Thursday, February 15, 2007

Fewer Vistas via narrow vision

Microsoft has reworded its end-user license agreement (EULA) to forbid the use of Vista Home Basic and Home Premium Editions with virtualization products like Parallels and VMware. Macworld has confirmed the information with a Microsoft spokesperson. The EULA reads, in part: “USE WITH VIRTUALIZATION TECHNOLOGIES. You may not use the software installed on the licensed device within a virtual (or otherwise emulated) hardware system.”
http://tinyurl.com/2t2jtn

This on top of the recent news that the core OS malware detection process not only was flawed but itself incorporates remote access control with no user oversight or notification.

Okay, I know all the Casey haters are annoyed at this point but... Think carefully. Why is it that when you buy something you have an expectation that you are not getting a defective product or an item with hidden catches? Cash back? Back doors? No difference AFAICT.

19 comments:

Anonymous said...

first and problably last since rob chose a lame ass topic for this post.

good job rob..now go make me a sammich.

Rob Dawg said...

Casey bashing, Microsoft bashing... It's all good.

Anonymous said...

Speaking of lameass, chjts: would you knock it off with this "first" crap? Nobody's impressed.

Rob Dawg said...

I can understand like a new jar of peanut butter or driving the car off the lot but some dysfunctional blog bragging rights? Aww whatever makes you happy. Laughing at Microsoft make me happy.

Anonymous said...

Once you go Mac, you don't go back.......

Anonymous said...

Caveat: I'm a Mac user, my first Mac was a Mac II, and I'm typing this on a G5. I also use Windows, and it's fine, but I prefer Mac.

I think this analogy is flawed, in that Windows EULAs and back doors through lazy/faulty code is different from intentional fraud that Casey committed. Casey is a liar and a thief, Microsoft is telling you up front what you can or cannot do, or in the case of back doors, has it's head up it's ass yet again. (MS programmers do odd things, and have odd expectations of it's users...)

Aside from that, Microsoft denying virtualization is a joke, as from what i can tell, when you register the product it does not look for the hardware, just the right serials. I could be wrong, but I know several people running licensed Vista copies on MacBook Pros, and have had zero issues.

It's just the endless pissing match between Microsoft and Apple, and nothing more - one of the selling points of the new Intel Macs is running Windows natively, so you'd think MS would welcome the sales - I know more Mac users who paid for all the copies of XP/Vista they're running on Macs, than PC users, who are mostly running pirated versions of Vista and XP. (I actually bought XP Home to run on my G4 Powerbook in Virtual PC. Yeah, it's slow, but it works! My next Windows box will be a Mac Mini running XP.)

And, for the record, from what I've seen, I like Vista, but it's DRM is sheer nonsense, so I won't be buying it, for that reason alone. Which is a shame, because I want to build a home entertainment PC, - and Apple's offering isn't great, nor does what I want. So, off to Linux I go!

Anonymous said...

I like win xp sp2, works with my xbox 360 great..streaming videos etc..unfortunately, windows vista home premium would have to be a clean install. only upgrades xp home..so screw that crap. I'll wait until I get a new machine. Gotta get me one of those quad cores with sli 8800gtx...I'll save the xp pro version for the 'music files' and videos.

Rob Dawg said...

Slap some old hds in a celeron box and run FreeNAS off a 128Mb thumbdrive and voila home server. Supports AFS no less.

Anonymous said...

Thank you for steadfast support of the ACLU. Every day, I take heart that people like you all across the country are card-carrying ACLU members and today I’d very much like your help.
To meet the enormous challenges and opportunities we face in 2007, we are mounting an ambitious campaign to recruit 3,000 members over the next two weeks.
Because inspiration is contagious, what better way is there to recruit new members than to have loyal supporters -- like you -- express what it means to be an ACLU member? Millions of people share our love of the Bill of Rights and know in their hearts that safeguarding our fundamental freedoms is a never-ending job. I often wonder why so many of them are not card-carrying members of the ACLU.
So we’re turning to you to help us make the case. Please tell us, in your own words, why you are a card-carrying ACLU member.

Anonymous said...

FreeNAS? VERY cool, thank you for the tip!

Anonymous said...

The Spouse upgraded to Vista Business as soon as it came out. He's an uber geek though. Me, I'm sticking with XP for now. My desktop system is about 2 1/2 years old, and at some point I'll want to upgrade, but not yet.

If Apple can get their **** together enough on Boot Camp so that I can run PC games on Mac hardware, I may well end up going Mac instead of going to Vista.

Rob Dawg said...

I've several Boot Camping clients who got the Mac hardware because it is so much better. Drivers needing upgrades? Feh! Very happy campers [groan]. It doesn't take long before they slide into parallels and eventually all OS X. One exception is a client who has an office management program written in Fox Pro. Yuck.

The Apple hardware won't ever be a gmers platform however. The market cachement just isn't economical. Now, if Leopard ever leaks out as a generic install... Well I can dream.

Anonymous said...

The more I see and hear about Vista, the more I think "ME" rather than "XP."

If MS can fix the many shortcomings of the product via a major (free) service pack, then I'll consider upgrading in 6-8 months. But as it stands now, I don't know why anyone would jump on the Vista bandwagon. Its an inferior product to XP, AFAIC.

-walt526

Lou Minatti said...

Vista is very slick and the new Office is kick ass. You should try it first before criticizing it.

However, I keep reading sneaky shit like this and it makes me nervous.

Anonymous said...

I'm probably going to wait until Vista SP1. The problem is that I do some tech support on the side, and there will be clients who switch to Vista before I'm comfortable doing so, and I won't have a reference machine to work off of. Blah.

segfault said...

anonymous @ 5:17:

Set up a small partition to dual-boot Vista and XP. That's what I did, and I've been using Vista for about 6 months.

more generally:

I'm using Boot Camp with XP on FAT32 (so I can write to the Windows partition from OS X). I haven't been able to get Vista to install to a FAT32 partition. I'm also running the latest beta of Parallels, which claims the ability to start a Boot Camp partition from within OS X. Parallels displays an error about not being able to read the Boot Camp partition when it starts, but then loads Windows from the partition without any problems. Then, once I've run Parallels at any point during an OS X session, it will hang up when emptying the trash, and MirrorAgent prevents the machine from shutting down (this never happens unless I've run Parallels at some point during the session). Restarting the Finder doesn't help, and I can't switch to Activity Monitor to manually kill the process. I have to press and hold the power button and restart. It's pretty infuriating, so I've stopped using Parallels for now.

The only irritation with Boot Camp is that it's not fully compatible with my Apple Wireless Keyboard and mouse. The mouse works fine, but if you boot into Windows, you have to power-cycle the keyboard before it's recognized. I was steamed about this too, trying to re-pair the keyboard, etc., until I figured out that all I needed to do was turn it off and on again and wait a few seconds.

LOL said...

"One exception is a client who has an office management program written in Fox Pro."

Fox pro! yikes

That being said I won't be moving the firm I work at to Vista until it's on SP2.

Anonymous said...

I feel like I just opened a thread in some unknown language.

Rob Dawg said...

What? You don't speak ubergeek? Now if you'll excuse me I just got back from Fry's where I got a 400w power supply $0, full tower case $19.90, and bluetooth headset for the macbook $24.99. My 10.4.8 bittorrent is also finished. This will be an ultraubertechie morning.