What do YOU expect from Vista SP1 ??

H

Henry

Previous "Service Packs" have often been software rewrites - in
file size nearly a re-install. Those rewrites have benefited
from an infinity of combinations of hardware, software, user
settings/errors, and from an army of professional malware
defenders fighting guerrillas who attack vulnerabilities just
for the fun of it.

Considering past SPs, I wonder what Vista SP1 will include.

My guess is that SP1 will not add much in the way of security,
but will push it further into the background and less intrusive.
Perhaps massive usage data will enable security functions to be
safely trimmed and made faster for most.

Will SP1 add stability? Vista overall seems to be very stable
for most, though - again - perhaps massive usage data will
support further stability enhancements.

What about functionality? I've seen interest in capabilities not
available from the present Vista - perhaps some will be added
once usage data suggests it's safe to do so.

And speed? Well, my Vista installation is as fast as XP Pro, but
everyone wants more speed. I think this is a primary goal for
Microsoft, who knows that consumers want faster operation -
particularly boot and shutdown times. The only thing worse than
"slow" is "STOP!", so there are pauses throughout Vista to
permit checks and cross-checks. Experience will permit
streamlining of such precautions and I therefore expect Vista
SP1 to "take off".

Microsoft collects massive data because most computers call
home, and MS information collectors watch discussions, monitor
corporate usage, are intimate with major software companies, and
collect information from professional repair services. With all
that since Vista was released, I'd guess that plans for SP1 are
pretty firm by now.

What do YOU expect from Vista SP1?

And, of course, when do you think SP1 will be released to
non-Betaphiles like me?

Henry

-------------------
PS
Though Microsoft bashing is an international sport, it's one of
the world's most successful companies and a monument to American
entrepreneurism and brainpower (credit goes to the Israeli
Microsoft groups for much of the latter). Such companies as
Microsoft, Boeing, Walmart, Dell, Exxon, Verizon, and GE take a
lot of heat, but I admire and respect such achievement.
 
A

Adam Albright

Previous "Service Packs" have often been software rewrites - in
What do YOU expect from Vista SP1?

The impossible dream... a version of Windows that actually works as
advertised.

What we'll get is:

1. a major rewrite of the useless User Account Control nightmare.
2. Microsoft sneaking in a fix for "calculating time remaining".
3. Fixes for some of the over 500 bugs Vista was shipped with.

The point of course why do users of Windows ALWAYS have to wait six to
nine month for SPI before Microsoft has a reasonably clean version of
what the initial release was SUPPOSE to be?

Only the software industry gets away with shoveling crap out the door
in some poorly tested, unfinished version. If Microsoft made widgets
they would have been laughed out of business years ago for never being
able to release any product that didn't require a major rework months
later.
 
D

Dr. Hackenbush

Adam Albright said:
The impossible dream... a version of Windows that actually works as
advertised.

What we'll get is:

1. a major rewrite of the useless User Account Control nightmare.
2. Microsoft sneaking in a fix for "calculating time remaining".
3. Fixes for some of the over 500 bugs Vista was shipped with.

The point of course why do users of Windows ALWAYS have to wait six to
nine month for SPI before Microsoft has a reasonably clean version of
what the initial release was SUPPOSE to be?

Only the software industry gets away with shoveling crap out the door
in some poorly tested, unfinished version. If Microsoft made widgets
they would have been laughed out of business years ago for never being
able to release any product that didn't require a major rework months
later.
 
D

Dr. Hackenbush

Adam Albright said:
The impossible dream... a version of Windows that actually works as
advertised.

What we'll get is:

1. a major rewrite of the useless User Account Control nightmare.
2. Microsoft sneaking in a fix for "calculating time remaining".
3. Fixes for some of the over 500 bugs Vista was shipped with.

The point of course why do users of Windows ALWAYS have to wait six to
nine month for SPI before Microsoft has a reasonably clean version of
what the initial release was SUPPOSE to be?

Only the software industry gets away with shoveling crap out the door
in some poorly tested, unfinished version. If Microsoft made widgets
they would have been laughed out of business years ago for never being
able to release any product that didn't require a major rework months
later.
lets be grateful Microsoft dont make cars or planes !!!!
 
M

Mike

Adam Albright said:
Only the software industry gets away with shoveling crap out the door
in some poorly tested, unfinished version. If Microsoft made widgets
they would have been laughed out of business years ago for never being
able to release any product that didn't require a major rework months
later.

