Microsoft promotes Windows 7 with a bunch of giant Whoppers

For real!

Now some Asian dude is going to drop dead from eating enough cholesterol to kill anything that’s ever lived.

I guess the lesson is, watch what you swallow.

Full story here.

Fun with Windows XP x64 Edition and a retrospective on DRM

When I got tired of slapping Windows 7 around I decided to whip out XP x64 Edition:

First, I pulled all the data off the CD and brought it up to speed with RyanVM Integrator using the Post-SP2 update pack* (*Windows XP x64 is actually Windows 2003 and shares service packs with it, so there is no SP3), the OnePiece Internet Explorer 8 add-on, the DirectX 9.0c March 2009 add-on packs (both the 32-bit and x64 version are needed), the Microsoft signed themes add-on (gives me all the signed XP themes Microsoft has released including the XP Media Center 2005 Energy Blue theme and the unreleased Royale Noir theme), and Windows Media Player 11 integrator and all the updates listed for WMP11 (separate program).

I then added a folder to the working directory that had all my drivers and the software it takes to get up and running. I had to hunt down a Ralink RT61 reference driver to get my wireless adapter working. (Logitech never officially supported XP x64 with the WMP54G 4.1 wifi chipset and told me to go buy a new wifi adapter).

My MP3 player is only XP-X64 compatible if you tell Windows to address it as a Mass Storage device (media players can sync it), my TV tuner needed a Vista x64 driver but works, XP x64 is known for having driver issues though.

And why did I go through this?

My system is too new for XP, in that I mean it has more RAM than XP can actually address, so normal XP was not on the table.

Try as I may to get away from it, I need a Windows partition around for a number of reasons, mostly because it’s what the rest of the world uses and people don’t take kindly to being told to change their evil ways and use file formats and messaging protocols that are Linux friendly, so I get left with spending 5 hours duct taping together an up-to-date Windows installation disc that installs a version of Windows I can live with so I can create a spare partition acting as my bridge to the Windows world.

Windows is dying. Microsoft’s last quarter they were down almost 30% in sales of Windows operating system software, people are abandoning the “throw away the computer every year and buy a new one” mentality, which is also hurting Intel especially, and other hardware makers as a whole.

The more successful companies are the ones that are building inexpensive hardware and low power consuming hardware that may not be able to go toe to toe with the fastest Phenoms and i7s, but also don’t cost $400 just for the CPU and eat a laptop battery after only an hour or two.

Microsoft and Intel totally failed to see the netbook in time to slam the brakes and avoid the Vista fiasco, the damned thing runs laptops so hot you can fry an egg on the touchpad, and in a knee-jerk reaction, Microsoft and Intel re-released XP which is nearly 10 years old, and the Atom, which isn’t really performing well enough for all the power it demands.

Vista has been routinely failing, crashing, and running poorly for nearly three years itself, as well as annoying people with endless dialog boxes.

Windows 7 fixes that, right?

After having had ample time with Windows 7 (from the beta to the release candidate, to spending some time with the RTM), I’m going to say no.

Windows 7 does fix some technical problems Vista has (or hides them better), but it also opens up a gaping security hole that Microsoft plans to do nothing about (exempts Microsoft software from UAC alerts, and spyware can piggyback on top of Microsoft UAC-exempt software to elevate itself silently), and the fact that they’ve engineered in more DRM.

The sheer audacity of trying to DRM unencrypted cable television which precisely anyone with a VCR has been able to record for almost 30 years is quite simply astounding.

There would have been a violent consumer reaction if the cable company just started reaching into your home and selectively disabled your VCR depending on what show you wanted to record, for personal use, at a later time and place of your choosing. And besides, the American court system has repeatedly found in favor of consumers “time shifting” the cable television coming into their homes.

The Hollywood DRM entities (now partnered with Microsoft) have been building a framework to trap the consumer into their ever more restrictive terms ever since they lost their case against the VCR.

First, MacroVision found that if they could manipulate the auto gain control feature in VCRs supporting the feature, they could ruin a recording you made of a tape you own, then their lobbyists succeeded in getting a law passed that said that all VCRs had to have an auto gain control. This didn’t work spectacularly well because the market was almost immediately flooded with devices that could remove the MacroVision signal before passing the feed onto the recording VCR, and some consumers *wink* simply made use of a VCR made before auto gain control became mandatory.

