I don't understand how some people think free ownership of commercially produced software is some sort of birthright.  
As much as I agree that some versions of Vista and a lot of the top end software (photoshop,ms office et al) are or can be prohibitively expensive I see this as no excuse for people just helping themselves to whatever they fancy,it's crazy.
I say yay for the BlackScreenOfDeath!  
If you don't want the grief don't be a teef.      

and if they try something new like this they will mess everyone else's puter up like be4 with the last update

A thief is a thief, no matter what the disguise, no matter what they are stealing.

As for the " its not lost revenues, we wouldn't have bought it anyways" B.S.... Fine don't buy it , but don't use it.

The way the world works... if you want something, you BUY it..

you don't steal it and try to justify it by saying "If I had to pay for it I wouldn't use it" the best yet Ive heard was "I'm doing the Dev's a service by pirating their software,I'm making it so popular" .... who gives a crap if the softwares popular among non paying thieves? You think Ford goes bragging about how many taurses are stolen every year????

Those things may be true and they may be poor coustomer service . . but they are not wrong.  Using a MS product is a choice.  People can alsways say no and get an Apple (a company that charges a high fee for products AND controls the software AND the hardware) or go with Linux.

Zubaz waits for Amiga (again)   

Sorry, Zubaz, but they ARE wrong. Something doesn't have to be illegal to be wrong. A basic tenet of both law and common sense is that one cannot execise free choice or give free consent when under duress. If your job says you use certain software products, and sometimes you have to take work home with you, you don't have a real choice that you can do something else. You buy the products you need to have.

And you don't get to choose whether you pay the American price for Windows or the Chinese price. And besides, saying "pick Mac" as a defence against being gouged by MS presupposes you're not being gouged by Apple. Linux? Great for us, but I'm not sure how well my elderly parents are going to fare updating to the latest versions of gtk and Gnome, not to mention getting their new photo printer working. This argument smacks of "it's not WRONG to mug you, because you could have walked down a better lit alley. You had a choice."

You don't get to choose if the copy protection software added on to that new game disables functionality on your DVD burner or not; it is installed surreptitiously.

You must think it's right that after buying a movie on DVD, you have to buy it again if you want to watch it on your Ipod (if it's even available). Or that the fast forward button on your DVD player is disabled when the introductory advertisements play EVERY TIME you put the disc in.

And if you really think the way the RIAA is using the court system for extortion is ethical and therefore "not wrong" then I'm afraid there's really no room to find common ground.

There's right, and there's wrong. Those things are wrong, and the companies that do those things should be ashamed. My ethical code does not allow me to say that an immoral act is ok simply because it has become commonplace.

Cheers...

It's about time microsoft pulled thier head out of the sand and retaliated to the pirates, because half the reason the bloody software costs so much in the first place is due to theft , and piracy of code etc pushing up the price to try and cut thier loses

I am certainly not worried as all my software is legit, i am in design so all my software is tax deductuedable anyways lol.

But for those who are not so lucky i can certainly see the appeal to download pireated stuff, i mean hell it's not hard to do is it

[Removed by admin.  No need to post ways to get around systems.  -- ZubaZ]

I don't do this myself as i have always supported the great work stardock and stardock design are doing, it's great a place offers designers a place to not only share thier creativiy but also make some $ at the same time.

But amyways i'm off topic now so meh ......

Um, well I've got a genuine copy of vista. Got updates, my own activatiion key and everything...

I guess pirates just stay one step ahead

I heard they were doing something that would make Vista completely vanish off the face of the earth as if it never even existed..................  





......then I woke up   


(The preceding has been brought to you by Skinner's Rant Magazine.) 

This video for MS OEMs seems like it ends in a Black screen. http://oem.microsoft.com/downloads/public/US/wgavista/Flash.html

From the source of the original story (http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/index.php/id;1971652632) (emphasis mine):

So maybe Zoomba should save this article for later? 

To reply to some, i am not saying that piracy is right if they "never would've bought it" in the first place... I'm just saying that to quote those copies as "lost revenue" is wrong and misleading - basically a way to make the company complaining look more like a victim than it really is.

Again - i will just say that it goes like this...
1. "Lost revenue" is due to piracy (as they say)
2. they introduce stuff to reduce piracy, and claim it's working (remember the big China bust?)
3. If high costs are due to piracy (and not corporate gouging) as they claim, prices go down as piracy goes down.

BONK! Sorry, logic fails... instead of prices going down as piracy is reduced (as it should according to their logic), they jack it higher still.
And this becomes even more of an affront in the face of the China pricing which people pointed out on here (i had been unaware of that bit).

The__Goo (post 33) was completely right (though i think 50$ is a little too low), that their constant ballooning of prices only contributes to the piracy problem, and if they brought the price DOWN to something reasonable (like the OEM copies) they would sell a LOT more...

I'm sure they already make a major profit just through sheer volume of sales, and if they lowered the price some, and sold that many more - and found just the right sweet spot balance between the two (those good old calculus optimizations of multiple factors, in this case price and sales volume), i'm SURE they could make even more.
So it would be an all around win as more people buy (benefiting MS) and it costs reasonable (benefiting the consumer).

Overpriced. Total control of OS and hardware.
I'll stick with Windows as my primary OS. 

Well if Microsoft can send out updates to a computer even with Automatic Updates turned off, Then sending out a command to shut down a pirated copy of windows shouldn't be a problem for them.

WWW Link


Kind of makes you wonder just how many and Just WHAT kinds of commands Microsoft sends to your computer.

Sorry Philly if I had of known I would have linked to it..  

ON another note I have been keeping track of just how many Microsoft Programs that try to dial home. So far I have 10 that I know about. Wonder just how many I don't know about.

One of them is windows Explorer.. Sure would like to know why Windows Explorer needs to dial home???