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If "winning the battle" is about "reducing piracy to zero", I agree about that, but I think MS is mostly interested in trying to reduce piracy a bit, at this point.

Well of course they can't completely stop piracy, but they can really make life difficult for pirates by breaking cracks and blacklisting pirated keys through Windows updates. That can make a huge difference, especially with average people that aren't computer experts.

How the **** is WGA a pain when you almost never ever see it?

WGA is a pain when it doesn't work, and WPA is a pain when you have to call up because it doesn't work. I know people using a corporate VLK XP warez version because they've had enough problems. so there.

You mean like a hardware dongle that is required to be plugged into the PC for Vista to function? That has been done before and hackers found a way to emulate the dongle or remove the need for it entirely (so the company doing it dropped that idea and did something else). Plus I believe Apple do a similar thing with having OSX requiring a special chip or something to function, that was cracked too...so I don't think something like that would work any better, as the saying goes, "what can be made by man, can be unmade by man" (or something similar)

Yes, to hackers, dongles are just either emulated, or they simply bypass the dongle check routine altogether and always have it report that it's inserted. The major problem with dongles is that you move the security to the local user. Once it's in the hands of the local user, it's also in the hands of a software crack.

All client-side security is at large risk of being hacked, and e.g. Autodesk abandoned this security measure a while ago. They now use license servers for the validation. They can of course also be hacked much like a Windows Vista KMS server can, but it's at least no less of security than a dongle is, and cost far less money for Autodesk to produce than a dongle, where actual hardware costs start getting involved.

Last edited by Jugalator on 26 Jan 2007 - 10:46

..which was cracked to run on non-Apple hardware. Anyway, back on topic eh?

and before intel macs were even released i think

True, though if OS X were licensed, the piracy would move beyond the small band of enthusiasts.

Probably not, linux is free and yet..

I don't think so. An ISO image of OS X is relatively easy to find (no harder than Vista), so if people really wanted to run a toy OS as their main OS, there would be nothing stopping them.

i suppose it depends what private trackers your on and if them trackers are linked with "The Scene" heh

No, it actually is champing.

Yup to Ravensworth. I remember learning this word. It's one of those oddities of...American english? Is it exclusive to us? We say stomp too, and I believe it's actually stamp.

I have no idea how the change in pronunciation came about.

There's nothing wrong with chomping

Did anyone say there was?

Considering that this is a play on the phrase "champing at the bit" the word is therefore champing. Chomping implies eating something (c.f. chowing [down]), champing implies frustration.

Last edited by mrbester on 29 Jan 2007 - 10:59

WTF? How in the world does running a cracked version of Vista "excel" people to new hights???? ROFL

Playing around with $1000 software like Lightwave 3D, Maya, Adobe Photoshop and Premiere sure is fun. Piracy makes the PC platform that much fun, but I'm worried with this P2P it may be back firing with online activation and driver-level copy protection. I wonder if they really sell less these days, or if they just say "oh we expect that much more buys this year as there are that much more PC's out there."

The if-they'd-just-reduce-the-price argument has been around for a while, and I'm starting to have my doubts about it.

Has anyone actually sat down with the numbers? Estimated percentage of users who have pirated copies, estimations of how many would buy if the price was lowered to specific points, and what the ideal price would be to maximize profit and minimize piracy...

The figure might actually be what the cost is now. Lowering it to half the price would never make sense. There aren't that many pirates out there to convert to make up the profit loss. 3/4 the price? 5/6 the price?

Maybe Windows isn't really ripping us off at all. *shrug*

Maybe many would love a Windows without Internet Explorer, Messenger, Movie Maker, Windows Media Player, Outlook Express, Windows Mail, File Explorer with full retail web browser functionality etc for half the amount they charge?

But nooo a monopoly strenghtening bundle is very important to them. Think if we had to buy the web browser and movie player separately, suddenly people might actually have a choice. Ohh.. i think i'll have PowerDVD XP and Firefox!

Pirate Windows all you want for all I care.

Yeah. And it'd be the only OS on the market that doesn't come standard with those features. Dude the web browser/file explorer merging is so permanent there's no going back. Even KDE does it. Taking a media player out is equally stupid. Windows has bundled a media player since the 16-bit days. And nobody cares about them bundling a mail client since the only decent quality competition is the full version of Outlook--their own product! People can insist Thunderbird is competition all they want--it really, really isn't. The full retail version of Outlook is by faaaaaar the best e-mail client of all e-mail clients ever to exist on the Windows platform.

But more importantly, here's why your response is silly: your list. Internet Explorer and File Explorer with web browser functionality--dude, you only have to list it once. Outlook Express and Windows Mail? The latter is just the new version of the former! List it once, already! Cross out Windows Media Player because it's just the modern equivalent of the same media player that's been there since Win3.x (or earlier, heck if I know--3.11 is the first Windows I ever used), and here's your actual list of things you want removed:

1) Web browser
2) Movie maker
3) Email client
4) Messenger

That's only four features. Here's why removing them won't make any sort of dent in the price whatsoever: the competition for those features are all free. Firefox/Opera? Free. Thunderbird? Free. AIM/Yahoo/Google? Free. You can't expect a price reduction by removing free components. The only thing with any commercial competition is the movie maker, but since it's geared toward the average home user who wants to convert something they made with a digital camera...and that's something that probably CAME with a free version of video editing software...the 'official' competition....is still free!

I suppose you walk into fast food restaurants and demand they charge you less because you don't want lettuce, tomato, and mayo like other people get. You aren't asking for the extras, so you should get it for half the price! Lord...

Microsoft would never be able to beat the pirates with price because...well...piracy is free.

considering most if not all torrent traffic is encrypted (depending on the client you use) i fail to see hows its such a big risk :s

Torrent traffic is not encrypted. There are some systems that add encryption to the packets, but that doesn't stop there being the same main server that lists everyone who is downloading it's IP address.

I guess the reason people do it is because they haven't seen any reason not to. As far as I know, nobody has done anything about software piracy (e.g. suing).

that's funny because utorrent allows me to use encryption , guess there lying , plus there is no main server for torrents , its a serverless protocol so it really do show how much you know , i suppose your on about the trackers ? if thats the case thats where private trackers come into their own , like i said before torrent if done right has no risk

Last edited by Fubar on 26 Jan 2007 - 17:00

Depends which tracker you're using; and which client, as well. Some trackers don't implement encryption, and some clients have encryption implemented better than others. It's an evolving field right now.

No bittorrent client uses true encryption, only the packet header is encrypted and it's done so to fool ISP's who throttle BT traffic, it has nothing to do with encrypting what you download and like somebody else said it's very easy to get your ip address from BT and see what your downloading/uploading, so even if it used encryption, it wouldn't make any diffrence.

I know Azureus lets you route your traffic through Tor, to anonymize your IP address, but Tor is incredibly slow.

Eh piracy probably would not decrease much, people still pirate regular old XP :p and it is as you say "somewhat reasonable" People pirate stuff because they can

Yes 250usd for an OS that will last you 5 years or more is so ridiculously expensive yeh?

well that's not exactly how it works. if you make major updates to your system you just have to call microsoft and they will let you use the key on your pc without problems.

How often do you change your CPU, GPU and Hardrive? You have 10 activations before you'll have to phone microsoft and ask them to reactivate it for you.

i'm sure that with all the money and effots microsoft is spending to fight piracy they've hired some crackers to help. but of course, they cannot hire EVERY cracker. that's why whatever they do, there will be someone who can solve it.