Last night, I formatted my laptop and loaded the final version of Windows Vista. The entire process: partition, format and installation took 18 minutes. Eighteen minutes after booting from the DVD, I was browsing the web wirelessly. Every device was detected and worked perfectly. This is not a review of Vista (maybe later), but I am literally amazed at the swift, completely painless installation. Color me impressed.
Tomorrow: the other half of my dual boot setup - Ubuntu 6.10.
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I’ve been thoroughly impressed with what I’ve heard of Vista to date. The twit.tv podcasts (namely Windows Weekly and Security Now) have given some really admirable credit to the development process of Vista and the final outcome. It’s certainly still a “we’ll see” sort of thing, but I’d certainly be curious of your thoughts after some time and I’ll be looking forward to using Vista personally.
Ubuntu is now on every machine I own, as the single host OS on one and as a VM on a two Windows machines. I love it.
David Russell
December 29th, 2006
Well, Zack, I know you probably expect this from me, but I have to mention that I was reading on the NANOG mail archives yesterday that people have discovered that Vista phones home to Microsoft to continuously verify that it is a legitimate copy. If it finds that it is not, or if it is not allowed to phone home, it goes into a “reduced functionality” mode. This is just what I read. However, there were many comments in that direction. Now, my problem with that is that if you are actually security concious enough to block all out-going communication, then you could potentially hurt yourself by unknowingly putting your Windows box in a “reduced functionality” mode. Once again, Microsoft has created a problem for their users by trying to cover their own rear end and try to stop the pirates from using their stuff without paying.
This is just as bad as DRM. I am tired of Microsoft and everyone else checking up on me. I am tired of having my hardware and software limited to whatever purpose the vendor decides to lock me into. If I buy something, give me full use of it. This is just another black mark against Microsoft to me.
P.S. - And if the game developers would stop catering to Microsoft and its Direct X, I would no longer need Windblows for anything.
…sorry for the rant.
Philip
January 4th, 2007
Philip, this started as a response to your comment, but ended up being a semi-rambling, disjointed response to several arguments I hear frequently in many of the open-source corners of the web. Please disregard any use of the word “you” because it is not directed at you personally.
This is going to be fun.
First of all, let me say that I fully support Linux and the open-source community. This is a general statement, as there are always aspects I will disagree with when dealing with such a distributed community as the open-source one. Anyways, I consider myself a relatively experienced Linux user who really likes the whole idea of open-source software. Having said that, I want to deal with some issues I have with how Microsoft and “corporate” software companies are often portrayed within Linux/open-source circles.
Microsoft is far from a perfect company. They have done many questionable things over the years. There is no doubt about that. They are often of being an anti-competitive monopoly. Fair enough. BUT – how many companies do not try to do the same thing every day? Do companies not want to be the dominant force in their market? Do they NOT want to drive away competitors? Of course they do. Microsoft’s main problem was that they became too successful. They were able to not only succeed, but dominate. With that overwhelming market control, they made deals, bought out rivals, forged OEM agreements with manufacturers, etc. Microsoft’s rivals did not like this. So, rather than keep trying to compete in a marketplace of products and ideas, they went to the government and asserted the claim that Microsoft was anti-competitive. Now, I am not saying that Microsoft was NOT anti-competitive; merely that virtually all businesses are as anti-competitive as they possibly can be. They want to drive out the other guys. OK, so Microsoft becomes a huge behemoth of an organization. They become Public Enemy #1. After all, any company as profitable as Microsoft must be doing something wrong, right?
People complain that Microsoft got where they are because of anticompetitive behavior and not because their products were better. Well, I say they got where they did initially because Bill Gates and company merely out-maneuvered their rivals. The better product is NEVER guaranteed to be the dominant one. I mean, Beta was a vastly superior to VHS but the VHS camp out-marketed the Beta group. OK, guess I am going off on a tangent here.
Let’s delve into the WGA/activation and all that fun stuff. I must say that I have absolute no problem whatsoever with Microsoft or any other company protecting their intellectual property. None. At all. Zero. Zilch. This might seem contradictory to my posted comments on DRM several months ago, but not at all. It is not the fact that companies want to protect their property, music, software or whatever – my problem is oftentimes in the implementation of these protections. I do not buy music from iTunes (generally, though I have recently on one occasion in a bind for a quick track from some reason). I have no issue with the fact that Apple protects the audio files – I would expect nothing less. If I were a record company, I would demand my music be protected too. The problem I have is that the DRM is not cross-platform-compatible and that I must use iTunes and/or an iPod to listen to it. And yes, I know I could burn a CD and re-rip to mp3/ogg or whatever, but that is a lame workaround that will result in additional quality loss to an already compressed file. If I buy music of any kind, I want to be able to listen to it in any form that I desire on any device I own. My problem with Apple’s Fairplay is that it locks you into Apple products. However, I want to be clear that in my opinion, there is absolutely nothing illegal or unethical about this. It is a business model they have chosen and consumers can choose whether they like it or not. If I don’t want to download music from iTunes, I can always buy a CD.
