Bend over people, Vistas on it’s way

Yep, its yet another sam-berates-Windows comment.

3 Things in the new Vista Licence this time around, in increasing order of importance.

DRM-ed material won’t/shouldn’t work in a virtual Vista

Currently, most people don’t know about virtualisation in the computing industry. It’s kinda like the Net back in the early 90’s; geeky and not much use.

But, in the next few years, you’ll be able to run Linux, WindowsXP, 98, Vista and *BSD all at the same time, side by side, doing different things. Or have the TV using MythOS on the TV card, you writing a document in Linux and your kids playing the Sims in XP on a thin client upstairs, all from the same machine.

Alas, with Vista you won’t be able to play all that DRM-ed music from Napster, according to the released EULA : http://www.macintouch.com/#tips.2006.10.13

Only 1 Re-Install

Yep, break Vista twice [or Vista breaks twice], buy a new shiny OS. Given MS’ track record on bugs, security holes, flaws and the like, I have a feeling this will quickly be dropped when people complain, MS’ phone lines get jammed with users trying to reinstall, the website goes down and the EC get involved again.

Validation fails, MS disables your computer

Yes. MS will disable most functionality of your computer if it fails the validation process, which “will from time to time validate the software, update or require download of the validation feature of the software”

What if it fails this validation? “the functionality of the software may be affected”

According to Techweb [http://www.techweb.com/wire/software/193300234], Vista disables itself “after a set period, leaving the user access only to the default Web browser, and then only for an hour at a time.”

WTF? I suffer a hard disk crash, the validation key stored gets garbled, validation fails and Vista locks itself down??

‘Aha’, I think, ‘I’ll reinstall. Wait, I already reinstalled once, so it’ll lock me out upon reinstallation’

Only thing is, I can’t get on the net long enough to fix the problem because Vista keeps closing the browser down.

And my virtualized copy of Vista on my laptop won’t play my Napster tunes, so I can’t use that.

[Don’t worry people, I’m not going out to buy Vista or Napster tunes, its for illustration purposes ;-) ]

So, to summarise, Vista will take a lot of the remaining freedoms away from it’s users to squeeze even more money to maintain it’s share price.

Thing is, I feel sorry for the good programmers who work at MS, as they hold a lot of the stock; when it tanks [and it will tank], they are out of pocket twice, once in stock and second being out of a job.

So people, bend over, Windows Vista is on its way, only MS forgot to bring the vaseline.