Microsoft said it’s seeing piracy rates for Windows Vista that are half those of Windows XP. The decline in piracy rates is largely due to the fact Vista is much tougher to fake than XP. Microsoft VP, Mike Sievert, said: “Piracy rates are lower because it’s harder.” There are a variety of reasons for that, including the fact businesses no longer have volume license keys that can be used to activate an unlimited number of machines. Another is the fact Vista machines that aren’t properly activated pretty quickly become basically unusable once they enter “reduced functionality mode”. For Microsoft, the gains have been significant. In its last profits call, Microsoft said five percentage points of Windows growth could be attributed to gains in piracy. But Microsoft is making the experience a little less harsh for those running pirated versions of Vista. With Service Pack 1, Microsoft is doing away with reduced functionality mode in favour of putting prominent notifications on systems that are not found to be genuine. Non-genuine systems with SP1 will display a warning at start-up that the system is not properly activated. Users will have the option to “activate now” or “activate later”, though the second option won’t show up for a time. Users will also have their desktop background changed to white and a prominent notification placed in the lower right hand corner saying that the machine is not genuine. Still, in a significant change, those with non-genuine or non-activated copies of Vista will still be able to use their systems. Also with SP1, Microsoft is closing two key loopholes that pirates have used to evade Microsoft’s security measures. One involves mimicking the process used by large computer makers to pre-activate their Vista machines, while the other extends the grace period that customers have to activate their machine, in some cases extending it for decades. Nice, but does Microsoft really think noone will crack it? Source: Zdnet, Silicon
another reason is vista is considered a resource hog, it takes alot more power to run then xp therefore not as good for some people becuase there computers cant keep up
or perhaps because the people who pirate are cheap and vista is more than their systems can take. or because their antipiracy system misses pretty much everything or because...
Because the piraters dont even see vista as pirate worthy so they dont waste their time, anyways microsoft is being stupid instead of making it limited they are just going to set the desktop as "this is not a genuine version", thats stupid, if somebody gets a ll mad about it you can just say its not activated yet.
I'm probably gonna stick with XP until they come out with a new operating system that doesn't like Vista.
people were saying the same thing about 95. then they did a mass migration people said the same thing about ME then they got 2000 which was released simultaneously people said the same about XP and claimed 2000 was king now everyone runs XP. the fact is vista is a good solid OS. IMO vista as an OS is better than XP. sure it eats RAM. Holy crap, you might have to spend $30 to get 2GB RAM for the OS. I can guarantee you though, if you can afford $100 for software you can afford $30 for RAM
I'm just gonna say it; Vista sucks. It uses far more resources than it should. They tried to rip the look of a mac, which they sorta did, but made it a resource hog. Mac can run fine, why can't vista, I mean it is trying to be one. Also, don't know if any of you saw, but it was shown that windows runs better on a Mac, lol. The point is, you shouldn't have to spend oogles of money to get your machine to use an OS that is just plain $hit in a box.
I don't care what is ripped from what, I rate a product on it's own merit. as far as I'm concerned both MS and apple make ----ty subpar products, apple because it's just going for sheer cash at the expense fo the consumer, and M$ because windows was built on top of crap and i order to maintain their monopoly, they need to maintain compatibility and their policy on compatibility is "legacy inclusion is good". And that is why M$ and Apple are evil and together have around 99% market share and are happy monopolists ripping off us the consumer. and FYI, with the huge premium apple charges on it's computers, you can easily but the diference into RAM. EG: hardware wise a $1000 mac is comparable to a $600 PC. In fact by definition, all of apple's computers are now PC clones. As in the term mac is pure marketing as there is no real difference. for $400 difference between the two, you can get 20GB RAM if 2GB is enough for me to the degree that under XP, Vista, and various versions of linux I see no apparent performance difference between 2GB and 4GB... and most boards don't support past 8GB RAM... I think you're fine in that regard. If anything, I think OSX should be leaning towards more aggressive memory caching. With Vista, many parts of the OS and regularly used apps are loaded into memory automatically. The entire industry should be going this way. With the average consumer doing little more than email, internet, music/media, and office work, 4GB RAM(which WOULD be standard if the move to 64bit were finished) is overkill. really, RAM is cheap 2GB RAM goes for as little as $30. And that 2GB is FASTER than the stuff used by Dell, HP, Apple, etc. in the bulk of their systems. and really OSX is ---- on a box. Atleast when it comes to performance in a system where memory is not an issue. While windows and other *nix OSes tend to be on apr and perform generally well, OSX is almsot always falling behind. Atleast according to the University of California Berkely. But again, for general use, where the end user is the primary limiter(EG: the rate at which you browse webpages or do work in photoshop is limited by you and not the system) it doesn't matter.