Tape had its flaws, but it also relied on an analog signal. So do DVDs. It’s how they operate, it makes it trivial to bypass the copy protection and make a personal copy, and even RipGuard, another MacroVision media hack that makes fake bad sectors on a disc to confuse a DVD copying device, couldn’t stop “error correction” in DVD cloning software.

HD-DVD and Blu Ray close the analog hole, they do this by artificially degrading  the picture and sound back to nearly standard definition DVD quality unless you use an HDCP compliant monitor/TV that lets them set up an encrypted link to transfer the high definition video and surround sound audio through. The disc is encrypted using 256-bit AES instead of the weak 40-bit CSS in a normal DVD.

Almost immediately, this scheme was broken when a key was extracted from a player, but the media and players are designed to update their DRM and blacklist earlier keys which were cracked, so while a key discovered now will decrypt all Blu Ray discs made before today,  future discs are still (in theory) not cracked,  and PC playback software such as CyberLink PowerDVD, has to be patched every month or so when it expires the old AACS keys. (But the cracks come out so fast that this barely matters)

The DVR you get from the cable company is yet another form of DRM, a closed device that encrypts everything it stores and makes sure you can’t copy the files. Windows Media Center has to visibly cripple the files because the PC hasn’t traditionally been a closed device where the user has no idea of what’s going on inside. (As much as Microsoft is working to change that)

DRM has always been hit-or-miss, cat-and-mouse, and a war by the big software and big media companies against the user, which they’ve always ended up losing because it turns out that there are a lot more smart people figuring out how to break their schemes as fast as the few smart people making paychecks to come up with the schemes in the first place can crank them out. (Instant job security?)

This latest assault on the consumer comes from Microsoft and big media finally coming for people who want to watch cable or satellite TV which has always had to be converted to an analog signal so it can travel travel over an unencrypted coaxial cable, the reason Windows Media Center will fail at this is because it’s trying to apply DRM after the fact, and other software is out there that will refuse to betray the user. (Both competing proprietary software, and free and open source software like MythTV for Linux).

Big Media has corrupted our laws to prop up their weak and laughable DRM systems, the next step for a while now has been to close the analog hole. The DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) is kind of like the entertainment industry’s very own PATRIOT Act, insofar as the United States government has granted companies like the RIAA, MPAA, Media Defender, and Microsoft unconstitutional search and seizure power with little or no judicial oversight. It’s what happens when money speaks louder than the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments.

How long will the CD last? How long before televisions no longer have coaxial cables, just an encrypted link and a “black box” stream decoder that your cable company and Microsoft can update over the internet or through your set top box with the cable or satellite company?

This remains to be seen, but you’d better believe that DRM will be back in a big way once they figure that out.

Mention this to a Microsoft apologist and they quickly snap back at you like a Republican defending the PATRIOT Act. “Well, if you’re not doing anything wrong, why are you worried about being strip searched and manhandled, and having your front door knocked down without a warrant?”

This wasn’t forced on Microsoft either, they went voluntarily in exchange for a large amount of money, just like when they partner with companies like StarForce, SecuROM, and MacroVision to install malicious software that disables your disc burner if it thinks you’re copying a video game and “whoops” crashes itself if you try to run the game on Wine in Linux.

Microsoft, Big Media, and PC gaming are digging a mass grave for themselves, and that mass grave is called “Windows 7″, it turns out that people usually don’t like being shoved around by big corporate interests and sold hardware and software with built in 3 year planned obsolescence.

The recession, more aggressive DRM, and bad performance are my official postmortem cause of death for this industry. In short, I am so deeply offended by these extra DRM layers that I will never purchase Windows 7 for that reason alone, and I don’t even care if it does anything well.

Does Windows 7 at least perform better? I heard it doesn’t crash or give you bizarre errors like Vista does…

It does perform a tad better than Vista, but it’s still a far cry from XP/XP x64 performance.  Except in synthetic benchmarks from Microsoft-funded websites, XP rocks the high heavens compared to either of its successors. Windows 7 will not bring your tired old Vista computer back to life. Windows 7 is  like the last years of Elvis when he was about 100 pounds overweight and taking vitamin B-12 shots and forgetting half his lines, Windows 7 being the B-12 shot.

