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Rant: Say no to crappy usage licenses (re: Windows Vista et al)
Tue, 31 Oct 2006

I've probably ranted many times on how when you buy a car, you can open the hood (so far..) and mess with it, or buy a muffler can to put on the back to make it sound grumblier, or attach goofy blue lights to the bottom should you like to drive a UFO around. You have choices. You bought it, its your car, and you can do whatever you like to it provided it follows the guidelines required of you by law (safety, etc.) Well and good. We're all very wary for when they (the man, OS vendors) start requiring micropayments to operate an OS (can't wait to pay 10 cents to turn on the PC for the day!) but we all know that will come too. And we all know (don't we?) that various versions of Windows in the past required you to re-buy them after updating your machine (Windows XP Home Edition IIRC only lets you upgrade your PC 2 or 3 times). But where will it stop? Not with Vista, thats for sure.

For the workplace, I'm sure Windows will continue to be popular and for many good reasons.. but even there I think Microsoft is eating into its bank of good will, slowly. But its in the home all of these many schemes in the industry will start to cause Rightclick-Revolution. I mean, once the iPod people try to move their music to a Samsung player and cannot, they will get angry - won't they? I wish people were not so ready to through away their sanity, but they buy from iTMS anyway (and at least Apple is wrestling with the RIAA so maybe something good will come of it.) Once the buyers of Windows Vista (the next Windows after XP runs its course soon) swap out a video card and find they can nolonger use their machine until spending another few hundred dollars.. maybe then they will learn, and fight back by switching to some other OS. (Consider -- you buyy a new hard disk and pop it in and MS lowers themselves to let you continue to use your purchased equipment; then you pop in a new video card and bam, thats it, MS has decided your computer is nolonger useful nomatter how integrated into your daily life it is. Maybe you even use it for telephone and 911.. but that video card just cost you $100 say, and now will cost you another $200 or so 'Microsoft Windows tax'. Why aren't the hardware companies up in arms? Won't this extra very large cost on gadgets suppress their markets?)

Of course, this is in addition to the other weird stuff -- not being able to run Windows in a virtual machine, meaning you can't run it inside of Mac OSX or Unix/Linux... so they want to be the main OS and not the contained OS. The average joe won't care, but thats still a pissoff... with no real benefit to Microsoft in the end. The people capable of such things know better, but it'll annoy them all the same. The average joe might notice when Windows will not let them reinstall it - one buy gets you one install. Heck, I suppose right off, their PC-detection software better work - its done okay for me so far, permitting me to use my laptop (and I really loathe buying something and having some third party permitting me to use it!), but there are many people whose hardware was incorrectly detected as using pirate copies of Windows and thus denied use. Vista is tied even closer so this stuff better darned well work right!

All this business annoys me; we all 'accept' that the world is moving to where you never own anything, but you license it when you buy it; thats bollocks and we need to make sure we stop buying that sort of product when we can. When we buy something, we want to own it, to reserve the right to trinker, destroy or fix something. Imagine how annoying it would be if your dishwasher broke and you couldn't call a repairman to fix it, but had to buy a new one instead; disgusting. If only all the employees of Microsoft could stand up and say 'please Crom make the madness stop', without being immediately fired and the jobs outsourced..

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