Microsoft Windows Product Activation chief Allen Nieman was in London this morning for city number five on his tour of Europe, evangelising his baby. WPA is simple, unobtrusive, doesn"t invade your privacy, almost cuddly and much misunderstood, apparently.
Nieman"s been telling everybody precisely this ever since WPA appeared in the WinXP beta programme, so the point of him coming to London to tell us all again wasn"t entirely clear. And The Register disagrees about it being misunderstood - the problem for Microsoft is that people do understand it, but just plain don"t like it. So really, it"s Microsoft that"s doing the misunderstanding.
But on this trip he came up with several useful facts, concessions or possibly hostages to fortune. Microsoft has already climbed down a fair bit on WPA. Yes, if you change your hardware too much after activating XP then you"ll have to call up to reactivate, but the number of pieces of hardware you need to change to trigger this is now six, and the change counter resets every 120 days. So you can, if you want to and you are a dishonest person, install WinXP on a new machine every 120 days.