Arrrhhh!
I always knew Las Vegas was a wretched hive of scum and villany, but I never figured Northern Michigan and backwater Mississippi would be so… evil.
Linked from Wumpus’ blog
pirated versions of Vista, for example, will not be able to enable the fancy Aero “glass” interface.
Almost a recommendation :)
Must be all those militia ‘screw-The-Man’ types.
What’s the blue mean?
Interesting that southern Missouri is a hot spot…
What’s the blue mean?
Oh, fuck. Robb, initiate Extraction Plan Q!
Obviously republicans don’t like to pay for software.
/em hugs his corporate edition of XP which does not require validation
Thought Republicans don’t like to pay for anything…
Yes, Roger, I saw the legend, too. But blue doesn’t really seem to fit in with the white-red scale. I guess it’s just where a lot of people validate, regardless of failure rate.
Which is another way of saying where are the population centers - not very interesting - we already know LA is a population center.
The question is, which cities pirate? (as opposed to more rural areas)
You do not need to install a third party hack to get rid of it. Just reboot into safe mode, rename the WGAtray.exe in your system32 directory, then task kill it, then delete it. Also delete WGALoginWindow.dll and one called spmsg.dll.
Then go through your registry and delete all references to wgatray.exe.
As a further thing you can do, is going into the Documents/All Users/Application Data (hidden folder), and the Widows Genuniune Advantage folder. You will find a file there called Data.dat. delete it, create a new, empty one, remove all write privledges from it (advanced securty tab) for all users.
I’m somewhat impressed that the Puget Sound Metropolitan Area is as clean as it is.
all this help 9 days after I bought a legal copy :/
“We don’t want to show the failed validation rate in high population areas.”
no its like phil said. the blue pixels show population centers. each represents at least 2500 unique validations (valid copies) of Windows XP.
Uh-Oh.
According to that map I better start talking like a pirate…
Which, conveniently, obscures the failed validation rate in high population areas.
It would be intresting to see the ratio of valid to invalid copies of windows for peronal users (not counting company computers).
Hmmm, I wonder how many “I bought Windows… Once…” you’d get…
Not really, because there’s some regional data smoothing going on. For example, you can see that there are a lot of Windows users in and around Denver, Colorado, but because the surrounding area is white/yellow, you can tell that few of those copies are pirated.
Why is that? shrug Maybe because people in Colorado tend to buy new computers pre-installed with windows instead of upgrading old hardware.