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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Windows updates and dial up users
--On Monday, September 22, 2003 12:41 PM +0100 Richard Cox <[email protected]> wrote: On 22 Sep 2003 10:45 "Stephen J. Wilcox" <[email protected]> wrote: | What if MS included something in the Windows Update that gave the user | the option of calling a toll-free number operated by MS for the purpose | of downloading.. ? Toll free - in many cases international - with 56k lines max for dialup and many way below that, would - given the filesizes typically used in WindowsUpdate - be a very costly call for Microsoft. And there'd be rather a lot of them, so you can be sure that M$ would be recovering those $ from somebody. Most probably (current and future) users. I have NO problem with that. Micr0$0ft should start bearing the costs of their brokenness. If they choose to pass that on to their end users, then that is a business decision they can make as a business. Hopefully when the true cost of Windows becomes part of the price tag, Windows users will wake up and realize it's too expensive. WindowsUpdate would presumably refuse to update pirated copies of the software, but pirate copies of the software will still be just as open to the vulnerabilities that have been, and continue to be, discovered. I have heard from multiple sources that this is not true. I suspect Micr0$0ft doesn't have the ability to reliably determine the difference between a pirated copy of Windows and the same serial number being reinstalled and repatched multiple times. Oddly enough the biggest killer of all will not be any of this, but the fact that most people will be unwilling for their single phone line to be tied up and unusable for the length of time each update will take. And then repeat that every month or so.. Yep. Owen
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