Comments on: Microsoft makes copying Vista a monster task

From the box to the code, Redmond is clamping down, forcing pirates to go to greater lengths to create "Frankenbuilds" that can evade detection.
Photo: Staying ahead of pirates

[pmchefalo]

Microsoft OS Are Not Volume Licensed

A look at the license agreements shows that Microsoft operating systems are ONLY licensed via OEM and full packaged product (retail full versions) versions.

If a PC is licensed the OEM or FPP terms agree: for the former the license is tied to the motherboard of the PC; for the latter the copy can be moved in entirity (not copied) from one PC to another.

OS upgrades are available via volume license. I am not completely sure what the license status of a "home use" OS upgrade is when an employee leaves. However an employer would have to expend considerable expense to downgrade an employee machine in thiose circumstances, greater than the acquistion cost, so I expect that the employer would not want to reclaim the license. As long as they did not try to count that in their internal usage, I'm pretty sure that Microsoft would be indifferent, and the employee would be safe. After all, that is a valid license as installed.

[peacefulsoul]

Press release copy

I can't beleive that news.com chose to just copy and paste a press release as article without any research. During my recent visit to Chennai a 12 grade kid was explaining how you can change few bytes to get license for 99 years.

Since then there has been many such hacks.

[KEITH-1]

Wake Up

Take a look at licensing, activation, W.G.A. etc. as a system and analyse it in the cold hard light of day and see what you come up with.
Software Licensing and all that go's with it is a counter market "RIP OFF' system designed to get their money back because the piraters ripped them off. 2 wrongs don't make a right If somone steels $10.00 from your wallet dose that entitle you to steel $10.00 from someone else's wallet to get your money back.
That's what software licencing is really all about.
As you all have benn saying, a pirater is a crook who will find a way around all this anyway. So who doe's all this really affect, the honest person who pays for their software.

[gmesaric]

Who wants to copy anyway?

My feeling is that MS recently *only* invests a lot in copy
protection, but it seems to me that testing their software is no
priority anymore.

I installed my (BTW, legally purchased) copy of Visio 2007 last
week and after it had destroyed my Outlook 2003, it went on
crippling my whole system (first sound, then network). So I have
to thank MS for my weekend job, reinstalling the whole system,
since the network part of the Windows kernel itself is even
damaged (!!!).

(BTW, I am sending this from my MacBook...)

Have a nice day,

Gerald

[tenaciouse1080]

Terrible OS.. not worth bootlegging.

Used Vista on demo PCs at OfficeDepot the other day.. terrible! Everything is aesthetically SLOWER. I could find plugins for XP to do the same darn useless thing.

Say goodbye to crapware.

[AXG]

Piracy is not right

In my opinion, using any software without paying for it is just not right. In my ethical code, it is called stealing. I do not understand why everyone gets mad if Microsoft puts checks in place to prevent piracy. As long as I have a valid copy of Windows, I do not mind how many times Microsoft WGA checks it. I have 5 copies of Windows XP/Vista obtained either as OEM installed or bought separately. Not one of these copies have failed WGA check in last 6 years. The anti-piracy measures are like a security system. If used incorrectly, it will sound the alarm and treat me, the owner, as an intruder.

As for free Linux, I have wasted enough time on various flavors of Linux to safely say: if you have plenty of free time, feel free to experiment with Linux. You probably won't go very far with it.

The cost factor of Microsoft OS has been pointed out many times as a large factor in promoting piracy. I hope MS will do something about it.

[KZGY1024]

Better Future?

If Microsoft should continue with this plan for any future versions and copies of Windows, I think that it may cause them to lower the price of their OS. This could mean that they do not have to devote so much to battle piracy, which in turn could possibly mean lower prices for future versions of Windows. This probably could happen...or not.

[stecha]

No better time to turn to LINUX

With the ongoing lies published by microsoft, and their campaign of false propaganda. I see no better time than now to turn to a good proven copy of linux. If anyone reading this article written here believes any or all of this garbage. Then you deserve a windows operating system. Lets not forget, it was the security enhancements in xp that ripped it to its knee's. The more you beleive the more they will take. This is why so many commercial computer users are turning to linux to get the job done. Less cost, less attacks and last but not least, less lies from microsoft.
Have a nice day microsoft users and losers. muha ha ha ha ha ha ha haaaaaaaaaaaaaa.

