Activation required

.. or who wants to live forever?

Yes, I have a laptop and yes it has Windows Vista on it. Yes, slowly and surely I begin to learn to live with its quirks and annoyances. I begin to find the little knobs you need to find to turn off those nasty warning screens. I mean, three dialogs warning me when I drag and drop some files to my C: drive? Honestly!

And then the confusing options when I want to go home. Should I:

1. let the laptop Shut Down?
2. put it to Sleep?
3. let it Hibernate?
4. or just close it down and see for it self what it does?

This is not a quiz with prizes but all answers are welcome in the comments.

Anyhow

Last night I put my laptop into Hibernate and this morning I woke it up again and Norton Internet Security welcomed me with this screen.

The message box in Dutch

You have decided to skip activation. This proces takes less than a minute. You have to activate your product within 4325464 days. Otherwise it will no longer work.
Do you want to activate now?

Now, I must remember to activate it in about 118 and a half century. Now, I just hope my laptop still is around by then. I will have to pass this on to my offspring. Because I don't think I will be around to remember.

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.