Well they already have that technology in place. In fact, that technology was in place 15 years ago. A lot of higher end software came with a 'dongle' that you have to attach to a serial or parallel port in order for the software to work. I remember running some high end video editing software in high school that required one.
I agree that making the user use a USB dongle isn't a big deal. If one usb port dies, use another. However, this is only good for desktops. Laptop users might find it inconvenient.
Or MS could just pull its collective head out of its ass and realize that they're going to be losing a lot of business in the next 2-3 years by crippling piracy this way.
Tweakers and enthusiasts will be crippled when re-installing the OS (even if it's legit). That in turn leads to frustration and a gradual move away from Vista. And guess what kind of people staff most IT departments? Right, tweakers and enthusiasts. A move away from Vista on the personal level leads to moves away from Vista on the business level. Gradual at first, but you'll see the mass effects in 18-24 months.
With Windows XP the deciding factor to weither or not a computer is a new computer or not is the motherboard.
It's the sort of way to figure it out if there is a dispute.
It's like this:
If my great grandpa had a ax and he used it all his life...
And my grandpa had the ax and he used it all his life until he broke the handle which he replaced...
Then my father got it and he used it all his life except the head wore out and replaced...
And I got it now, is it still my great grandpa's axe?
So if nothing has changed then I expect that if push comes to shove with Microsoft if you have a different motherboard then it's a different computer and it counts as a transfer. All except if the motherboard is a OEM replacement for a hardware failure.
And frankly those guys selling 'OEM' licenses of XP along with a floppy drive or something were full of crap about the legality. OEM is suppose to be for people who build computers for OTHER people. But MS looks the other way because a sale is a sale.
Same thing with this. If there is a problem then all it will require will be a phone call.
This sort of thing is only realy going to apply to businesses. For individuals it's more important to Microsoft to keep you dependant on their OS rather then making a single extra sale.
Wrong. Please don't project your apathy about the ridiculous and draconian changes to the license onto everyone. If Vista sticks around for as long as XP has, and if I were to get a retail license, I would be forced to buy multiple copies of Vista for the same computer if I upgrade major components (CPU, motherboard) of the "hardware system" once every 1.5 years. Will you tell me that such nonsense is perfectly acceptable, and that Microsoft should be able to make such unreasonable demands without anyone being allowed to express a complaint about it?
Shamrock
Golden Member
- Oct 11, 1999
- 1,439
- 561
- 136
No VM for basic and premium either. Also found more on Slashdot.
"For instance, Home Basic users can't copy ISOs to their hard drives, can't run in a virtualized environment, and can only share files and printers to a maximum of 5 network devices."
I think we ought to wait for RTM and once Vista is on store shelves we can find out what the real deal is.
January is quite a ways off (for Consumers) and I'll reserve comment until such time.
Sounds like a good reason to stop being so dependant to me.
With the speed computers have you can easily run w2k or Win98 in a VM environment created by Qemu or Vmware for application compatability and you never realy have to by another Microsoft license again. (assuming, of course, you already have licenses for those systems) Especially when you get machines with multiple cpu cores.
For instance qemu is open source and free. For speed you may want to install a kqemu kernel module (which unfortunately is propriaty and closed), but it's not required.
qemu -hda harddrive.img -cdrom w2kinstall.iso -boot d -smb ~/share
Pretty simple stuff when you think about it. And the nice thing about VMs is that you can copy them and move them from computer to computer and there is no change in the hardware as far as the OS is concerned.
edit:
or
qemu -hda harddrive.img -cdrom /dev/cdrom -boot d -smb ~/share
If you'd rather use a real cdrom.
That's a hypothetical situation. I'm just dependent on an operating system that offers proper color management and some application with the tools, format support, and ease of use for high-end digital photo processing. If Microsoft actually follows through with this, I can always stick with Windows XP until a) I can get a Mac Pro or b) the GIMP developers catch up to this millennium in terms of color management support and other stuff that doesn't matter to anyone except serious digital photographers (probably why no one cares to implement such features).
And just think what will happen when the crackers with their key-gen programs happens to guess a few legit keys?
Microsoft really is becoming retarded - and so is the whole goddamned world for that matter - but that is another conversation, altogether.
Microsoft really is becoming retarded - and so is the whole goddamned world for that matter - but that is another conversation, altogether.