I probably encountered a few less errors than in Vista, but I also ran into quite a few brick walls that were introduced with malicious  intent to betray you, the “Windows Media Center trying to DRM the 30 year old cable TV standard” hilarity was really the tip of the iceburg, the rest of Microsoft’s power grabs are more subtle.

The same “PlayReady” DRM that’s trying to steal your cable TV from you is also baked into Microsoft Silverlight, and it’s going to be bad for everyone if SilverLight catches on. Right now, you can easily nab a Flash video from a website, they may be able to obfuscate the address where the file is at, but they can’t easily DRM it.

If Silverlight catches on, you can forget about downloading videos from websites, because they will just  simply fail to play, perhaps even with no further explanation.

I wouldn’t call it more stable than XP or Windows 2003 simply because there have been almost 4,000 patches in the last 8 years and neither one of them gives me any truly bizarre errors anymore. (See list of updates in both service packs plus the standalone hotfixes) It’s clear though that Microsoft never intended to have over two thirds of users on XP over three years since they released Vista, and over a year after they stopped selling XP in retail channels. (Still available as OEM, but Microsoft sent the last batch of those out last month).

I’ve been a Microsoft user for going on 15 years.

I’ve owned every version of Windows since 3.1. Vista was bad, 7 is the last straw. The next PC I build or buy will be entirely designed around Linux, there won’t be hardware in it that doesn’t work right under Linux.

If you had asked me two years if I had a real strong preference between Windows and Linux, I would have shrugged, now I can state clearly that I will not be buying any more copies of Windows, ever.

There’s only a few real options left for those clinging to XP.

(1) Hold out til 2014 and hope Microsoft gives up their wicked ways in “Windows 8″

(2) Start dual booting with Linux now and kill off XP when you’re weaned from it, buy a system with Linux in mind next time.

(3) Buy a Mac.

I’m keeping it on life support because I still have a copy. If I was asked to pay more money to keep it going, I’d just shoot it now. In any event, I can comfortably say that in my opinion,  Windows’ best days are definitely behind it and they’ll continue bleeding users at a slow and steady rate until Linux and Mac overtake them sometime between 2015 and 2020. Just like video game mega-publishers such as EA, Windows is dying because Microsoft got too greedy and pissed all over their customers.

What do you see the PC turning into in the next 5 years?

Microsoft wants to turn your property into their rental kiosk, not only charging you to use Windows, but also a monthly subscription to its features and for their “partner’s content”, namely every song and movie that you want to listen to or watch. I can kind of imagine “Windows 8″ PCs shipping with a credit card scanner to ding you for more money every time you press a button.

Why I refuse to use real time antivirus software.

If you tell most Windows users that you don’t like antivirus software, they’ll look at you like you told them you drink the blood of puppies, but antivirus software can be more of a disease than the disease it’s there to cure.

There’s free antivirus, sure, but it’s a crock, and it’s constantly advertising about why you need to buy more protection.

Should be noted that viruses and spyware haven’t typically been a problem on Linux or the Mac, but that hasn’t stopped these idiots from huckstering their wares there. (sigh)

Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!

Then there’s the little issue of “What does malware do to a PC anyway?”

Malware:

Takes lots of RAM

Denies you access to certain files and websites

Causes system crashes

Sends personal information back to its creator

Causes additional CPU load

Hurts your battery life

Oh wait, I was talking about the antivirus suites wasn’t I? How clumsy!

Anyhow, with the Windows system I have I’ve decided to just use ClamWin (Free/Open source antivirus that uses the same pattern files as ClamAV) to manually scan files I download before running them (no realtime scanner yet). It may not be fancy, but it doesn’t slow the computer down scanning uninfected files I open 20 times a day.

How bad is the performance hit of running an antivirus scammer, errr, scanner?

Let’s find out

The funniest thing we observe is that Norton slows disk access down by almost 2369%, while the best one looks to be Avast Home Edition which “only” slows file access by 115%, and no matter what you choose, Windows Defender will slow you down by another 54%.

Then we get to booting, where Norton slows Vista’s boot by 46%, while Avast Home “only” by 4%.

