Vista to Take Hard Stand Against Piracy

Excite News ^ | 4 October 2006 | ALLISON LINN

[ShadowAce]

[fhlh]

Good Luck, Micro$oft!

[MortMan]

Ruh-roh. Microsoft may well see lawsuits when OEM versions of Vista are erroneously identified as pirated - as with the current anti-piracy software they have. This will undoubtedly end up costing some business somewhere a bunch of money.

JMHO.

[TChris]

The company also said it has added more sophisticated technology for monitoring whether a system is pirated. For example, the system will be able to perform some piracy checks internally, without contacting Microsoft, Lindeman said.

Microsoft is just itching for a customer revolt.

[dubie]

who will actually buy vista I wonder?

[ShadowAce]

Yeah--It seems that every time I turn around, MS is doing something to pi$$ off its customers.

It's practically a given that this tool will have false positives and hurt some company's network and productivity.

[furquhart]

Having used Vista Beta 5484 and RC1, I'll say this - if you have modern hardware, it's probably worth the money.

But Vista is a real bear.

The most interesting thing about Vista is that it demands:

1) I'd say over 1 Gig of Ram - 2 Gigs is probably ideal, for now.

2) A high-end video card. Well, not high end - but higher than any integrated graphics chipset, and many low-level stand alone cards.

The real bitch is going to be on Notebooks, most of which - even many "high-end" ones - have integrated graphics. A lot of people are going to be mighty pissed when the find out that their $1500 Lattitude or Thinkpad can't run full Vista with Aero Glass.

[thoughtomator]

It's also a given that the EULA will indemnify Microsoft against any damage their software may do you their customers.

[Dont Mention the War]

Whatever this is, it'll be cracked in less than 24 hours.

And in most cases, being "denied" Aero will be a feature.

[steve-b]

LOL -- once they start inflicting this on millions of legit customers (every one of their anti-bootleg systems to date has had a very high false-positive rate, and I see no reason to suppose they're going to do any better this time), there will be hell to pay.

[kingu]

Kay also doesn't expect the new piracy measures to be that effective against hardcore pirates, who have built de facto businesses selling illegal Windows copies. But he thinks it will stop some lower-level piracy.

See, this is just a question of professionalism. If you decide to nab some copies of Vista to go install into your home computers from your corporate license, yup, they'll be dumbing down your computer. But if you buy it from the Mexican on the street corner who got it from the guy in Hong Kong, well, then you're golden.

Advice to Microsoft: Make the price reasonable; people will pay for it. Make all your products licensed for an entire home or a certain number of seats in business, and you'll make far more money. Do it now; the next generation is getting used to pirating.

[brownsfan]

"Good Luck, Micro$oft!"

It's a win/win for Microsoft and the alternatives. More people will pay for their software, so Microsoft will keep their revenue stream intact.
However, more people will look for alternatives, Apple and Linux. Linux will be the big winner.
The long term effect will be that people, (college kids), who have switched to Linux at home because that's what they could afford, will begin to demand what they've used at home, at work.
Microsoft knows the model well, it worked for them in the early days of the PC when you could steal all the Microsoft stuff you felt inclined to steal.

[fhlh]

completely agree.

I just don't see the need to move to vista in the first place... I don't see anything REVOLUTIONARY about it.

[Republicain]

Time to 'Think different'...

[Still Thinking]

A lot of people are going to be mighty pissed when the find out that their $1500 Lattitude or Thinkpad can't run full Vista with Aero Glass.

Only stupid people. An operating system is only supposed to serve as an abstraction layer between apps and the hardware. If it weren't for Bill Gates, people wouldn't have this moronic idea that merely running an operation system is supposed to be an "experience" and an end in itself.

[Dead Corpse]

I had exactly the same thought. We ran in to just this problem while auditing some of our workstation and server clients.

This isn't gonna go over well.

[stylin19a]

I'm guessing the crackers are the vista beta testers.

[ShadowAce]

This isn't gonna go over well.

Nope. I'm gonna watch the adoption rate of this closely to see how measures like this affect customers' attitudes.

[VanDeKoik]

Bah.

Im loving Ubuntu too much to care about Vista.