Not really surprising now, is it?

It just makes me sick...

Dont get to bent over it . I used a bad copy of xp pro till I could get enough money together and buy a legit copy, this sort of thing works for ppl like me back when I was short on cash. If you have to money and you need it that bad you have to pay, but if you are like I was and used a bad copy they might figure that you are some teenager that cant afford that much(or want to pay at all). At least they are giving some people a chance?

You have to look at the subtext behind any anti-piracy schemes. Microsoft or any company could make the most uncrackable scheme of all time--but, historically, they tend to piss off too many customers and they actually lose more money that way than through piracy. On the other hand, they cannot merely do nothing about piracy; they must look like they are making a stand. As such, they must do a balancing act to weed out the vast majority of software pirates, who are idiots, while not being so restrictive as to piss off the hardcore computer geeks, who will then spread bad press throughout the internet.

It's mostly a game of psychology.

Melon

You have to look at the subtext behind any anti-piracy schemes. Microsoft or any company could make the most uncrackable scheme of all time--but, historically, they tend to piss off too many customers and they actually lose more money that way than through piracy. On the other hand, they cannot merely do nothing about piracy; they must look like they are making a stand. As such, they must do a balancing act to weed out the vast majority of software pirates, who are idiots, while not being so restrictive as to piss off the hardcore computer geeks, who will then spread bad press throughout the internet.

It's mostly a game of psychology.

Melon

You have to look at the subtext behind any anti-piracy schemes. Microsoft or any company could make the most uncrackable scheme of all time--but, historically, they tend to piss off too many customers and they actually lose more money that way than through piracy. On the other hand, they cannot merely do nothing about piracy; they must look like they are making a stand. As such, they must do a balancing act to weed out the vast majority of software pirates, who are idiots, while not being so restrictive as to piss off the hardcore computer geeks, who will then spread bad press throughout the internet.

It's mostly a game of psychology.

Melon

Hmm, good point indeed. However I feel that Microsoft has such a SOLID market share, that even if people got peeved, I really don't think that Open Office (for example) would stand a chance to take over the market. I really don't think "hardcore computer geeks" would get "pissed off" if Microsoft actually made a product that needed to be legit in order to be supported for updates. What type of bad press would be "oh, since I didn't but my product legally, I can't update it. They stink!"

Good point, I wasn't trying to attack your opinion, but I just feel they should be more aggressive. In the movie for Vista Beta 1, they were talking about making the car for the "driver, not the mechanic." Which goes to show, IMO, they are gearing towards aggresively satisfying consumers. You don't really hear about a lot of piracy on the MAC side, and the users and consumers are happy as clams for the most part

Well, then you've got to ask yourself why Windows has had such a large market share versus Apple, who has actually declined in share since the G3+ era. Indeed, the biggest irony about Apple is that with all the iMacs and fancy advertising, their percentage of the market has declined.

I can't exactly explain the phenomenon, but the more "open" a computing technology is, the more popular it will be. It's held true too, back in the dawn of PC computing, when all of our current CEOs were back hacking Altair machines in the 1970s. And then back in the 1980s, the software industry had to remove copy protection from all their diskettes, because no one was buying them anymore with it enabled. And now Linux. If it weren't hackable, it would be as obscure as Solaris currently is--and now Sun has made Solaris open with the hope that it will become as popular as Linux.

If Microsoft became air-tight, what would more likely happen than not is that all the computer geeks would flee Microsoft entirely to move to an OS that they could hack. Then, since the media is generally populated with geeks, the only OS they will talk about is the one that they are currently playing with. Windows loses media attention and then suffers a drop in market share.

It's funny, but that's seemingly how it works.

Melon

Wonder how long this will stay in place...
http://microsoft.weblogsinc.com/entry/1234000533052770/

"Microsoft has updated the Windows Genuine Validation tool to circumvent the hack exposed last week that allowed the system to be bypassed with a snippet of JavaScript code. The Validation is now a two-step process that first generates a code and then has you copy and paste that code to complete the process."