On 1/6/2011 12:19 PM, Stuart Jansen wrote: > >> Which it doesn't do very often and it isn't (at least according to my >> understanding) that crippled and about which you can presumably call some >> hotline and chat with them about the mistake. > For a home system, sure no big deal, much easier than getting the cable > guy to fix your Internet connection. For an enterprise, the increased > support load alone is bad news. The potential for catastrophic failure > is even more frightening. > > Woah there, Nelly! Let's not paint this as some sort of travesty. Let's assume that the false positive rate is 1%, and ignore the idea that you're probably using a corporate license which will have less of a chance of being identified in a one-off situation. If we had 1000 users, that's roughly ten calls we'll have to make over the life of their PCs.
I'm pretty sure IT would be spending more time on failed hard drives alone. Why would they even notice WGA as anything more than an annoyance? (This is also assuming a lot of other things like every end user trying to manually install some windows component that WGA is required for, because their updates would be from an internal update server, and really you don't tend to need extra components unless you're a power user anyway.) Don't get me wrong, I'm not a fan of WGA, but I also don't have a political point to make about it. A lot of open source software is going that direction now anyway. Heck, even debian and ubuntu collect package usage statistics, optionally on your end of course. You can gaurantee they're looking at usage from their servers though, and that's not as private as some would tell you. So maybe this is sort of a moot issue, and people should just vote with their wallets like Stuart mentioned, and not cry foul on MS when even open source people are getting with that program these days? Just a thought. -Tod Hansmann /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