Well thats why I suggested it there are plenty of companies that have a security dongle (usb) that you need to install in order to use their software, the guy who sells snap-on tools at my friends shop's inventory software is setup like thatthere is a delay however in that the software will be functional for a week or 2 if the dongle is missing but after that your locked out... so I would think tieing vista to a $5 usb thumbdrive like the ones that they give away at all the trade shows would be a good way of doing it and I wonder if yo ucould even duplicate it so you had a backup of it if need be? I don't know the guts of a usb drive which is to say if there is a unique hardware ID assigned to it (similar to a MAC addrdess) but I am sure there will be a hack or a workaround with vista, pirates rule the world!
What? You don't think Linux has color management? It's not exactly a 'high end' thing anymore. Maybe 5 years ago, not so much anymore. It's not super nice, but it's aviable. In Linux it's pretty primitive now but it's being worked on.
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/OpenIcc
It's mostly done through the form of ICC color profiles. Gimp support for it is still new, but it works. Also I do.. I REALY DO understand the point of color depths greater then 8bit, but still it's vastly overrated for what people think they need it for. (of course nowadays 'serious' digital 'artists' are sounding more and more like 'serious' audiophiles.
I know some stuff about all this sort of thing. Gone to school a long time ago for it. For instance I know that CYMK is used for printing because it's easier to have a seperate color channel for black then to try to combine the much more expensive colors to make darkness. So if you have any questions I'd be happy to answer them about Linux stuff.There are tools to help you calibrate your scanner and your printers. Publishing tools like Scribus support CYMK colors very well and support color profiles. Krita is still fairly immature, but it has deep color depth support and CYMK for printing support as well as support for some HD formats.
Support for hardware calibration of your monitor has been around for years, but it only supported one or two relatively old and very expensive devices. Recent support has been added for Xrite DTP-94 device for calibrating lcd and crt montitors. Of course there are things to help you eyeball it.
Of course this is all so very hypothetical.
One page you may be interested in is something curiously called 'HOW-TO: Adobe Photoshop CS2 on Ubuntu - 10 steps'.
http://blog.publicidadpixelada.com/2006...dobe-photoshop-cs2-on-ubuntu-10-steps/
To bad it's bandwidth has been burned up and is only aviable via google cache.
http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:Vso...en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=1&client=firefox-a
However then again you can always get a Mac. Except... the licensing terms for Mac OS is much worse then Vista. They avoid most of the problems, of course, by only allowing you to use it on very specific hardware, instead of allowing you to choose like Microsoft does!
Interesting. Wow, I'm surprised that they have support for a colorimeter that one can actually buy (not to mention that it's USB, not serial!). Eyeballing it simply is not going to work for serious stuff, needless to say.
I don't care about CMYK for my work, but I like to use larger color working spaces (Adobe RGB or even ProPhoto RGB if the image calls for it), and please don't try to compare my desire for 16 bit support (mainly for the large color spaces, to prevent banding in gradients, e.g. sky, after edits) to "serious" audiophiles who use $2000 power cords and custom wooden knobs for their potentiometers to "improve" audio quality. It's nice to dismiss the need for 16 bit because GIMP doesn't have it, but that doesn't change the fact that unlike those other things, 16bpc can actually be useful.
It will be interesting to check back in a year or so to see how things are coming. Hopefully GIMP will have 16 bit support, and maybe there will even be some rudimentary support for XMP metadata in some sort of basic image viewer, that hopefully supports DNG raw files, because that's what I have 80GB+ of already (tagged with info by Bridge in XMP, of course).
Sorry, I digress. Back to discussing MS's licensing practices...
I don't care about CMYK for my work, but I like to use larger color working spaces (Adobe RGB or even ProPhoto RGB if the image calls for it), and please don't try to compare my desire for 16 bit support (mainly for the large color spaces, to prevent banding in gradients, e.g. sky, after edits) to "serious" audiophiles who use $2000 power cords and custom wooden knobs for their potentiometers to "improve" audio quality. It's nice to dismiss the need for 16 bit because GIMP doesn't have it, but that doesn't change the fact that unlike those other things, 16bpc can actually be useful.
It will be interesting to check back in a year or so to see how things are coming. Hopefully GIMP will have 16 bit support, and maybe there will even be some rudimentary support for XMP metadata in some sort of basic image viewer, that hopefully supports DNG raw files, because that's what I have 80GB+ of already (tagged with info by Bridge in XMP, of course).
Sorry, I digress. Back to discussing MS's licensing practices...
Most people don't buy windows, full stop. 80% of windows installs are pirated. That's what they're trying to fix. But hopefully they're digging their own smelly grave.
And this install i'm on is legal. I'm at work.
