Article re Windows Vista "activation"

According to Paul Thurrott something called Vista "activation" can be postponed indefinitely.

When I examined this story, I first thought that "activation" was the enabling of the product's functionality above a baseline.

But as it turns out, for Vista, "activation" is far more complex. The system loses functionality and becomes a brain damaged Explorer, basically, if you don't "activate" within thirty days.

I've discovered that activation even for MS Office on XP is a nightmare in Hong Kong. It doesn't work. The activation progress screen crawls to a stop halfway and then after a while the activation software tells you activation has failed, and you should try again. You do so if you are an idiot, but the same thing happens again and again.

I'd downloaded Office as a trial intending to pay for it within sixty days, and I now am the proud owner of a NONWORKING office suite which until I get around to deinstalling same, simply prevents me from double-clicking Office documents and getting to Open Office, which is the only tool I have to work with my documents.

I now learn that:

(1) Product activation is even more of a nightmare for Vista.

(2) Big corporations have been given a bonehead workaround involving a simple Registry change which can be automated.

(3) The bonehead workaround will also enable pirates to mass release illegal Vistas, since there is no way to separate the self-interest of big corporations and big pirate bands here in China yo ho ho aaargh.

This is the absurd consequence of an epistemology in which secrets and knowledge were treated as equal in status. It is the epistemology of the community college, and I am on record as teaching at this level, in sympathy with its goals, but well aware of how anger and resentment create a "theory" of knowledge in which manufactured "secrets of da Windows masters" are treated as valuable commodities...in such a manner as to create an essentially corrupt economy.

"Consultants" ignorant of the basics of computer science can continue (as they did in the IBM mainframe era) making the big bucks by being brave and stupid enough to use Regedit to change the key, giving the corporate OS a month of viability at a time. Wiseguys will not automate the update, they will charge for coming in.

They will look good, they will be oh so "productive", unlike those of us Developer dot stars naive enough to actually discuss how to do our jobs better.

This is CORRUPTION.

You can take my charge of corruption as read. Computer geeks don't realize it, but we're surrounded with corruption powered by the new technology. My mates in software and in graphic design express puzzlement when I wonder how I shall pay for two tools I need, Photoshop and Visual Studio Professional, since within the graphic design community it appears easy to get free Photoshop and likewise within the Visual Studio community, Microsoft has fostered an (essentially corrupt) economy in which you can get software tools for saying nice things about Microsoft.

Essentially, the Bonehead Workaround is a kickback to big companies, who cannot, it seems, force their people to keep current with activating Vista.

In the 19th century, the railroads gave favorable rates to the biggest farmers and ranchers which was like to put small farmers and cattlemen out of business, and because Karl Marx's angry ghost was still about the shop, the business press was unable, as yet, to manufacture the sort of justifications of this sort of bullying you read in the Wall Street Journal.

Therefore, the little guys, unlike their great-grandsons, found their manhood and organized and fought for the candidacy of William Jennings Bryan who asked at the 1896 Democratic convention why the farmer, the rancher and the working man had to be crucified on a cross of gold by a combination of monopoly and the gold standard.

Microsoft is trying to maintain monopoly power over desk top operating systems and in this it's fine for me to sit and wait for nothing at all in Hong Kong while REAL pirates in Shenzen are given free of charge a way to vend Vista copies, so that big company system administrators can be comfortable.

Even people whose material interest is in maintaining a secrets epistemology, and vend workarounds around workarounds, where the workarounds are meant as commodities, find their consciences when the cynicism and absurdity is exposed.

Little guys who need to be able to help corporations and individuals use Vista need in the final analysis to know the difference between secrets and knowledge. They find themselves unindicted co-conspirators, passing along techniques that pirates will use to destroy Microsoft's ability to make money (about which I don't care) and the future of the people who work for Microsoft (about which I do care).

Clearly, software is too important to the survival of the human race (given our absolute dependency on the Internet to maintain our solidarity in the face of governments who absent the Internet would have started World War III some time ago) to be privately developed, and clearly, the Open Source and Open Content models are political.

Teach your kids the basics of real computer science. Show them how to program in machine language, and demystify the whole corrupt business. Show them that PEOPLE write software and don't need pseudo-magic secrets, lies and videotape!