You mean like the auto industry? "Never buy a new car model in it's
first year of release. Always wait until the 2nd or 3rd year. "
There are many examples of models being "recalled" to fix something or
other that "should have been found in the QA process".

Mike
 
C

Charles W Davis

Adam Albright said:
The impossible dream... a version of Windows that actually works as
advertised.

What we'll get is:

1. a major rewrite of the useless User Account Control nightmare.
2. Microsoft sneaking in a fix for "calculating time remaining".
3. Fixes for some of the over 500 bugs Vista was shipped with.

The point of course why do users of Windows ALWAYS have to wait six to
nine month for SPI before Microsoft has a reasonably clean version of
what the initial release was SUPPOSE to be?

Only the software industry gets away with shoveling crap out the door
in some poorly tested, unfinished version. If Microsoft made widgets
they would have been laughed out of business years ago for never being
able to release any product that didn't require a major rework months
later.
"500" bugs. What is your information source?
 
C

Chad Harris

Never have; never will. If by now you don't realize that Sinofsky cut off
developers from making a couple hundred major components of Vista work and
shoved it's unfished ass out the door, you are beyond help.

Sinofsky can make the trains run on time, but he's too dumb to care that he
runs them off the tracks immediately.

CH

Don't be an indifferent American; stop the explosions that slaughter the
children and families of your poorer members in Iraq. Those would be the
explosions you make sure your family doesn't get near.

Welcome to apathetic America (home of Redmond, Washington) where the
indifferent people get the Democracy they deserve:

FRANK RICH: I Did Have Sexual Relations With That Woman
New York 7/22/07

IT'S not just the resurgence of Al Qaeda that is taking us back full circle
to the fateful first summer of the Bush presidency. It's the hot sweat
emanating from Washington. Once again the capital is titillated by a scandal
featuring a member of Congress, a woman who is not his wife and a rumor of
crime. Gary Condit, the former Democratic congressman from California, has
passed the torch of below-the-Beltway sleaziness to David Vitter, an
incumbent (as of Friday) Republican senator from Louisiana.



Mr. Vitter briefly faced the press to explain his "very serious sin,"
accompanied by a wife who might double for the former Mrs. Jim McGreevey. He
had no choice once snoops hired by the avenging pornographer Larry Flynt
unearthed his number in the voluminous phone records of the so-called D.C.
Madam, now the subject of a still-young criminal investigation. Newspapers
back home also linked the senator to a defunct New Orleans brothel, a charge
Mr. Vitter denies. That brothel's former madam, while insisting he had been
a client, was one of his few defenders last week. "Just because people visit
a whorehouse doesn't make them a bad person," she helpfully told the Baton
Rouge paper, The Advocate.


Mr. Vitter is not known for being so forgiving a soul when it comes to
others' transgressions. Even more than Mr. Condit, who once co-sponsored a
bill calling for the display of the Ten Commandments in public buildings,
Mr. Vitter is a holier-than-thou family-values panderer. He recruited his
preteen children for speaking roles in his campaign ads and, terrorism
notwithstanding, declared that there is no "more important" issue facing
America than altering the Constitution to defend marriage.



But hypocrisy is a hardy bipartisan perennial on Capitol Hill, and hardly
news. This scandal may leave a more enduring imprint. It comes with a
momentous pedigree. Mr. Vitter first went to Washington as a young
congressman in 1999, to replace Robert Livingston, the Republican leader who
had been anointed to succeed Newt Gingrich as speaker of the House. Mr.
Livingston's seat had abruptly become vacant after none other than Mr. Flynt
outed him for committing adultery. Since we now know that Mr. Gingrich was
also practicing infidelity back then - while leading the Clinton impeachment
crusade, no less - the Vitter scandal can be seen as the culmination of an
inexorable sea change in his party.


And it is President Bush who will be left holding the bag in history. As the
new National Intelligence Estimate confirms the failure of the war against
Al Qaeda and each day of quagmire signals the failure of the war in Iraq, so
the case of the fallen senator from the Big Easy can stand as an epitaph for
a third lost war in our 43rd president's legacy: the war against sex.


During the 2000 campaign, Mr. Bush and his running mate made a point of
promising to "set an example for our children" and to "uphold the honor and
the dignity of the office." They didn't just mean that there would be no
more extramarital sex in the White House. As a matter of public policy,
abstinence was in; abortion rights, family planning and homosexuality were
out. Mr. Bush's Federal Communications Commission stood ready to punish the
networks for four-letter words and wardrobe malfunctions. The surgeon
general was forbidden to mention condoms or the morning-after pill.



