The GnuVision Blog

MS India chairman Ravi Venkatesan has great words of wisdom for us.

The interviewer asks questions like:

Being a world leader, in a sense, in the software sector, can’t Microsoft make piracy-proof products?

To which Mr.Chairman answers:

Every time somebody invents a better mouse-trap, criminals figure out how to break that.

It’s interesting to see how easily the common man has been fooled into believing that he becomes a criminal (that too, a pirate) when he `copies’ something. It’s not easy to convince people this is not the case - such is the power of the `psychological conditioning’ carried out by software/media companies for the past many years.

Mr.Chairman goes on to say:

In Windows Vista, one of the things we are doing is: if you can’t show that you are using genuine [software] and you don’t go and get a genuine version, you will operate in ‘Reduced Functionality Mode’ — a very, very diminished state.

Industry insiders say that MS has tied up with Intel/AMD to implement a special assembly instruction called:

BLING

which when executed on a Pentium/Athlon/Sempron processor will result in the processor destroying itself by consuming a large amount of current. The next version of Vista, code named Vista++, will invoke the BLING (BLow up If Not Genuine) instruction if it finds out that you are not using a genuine version.