Well there's certainly a prominent example of a company taking explicit aim to *break* knock-off devices in a driver update:
http://arstechnica.com/informa...

It's not about working through BIOS/burned in rom. It's about when manufacturers go to some cheap knock-off that closely enough matches some other component in the market close enough to get the wrong drivers.

Alternatively, when they use a configuration of some component in a way that requires special drivers (e.g. cramming a part into a thermal situation that's undersized for the component and having particular throttling scenarios to preserve capability and/or comfort).

Adobe is an application. Windows is an OS platform. For Office I could see the argument, but for the OS being a subscription... That would be the opposite direction of all their competitors.

There are no signs and no precedent in the industry for a move like that. My point was that they are doing their best to dress up business as usual in clever ways to make various people *feel* like they are changing in a direction they think is right (revenue that resembles a subscription for investors, upgrades for OEM devices to new platforms without ever 'paying' for the OS explicitly for the end user). It seems silly they have to do it, but it's what they need to do to shape perception as the market is fickle and demands change even out of businesses that demonstrate solid revenue. This is probably the best sort of strategy from a business perspective I could see them moving with.

With regards the last release of Windows, everything I've heard is basically them deciding it is 'rolling release' time, with the LTS branch sort of still getting releases, but without so much noise each release.

Perhaps you should read the full thing ". Nothing however really changed in any real fundamental way."

They use phrasing that sounds like a subscription model and accounting trickery to make it *behave* like a subscription model, but the actual business does not change as they still just sell a license in a transactional way with respect to the client device. Essentially, they are hand waving to investors demanding annuity income to say 'think of a purchase as a prepaid subscription that expires when they probably are going to get a new license anyway'.

MS is stuck with the knowledge that a *real* subscription model for an *OS* would be suicide, but facing investors who think it would be awesome, so this is what they came up with.

They keep using 'Windows as a service' and 'supported lifetime of the device' which strongly hint at subscription.

On the financial side, they have done something with a strong hint about what they means: they declared they will defer a license revenue purchase and only count a part of it a year until the projected useful life of the hardware device is over. So they need to come out and be explicit, but it seems nothing really changes from the customer side and they play accounting tricks to transform their revenue to resemble a subscription offering.

So all signs currently point to Windows 10 being more of the same. Their upfront price is large enough and in pracitce gets thrown out with the hardware it was running on.

So they gussied up some fancy accounting and marketing and suddenly they look like they are a 'free' platform to customers and subscription to investors. Nothing however really changed in any real fundamental way.

They were cagey and had some misspeaks along the way, but the final picture is shaping up: Only those who are currently entitled to a currently supported Windows release level product license are entitled to Windows 10. Full stop. In short, it seems they are trying to rework their product development scheme to simplify their offering and reduce their exposure on support lifecycles while redefining the consumer space to enable them to keep up with their competition timelines on more equal footing (all the 'supported' desktop/mobile platforms abandon users pretty quick compared to microsoft).

The initial confusion around pirated copies: only genuine copies get to be 'genuine' Windows 10 versions. Basically the statement about update turns out to be a non-statement, though they allude to some 'attractive' offer.

The recent confusion that any Windows 10 previewer gets it for free: "It’s important to note that only people running Genuine Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 can upgrade to Windows 10 as part of the free upgrade offer." They edited the blog post to basically say 'no you are not entitled to a free copy just because you ran Windows 10 during preview".

So that's the strictly legal side. From a technical perspective, I wager that blog post hints at the reality that preview users will be able to get 10 for free fully activated without MS being the wiser, just without legal entitlement to do so.

I think if MS published numbers on Windows revenue from system vendors versus retail sales, we'd see that retail sales of Windows is a drop in the bucket. It seems entirely likely that the retail pricing is like list price of a vehicle: it's there to make you feel like you are getting a better deal when it gets 'included' with a device. All these shenanigans that let determined illegitimate users run Windows 'Genuine' are not worth addressing, because the opportunity cost is just not there in any realistic view of the world. They can selectively audit folks that *would* represent an opportunity cost and that threat keeps the viable revenue stream running from the world that actually licenses Windows in significant volumes: OEMs and corporate users. Yet they do make those people go through shenanigans so there can be no mistake, that someone is knowingly violating their agreements and that is not ok, so you better buy a copy of windows, or just give a little extra money to an MS partner and get new hardware while they are at it.

Of course the reason that the shenigans work is that MS licensing/'genuine' program is so convoluted, there are several scenarios and times when MS has no hope of masking illegitimate users without hitting some legitimate users. For example, in the 'Insider' case, it's probably the case that MS won't be able to stop a non-entitled user without also screwing over a Windows 7+ user that replaced their Windows 7+ platform with Windows 10 preview, probably losing the ability to prove to installer/activation servers they once had Windows 7+ genuine. Or maybe they could, but would require them to reinstall Windows 7/8/8.1 before update to Windows 10, which would just blemish their image just to keep it out of the hands of some people who weren't going to be giving MS money by any stretch.

Ever more severe correction:
"Once you have successfully installed this build, you will also be able to clean install on that PC from final media if you want to start over fresh. It’s important to note that only people running Genuine Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 can upgrade to Windows 10 as part of the free upgrade offer.*"

Basically, Windows 10 is not *intended* to be free for anyone who wasn't going to get it for free already. MS may not be able to reasonably stop free editions of 10 stemming from free installs of 10 preview, but it certainly seems to reserve the right to try and say that it is invalid per their license terms.

