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[isthisthingon]

Visualize this in the lower right hand corner of your desktop:

Windows Vista (TM)
Build 6002
This copy of Windows is not genuine

Now imagine your wallpaper changing from a beautiful beach scene to a menacing black "suggesting" pretty has a price.  Only those who pay properly can enjoy prettyness.  The rest are pirates that should be shot.  Namaste.

Now, breathe deeply and calm your mind.  When you feel sufficiently relaxed and non-threatening to authority, visualize all of your files - terabytes of files - being instantly rendered inaccessible until you provide a valid credit card and pay hundreds of dollars to Microsoft.  Imagine literally thousands of dollars worth of purchased, legally licensed games that you love being instantly rendered inaccessible because they exist within an OS that you received as a gift from a friend.  All poop aside, this is completely true.  What happened is my friend's company went BK a while ago and the corporate licenses of Vista were not maintained.  Therefore his gift to me and subsequent financial fallout turned me into a "pirate" and now I'm stuck with either paying Microsoft a huge sum or losing my extensive and LEGAL investment in all the games I love to play. 

Yes, I can afford it.  However, others can't.  But regardless of this, I'm faced with dismissing my integrity so I can continue to enjoy the games I love, or honoring my integrity, losing my investment in games and divorcing the closed source, corporate fish hooks that tempt me with their seductive and evil offerings.

Oh I almost forgot, did I mention having to pay hundreds of dollars to Microsoft??  More accurately, did I mention having to post bail to get my files that contain tax information that I absolutely require prior to April 15'th?  I realize the Cache is kind to corporate controlled existence and I'm just some squeaky wheel of ignorant anarchy that you see as sweet yet dumb.  ITTO is good at heart but he just doesn't "get it." 

Sorry to be so preachy, or even risk sounding like Rush Limbaugh.  I absolutely love to laugh and celebrate life in a lighthearted way.  But please try to imagine how it might feel if you were already an avid opponent of closed source, proprietary, lock-in type approaches to business and in a flash you realized that everything you've worked so hard to protect is instantly rendered useless unless and until you provide Microsoft with a credit card to bail your life in data out of jail.

Well here's the moment of truth.  Does ITTO exchange a sliver of soul for sick ass, surround sound gaming glory or does he take the high free software road?  Is every good priest a lying sex predator that poops in the woods with a funny hat?  Exactly.

So here's to Microsoft and the rest of the lock-in champions: 

[jammaster82]

I can appreciate how you feel on this one... in 2004 or so i lost about 4-5 years worth of work i did in ms sql server and somehow it went across my network to two other computers and completely shut down everything i had worked on for the longest time really.... i cried for the longest time and then got into mysql.

The grim future that I keep seeing especially with the cloud is this loss of control over your own data and what your computer does.. you know, like how everyone got raped for extra text message fees when the craze first hit?  I see a bunch of people not able to get to 'their internet' until payday because they havent paid the bill... free wi fi wont matter cause youll need to pay a fee just to run a browser that does the latest java/html/flash combo....

This is pure evil.*

I think we can pretty much already forget private browsing unless you buy a netbook hand to hand and keep some thermite available and only use it from wifi spots and never type a single personal character on it.  Cause the onkeypress->ajax stuff is all there to watch every word you type, much less if they get the speech recognition thing ... they will its just a matter of time. Prolly done already but they have to ease us into the spooky idea that my atari 800 1.77 mhz voice master blackjack basic program did it good enough to play blackjack with any similarly gendered user after i trained it... and that was in 84 or so... so maybe the nissan and chrysler 1985 talking cars freaked people out too much idk but i see a picture of me on google street view and i was where i shouldnt have been
license plate, face photo and everything.

*(time bandits reference)

[perkiset]

Freakin' horrible. That's beyond lock in, it's extortion. What if all the work/games/files etc you'd created were in *nix and you just moved them over? Windows should have *no control at all* of your derivative files on a machine that's running Windows. Ghastly.

[isthisthingon]

I've been working on pulling things over with some success.  I'll never get the gaming system out of an emulator like Wine in Ubuntu but I'm working at least to get the files.  Although I didn't use encryption I'm finding that some of my directories are simply invisible to Ubuntu while I can access others with no problem.

It does make me really see the design behind DRM since what is really needed for that to work is for files themselves to prevent access if no license is found.  Strangely enough I'm having some success by physically moving files to an external that is not also the boot partition of Vista.  Even with a root-level, shared and open folder I'm having problems seeing it but copied to a 500GB external it sees it fine.

So most of my data may be fine after all.  Just lots of grunt work at this point.

[perkiset]

You might try putting that drive into an external USB connected enclosure, then bring it up on another XP box or something that understands NTFS but wont implement the restrictions on the files as well.

[isthisthingon]

You might try putting that drive into an external USB connected enclosure, then bring it up on another XP box or something that understands NTFS but wont implement the restrictions on the files as well.

Yep I'll bet this would work well, though it's a challenge since that same physical drive is partitioned with a dual-boot into Ubuntu.  I think most of my files are back at this point.  I'm just installing the right drivers and such in Ubuntu so I can see all my DVD backups

[Phaëton]

If you have a copy of xp or anything with a legit serial you can upgrade for like 70$ and put everything on a seperate drive on a legit win 7 copy and play all your games on a seperate hard drive all together.  But other than games theres nothing you shouldnt be able to accomplish better with ubuntu.

If you are a student you can download a legit updateable .iso for free:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMrQfg1TgRc