[ITprosupport]

yeah right

The more people that turn to lunix the faster the sales of vista will rise!!great suggestion!!

[stecha]

windows 3.1 on steroids

This new OS from muckasoft is nothing more than history repeating itself. If any of you ever used 3.1 and remember it. you would find microsoft did what the old soviet union and east germany used to do all the time. "Steroids", yep. Lets save time and money, layoff 10,000 U.S. employee's and pay those low wage working foreigners to juice up a copy of windows 3.1. Charge an absorbent amount for any one of thirty different versions. Make you buy a new computer in order to upgrade it. Then prostitute oooops( prosecute ) you for turning to warez to fix it when all MS released patches fail to fix it for you.
Have a nice day muckasoft users and losers.

[sanenazok]

you're past steroids

waay past, really moved on to the hard stuff, didn't you?

I wanted to see what kind of analogy you were going to draw, but basically you got nothing. Were there many versions of Windows 3.1? I guess there was 3.11 and WfW, but both were stepping stones toward 95, and I don't think any of them were marketed at the same time.

The closest thing I could see as being the parallel between Vista and 3.1 is that 3.1 added a slightly slicker look to Windows 3.0 and multimedia features that could easily have been added to 3.0 as well. Instead of releasing a free upgrade to 3.0, greedy MS forced people to buy Windows 3.1. Whoop ti do.

BTW: nobody's forcing anyone else to buy Vista. Compute free or pay MS. It's the users' choice. Heck, you could even buy a Mac and join the growing 5% of computer users. Nobody's entitled to steal software, and warez, contrary to your claim, never fixes or patches your system, just turns it into a zombie.

[rubenerd]

How pathetic.

How pathetic. If Microsoft spent as much money on actually improving the operating system itself (the thing people are paying them to do) and not charging such ridiculous prices, it would reduce piracy a lot more than these paranoid measures. No amount of copy protection is going to change that.

[ChazzMatt]

too funny

I can't believe CNET wrote this. All they talk aobut is Frankenbuild. How 2006.

Have you never heard of Clony or Paradox one-click activators? Do a Google search. Vista is already cracked.

This article is too funny because it's so outdated....

[iRhapsody]

For those who convincing others to switch to Linux

Recently I installed the Ubuntu 6.10 on desktop. Everything worked quite smoothly for me even though I was a first-time user, except for getting the USB wireless adapter WG11v2 to work. It was really a pain in the ass. I had to install the Ndiswrapper, then installed the driver for the WG11v2. It showed the driver installed and the device present. However, I couldn't get it to work after all this effort.

It is just not easy to switch. I know it would take some time to get used to the Linux environment, but how long?

Base on your own experience, how long do you think it would take for an average user to get used to Linux?

For Linux pros, can some of you walk me through setting the WG11v2 on Ubuntu in details? It would be much appreciated!

[stecha]

Here ya go

Step 1: Downloading & Saving
1.) Download ndiswrapper and the Linksys WinXP Drivers
2.) Do NOT extract anything at this point unless specified
3.) Save the ndiswrapper-[version_number].tar.gz file onto a Floppy, CD-R/RW or DVD+-R/RW (or other storage mediums)
3.) Open up the WinXP Driver's .zip file and save the 2 files (bcmwl5.sys & bcmwl5.inf) onto a Floppy, CD-R/RW or DVD+-R/RW (or other storage mediums)
4.) You should have 3 files on your Floppy, CD-R/RW or DVD+-R/RW (or other storage mediums) [http://ndiswrapper-1.0.tar.gz, bcmwl5.sys & bcmwl5.inf|http://ndiswrapper-1.0.tar.gz, bcmwl5.sys & bcmwl5.inf]

Step 2: Installation (Part 1/2)
1.) Extract the 3 files (ndiswrapper-[version_number].tar.gz, bcmwl5.sys and bcmwl5.inf) to /home/djmuk/
2.) Open up your terminal (Shortcut: F4 - if you're in the /home/djmuk/ folder)
3.) Type: su (super-user)
4.) Type your 'root account' password
5.) Type: tar -zxvf ndis (hit tab to auto-complete file name, and hit enter)
6.) Type: cd ndis (hit tab to auto-complete folder name, and hit enter)
7.) Type: make (hit enter)
8.) Type: make install

