According to Brent :
On Sep 22, 4:50 pm, (DoN. Nichols) wrote:
[ ... ]
This might not be so bad -- except that if it can't contact the
server, it *assumes* that the software is pirated.
And Microsoft has already had the servers go down -- for
something like 18 hours, resulting in a lot of people with perfectly
legal copies of Windows Vista being accused by their OS of running
pirated software and thus their OS being crippled.
I followed a pointer to a Microsoft blog site where a lot of
users were muttering "linux" after being shut down like this.
[ ... ]
You are aware officially vista is a PER INSTANCE licence. A reformat
officially invalidates your windows license and you do not own your
COPY of the OS on one computer anymore
Ouch! Nasty!
you only own vista for one instance of installation
reformats as ser the license agreement require you re-purchase a Vista
instance
If I had ever been tempted to buy vista (which I haven't) this
would be the final straw. :-)
Hows that for Gouging? IF i run afoul of that issue with M$ i will be
abandining their OS for PC's (I already have for servers)
Have you ever heard of them enforcing this? It strikes me as
particularly nasty when a system is badly compromised by a virus where
reformat and reinstall is the only sensible choice (assuming that you
need to keep running the same OS which became vulnerable to the virus in
the first place. :-)
And for contrast, Sun makes Solaris 10 available for download
for free -- you just have to register (once), and tell them your best
guess as to the number of systems you will be running it on at first.
(And, you don't need to enter a license key with each install, either. :-)
After that, you can install on as many systems as you can
collect.
For that matter -- just before the upgrade to Solaris 10 U4,
they would ship you *free* the DVD-ROMs for Solaris 10 for SPARCs, and
for x86 systems, and their fancy development environment (Studio 11)
including the c, c++, and FORTRAN (f77, f90, f95) compilers, as well as
the java development environment (netbeans).
What you download is the images of those DVD ROMs and CD-ROMS,
but having them shipped is more convenient, since the image of the
DVD-ROM is on the order of a day's download or more with a T1
connection. (They provide a program to automate the download, including
retrys if the checksums fail or if the download is interrupted.)
Granted -- the computers to run these cost a lot *new* -- but I
don't think that I've paid more than $250.00 for any of the ones which I
am currently running, and some have been as little as $20.00 at a
hamfest.
And there are quite a few other unix systems free for the
download. I particularly like OpenBSD (enough so I buy a new set of
CD-ROMs every other release or so, instead of downloading it every
time).
Enjoy,
DoN.
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