To say that this ambitious program has fared no better than the creation of
an Iraqi unity government is an understatement. The sole lasting benchmark
to be met in the Bush White House's antisex agenda was the elevation of
anti-Roe judges to the federal bench. Otherwise, Sodom and Gomorrah are
thrashing the Family Research Council and the Traditional Values Coalition
day and night.


The one federal official caught on the D.C. Madam's phone logs ahead of Mr.
Vitter, Randall Tobias, was a Bush State Department official whose tasks had
included enforcing a prostitution ban on countries receiving AIDS aid. Last
month Rupert Murdoch's Fox network succeeded in getting a federal court to
throw out the F.C.C.'s "indecency" fines. Polls show unchanging majority
support for abortion rights and growing support for legal recognition of
same-sex unions exemplified by Mary Cheney's.


Most amazing is the cultural makeover of Mr. Bush's own party. The G.O.P.
that began the century in the thrall of Rick Santorum, Bill Frist and George
Allen has become the brand of Mark Foley and Mr. Vitter. Not a single
Republican heavyweight showed up at Jerry Falwell's funeral. Younger
evangelical Christians, who may care more about protecting the environment
than policing gay people, are up for political grabs.


Nowhere is this cultural revolution more visible - or more fun to watch -
than in the G.O.P. campaign for the White House. Forty years late, the party
establishment is finally having its own middle-aged version of the summer of
love, and it's a trip. The co-chairman of John McCain's campaign in Florida
has been charged with trying to solicit gay sex from a plainclothes police
officer. Over at YouTube, viewers are flocking to a popular new mock-music
video in which "Obama Girl" taunts her rival: "Giuliani Girl, you stop your
fussin'/ At least Obama didn't marry his cousin."



As Margery Eagan, a columnist at The Boston Herald, has observed, even the
front-runners' wives are getting into the act, trying to one-up one another
with displays of what she described as their "ample and aging" cleavage. The
décolletage primary was kicked off early this year by the irrepressible
Judith Giuliani, who posed for Harper's Bazaar giving her husband a
passionate kiss. "I've always liked strong, macho men," she said. This was
before we learned she had married two such men, not one, before catching the
eye of America's Mayor at Club Macanudo, an Upper East Side cigar bar, while
he was still married to someone else.


Whatever the ultimate fate of Rudy Giuliani's campaign, it is the straw that
stirs the bubbling brew that is the post-Bush Republican Party. The idea
that a thrice-married, pro-abortion rights, pro-gay rights candidate is
holding on as front-runner is understandably driving the G.O.P.'s
increasingly marginalized cultural warriors insane. Not without reason do
they fear that he is in the vanguard of a new Republican age of
Addams-family values and moral relativism. Once a truculent law-and-order
absolutist, Mr. Giuliani has even shrugged off the cocaine charges leveled
against his departed South Carolina campaign chairman, the state treasurer
Thomas Ravenel, as a "highly personal" matter.


The religious right's own favorite sons, Sam Brownback and Mike Huckabee,
are no more likely to get the nomination than Ron Paul or, for that matter,
RuPaul. The party's faith-based oligarchs are getting frantic. Disregarding
a warning from James Dobson of Focus on the Family, who said in March that
he didn't consider Fred Thompson a Christian, they desperately started
fixating on the former Tennessee senator as their savior. When it was
reported this month that Mr. Thompson had worked as a lobbyist for an
abortion rights organization in the 1990s, they credulously bought his
denials and his spokesman's reassurance that "there's no documents to prove
it, no billing records." Last week The New York Times found the billing
records.



No one is stepping more boldly into this values vacuum than Mitt Romney. In
contrast to Mr. Giuliani, the former Massachusetts governor has not only
disowned his past as a social liberal but is also running as a paragon of
moral rectitude. He is even embracing one of the more costly failed Bush sex
initiatives, abstinence education, just as states are abandoning it for
being ineffective. He never stops reminding voters that he is the only
top-tier candidate still married to his first wife.


In a Web video strikingly reminiscent of the Vitter campaign ads, the entire
multigenerational Romney brood gathers round to enact their wholesome
Christmas festivities. Last week Mr. Romney unveiled a new commercial
decrying American culture as "a cesspool of violence, and sex, and drugs,
and indolence, and perversions." Unlike Mr. Giuliani, you see, he gets along
with his children, and unlike Mr. Thompson, he has never been in bed with
the perverted Hollywood responsible for the likes of "Law & Order."


