Vista: it ain't pretty

Microsoft has instituted a scary new antipiracy policy on the forthcoming Windows Vista: if you steal it, it won't look pretty. The OS includes a new graphics display engine called Aero, which performs such mission-critical tricks as creating translucent windows, animating flips between open programs, and displaying "live icons" that show a graphical representation of a file.

But if a piracy check shows that you haven't purchased Vista, you won't get the fancy-pants graphics action. Oh, and if you buy the cheapest version of Windows Vista, you won't get Aero either. Oh, and if you don't have a fast enough PC or one of the, like, nine graphics cards that meet the Vista requirements, or you don't have enough memory bandwidth (what, now?), you won't get Aero, either. And hopefully, assuming you buy the OS legally and have the properly mystical configuration of technology to run it, there'll be a button that lets you turn off all that Aero junk, so you don't have to live with what sounds like a supremely irritating collection of resource-sucking whirligigs.

(Wow. Is it wrong to have this much anger toward an operating system that barely even exists yet?)