Then we get to RAM use which I don’t think he listed, but Windows Defender will eat about 45-50 megs on Vista, and Avast will eat about another 40, not really enough to have a noticeable impact on a system with 2-4 gigs of RAM, but older systems would suffer greatly.

The file I/O penalty is the most troubling though, as hard drives are already the slowest part of a PC.

The call is yours:

If you don’t think you can trust manual scans and your own wit to keep you safe, then don’t do it, but for performance alone, I really can’t stomach dealing with antivirus software that eats away at Windows like the cancer it is supposedly trying to fend off.

Overall, this anti-malware software makes using your PC about as fun as sex with 27 condoms on.

My configuration:

Clamwin with Windows shell extensions for manual scan.

Windows Defender off.

UAC to Prompt for Credentials. (Makes it so I don’t have a knee jerk reaction to a prompt.

Adblock Plus and NoScript add-ons for SeaMonkey (they work in Firefox too)

Speaking of ads and spyware and junk:

You probably (1) Don’t want to open Internet Explorer anyway, but especially with no real time antivirus scanning, so you may want to delete its icons.

and (2) If you use Windows Live Messenger or Yahoo, you probably want to block their ad servers with the Windows hosts file to make sure a repeat of the MS ad servers spreading spyware through Windows Live Messenger incident doesn’t happen again.

The bottom line is that there’s a lot of stuff you can do to toss out some roadblocks without cutting your PC’s performance in half, be creative!

Don’t get in the car with strangers and don’t trust RIAA executives with candy.

I just noticed a blog entry that found 62 more malicious lawsuits against individuals files by the Recording Industry Brownshirts of America.

Thing is this was supposed to have stopped in December when the RIAA said they would quit suing individuals.

It’s obvious that the RIAA never had any such intentions and knew that the “It’s over, we won!” crowd would go right back out into the open.

It’s part of their whole crooked business model, which seems to be geared towards filing a bunch of suits against so-called “John Doe”s and figuring out who you sued after the court orders someone’s identify from their ISP, the RIAA then at this point offers them an outrageous “settlement” in the amount of $10,000, $20,000 or more dollars, and the victim is intimidated by going to court, so sometimes they sign it.

What’s most alarming is that this corrupt organization has the ear of President Obama who is appointing them to high levels of the United States government.

Is this the change you voted for? We could have gotten that much from another 8 years of George Bush.

So look out dead people, single moms with no computer, and homeless men, everyone’s a target in the RIAA’s continuing shooting gallery!

Product Activation: The proof of what Microsoft is doing is in what it does.

I got a few search hits from people looking for Vista cracks:

No I’m not going to give you any or tell you exactly how, so if you’re here for that go away.

I just figured this would be a reason to write a little bit about what Product Activation and WGA do, what Microsoft has stated, and what they’ve actually done.

Most Vista cracks…

…are based on trying to fool Vista into thinking that you have an OEM license by loading a “System Locked Pre-installation” key into your BIOS or into the shadowed copy of your BIOS (where Vista actually checks).

There are two main ways to do this:

1. A bootloader which patches the shadowed copy of the BIOS to contain this authorization.

-and-

2. Actually editing the BIOS to insert the license into it.

As it sounds…

… Method 1 is easy and involves little actual risk, but because it involves files stored on the boot sector of the hard disk, Windows can easily detect it and any hotfix you download from Windows Update could be your last, so while it may work now, it’s only a matter of time before Microsoft notices the exploit and patches Windows to counter it. These are usually trojaned in as part of an innocent sounding update, or as a Windows Defender pattern file.

Microsoft is not going to just shout “ALERT! Hey you! Fucktard! If you click here we’ll trash your computer!”

So it’s obvious that this method not only doesn’t scale to large “counterfeiting” operations, but isn’t a great idea for users either.

Now Method 2 is slightly harder and since it involves a BIOS flash, there’s a fairly decent chance you could brick your motherboard if you have the wrong firmware file or messed it up somehow, but if it works it will probably stay working because Windows really has no good way to detect it.

Microsoft claims that since the BIOS flash is risky, this method doesn’t scale, but let’s back the truck up for a second.

Lets say a “Counterfeiter” wants to sell a million systems with “Counterfeit Windows”, all he has to do is make a million models with the same motherboard, find one flash that works, and Flash them one by one.

