Human vs Machine

I was stunned by this Wikipedia entry about Vista Edition.

Much like Windows XP Starter Edition, this edition will be limited to emerging markets such as Brazil, Colombia, India, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines, mainly to offer a legal alternative to using unauthorized copies. It will not be available in the United States, Canada, Europe, or Australia.[4] It will have many significant limitations, such as only allowing a user to launch three applications with a user interface at once, not accepting incoming network connections, a physical memory limit of 256 MB, and will run only in 32-bit mode.[5] Additionally, only AMD’s Duron, Sempron and Geode processors, and Intel’s Celeron and Pentium III processors are supported.

Not accepting incoming network connections. Hm.. they still allow me to use flash disk, right?

It works only on Pentium III class? No problem. You don’t need much too run Visual Bla Bla Bla Express and NAnt.

Only 256 MB memory allowed? My old PC five years ago, only had 224MB SDRAM (64 + 64 + 64 + 32) and I ran it for VB6/VC++ on top of transactional COM+ and beautifully designed asynchronous MSMQ distributed applications adhering to Windows DNA architecture with Oracle 9i’s SGA/PGA-raped. 256MB is enough.

But this Vista Starter Edition, aim to address Indonesia market, allows a user to launch only three applications at time.

Three?

Let’s see.

A minesweeper. One application.
Wordpad readme.doc. Two applications.
Excellent Roeder’s .NET Reflector coming up. Three applications.
Notepa…. uups. You’ll get a friendly i18n-compatible WM_WINDOWS modal carved with a message like: “You must buy or upgrade Vista to run Notepad file4.txt”.

Is that an exact definition of three applications with user interface at a time?

Are we, Indonesian people, really that bad so they only allow us to run three applications?

Are we really that low?

Maybe I am a thief.
It is true that I prioritize open source platform over proprietary. I never give up hope in Gimp no matter how suck it is. Feeding my ego and idealism, sometime I pray to God so my hand never get dirty with .NET again. I spare my time to read about why fonts don’t created equals just to get Verdana and Arial works in OpenOffice. I even dig really deep on many proprietary multimedia format articles just to get my Totem start sound something other than Nelson Mandela rumbled about selling guns in Africa (or worst, deep-hack ALSA server modprobe: “Hello, I’m Linus Torvalds. And I pronounce Linux as lih-nucks”).
I’m a daily Linux user plugged with many open sources agendas, but ironically I still spend some time, walking down Sabang and Mangga Dua, looking for pirated Spiderman 3 DVD to test whether my GStreamer Plugin works fine or not.

So yes, I’m a hypocrite thief. Many of my fellow countrymen are.

Maybe I’m a poor.
I only get average paid-rate. New York construction workers get paid 19$ an hour. We’re considered lucky to get 19$ a day. I work overtime, without ever getting any sign of three-weeks paid vacation, to get crumble with XML files, scattered *.properties, classpath loading nightmare, AJAX request cross browser hell, intermingled DWR/Prototype/Dojo, flame-wars daily read, SVN repository out-of-sync, failing unit test, undetected bugs, ignorant IKIWISI archetype clients, an impatient boss, and blood sucking HR department.

So yes, I’m a poor. Many of my fellow countrymen are.

But then again, Vista Starter Edition, designed for Indonesia and other poor-thief countries, allows only three applications at a time?

I’m insulted.
Even a lowliest hypocrite poor-thief has some kind of dignity, at least to run many applications at a time as he/she wish.