There are those who argue Mr. Romney's campaign is doomed because he is a
Mormon, a religion some voters regard almost as suspiciously as Scientology,
but two other problems may prove more threatening to his candidacy. The
first is that in American public life piety always goeth before a fall.
There had better not be any skeletons in his closet. Already Senator
Brownback has accused Mr. Romney of pushing hard-core pornography because of
his close association with (and large campaign contributions from) the
Marriott family, whose hotel chain has prospered mightily from its X-rated
video menu.



The other problem is more profound: Mr. Romney is swimming against a swift
tide of history in both culture and politics. Just as the neocons had their
moment in power in the Bush era and squandered it in Iraq, so the values
crowd was handed its moment of ascendancy and imploded in debacles ranging
from Terri Schiavo to Ted Haggard to David Vitter. By this point it's safe
to say that even some Republican primary voters are sick enough of their
party's preacher politicians that they'd consider hitting a cigar bar or two
with Judith Giuliani.
___________________________________

MAUREEN DOWD: A Woman Who's Man Enough
WASHINGTON 7/22/07

Things are getting confusing out there in Genderville.

We have the ordinarily poker-faced secretary of defense crying over young
Americans killed in Iraq.

We have The Washington Post reporting that Hillary Clinton came to the floor
of the Senate in a top that put "cleavage on display Wednesday afternoon on
C-SPAN2."

We have Mitt Romney spending $300 for makeup appointments at Hidden Beauty,
a mobile men's grooming spa, before the California debate, even though NBC
would surely have powdered his nose for free.

We have Elizabeth Edwards on a tear of being more assertive than her
husband. She argued that John Edwards is a better advocate for women than
Hillary, explaining that her own experience as a lawyer taught her that
"sometimes you feel you have to behave as a man and not talk about women's
issues."

We have Bill Clinton, who says he'd want to be known as First Laddie,
defending his woman by saying, "I don't think she's trying to be a man."

We have The Times reporting that Hillary's campaign is quizzical about why
so many women who are like Hillary - married, high income, professional
types - don't like her. A Times/CBS News poll shows that women view her more
favorably than men, but she has a problem with her own demographic and some
older women resistant to "a lady president" from the land of women's lib.

In a huge step forward for her, The Times said that "all of those polled -
both women and men - said they thought Mrs. Clinton would be an effective
commander in chief."

So gender isn't Hillary's biggest problem. Those who don't like her said it
was because they don't trust her, or don't like her values, or think she's
too politically expedient or phony.

There is a dread out there about 28 years of Bush-Clinton rule. But most
people are not worried about Hillary's ability to be strong. Anyone who can
cast herself as a feminist icon while leading the attack on her husband's
mistresses, anyone who thinks eight years of presidential pillow talk
qualifies her for the presidential pillow, is plenty tough enough to smack
around dictators, and other Democrats.

John Edwards and Barack Obama often seem more delicate and concerned with
looking pretty than Hillary does. Though the tallest candidate usually has
the advantage, Hillary has easily dominated the debates without even wearing
towering heels.

When she wrote to Bob Gates asking about the Pentagon's plans to get out of
Iraq, it took eight weeks for an under secretary, Eric Edelman, to send a
scalding reply, suggesting that she was abetting enemy propaganda. But Mrs.
Clinton hit back with a tart letter to Secretary Gates on Friday and scored
something of a victory, since he issued a statement that did not back up his
own creep.

Maybe Hillary has had her tear ducts removed. If she acted like a sob sister
on the war the way Mr. Gates did, her critics would have a field day.

Even in an era when male politicians can mist up with impunity, it was
startling to see the defense chief melt down at a Marine Corps dinner
Wednesday night as he talked about writing notes every evening to the
families of dead soldiers like Douglas Zembiec, a heroic Marine commander
known as "the Lion of Falluja," who died in Baghdad in May after giving up a
Pentagon job to go on a fourth tour of Iraq. "They are not names on a press
release or numbers updated on a Web page," he said. "They are our country's
sons and daughters."

The dramatic moment was disconcerting, because Mr. Gates, known as a decent
guy who was leery of the Bushies' black-and-white, bullying worldview, has
clearly been worn down by his effort to sort out the Iraq debacle. He and
Condi, who worked together under Bush I, have been trying to circumvent the
vice president to close Gitmo without much success, while the president
finds ingenious new ways to allow torture.