It’s a pain to manually flash them, but it takes all of like 5 minutes to flash a system, and you can have several systems going at once, so all of a sudden you have a massive operation and the money you “saved” by not buying “Genuine Windows” still compensates for the time and effort.

As we can see…

Even though Microsoft talks about WGA and Activation being there to stop “mass counterfeiters” and not “every mad scientist on a mission to hack Windows”, the result is quite the opposite.

With XP this same exploit was possible because of SLP 1, but as Microsoft says, “frankly there were easier ways to [make unlicensed copies] of XP” so that never really caught on” due largely to the fact that Volume License Keys were easier to use although MS blacklisted any of them that looked fishy (too many installations), so by forcing the “counterfeiters” to use an undetectable exploit, Microsoft has actually created a huge chink in their “Product Activation” armor.

In effect, by having a documented system to bypass Product Activation that is moderately risky (think coat hanger abortion) to do at home, but scales well to millions of systems (this is how it was designed to work), Microsoft has effectively admitted that they will never stop these so-called “mass-counterfeiters” and has declared war lamer-by-lamer who tries to casually copy their Windows disc to use on a spare PC.

Method 2 essentially becomes “Why use the front door which is barricaded and garrisoned, when Microsoft has kindly left the service entrance unlocked and unguarded?”

Product Activation is therefore a way to get blood out of a turnip by making sure that you don’t buy that $300 Vista disc and dare to use it on two PCs, and it’s really pathetic that instead of making Windows better so that more people want to use it or think it’s worth paying for, Microsoft has hired a team to effectively “crack down on insurgents in door to door raids”.

So much for hearts and minds. :)

Yet another example of a hostile invader getting pwned in a conflict they started.

Say what you may about Mac or Linux, they don’t have any such damned contrivance.

Reference:

http://blogs.msdn.com/wga/archive/2007/04/10/reported-oem-bios-hacks.aspx

Did Microsoft hire maker of nLite and vLite?

I just stumbled onto a post that was several months old:

End of road for nLite/vLite? Microsoft hires Dino Nuhagic

Update: That link is dead

Mirror: http://brokencontrollers.com/end-of-road-for-nlite-vlite-microsoft-hires-dino-nuhagic-t313944.php

If this is true, it would explain why the man has gone quiet and no new work has been done on vLite for quite some time.

For those that don’t know, nLite and vLite remove so-called “integrated” Windows components from the Windows XP and Windows Vista installers, respectively.

Logically, I could see why Microsoft would want to hire the man to get him to stop undermining their claims that this crap is a “non-removable component of Windows” rather than foistware pushed on the end user in order to illegally stifle the competition.

Earlier in vLite development, the Redmond bully forbade him from distributing the 44 kilobyte WIM image filter necessary to customize Windows ISO images, forcing the user to download a 1.1 GIGABYTE ISO image of the Windows Automated Installation Kit to get the offending driver.

With the EU after Microsoft for illegally bundling Idiot Exploiter and other software unrelated to an operating system, it can’t look good that there are utilities out there that can in fact surgically remove it.

Unfortunately with Windows 7 approaching, users could never have needed a utility to strip down Windows more, as the installer will copy all files for the Ultimate Edition to the users hard disk regardless of the version they bought, and will leave them there, functionless, until the user pays Microsoft more money to “activate” them.

Nobody can seem to get Nuhagic to comment on what in fact is going on, leading to more speculation, but I for one hope that Microsoft has not hired him to simply put him out of business like they did with SysInternals…

Microsoft pays yes men to spread more FUD about Firefox, Chrome, and Opera

Since Microsoft cannot promote IE on it’s own merits:

They have apparently paid for another biased opinion from a bunch of spin doctoring suck ups, to try and do damage control on Internet Explorer 8, the slowest and most brain damaged browser on Windows in a fair benchmark conducted by myself, comparing IE 8’s (lack of) performance compared to its competitors.

(Note: Firefox 2 and 1 have been unsupported for a while, I just threw them in as a baseline, I later ran IE 7 through and got a score of 435, the same performance of Firefox 1 from early 2004)

There are simply no lies that can cover up Internet Explorer’s inherent insecurity, its bad performance, and Microsoft’s outright contempt for established web standards.

