Re: [LUG] Offtopic: Re: Windows "kill switch"?

Keith Abraham wrote:
> Interesting for dual-booters?
>
> http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=84&tag=nl.e550
>
> I'm glad my software is free.

Hehe

Last time I ran Windows update for a colleague at work, it presented me
with a "Microsoft Pre-release" licence. I glanced at the first few
terms, thought "I didn't run Windows update to install pre-release
software" (given the quality of the released software - pre-release
would be suicidal - surely Windows update is to fix all the security
holes?), so I declined the licence. Turns out it was WGA that I declined
- although the update tool doesn't make that clear when the licence is
presented <sic>.

Still it pays to read the small print, as whilst I'm fairly sure DELL
ship legitimate copies of Windows, I have no faith in software licence keys.

Mandatory licence keys are notorious for going wrong. I've squandered
whole days of disaster recovery planning due to minor licence key issues.

The 15 day 'hardware switch' relief that BAAN is suppose to give didn't
give me any time at all on the DR hardware once - oops - guess that is
why you do DR test runs. But this resulted in other DR tests being
omitted due to time constraints.

The HP Softbench team once admitted they had more calls on the licensing
system (it used the default DCE cell by default, resulting in licence
database corruption when any box with a printer plugged in sneezed,
locking out 30,000 quids worth of software and making the developers
lives painful), than they did on the product itself (which was a
development environment for programmers - glueing together debuggers,
editors, SCM, Make, compilers etc - so trivial to support <sic>.

Oracle, notorious licence enforcers, have generally seen fit to enforce
their incredibly expensive licences with visits from auditors, rather
than mess around with software and screw up a perfectly good database
for want of a magic number -- but hey I'd rather the proprietary
software people make it as painful as possible for their users -- so
don't tell anyone.

WGA doesn't work anyway, if you don't pirate via p2p, allegedly.
Also, Activation does not prevent one from using one copy on multiple computers so long as they are not identical, allegedly.