Minor Detail Follow-ups, + ranting about WGA

I just realized that gmail had been filtering my blog comments into my spam folder, so I apologize for those of you who I haven’t responded to yet.

SXSW “featured” my podcast last week (I was like the second person to actually do it) so here it is, for your listening pleasure.

I’m headed to LA tomorrow for the iConference, where I’m participating in the Doctoral Colloquium, presenting a poster on the MySpace moral panic and sitting on an SNS panel with Fred, danah and Cliff, which I’m very happy about.

Otherwise, I plan on enjoying the 70 degree weather in LA and going to the Getty and maybe the La Brea Tar pits and definitely Aardvark’s on Melrose.

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In completely different news, I am disgusted with Vista. I really enjoyed it for the first three months I used it, but now I’m seeing the cracks in the facade. The wireless networking is buggy. Explorer crashes not infrequently. There are well-known device driver conflicts that nobody’s figured out how to deal with, and it’s a terrible resource hog.

Worse, I hate Windows Genuine Advantage with a passion. I have no interest in having Microsoft “validate” whatever applications I choose to run. I am very suspicious of this as it smacks of Trustworthy Computing (which I worked on for 9 months or so): e.g. when Microsoft decides uTorrent cannot run simultaneously with WGA and blocks it, then there’s nothing you can do. The problem is that even with my totally 100% legal copy of Vista, I can’t install patches without installing WGA.

For example: there’s this bug where when I put my laptop into hibernate, about 60% of the time it crashes. This is, according to Microsoft, a “known issue” (thanks guys). On the MS support website, they claim a fix. So I go to Windows Update to get the fix. Of course, Windows Update doesn’t work in Firefox (which is exactly the kind of shit which got them under investigation for anti-trust and you would think that they would have stopped pulling it). So I open up Internet Explorer, which immediately tries to set itself as my default browser for everything (no thank you), navigate to Windows Update.. it won’t work without installing WGA. I find an alternative patch, but after it unpacks itself, it crashes. Hibernate bug still in full effect.

SO: what I’m going to do is call Sony, get them to send me a copy of my Vista disk (a) which should have come automatically with the laptop and b) which I can’t use to reinstall Vista b/c Sony packed literally like 40GB of bloatware on this laptop, including full, DRM versions of Spiderman 1 and 2), torrent Vista + SP1 (which has been released but not in an over-the-air update, wtf) + WGA crack, and use Vista to my heart’s content. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: When using legal software is MORE DIFFICULT than using illegal software, you have a problem.

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