I strongly suspect the initial description will stand. Windows 10 preview activations weren't linked to anything at all, and all signs point to MS not having the ability to discern the history of an activation to see if there is any weirdness that may invalidate. So they are likely in the situation of either letting 'insiders' get 10 for free that were not running genuine 7, 8, 8.1 or screwing over 'insiders' that installed Windows 10 and no longer have the ability to easily prove their Windows 7/8/8.1 genuine status.

Windows rootkits *shouldn't* have been an inconsequential thing, but it was in the mind of the mass market. They got CDs, they put them in things and usually not a computer. Even when they put them in a computer, most probably had no idea what ever happened, or made no connection with the impact of opportunistic malware and that rootkit. Most people have no idea what their computer does and when it goes off the rails they don't make meaningful correlations to the causes of their grief (some think it's normal for rouge windows to open, some things computers just get slower with age, some people just randomly blame random things because the cause and effect aren't obviously connected).

As confusing and convoluted as the PSP product life went, for one PSP wasn't exactly a huge product for Sony and I don't think any of the gripes about PSP bungling about qualifies as a 'scandal'.

PS3 'Other OS' is a good example of why I'm not exactly keen on the idea of buying any 'game console' ever again. Thankfully most everything gets a PC version, and I can reasonably accumulate a gaming library that I can actually revisit long after the hardware used to play it in the first place is long dead.

The difference is that Sony is a mass consumer brand with a great deal of casual interest, with the bad thing pretty tangential to the general interest in the affected product.

Sourceforge's target demographic is narrower and what they did is more core to the concerns of potential users. Combine with the reality that the sourceforge platform just isn't that interesting anymore (there remain some things they do well enough, but other candidates are just as good and sourceforge has had a bad habit of changing stuff out from under projects and requiring projects to do work and change their processes just because sourceforge decided to do something else). Basically a project that would have gone to sourceforge is better off going to github for core development, documentation, and executable download. Those wanting more complete packaging solutions for linux distributions now have blessed infrastructures to feed data in and get repositories (launchpad, copr, opensuse build service).

The life lesson is a project should have everything in a 'to go' bag so they can hop platforms without much muss or fuss.

Well, if you have a lot of awareness of the landscape, you can sort of fill in the pieces. Basically what they did was reveal enough to show that they may be clever, (the principles described are sound) but not enough to actually change the landscape. What they purport to have done is already an obvious high level strategy to anyone in the world who would have actually been able to pull it off and probably is already in play at some of their competitors. If you ask someone who actually recognizes the specific cited components, they can testify that it's a reasonable result though they are likely unable to say they could trivially reproduce the success. I would say the nearest competitor to Google with external evidence that they *could* possibly do this is IBM (their POWER servers used to support a proprietary interconnect that acted like this in the super computer space), though I don't know how much of that team is left or how capable IBM is at actually gathering those folks together for their cloud initiative.

The short of it is they used OpenFlow to enable them to construct an ethernet fabric that resembles a supercomputing fabric. I thought from the first time that I got a high level briefing on OpenFlow that the openflow controller role was quite reminiscent of the subnet manager concept that is ubiquitous to high speed fabrics (today basically Infiniband, but other fabrics historically did the same thing). By using OpenFlow, they get out of the trap of having to use equipment from the dwindling number of suppliers (if you want to buy a new fabric today, basically only three companies do it anymore, Mellanox, Intel, and Cray). They don't get *all* of the benefit of those fabrics, but they get the vast majority of the benefits that would be relevant to the Google workload, at siginificant reduced cost. Basically, in 'traditional' ethernet, there's a gread deal of gymnastics to have a loop-free network from the perspective of any particular participant while at the same time doing all sorts of things with aggregation and MSTP and other technologies to gain some benefit. In a supercomputing fabric, they go to town with mesh networking that doesn't give one crap that there are 'loops' in the network because the entire route of each packet is settled at the edge.

There are things in a modern Supercomputing fabric that I don't see mapping to OpenFlow, but I could see how a sufficiently invested company could negate the need of some of it in something designed particularly for their application.

The point being that it is perfectly legal for them to do so, and no one is saying 'SUE SOURCEFORGE FOR INFRINGMENET'.

They are saying 'BOYCOTT SOURCEFORGE FOR BEING DECEIPTFUL'. It's completely valid to call them out for being misleading about content they are manipulating for reasons that are not at all aligned with the enduser benefit.

Actually backup is fair use. If the media is sold under the exact same terms but not explicitly protected by CSS or whatever then a backup is perfectly legitimate.

DMCA created a weird world where you can break copyright law without infringing copyright. Circumventing a technology intended to protect against infringement is made illegal even with the copyright is not infringed. Circumventing it just to *play* the content is also illegal.

I don't think it's considered 'piracy', it's a different crime. The copyright is not infringed (fair use applies), but the circumvention of the protection is a crime on it's own regardless of copyright being infringed in the US.

For them to have gone to the trouble of doing an RTG solution for this would have been perceived as completely unnecessary, even if not for the 'oh no, nuclear' facet of it. It only made sense in retrospect because *TWO* things failed in a way that the lander managed to survive by incredible luck. If you were on the engineering team and someone said 'well, what if our harpoon system fails and our thrusters to control descent don't work and we can't slow the craft down, let's put in an RTG to work if we end up on the dark part of the comet', you would say 'if the descent thrusters fail to fire, the thing is pretty much toast anyway, the likelihood that we will hit that hard, survive, and not be tethered to where we are supposed to be is so thin that putting in an RTG to tolerate that is ridiculous.

The landers circumstances are very very unique and the RTG would have been a poor fit for the mission parameters if all went according to plan, and failing in this specific way is just so peculiar that it's silly to say they should have planned for this scenario with an RTG (as opposed to some other mechanisms to be triply sure they would get on the comet just right)