RebateMonger
Elite Member
- Dec 24, 2005
- 11,586
- 0
- 0
You don't remember the "golden days" of dongles? When you had two or more programs that EACH required its own dongle? So you had to start stacking dongles on top of each other so that each would be read?
Hardware copy protection has always proven impractical, from the days of Lotus 123 floppy potection, to dongles, to various attempts to encrpyt CDs. It causes too many problems for legitmate end users.
From a 1996 UseNet post, discussing dongles:
"A "Dongle" is just another name for a hardware key. LW uses the
Sentinel Pro dongle from Rainbow Technologies. The dongle is about 3"
long and plugs into your parallel port. It has a male and female end so
you can "stack" dongles on it from your various apps, or add a printer
or other peripheral device to the end. It is supposed to be transparant
(i.e. it has no effect on whatever is pluged into it.), but my
experience, and some others, have proved otherwise.."
A 2000 UseNet post:
"I've worked in an environment in which we had three enigneering apps which
were protected with dongles, and as they were all used on the same machine,
the options were a) keep changing dongles, or b) stack them.
For obvious reasons, we chose to stack them, but it took a lot of
experiments to find the right order, so that all would work. Mechanically it
was horrible, and we despised all three companies for their paranoid
approach."
Not realy. Its just a huge pain in the rear. For instance you'd think that people who make movies using digital stuff would spend a lot of money on calibrating their monitors and such, but they don't. At least not until very recently anyways.
What makes it impossible is if you dealing with a dozen workstations. All with different monitors and different ages and usage patterns were the colors will change over time based on use and abuse. Now trying to eye ball that would be horrific.
I don't care about CMYK for my work, but I like to use larger color working spaces (Adobe RGB or even ProPhoto RGB if the image calls for it), and please don't try to compare my desire for 16 bit support (mainly for the large color spaces, to prevent banding in gradients, e.g. sky, after edits) to "serious" audiophiles who use $2000 power cords and custom wooden knobs for their potentiometers to "improve" audio quality. [/quote]
No, not you. And like I said I do understand why you need it.
Although when I see people going on and on about 'microdetails' and such in pixels I want to slap people.
It's just funny when you get one person complaining about lack of CYMK support and lack of 16bit color for doing their work when they don't quite realise yet that the color depth that your monitor presents, even at 8bit color, is much more then anything you'll get from any sort of reflective media. But people like to complain.
For Gimp I know the 8bit color is a limitation. Don't you think I don't.
Gimp won't get deep color depths until "Gegl" is finished. Gimp is a very very old program and at it's core it's stretched out past it's limit. That's why you don't have 16bit color depths. It's not that the Gimp developers don't want it or don't think they need it (although they know the majority of photoshop users and gimp users that think they need it, don't). It's just that Gimp in it's current form could possibly support 16bit color, but performance would be bad and they couldn't ever possibly extend it beyond that. Gegl would be the next core image proccessing library that would allow Gimp to break out of it's current limitations in spades, but development had stalled for a long time.
Also you run into hard limitations with Gimp when your dealing with very large files. High cpu load and high memory usage. Also you miss some of the more fancy features like transformation layers and such. Gegl would fix that and make advanced graphical programming much easier. At least that is the theory.
UFraw has some nice RAW handling features (color management, exposure, white level, etc) and integrates into Gimp as a plugin. It has support for a veriaty of raw 'fomrats' such as Adobe's DNG.
Gimp development version currently has rudementary support for XMP, I beleive.
I don't think there is realy much to discuss.
MS is going to do what they want and dispite people complaining about it they will end up getting it and Microsoft will profit from their moves non-the-less. I bet you that 90% of the people here complaining about Vista will definately own it and if they can't steal it they'll walk right down to Wallmart or CompUSA and buy a copy.
They could start a new licensing sceme were you had to stick a dongle in your ear to measure brainwaves or core tempurature or something to make sure it was realy you using your copy of Windows and people would bitch and complain about it, but I expect 3 years from now it would be a fasion accessory.
Anyways the vast majority of people here will never run into problems anyways. At most it's a phone call. This stuff is aimed at businesses and such that may want to try to figure out a way to get around paying for full retail licenses.
-------------
The only thing that affects users is going to be the VM limitation. Although they'll never realise it because Microsoft is being pre-emptive here.
Both with Linux and OS X we have advanced VM stuff that is no were aviable in Windows. It's not easy to use or full of gui-goodness in Linux, but as far as technical stuff goes it's cutting edge as far as personal computers go. (IBM is cutting edge. The current status for all the Vmware stuff, and Xen, and Intel's VT, and MS virtual server is now were IBM was 10-20 years ago and I am not exagerating)
It'll affect users, but they won't know it. It's because in the next draft PCI Express specifications there are ways to allow operating systems running in a VM to bypass underlyning hypervisors and such and access certain types of devices directly.
