Why would anyone want to do business with MS? It's beyond me. These are in fact not new tactics just a new use of them. Microsoft is now running a new campaign targetted at medium sized businesses. Basically they are sending out questionnaires in order to establish whether or not you have enough licences for the number of users using the software. This seems simple enough, especially if you have nothing to hide, but from a business perspective think of it this way. You paid MS a large sum of money for the right to use Windows (or any other of their software) now they are requiring you to spend more money simply so that they can check if you are keeping to the terms of your license. After all how many employees will want to fill out the form in their own time? It will be on company time, which means you will be paying someone a wage to do Microsofts work.
If you do not comply (i.e. Don't fill out the questionnaire) then MS will pass the matter onto the Business Software Alliance (BSA) who will arrange for an audit.

It just goes to show that MS does not trust its customers one bit, realistically they will never be able to stop the piracy, but a lot of the people who run Pirated versions probably would not have paid to get Windows anyway, why bother when Linux is a far more feasible alternative for anyone who can be bothered to learn to use it.

Anyone who does business with the dog that is Microsoft is likely to have their hand bitten off sooner or later.

On the topic of Microsoft, the BBC has done a comparison between Vista, OS X and Linux. I find it interesting that they felt the need to ask two people about Vista and only one for each of Linux and OS X, but the review does otherwise seem to have been done on a level playing field.

I myself played with a Vista beta but my machine was not up to a suitable spec to use Aero (I was running in a VM), now having read, seen and heard about Aero it is simply unimpressive. Sure, the technology was impressive when Novell demonstrated it on SuSe for the first time, and when Beryl was released, but for those of us who have not been chained to XP since it was released that sort of eye candy has been done.
I do not pretend not to be slightly biased when it comes to these matters, however whether MS likes it or not, their 'innovation' is usually limited to innovation within the world of Windows. Most of the features they have released have been around far before the beta's of Vista were released.

I have to say I am impressed with the idea of Ramboost, though it does have a few fundamental flaws. For those who do not know, Ramboost works on the basis that if your computer is running slowly through lack of memory, you can simply connect a USB flash disc and then trigger RAMboost. I imagine what then happens is the system will use a Swap file on the USB disc instead of on the Hard Drive (as well even?). This may of course be incorrect, however regardless of how it is done there is one major flaw. Flash Memory has a limited write life, that is to say if you write to it too many times you will find yourself getting read errors. If the disk does in fact provide more resources (otherwise there is no point in running the program) it could be that you will kill a USB disk in a day, certainly not more than a week of sustained use.
Sadly many people will be unaware of this, and so we may find a great many dud flash sticks on ebay