Christmas Stuff

Christmas Stuff
12/27/2006 8:08:00 AM
By Simbey

All in all, I'd say I had a great Christmas this year! I received plenty of great gifts, and we had the satisfaction of hearing from both of Danielle's parents that we "over did it" on buying them gifts. Strangely, we didn't get quite the reaction for which we'd hoped from my dad after he opened five wrapped boxes of 'O' Scale Nazi tanks and soldier figurines (I guess he expects such randomness from me). He says he'll be incorporating them into an already-planned military section of his train layout.

One of my gifts was a new pair of Bose PC speakers. My old Creative set is more than a decade old and was failing to play particular frequencies. One if the first programs I ran after setting up the new speakers is Microsoft Money, and I heard tones in its startup sound I'd never heard before!

The next program I ran was Windows Media Player 10. Version 10 has been prompting me for some time now to upgrade to version 11, so I finally decided to do it. It installed fine, but the post-installation setup required a Windows authenticity check, which, of course, failed.

The failure that is WGA

You see, I was the unlucky recipient of a Windows product key that Microsoft later decided was invalid. I paid for the key, but now I'm the unproud owner of a little blue star in my system tray. Isn't it a blue star? I once contacted Windows technical support inquiring whether I could use a new product key to legitimize my system without reinstalling Windows. I had to send the technician a screen shot of the "blue star" before she even remotely knew what I was talking about, but she still didn't have an answer!

Okay, so I've been living with the little blue star and its annoying message balloons for several months now. I've lived with the five second delay when logging into Windows. But now I was without Media Player too! Not generally caring much about music, this wouldn't normally be a huge loss, but I decided to take back my system! After a visit to MyDigitalLife.info (yeah, I know, .info is gay) and two registry patches later, I finally defeated Windows Genuine Authenticity! Well, I do still have the blue star, but the startup delay is gone, and Media Player 11 runs.

WGA's future and other mistakes

This morning, I received an E-Mail from ZDNet with an interesting story title in its list: Is Microsoft about to release a Windows "kill switch"? With a clearly anti-Microsoft agenda, you generally can't give ZDNet too much credit, but, in this case, having suffered through similar experiences as listed here, I would at least say read the article and give it some thought. Would Microsoft actually implement a kill-switch? Even I would consider that a stupid move, at least as long as otherwise legitimate keys are rejected by WGA. I doubt the system in place for Windows XP can be fixed, so a kill-switch for XP shouldn't happen. It would be more likely for Vista since it's starting out soon with a clean slate (more or less).

WGA has been a real disaster. I guess even Microsoft isn't immune to the aphasia that affects most large corporations because it was by no means a smart move. As a Windows user, promoter, and believer since 3.11, I usually agree with Microsoft on most decisions, but lately there has been an increase in blunders:

WGA
Click activation for web ActiveX controls in IE. Michael Doyle is a cyberterrorist. Whatever happened to the "We do not negotiate with terrorists" policy?
.NET Promotion. There's been a lot of uncertainty among developers as to whether .NET should replace C++. Microsoft's promotion of .NET has left many questions with few or vague answers. In my opinion, .NET should not be used in anything other than website development. It makes sense for the web, but desktop applications should be native. Plus, I shouldn't have to install the .NET Framework when I install Visual Studio 2005 just for C++ programming either.
No longer reusing Internet Explorer and shell folder windows for each other. Am I the only one who misses this integration that was so highly emphasized in Windows 98?

But, hey, Linux isn't any better! Is Linux still overly embracing Java? You don't want Java! You also don't want SDL. Pick a platform and write native software for it!
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