When you hear those two terms together, don’t you usually think about how the first decreases the second? Yeah, right. That’s what Microsoft and Macrovision want you to believe. Let me give you one real-life example of why product activation does not decrease software piracy, but, in fact, increases it.

The other day I needed a recent copy of Microsoft Office on Nighthawk. The only copy of Office that I own is a copy of Office 97 that came with my first computer. I had a working copy of Office 2003 on Scribus, but I needed it on Nighthawk. So I zipped out my iPod and copied the installers for Office 2007 Beta 2 and its “technical refresh” over from the openSUSE partition. Before long I had everything installed. But there was one problem.

It refused to activate.

I don’t mean that my product key was illicit or anything…it’s the same key everyone else has been using. And it’s the same key that I got through the Microsoft Beta Experience program. But the Microsoft activation servers failed to respond. Since I really needed Office to activate, I decided it was time to try a less out-in-the-open route.

I went on a few torrent sites (not gonna name names here to keep myself out of trouble but Google is your friend) and quickly found a keygen for Office 2007 Enterprise Edition - and the corresponding ISO image. Soon I had downloaded both and happily bypassed Office Product Activation. And what’s the kicker? Microsoft can’t tell where my Office copy is among the soon-to-be millions of Office Update users. So, as far as I know, I have the Office Genuine Advantage without even having the “Genuine” part. I really have no regret for doing that, and if the FBI shows up at my house then who cares. I tried taking the legit route, and Microsoft failed me. So I really had no choice.

There’s your one example. If you don’t get the point, then let me make it painfully obvious: If the product activation system in the beta version of Office had (a) worked properly, or (b) not been there in the first place, then I would not have had to crack the release version of Office. (And I tried the keygen’ed key on the beta release of Office as well.) Any comments/excuses, Microsoft?

Let’s face it - Lapdawg is getting old. She first booted in 2003, she’s been through two owners and two power cords, and her power jack is smashed and being held together by a oversized dose of hot-glue. I needed a new laptop.

Now there’s one thing you need to know about me: I don’t settle for the low-end solution. Ever. I could have bought a terminator chip for BigMomma, but instead I bought a second CPU. I could have stuck with that 4MB PCI video card that was installed in Nighthawk three years ago, but I decided that a GeForce FX5200 was more in order. Even on Lapdawg I couldn’t stand to go without at least 512MB of RAM. I have a total of 768 MB in there.

Usually I settle for the mid-grade solution. My wireless router is a Linksys WRT54GL - not terribly awesome, but better than that cheap Netgear box.

When it came to choosing my next digital best friend, however, I decided it was time to splurge. There was one notebook in particular that caught my eye - the world’s lightest laptop computer, the IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad X41 tablet PC. I got one with a 1.60GHz CPU, a 60GB hard disk (I think it’s SATA because it shows up as a SCSI disk in Linux), 512MB of RAM, and a surprisingly fast Intel i915 video chipset. Even with all that, it weighs in at a petite 2.5lbs! I got it with both the 9-cell and 4-cell batteries, and both can be installed at the same time, and as a result I can get as much as eight hours (!) of battery life out of the thing. Oh yeah! Of course the fact that it’s an ultralight means that certain “unneeded” facilities were not included - most notably, a method for reading optical disks. That meant that installing Linux was inevitably going to be a bit of a challenge. Luckily BigMomma is configured to support PXE booting, so a quick tweak to dhcpd.conf allowed me to boot the Fedora Core 6 installation image and get FC6 loaded with minimal effort. One thing to note though - FC6 required a lot of configuration on my part, and make sure you deselect the OpenOffice.org packages during installation, lest you run out of RAM and be forced to reboot. I chose Fedora because openSUSE has horrible hardware support and Ubuntu is too minimalist.

Scribus has quite a bit of oomph as a web server. I’ve been using her to work on Enano for the past few days, and she has kept up with the load pretty well. The only problem is, I’ve had some serious trouble getting her to do web development without digging into the swap space. I guess that can be expected because I’m running AIGLX, Apache, MySQL, jEdit, and Firefox all at the same time, and on Fedora 6, which can be a bit of a memory hog. But overall my experience with Scribus has been pretty great. Stay tuned for more news!