned out this was a way of trying to get MS consultants in, and they had no evidence at all that anyone was out of compliance.
Moral: If you think MS is doing something reasonable, think again.
Actually, a bit older than that.
IBM’s founding company started in 1885, so it’s 121 years old this year.
I know, I was playing off somebody else talking about buying a shifty comp from “a 22-year-old geek”.
That’s who I’m pissed at. We’re in the same situation in my house.
About once every three or four months I think “I should switch.”
Then I need to do something that should be trivial - and spend 8 hours hunting down answers for poorly documented and completely untested code (and having it still not work because there’s a missing dependency somewhere) and run screaming back to Windows where the process takes 5 minutes.
To paraphrase Churchill - Windows is the worst, apart from all the others.
Well, they won’t be dumping right away. They didn’t stop supporting Win2k until several years after XP came out. They have a whole schedule for phase-outs.
But, despite all the pies MS has their software fingers stuck in, they’re bread and butter is Office and Windows, sales of both of which have been petering out over the last few years.
On the Vista front, within the last two years, MS has presented advance versions of their new OS to the major third-party developers so they can tweak the bestsellers to run on it. These vendors have been singularly unimpressed with Vista, and have predicted only a 30% market share for it. I haven’t read a whole lot from the industry or the dedicated media who have had a great deal of access to Vista and the new Office, other than they are of the distinct impression that they are going to be complete turkeys, ones which require you to dramatically upgrade your system so you can run them and find that fact out for yourself.
So my bet would be that pragmatic heads at MS are thinking maybe they need to shore up profits on their proven OS. Hence WGA.
Or, they could try writing decent code for a change.
One of the PC mags I occassionally read has speculated that Apple’s planning on releasing a version of OSX for PCs. If Vista’s the dog that folks are claiming it to be (the RAM requirements are just absurd from what I hear) and Apple does release OSX for PCs (though I’d be surprised if they did), MS may just find themselves dead in the water very quickly.
I, for one, welcome our new OS X overlords.
The popup recently also appeared on my sisters laptop, an Acer with a genuine copy of Windows XP. It goes away after a few days.
If anybody is thinking of switching to Linux, Fedora Core 5 is really good.
As in a version of OSX that would install on the PC I built myself, not on special OSX only PCs sold by Dell and Gateway?
I wish.
But as they say, wish in one hand and crap in the other. See which one fills up first.