This review from Jingo Associates Janco Associates is poorly written and trips over itself several times.

“So far user acceptance of Vista has been slowed by the lack if user acceptance for the new OS.”

Uhhhm, and statistically, the biggest cause of redundancy are redundancies.

“An added kicker is those who move to Vista can more readily have multiple browsers on their systems or switch from one to the other quickly and with little pain.”

What exactly stops me from installing Firefox and Chrome and Opera and picking a default on XP, or Windows 2000 for that matter? If anything Vista makes it harder to keep your defaults as Internet Explorer keeps trying to steal them all back while you’re not looking, and instead of one menu to choose your default (XP), Vista has no less than five.

“The cost of doing that is minimal.”

Yeah, Firefox, Opera, and Chrome are all free, Internet Explorer is built into the price of Windows.

(Fact: Microsoft increased the price it charged for Windows 95 to OEMs by $10 after IE was “integrated” See: United States v. Microsoft)

“Google is a challenge for Microsoft to face — so far Microsoft continues to outpace Google and beats both Google Desktop and Google Chrome.”

Internet Explorer can’t beat any other browser currently in support.

As for Windows built-in search, that’s integrated so more people have it, no shit.

Microsoft’s mighty 5% share of the internet search market (down from 9% in 2007) after dumping several years and millions of dollars into it, not even counting the user-bribing search “incentive” programs will surely make Google cower and tremble at the almighty Windows Live Search Hijacker. :) (Yes, they’ve resorted to borderline search hijacking, even of your Firefox and preferences when you install IE 8 or Windows Live Essentials if you slip up and push the wrong button)

“In addition, IE 8 is feature rich and a step ahead of the other browsers.  Both Firefox and Chrome has major defects which limit their usefulness on all sites.  Several of these defects are highlighted in this White Paper.”

Yes, IE’s ActiveX enables drive-by spyware infestations and the lack of an advertising blocker is also a major plus for the chowderheads that want to make the web nigh unusable and install all kinds of malicious software.

I hope Firefox gets cracking on copying these innovations post haste. /sarcasm

The study concludes by offering no explanation or reconciliation of why Internet Explorer has lost 10% of its users in the past year since Microsoft has “stabilized” the situation and its competitors are so “crippled”.

Amusingly, they also admit that only 18% of the operating system market is comprised of Vista users, after having been out for 3 years.

I suppose even the most flagrant lies are covered with a grain of truth, but clearly you are all too stupid to know what you want, now kindly go back to Microsoft, show’s over, nothing to see here, pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.

Don’t forget to tune in for my next review of IE 8 where I compare the browser to a steaming pile of dog shit. (Spoiler Alert: The dog shit wins)

IE 8 fails

Microsoft’s anti-ipod ad shows how out of touch their Zune division is

This video is essentially a lie by omission:

The premise is why buy music from Apple when you can get DRM time bombed subscription music from Microsoft.

$15 a month * 12 months = $180

So assuming you bought $180 of music from Apple, you’d have 16-18 albums worth that you could keep, whereas if you bought the subscription from Microsoft and stop paying, you have a lot of worthless WMA files that won’t play.

Notice the ad doesn’t mention that the “unlimited downloads” will commit suicide if you quit paying rent?

Microsoft also doesn’t point out that you cannot burn subscription music to a CD, or that the RIAA found loopholes in singer and songwriter contracts that let them fuck the artist over because it doesn’t count as a “sale” if you downloaded a subscription file.

Would you rather have 180 real songs to keep or a lot of dead bits when you stop paying Microsoft?

Now I’ve had my ipod for about 2 years now, so in that time I could have had 360 songs from the Apple store or more just for what I would have otherwise bought nothing from Microsoft for the same amount of money.

Though I still buy the CDs and rip them myself most of the time, the ipod is clearly superior to the Zune.

And if you thought you were going to be cute and record your SPDIF output, Vista will disable that if the file is DRM’d.

Have fun lighting your money on fire with Zune + Vista!

Microsoft-paid anti Linux stooges at Lenovo

I don’t normally reply to cases like this, but why not?

http://tech.blorge.com/Structure:%20/2009/05/09/lenovo-on-the-future-of-the-netbook/

Lenovo’s Worldwide Microsoft FUD spreader, Matt Kohut recently listed a bunch of lies, damned lies, and damned funny lies about Linux and how Windows is so much easier.