So, how does that relate to Windows? It is the same concept. Microsoft has the right to protect its intellectual property. I have seen nothing that definitively demonstrates to me that Vista phones home and goes into Reduced Functionality Mode if it cannot establish a connection to Microsoft. I would have a problem with them if that was something that Vista did. Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t see it. One part that seems to be true is that when you go to download updates for your copy of Vista, part of the process includes looking for leaked volume license keys and known hacks that modify OS-specific files. I have no problem with either of those measures if they are done correctly. If I am using an illegal key, and I go to Microsoft, they have every right to validate that I am a paying customer before allowing me to download updates or enhancements.
Please don’t misunderstand what I am saying, I am not saying that I have never used **cough**unauthorized**coughs** software. I am just saying that I think Microsoft has the right to use reasonable means to ensure that people are not using their software illegally. Will “innocent” users be caught up in this? Maybe sometimes, sure. That’s true with anything though.
I have heard people say that Microsoft should not have anti-piracy technology and that, “If their prices were only more reasonable, then people wouldn’t pirate.” That is complete garbage in my opinion. Do you even want to know how many people I know that use pirated versions of the $29.99 Winzip or $29.00 Winrar? Price has nothing to do with it. If people CAN get something for free easily, they oftentimes will, regardless how low the price.
Microsoft loses money to piracy. The music industry loses money to piracy. Sure, their methods of combating it are often ridiculous (RIAA lawsuits, etc), but still, even those work to a certain degree. If the law says downloading music without permission is a crime and you do it, why would the RIAA be wrong to sue you? Of course, they jump the gun a lot, but in principle, defending their legal right to go after people that steal their material is fine with me. After all, a TON of people pirate software and music every day. I know people who have not purchased a single piece of software or a single bit of music since the 1990’s. And there are a lot of them. If anyone thinks that copyright holders don’t lose truckloads of money, then that is just ignoring the obvious. It’s as ridiculous as Napster’s proponents talking about how they were used so frequently by indie artists to distribute their music. Please. I would be willing to bet that ¾ of the traffic on any peer-to-peer system at any given time is pirated material. Should we ban the technology? Of course not. I use it all the time…and, umm, always for legal purpose only.
There will always be the more technical-minding people who can work their way around DRM, WGA or whatever. However, 90% of the people out there won’t bother and will either purchase what they want, find alternative (i.e., open source) or will do without. I think most companies would be willing to just live with the other 10%.
I think that sometimes the open-source community steps onto its soapbox and leaps to its white horse to shout how organizations that dare protect their property are evil, but because they are a “community” and don’t exist to make money, somehow they are morally superior. It’s a tired slogan that gets repackaged every couple of years, but the drumbeat continues.
Open-source is good and I support it, but I have no problem with software companies making money from their products (lots of money) or protecting it. If I do not like how they choose to protect it, then I will not use it (see my Apple comments).
Do I use Windows? Yes, I do. Do I think it is superior to Linux? No, not necessarily, but I do think it is a mature operating system and it suits my needs. I have no interest in teaching Linux to my wife, even though it might require little effort. I just don’t care. She doesn’t care. I happen to love Linux and have for years. That is why I dual-boot. Additionally, my other family members, friends and associates – many of them use Windows and I am often asked for help, advice, whatever. We live in a Windows world right now and I have no interest in inconveniencing myself just so I can sleep better knowing I am using open-source software. Besides, it doesn’t matter to me, so I wouldn’t sleep any better either way.
In the end, I love technology and I want to know and master as much of it as I can – Windows, Linux, Unix, OSX, whatever I can get my hands on. It’s all fun to me. I feel blessed and fortunate to work with something I really love – technology…in all its many flavors.
Wow, this was a long, somewhat disjointed post. Sorry – I should have kind of planned it out a little better…or at all. I was writing it sporadically while doing two other things.
By the way: this post was written in the open-source Firefox web browser running under the open-source Ubuntu 6.10 Linux distribution. And I’ll post a little something about my Ubuntu installation experience later on.
Zack
January 11th, 2007