Step 3: Verification & Installation (Part 2/2)
1.) Type: ls -l /lib/modules/`uname -r`/misc/ (hit enter). This verifies the installation of the kernel module
2.) Type: whereis ndiswrapper loadndisdriver wlan_radio_averatec_5110hx (hit enter). This verifies the installation of user space utilities
3.) Type: /usr/sbin/ndiswrapper -i /home/djmuk/BCMWL5.INF (Case sensitive, if file: 'BCMWL5.INF' is in capitals in /home/djmuk/ then use capitals here)
4.) Type: ndiswrapper -l <-- That's the letter 'L' by the way (not the number one). This verifies the installation of the Windows driver
5.) Type: /sbin/modprobe ndiswrapper (hit enter)
6.) Type: ndiswrapper -m (hit enter)
7.) Type: /sbin/dhclient wlan0 (This activates the wireless connection - FINALLY!)

ALL DONE!

* There is no encryption being used at the moment. I haven't ventured that far yet wink.gif (but I will do when I get some sleep)

You should also note, that if you reboot your machine, you might notice there's no Internet connection.
To fix this, when you log in to the system, immediately open up the terminal and type the last command (Step 3: Part 7): (/sbin/dhclient wlan0). I'm sure there's a way to initiate this upon Start Up - but I'm still a n00b at Linux.

[dogatemycomputer]

OpenSUSE 10.2 out of the box

I installed OpenSUSE 10.2 as a farce on a machine here at the office about 45 days ago. I expected it to crash and burn. Ironically.. it worked so well that I gave up my Windows machine about 2 weeks later. (We use Exchange which makes Evolution a bit temperamental but it still works well enough that I don't have any reason to keep Outlook).

I also bought a IOMega NAS running Windows Appliance Server. I had trouble getting multiple people to authenticate (Appliance has a licensing limitation that only allows 25 people to connect) so we converted that to linux with apache.

About 2 weeks ago I converted my primary home machine to linux with a separate Windows machine for gaming. After finding that Unreal Tournament (including the upcoming Unreal 3 Engine) and World of Warcraft both work well with linux.. I might convert my Windows machine too.

For those of you who are looking for stability then I would suggest OpenSUSE. If you're looking for bleeding edge technology with a great support network then Ubuntu/Kubuntu are both excellent alternatives.

[stehakeem]

Useful zune converter

Thank you so much for providing this.
http://www.zuneconverter.net

[stecha]

Good Answer

Unfortunately, People that use microsoft windows use it because they cannot think for them selves. Lets look at what's involved in a good copy of linux.
1. The ability to think for yourself
2. Not dependant on the ease of use factor
3. The ability to read
And this list just go's on. In fact, windows makes you lazier studies show. So if you want to be thoughtless, overweight, bald( from scratching head )Then I suggest you pic up your copy of vista from your closest over priced garbage shop. Sorry windows users that is BEST BUY.

[Fil0403]

Ignorant Comment

Unfortunately, people who don't use Microsoft Windows do it because they think they are cool if they do it like that. Let's look at what's involved in a good copy of Linux then.
1. The ability to believe you know a lot about computers if you just use Linux instead of Windows.
2. Dependant on the factor of not being able to really do anything but be happy enough to say you take 1 hour to do something in Linux that you can do in 15 seconds in Windows.
3. The patiente to read a 500 pages manual everytime you want to do such coplicated and complex tasks as uninstalling a program or getting your microphone to work with Skype.
And this list just goes on too.
In fact, Windows makes you more efficient, is more secure and is the most used OS in the world, studies show too.
So if you want to be stupid, geek, wear glasses (from not undersating anything you see on the screen) then I suggest you download your copy of Linux from your favourite sad geek site and prepare yourself for a lot of manuals-reading.
Sorry Linux users that is PLAIN RETARDED.

[wemccullough]

Possible Glitch Going Forward

On my duel-boot Vista and XP system I sometimes try to download software from Microsoft which is not compatible with the operating system I boot on and get the failure notification that my system is not valid. I hope no functionality gets disabled because of this failure to validate. I would prefer they respond with some indication that the software is not compatible and I hope they review this situation going forward.