“Linux, even if you’ve got a great distribution and you can argue which one is better or not, still requires a lot more hands-on than somebody who is using Windows.

You know, there were a lot of netbooks loaded with Linux, which saves $50 or $100 or whatever it happens to be, based on Microsoft’s pricing and, again, from an industry standpoint, there were a lot of returns because people didn’t know what to do with it.

So, we’ve seen overwhelmingly people wanting to stay with Windows because it just makes more sense: you just take it out of the box and it’s ready to go.”

This doesn’t sound biased at all, does it?

Yes that damned Linux where I need to burn discs full of hotfixes and drivers before I install it, get it on my system, realize I don’t have all the hotfixes and I got the wrong drivers, so now I have to get on the internet (unless I got the wrong network drivers) and look for the right make model and such in the manufacturer support page, then assuming I didn’t have to hack something together myself because they don’t support my particular niche version of the OS, I reboot and maybe it works.

So then I go and find antivirus software to protect me from the 300,000 Linux viruses, and hope it works, because nothing is 100% effective, then I have to figure out how to clean junk files, defrag the hard drive (cause the defrag included with Linux is worthless and slow), then it’s about this time that I break Linux Media Player by trying to force it to accept codecs for something other than WMA and MP3 and spend an hour trying to fix that.

Linux also artificially degrades my high definition home movies in case I’m trying to pirate them from myself unless I’m on a suepr expensive Linux-certified HDMI monitor . :)

Then when that’s done, the browser that comes with Linux is worthless so I have to use it long enough to find and install something else.

This is assuming you can get past that horrible Linux Genuine Advantage product activator by telling it it’s running on a Lenovo notebook.

This isn’t like Windows at all which already has or provides easy access to everything I want it to do, can be downloaded and burned legally and for free to any blank disc I have laying around, and is entirely open source. Linux is proprietary and costs between $140-$1000 a license.

By the way, Internet Explorer and everything that comes with Windows is an optional component, whereas Linux tries to lock you in by not allowing you to remove anything that you’re never going to use.

Bill takes an innovation

*rolls eyes*

“Windows is easier” my ass, I may have to live with it, but I don’t have to like it.

My thoughts on “Virtual XP Mode” nonsense and the future for XP users.

See also: How to roll your own Virtual XP Mode

This is based on a reply of mine to a blog posting by a Microsoft “MVP” regarding Windows XP in a VM under Windows 7 “as a feature”:

Microsoft has obviously utterly failed to get 63% of Windows users (as of April 2009’s stats) to “upgrade to Windows Vista from XP.

It’s kind of easy to see why this is the case when Vista:

Is 9 times bigger.

Has a horrible anti-piracy system that has serveral times gone berserk and shut paying users out of their own machines.

Harasses you with nag screens every time you click on something asking if you really wanted to click on that.

Downgrades the playback of your Blu Ray movies if you’re not using an HDCP connection to the monitor (which also requires a Vista-Certified monitor).

Performs so badly that your 5 year old budget laptop with XP will run rings around your dual core Vista desktop with 4 times the RAM?

(And I’m sure I’ve missed something).

The end result? I decided to go over my Vista Business DVD with Vlite to see how much useless crap I could remove that I never use, here are the results:

Normal Vista Business: Installed size of 17 GB.

VLite cut 6 gigabytes of fluff that I never use out of the DVD, all while leaving components like collaberation, presentation, IE, Media Player, and everything that any business user may really get anything useful from quite intact.

In fact, the voice wreckagnition support files alone were over a gigabyte of the ISO, even if you never use any of them.

When I was done, Vista Business was still 5 times larger than XP Pro (10 gigs installed  vs. 2 gigs for XP Pro SP3, vs. 1.6 gigs for an nLited XP Pro SP 3) (and after VLiting, you can’t install the next Service Pack, so be warned!)

Microsoft’s response to users crying out, wanting an end to the bloat, the draconian DRM, and every other repugnant “feature” of Vista?

Rename Vista, add a few superficial tweaks that change nothing about Vista’s massive underlying, rotten core, and demand hundreds more dollars out of Vista users for a product that at best, addresses a few minor issues.

