news.com.com — Some people testing Microsoft's Windows Vista got an unexpected holiday surprise: Their TVs stopped working. Media Center, which is included in the Home Premium and Ultimate versions of the Vista operating system, allows remote-control access to a variety of entertainment options, including television, for machines that have a TV tuner.
Jan 4, 2007 View in Crawl 4
liquidpenguinJan 4, 2007
This is a prime example of some fundamental problems with underlying software designs. Namely, the automatic shutdown or disabling of previously licensed third party software. If the licensee doesn't renew their license in some fashion, then the software license is revoked and millions of people are potentially screwed because the licensee didn't want to pay.Twice, I've had the annoying expired license message for my Bluetooth stack. Despite the fact that I paid for the damn hardware (as part of a much larger hardware component). In order to get rid of it, I have to unistall the Bluetooth drivers and reinstall an updated version from a third party company. I finally found a unofficial patch to simply disable the damn license code just so I don't have to hassle with down time before I'm forced to update the drivers. It's true that I don't pay for the updates (for now), but it's not fair to force a person to jump through hoops on a whim. Oddly enough, despite the popularity of this particular bit of hardware, Microsoft actually recommends _not_ using their Bluetooth stack with it.