Firstly this allows for higher level of isolation and performance between systems running in a VM.. But it would allow you to do things like run Vista with hardware acceleration in Xen/Linux for playing video games with full 3d acceleration and sound. Since this is a big reason why otherwise technically advanced users to stick with Windows rather then going full on to Linux or OS X this is Microsoft's way to help prevent this from happenning in large numbers.
I know it may not affect you or a lot of people, but if a lot of people would be able to play and access all their games with 100% performance and 100% of compatability by running Vista in a VM (which you can pause and save the state of at any moment so you don't have to leave it running or 'reboot' all the time) on their Linux/OS X desktop they would probably want to do it. Dual booting is realy a pain in the *ss.
It won't stop it completely, but it will require you to purchase the top of the line versions of Vista to be able to run games in a VM in Linux or OS X and most people are not willing to go and pay for that.
My only question is weither or not Microsoft is planing on using DRM/Trusted computing stuff to limit it. And seeing how all drivers will have to be signed (again another barrier to VM stuff for good or bad, intentional or not) for 64bit it seems very likely since only future 64bit machines will be able to do this.
Just my speculations.
I use a calibrated profile for my Ubuntu Linux install. I did have to generate an ICC profile from Windows with my colorimeter, but then I just used xcalib to apply it under Linux with perfect precision. I'm all set.
Yeah if you need >8-bit then I recommend Photoshop CS 2 under VMware. VMware should not affect gamma at all (it should match what the X desktop is set to, so every color should be mapped just fine).
since that 80% number was thrown out...
I think it's probably MORE THEN 80% that are OEM machines, which come with a licensed copy of windows.
I think it's probably MORE THEN 80% that are OEM machines, which come with a licensed copy of windows.
There should be an API independent of the OS. And OS and Hardware should program to that. The API's should be created by a board of CPU manufacturers, just like OpenGL has a board. CPU manufacturers, most Intel, are the ones responsible for designing most of the platform. Just like a browser to an OS, an OS would be to this API. Then we wouldn't have to take MS's monopoly BS.
Like POSIX?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POSIX
For hardware there is the x86 and x86-64 ISA. PowerPC and POWER machines have their ISA.
This is how hardware appears to software. The hardware can be whatever design it want's but the ISA is a layer of hardware abstraction that standardizes how the hardware appears to software. So software for a Intel 486 machine can run on a AMD Opteron even though they are entirely different systems. Worlds apart.
Intel has it's ACHI for SATA drives which is a royalty free standard hardware /software interface for handling SATA controllers and SATA's special controllers. You'll see it on nicer motherboards everywere.
Then for sound cards you have the AC97 and HD Audio codecs that a lot of devices tend to support. That stuff is along the same lines.
For video cards there is VESA and things like VGA. But VESA only provides for very basic access. No 2d or 3d acceleration elements.
Well.. x86 was definately Intel and AMD64 (aka x86-64) was AMD.
Trouble was is even with standards like POSIX all Unix systems were always subtly incompatable with each other. It's a product of multitude of companies hoarding their code from one another in a bid to make their propriatory features more appealing to customers and attract business. Meanwhile Microsoft came in on the PC and Unix never entered that market because they were to busy circle jerk'ing it around the high-end high-profit areas.
What Microsoft offers is a single unified development platform. You program for Microsoft Windows and Microsoft will do what it possibly can to make sure your application will always run on Windows.
Everything you want software-wise is here for the most part. You just can't be using Microsoft's products because they purposely design their stuff so it is incompatable with everythign else. Even when they use open source/open spec stuff like using Kerberos or LDAP in they make sure that it's not realy usefull for anything else their their own software.
If you can afford to replace your motherboard or upgrade twice then you can afford a new copy of Vista. You don't want Bill Gates to ever lose his position as the world's richest man, do you? Buy Vista for Bill!
RebateMonger
Elite Member
- Dec 24, 2005
- 11,586
- 0
- 0
No way are 80% of XP installs pirated. Windows 98 and 2000 are a totally different story.
But the vast majority of XP PCs that I run into have "legal" licenses. Based on the homes and offices that I've been into, I'd put the piracy rate of XP at something like 5%.
Almost all pirated XP installs I've seen are with "stolen" Volume License Keys. And I've seen one or two systems with some other jury-rigged piracy arrangement.
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