Re: XP license to 2nd computer legal?

mayayana writes:

I think the admin. issue is also somewhat of a red herring.
It's only in recent years that security has become an issue,
and admin. privilege is an entirely different issue for
corporate vs home/office computers.

Windows comes from a background in which there were no user accounts,
so most applications assume that the current user has all rights to do
everything. Today, Windows is a system that implements separate user
accounts, but some software still won't install (and sometimes won't
even run) unless the current user is an administrator.

This was never a problem on UNIX because UNIX was designed as a
multiuser timesharing system, and it always had user accounts, so
software was designed not to require root privileges unless they were
really necessary.

A "user" account is for workers who are not allowed to control
the computer.

Anyone with physical access to the computer controls the computer.

Microsoft hasn't made much that people want to buy for quite awhile.

The sales figures for the company say otherwise.

They collect a monopoly PC tax on all machines built, and they
still profit from their proprietary office suite that they
successfully get people hooked on in college.

Only because people want to buy their products. Vendors sell very few
Linux machines because nobody wants a machine with Linux preinstalled.
Microsoft came up with a version of its OS that does not contain
Windows Media Player in order to conform to an order made by the
European Union, but nobody actually wants that version of the OS; they
are all buying the full version. The market and Microsoft's
competition are two different things.

That's the best case MS can make for newer
office versions: that the old version is unfashionable.

That's the best case that anyone can make for most "upgrades."

Everything else MS makes is losing money.

MS makes almost all its money on Windows and the Office sweet. There
has never been much of "everything else." But what products do you
have in mind, specifically?

And XP has only gained by attrition.

That's how all new OS versions get installed. Almost nobody runs out
and explictly buys and installs an "upgrade."

The constant reworking of software in Linux is a big
problem. Nothing ever quite gets finished. But there's
no comparison when it comes to fixing bugs. Firefox
is a great example. They just came out with a fix for
12 bugs that were not even announced, as far as I know.
When there's a critical bug it gets fixed in days. Microsoft
doesn't even admit it's a bug until they issue a fix. That's their
trick for keeping the official list of bugs small.

Open-source only fixes the bugs it feels like fixing, since it has no
incentive to fix all bugs (such as the threat of lawsuits or revenue
loss).

There are webpages
that maintain a running list of unfixed IE bugs, and people are
still waiting for a fix to the latest Word bug. In fact, MS
bugs are so bad that I think it's not an exageration to
say that the single best thing a Windows user can do
to be safe online is to use no Microsoft software at all
(aside from Windows, of course).

There are hundreds of millions of people who are happy with Windows
today. You greatly exaggerate the risk. And the risk is rapidly
rising for the Mac and Linux. Most new security bugs are in Linux.

--
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