How is in for sheer cash? Apple makes plenty of products that work good for coming with the system, I know I would rather use iDvd than Windows Movie Maker for an average person. And there isn't much of a premium. If you buy windows, you're either just buying the OS, or a tower. YOu don't get a monitor with it, or any decent programs that just everyday consumers want to use, such as iTunes, or iPhoto, iMovie HD, and if you have no web experience at all, but need a minor site for like a local business, iWeb. I am not claiming them to be the best products ever, neither am I saying Mac is flawless, nothing in this world is perfect (except Jessica Alba in my bed), but I have never seen Windows treat java applets very well, nor run a virtual machine all too good.
If you're telling me that Apple isn't the greediest, money whoring company out there you're lying to yourself. They spend more money on marketing than on R&D. most of their hardware design is outsourced when a competitors media player costs $60 to make, sells for $100, gives a $20 margin to the retailer, and has tons of features and is outsold 50 to 1 by an iPod with an approximate manufacturing cost of $50, sells for $200, and gives the retailer a margin of $10... that's sad and attributable to really good marketing and excellent business decisions. For the last few years I'd say that apple has been making better business decisions than M$ people don't want functionality(from a low level perspective) and performance - they want the illusion of functionality and performance coupled with good looks and a low learning curve. and don't kid yourself, there is a HUGE premium on apple hardware. That's why they don't sell OSX by itself. They make almost nothing on software sales and BIG $$$ on hardware sales. when it's $1300 for a iMac with a 2Ghz core duo, and 512mb RAM, a keyboard and monitor(about a year ago) and $900 for a case, a mouse, kb, monitor, a 2Ghz athlon x2, 2GB RAM, I call BS. No really I do. 50% price premium back in q1 06 right there. can't give a current example off the top of my head because I haven't looked in a bit, but trust me THERE is a HUGE premium. Usually around 50% over building yourself. and I'll agree java under winblows is pathetic. But VMware seems solid under windows, probably moreso than parallels is under OSX. Sure parallels allows better driver level emulation, BUT performance is still mediocre in that degree. At the end of the day, if you're a multibillion dollar corporation and you're banking on good virtualization performance, you'll be running some sort of linux or BSD derivative. Noone runs OSX in the server industry. OSX is not that good of a performer. It has a great GUI. It has a low learning curve. I use a keyboard more than a mouse, have 5000 shortcut key combinations memorized and quite frankly I think the whole gui concept is overrated. by the time i navigate to the program that I want under the GUI, I could have opened up terminal, command prompt etc. typed in the programs name and have been done with it. For me the whole idea of an effective GUI is bs and misguided. performance>looks and then I'm cheap. ----- also don't get too worked up about it, I REALLY HATE M$ AND CRAPPLE. They monopolized the consumer OS industry and screwed us the consumer. I jut tend to take it out more on apple because people idolize them so much as they're supposedly the last hope against M$ while i see them as nothing more than part of the problem(heck they're around 30% owned by microsoft) If it weren't for games I'de be a linux only person and run other apps through VMware and the like. and if you haven't noticed, i have roughly 5000 posts in the tech section. i have no life outside of computer hardware and the like... ok i do but the point remains I spend too much time with this stuff.
simple explanation - no one WANTS vista because its total crap =/ it would be a waste of time to crack it and upload it for users across the web
I dont know about other people but when I got my first computer it was with Windows Me and then I went on to XP which I found even better. I've used Windows 98 and 2000 and I never kujed them, dont know why people liked them. I usually find the newer models, software etc. better than the previous ones but with Vista it's different, it's just ----. When Vista came out, our teacher installed it on like 4 computers in class which I used and it had problems running some of the softwares, that he had to call some one from MS or something and they couldn't even fix the problem. Vista has way too many useless features, I hear people say they ripped of Apple's OS which I dont know, dont care, I'm not an Apple user, all I know is that Vista is not that great. Btw not even on newegg.com do they sell 2gb of ram for 30$, the cheapest there is like 39$ plus theres shipping as well, and I dont know how much shipping is. At retail stores you wont even find 1gb of RAM for 20$ unless they have a sale on it which they dont usually have that much. Cheapest I've seen a 1gb RAM was like 35$ at a store, and not a lot of people like to shop online.
