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Users of pirated Windows Vista will soon discover that their warez installation being rendered useless via a “black screen of death”. Here’s the email obtained by:

“Good afternoon, as of this week, Microsoft has activated a function in Vista called ‘Reduced Functionality.’ This is a specific function in Vista that effectively disables nongenuine copies of Windows. Therefore anyone who has a pirated copy of Vista will experience:

A black screen after one hour of browsing
No start menu or task bar
No desktop

Please communicate this antipiracy initiative from Microsoft to your resellers — note this function has only just been activated in Vista worldwide and therefore any issues with nongenuine versions will start to arise from now onward.”

So, users of pirated Vista out there; it’s time to go legit. Alternatively, you could suck it in and get yourself acquainted with a better operating system

The votes have been tallied and Microsoft’s broken Office Open XML draft standard has been rejected in the process (emphasis mine):

Approval requires at least 2/3 (i.e. 66.66%) of the votes cast by national bodies participating in ISO/IEC JTC 1 to be positive; and no more than 1/4 (i.e. 25%) of the total number of national body votes cast negative. Neither of these criteria were achieved, with 53% of votes cast by national bodies participating in ISO/IEC JTC 1 being positive and 26% of national votes cast being negative.

Read the rest of Microsoft’s OOXML Rejected By ISO »

Scott McCausland was convicted of illegally downloading one of the Star Wars series some time in 2005. He’s now under probation after serving five months in prison.

A condition of his probation includes him consenting to periodic checks on his computer by a probation officer and/or monitoring software. McCausland in not against this, but apparently the monitoring software only supports Windows and not McCausland’s current OS, Ubuntu Linux:

“I am consenting to all of it, but it just so happens that the OS I use might not be supported by the software they use to monitor. So I do not feel (neither does my lawyer) that the government can force me to switch OS.”

McCausland has now started an appeal on his website to cover the cost of buying Windows.

So what’s a pirate to do in this situation? Launch a “Windows Tip Jar Campaign” of course

PC World reported that Microsoft web servers are deployed more than twice as often than its Open Source counterpart Apache among Fortune 1000 companies:

According to Port80 Software, which periodically surveys the public sites of Fortune 1000 companies to determine their use of web and application hosting technologies, Microsoft Internet Information Services 6.0 web server (IIS 6) gained 9.5 percent since August 2006, and passed IIS 5 to lead the survey for the first time, “outserving the open source Apache server and all other Web servers among Fortune 1000 sites.”

Overall, IIS 4, 5, 6, and 7 deployments continue a four year lead in the survey with a combined 55 percent share of all Fortune 1000 corporate sites, versus Apache’s 24.9 percent share.

Does this mean that IIS is approaching global domination in the realm of web servers? Probably among the richest companies in the world. This has always been Microsoft’s forte. They provide excellent support when it comes to corporate customers.

I still think that Apache and Open Source software in general, will be healthily adopted by SMEs. What do you think?

It seems that Microsoft will soon be releasing Works 9.0 as adware, if this post on ZDNet is accurate.

If you don’t know what Microsoft Works is; it’s a light office suite (if you can call it that). I remember it from the days of my second PC. My father bought for me a Compaq Presario and it has Microsoft Works 5.0 bundled along in the default Windows installation.

It has basic word processing and spreadsheet capabilities, as well as scheduling and contact management. If you’ve used Microsoft Office, you might find using Microsoft Works to be hell! It’s like having to drive a decrepit Proton Tiara when you’re used to driving a Ferrari.

Even with the free ad-supported version of Works coming out soon, I find it very, very hard to recommend it over much better free alternatives such as Open Office.