“Windows Genuine Advantage cries wolf (again)”

Oh, lovely. Microsoft falsely accuses twelve thousand people of piracy over the weekend, and considers it nothing but a “glitch.” If my company had a “glitch” like that, we’d likely be out of business come Monday.

I hadn’t noticed the problem here, but that may have something to do with the fact that only two of our weekend-running systems are still running Windows (XP), and one of those is only rebooted when it absolutely has to be (maybe once every month or two). Then too, I’ve declined the WGA “security upgrade” on most of our systems, so it only gets a chance to falsely accuse me of piracy when I manually update it — and since security updates are installed automatically, and have been for some time, that means maybe once a year.

Between the ever-present security headaches, Windows Vista, and this kind of thing, it looks like other people are deciding to abandon Microsoft wherever possible too. Microsoft’s recent mistakes may be the best things that have ever happened for MacOS and Linux.

4 Comments

  1. You’re quite right. The rollout of Vista, 2-3 years in the making, plus all of these idiotic occurrences on behalf of Microsoft are the best things that can happen to Linux and Mac.

    Did you read about the bug where playing a media file in Vista causes network transfer to be cut in half by some new throttling component?

  2. No, that’s a new one on me. I haven’t been keeping up with most of my IT news in the last week and a half though (temporarily too busy).

  3. According to Microsoft, this is not because of DRM, as many in the blogosphere have said, but because the Media Player is now prioritized over network traffic, file traffic, and even the mouse pointer: (link courtesy of osnews.com)

    http://www.betanews.com/article/Microsoft_Responds_to_Rediscovery_of_Vista_Network_Slowdowns/1188244273

    They claim “this is by design”, and are trying to paint it as a feature rather than a bug, which shows how much they have their heads up their (donkey) nowadays. 😉

Comments are closed.