OK,
First, the Microsoft Product Activation is a _requirement_ for winXP or it stops
working after
30 days (10 in some circumstances). Corporate licenses have other arrangements.
Product activation does _not_ reveal your hardware to microsoft, so they claim
at their website. What they describe is a hashing algorithm that makes it easy to
detect changes but also makes a non-unique key. That is, several different hardware
configurations can compile to the same key, but a minor chaqnge on the
hardware is highly unlikely to produce an indentical key. Re-Activation will be
required, either by web or by telephone, when the hardware has changed a lot.
This is Microsoft's remedy, they say, for casual piracy where one person makes a
copy of the software for a friend who installs it and makes two copies for his
friends, and so on.
Unfortunately, the plan fell through. It's not out of BETA and the activation key has
been cracked, finally, totally, fatally, which is what Microsoft probably had iin
mind all along, since most new machines come with a ready-made microsoft tax
anyway.
Can we end this thread here? I'd rather be positive about linux any day and
fight necromancers with disbelief.
We also have a reportng mechanism that snapshots your computer. It will likely
be in next release. Of course the source is available so people can examine
how it functions. Its purpose is different--you will have a menu of things to
report, like hardware configuration, security configuration (no password files),
network configuration, Printing Config, USB configuration, Samba configuration,
Wine Config, a list of installed packages, partitioning and filesystems,
symbolic links, and they're in a checklist. The send button will contact the
MandrakeExpert website and upload as much of your configuration as
you care to report, so that any experts helping you can see it.
Civileme
