Free Netbook From Microsoft, Then Things Got Weird 17
paiute writes "Matt Karolian, a Marketing Communications major at Emerson College in Boston 'won' a netbook in a Microsoft re-tweet competition (whatever that is). Then the prize arrived, and it was not exactly the high-quality major award he had expected from Microsoft."
Who cares? (Score:1)
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
Forget virus/rootkit scans. Nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure.
(in this case, replace "nuke it from orbit" with "install Linux on it")
Re: (Score:2)
What if the hardwares are rootkitted? :P
Licenses. (Score:2, Informative)
Unless he uses Linux, FreeBSD or any other OSS, he's exposing himself to infringing on Microsoft copyright (how can that be penalized more heavily than physical robbery, is beyond me).
And he has just make a very public questioning of the legality of his software ownership.
I do think he should press to get proper licensing. How does he knows that it was properly activated and it's not a crack? WPA itself has lots of false negatives as it is.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
While it's clear that publishing something like this could raise some flags I have to disagree. If he wants to keep the system as-is then documenting the received condition should serve to protect him.
Lack of a COA is not lack of proper licensing. There's nothing that requires Microsoft to provide a COA with a promotional item, and should there be a case brought against the new owner it's still the copyright holder's responsibility to prove the lack of license and the presence of use.
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Gifted horse? (Score:1, Insightful)
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honestly? I would uninstall office 2007 and replace it with anything that doesn't have that horrific abomination of a ribbon. Ok, so some people like it. But would it have been that hard to give the option to use a classic menu based interface?
Ribbon isn't that bad (Score:2)
For one thing, I'm not so sure that the tabbed toolbar that Microsoft calls "ribbon" is such a "horrific abomination" as you call it. Sure, it takes some of the limited vertical screen space away from the document, but that can be changed. Double-click one of the tab titles to minimize the ribbon, and it will act a lot like traditional menus, just across instead of down.
For another, Office 2007 applications started faster on my work PC than recent OpenOffice.org did when I tried both a couple years ago.
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I have a perfectly good copy of office 2003 I use regularly with standard menu's and keyboard shortcuts.
And open office recently had a major boost in performance in its latest release. Comparing vs a few years ago may be doing yourself a disservice.
Unless you use spreadsheets a lot, Oo still has a long way to go there.
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Unless you use spreadsheets a lot
That I do. Also, I'm trying to transition my employer from an off-the-shelf inventory and order management solution based on Access+VBA to an in-house web-based one that runs on LAMP.
He should know better (Score:2, Funny)
> ..it was not exactly the high-quality major award he had expected from Microsoft."
Expecting anything high quality from Microsoft is a mistake.
Test PC? (Score:2, Interesting)
boxxxxxx (Score:1)