Quite frankly, Microsoft has released Service Packs with more new functionality than you’re likely to find in Windows 7 from Vista SP2 (XP SP2?).

Microsoft has apparently tweaked with the “Product Activation” DRM to be less accusatory, that is to say, they’ve changed the way they phrase things and how often you see it.

Instead of a Nazi interrogation session where it punches you in the stomach to get you to talk, you get a Soviet re-education camp about “Why piracy is bad, mmmmk?”.

I still fail to see the part about why I should fork over $200 for the upgrade when Microsoft themselves admit that everything of any consequence will be backported to Vista (including DirectX 11), but it’s Microsoft, and so you can expect them to sabotage Vista in subtle ways and whisk away support for extra bells and whistles like they’re doing with XP now. (Think Windows Live Essentials)

Which brings me to the beginning of the end for XP

As you may or may not know, XP went into “extended support” last month, which means that you get no new Windows Media Player, no new IE past version 8, no new Windows Live Suite after they get enough users to defect to Vista or 7, etc. The only thing you’re guaranteed from Microsoft now is security patches. No other bugs will be fixed. As for third party driver support, I’d say you can expect that for a couple years to come as SO MANY PEOPLE use XP.

With those caveats, the XP you see now is how XP will stay til it’s officially unsupported.

Microsoft started sabotaging Windows 2003 and XP X64 last year and what’s the future for Vista Home, and Ultimate users?

My guess is that Microsoft, at some point in 2012 will refuse to activate Windows Vista Home Basic, Premium, and Ultimate, because Windows 7 is what is “supported”

Need to reload that old computer that crashed? Too bad. You need to buy Windows 7, which will also need a newer computer with a faster processor and more memory.

It’s really that reason that stands out as to why so-called product activation is a bad thing, Windows has the ability to shut you down.

 I guessed when Windows XP was released back in 2001 that in “5 or 6 years” they’d do that to XP, but the fact is now that that they would have to just outright piss 63% of Windows users off, and that’s too much of a gamble even for Microsoft.

Instead what they’re doing with XP is subtle, they’re removing support for popular applications one or two at a time by introducing bogus checks into the executable for functionality that the program never even calls, similar to what Microsoft has had EA games do with Windows 2000 (theres patches to get all the latest EA games on Windows 2000, but why would you want them?) .

I don’t expect them to support Windows 2000 forever or even guarantee that the game will run. I do believe that the OS should be allowed to gracefully decay, that is if they really truly need functionality that XP or Vista have that Win2K doesn’t, then by all means. But what they’re doing shows a kind of deliberate sabotage of an otherwise fully functional title on a capable OS, both of which the user has paid for.

I ran into this with Windows Live Essentials on XP X64, it says that “Windows XP X64 and Windows 2003 are not supported, you need XP SP2 or Vista”.Well, I tricked it into installing, so far I’ve ran Live Messenger, Live Mail, and Live Writer, all the latest versions, and I haven’t come across one function that really honestly needs Vista or normal XP.

Why is Microsoft doing this? Simple. XP X64 isn’t used by many people, the ones who do use it all got it OEM or with special (at the time) X64 machines, and most likely depend largely on Microsoft programs. Cutting off Windows Live is like cutting off their oxygen supply, it’s easy to choke this demographic because they will easily go out and pay for Vista just to get something like this back.

What about this Virtual XP Mode in Windows 7?

A few things. 1. It’s a virtual machine, virtual machines are slow. 2. It’s only available on the expensive Business and Ultimate Windows 7. 3. You can do the same thing yourself with the freeware Virutal Box from Sun and a copy of XP, you can even run seamless mode. (XP apps on your host operating system’s desktop.).
XP Mode is quite frankly offensive, not only because a lot of processors just can’t cope with it, or because they rough you up for a more expensive version of Windows to get it, or because it’s got all the problems of running a virtual machine.

If Microsoft wasn’t so damned insistent on this DRM nonsense, then they would have just had a library where they exported XP and WIndows 2000 functions and registry entries, and used a compatibility shim to redirect API calls and registry ops. That would have been less than 1% performance penalty, and they have everything they need to do that with WOW64 anyway.

AGGGGGHH!!!!!