On being treated like a pirate

... Hasta la Vista baby!

In a shocking article "WARNING: device driver updates causing Vista to deactivate" James Bannan from the Australian APC Magazine reports on his completely legal copy of Windows Vista almost closing down on him after having replaced his video card and updating some device drivers. Apparently, the anti-piracy miracles inside Vista decided that there was enough evidence of a major hardware change that it concluded that it had been copied to a completely new system!

Exchanging the video card or updating the driver for his hard drive by themselves was not enough to start the deactivation, but combined it was just enough. In the comments to said article there are reports taht even things like a number of creating encrypted volumes can trigger this unwanted behaviour.

Long live the pirates!

Also in the article it is made clear that the pirated version you can grab of Torrent sites completely ignores this Activation check. So the group those lovely people over at Microsoft want to tackle just continue without a glitch and the Joe Average who updates his device drivers directly from the hardware manufacturer and maybe exchange a piece of hardware is in danger of getting stuck with a helpless copy of Vista ...

It seems like the world has turned upside down.

iPhone, youPhone, wePhone

.. or noPhone?

Eventhough not too many people read this blog, not like thousands a day, I do get one or two odd visitors every now and then. I have seen people with huge monitors like 6000 pixels wide, which are in fact quadruple monitors (ow, how I envy just the deskspace for that setup!). But now apparently an iPhone has made to this site.

Weird!

But interesting!

Good Cheap and Fast Service

.. sounds too perfect to be true

In fact it is too good to be true.

Anyway, two out of three aint bad.

You need a split brain

.. to split the atom

Molly E. Holzschlag has a very interesting post on the split brain you need as a web developer / designer.

You need to know a lot of technical stuff AND you need to be creative. You need to make something visually appealing AND make it work. Not an easy assignment.

For me, the split between trying to stay up to date with everything web related and making this appealing and getting the work done, is what makes the entire constellation go round and round. It's fun to learn and re-solve the puzzle with new tools in new ways.