Why Microsoft, why do you hate me? Why do you want me to switch to OS X or Linux? Why do you do what you do? Why am I here once again ranting about Vista? Well because you obviously hate and distrust me...

Everyone likes to bitch about DRM technologies and while I'm no different this situation is. Activation. Why on earth do we put up with this shit. We don't have to from OS X or Linux but because of your monopoly position we have to with Windows. I've wasted countless hours on the phone activating Windows, I think I die a little bit each time I have to call. Why do I have to call? Well even though we bought a volume license edition of Vista we are still limited to the number of activations. I bought more licenses than we had computers so this would be easy for the future. But because of the number of times I rebuild PC's I hit this limit extremely quickly, well over 10 months ago.

So why specifically am I ranting today? Well Brad brought me his new Macbook Pro so I could figure out what is wrong with Parallels on it. I boot into Vista using BootCamp and everything is just fine, Windows is all activated and everything works great. I boot into Vista from Parallels (same BootCamp partition) but I'm greeted with "An unauthorized change was made to your license". I get two options, validate and continue. Validate takes me to a page on Microsoft's site telling me my license is invalid (which it most certainly IS NOT) and gives me PAY OPTIONS FOR PHONE SUPPORT! What, I have to fucking pay to get you to let me use the software I already paid for?!? And it gives me some options to try to repair it - the issue is this all happens before Windows loads so I can't do anything!!! Oh and that continue option, yeah, that just logs me off and starts the cycle all over again. So right now I'm pretty much screwed...

So to you Microsoft today I just say fuck you. I am not a thief, I am not a liar, why must you assume that I must be? Apple you must love these guys, they are making your life easier every day aren't they? Now if you would just create a true Exchange competitor so we could get away from these assholes all together I'd appreciate it...