Mostly, though, it was moving - a relief to see a top official acknowledge
the awful cost of this war. The arrogant Rummy was dismissive. The obtuse W.
seems incapable of understanding how inappropriate his sunny spirits are.
And the callous Cheney's robo-aggression continues unabated. (What could be
more nerve-racking than the thought of President Cheney, slated to happen
for a couple of hours yesterday while Mr. Bush had a colonoscopy? Could it
be - a Medal of Freedom for Scooter?)

Mr. Gates captured the sadness we feel about American kids trapped in a
desert waiting to be blown up, sent there by men who once refused to go to a
warped war themselves.
 
C

carl feredeck

I expect SP1 to be as crap as vista...Vista is un-fixable!!!

You need a new version (windows 7) to fix all the horrible mistakes they
made in vista!
 
A

Adam Albright

"500" bugs. What is your information source?

Several in this newsgroup reported that's what they as beta testers
saw on some "list" I take them at the word, but considering, maybe not
that good an idea. Only reporting what was posted. <snicker>
 
J

Juan I. Cahis

Dear Henry and friends:

I expect that Microsoft delivers the possibility to all, to boot to an
equivalent to the old XP "Recovery Console", in order to survive to
some Registry related crashes. This is essential for all the poor guys
like me, that received some un-useful "Hard Disk Recovery CDs" from
their computer manufacturers, instead of a bootable Vista DVD.

Henry said:
Previous "Service Packs" have often been software rewrites - in
file size nearly a re-install. Those rewrites have benefited
from an infinity of combinations of hardware, software, user
settings/errors, and from an army of professional malware
defenders fighting guerrillas who attack vulnerabilities just
for the fun of it.

Considering past SPs, I wonder what Vista SP1 will include.

My guess is that SP1 will not add much in the way of security,
but will push it further into the background and less intrusive.
Perhaps massive usage data will enable security functions to be
safely trimmed and made faster for most.

Will SP1 add stability? Vista overall seems to be very stable
for most, though - again - perhaps massive usage data will
support further stability enhancements.

What about functionality? I've seen interest in capabilities not
available from the present Vista - perhaps some will be added
once usage data suggests it's safe to do so.

And speed? Well, my Vista installation is as fast as XP Pro, but
everyone wants more speed. I think this is a primary goal for
Microsoft, who knows that consumers want faster operation -
particularly boot and shutdown times. The only thing worse than
"slow" is "STOP!", so there are pauses throughout Vista to
permit checks and cross-checks. Experience will permit
streamlining of such precautions and I therefore expect Vista
SP1 to "take off".

Microsoft collects massive data because most computers call
home, and MS information collectors watch discussions, monitor
corporate usage, are intimate with major software companies, and
collect information from professional repair services. With all
that since Vista was released, I'd guess that plans for SP1 are
pretty firm by now.

What do YOU expect from Vista SP1?

And, of course, when do you think SP1 will be released to
non-Betaphiles like me?

Henry

-------------------
PS
Though Microsoft bashing is an international sport, it's one of
the world's most successful companies and a monument to American
entrepreneurism and brainpower (credit goes to the Israeli
Microsoft groups for much of the latter). Such companies as
Microsoft, Boeing, Walmart, Dell, Exxon, Verizon, and GE take a
lot of heat, but I admire and respect such achievement.
Thanks
Juan I. Cahis
Santiago de Chile (South America)
Note: Please forgive me for my bad English, I am trying to improve it!
 
A

Adam Albright

You mean like the auto industry? "Never buy a new car model in it's
first year of release. Always wait until the 2nd or 3rd year. "
There are many examples of models being "recalled" to fix something or
other that "should have been found in the QA process".

Mike

The old others screw up, so Microsoft can too excuse. Typical fanboy
response or the tired and threadbare all software has bugs excuse
followed by the always popular nobody forced you to upgrade excuse go
back to XP. Simple question, what happened to quality control?

Does Microsoft REALLY test their software before dumping it on a
unsuspecting public half baked? Answer: hell no, they expect the
general public to serve as unpaid beta testers for them. Fanboys say
so what.

Lets just zero in on one problem many people have reported. The
calculating time remaining slow file transfer issue. In researching
this problem I've come upon many forums where people that have claimed
to be beta testers for Vista both experienced and reported this to
Microsoft, yet the boys of Redmond released Vista anyway. That boils
down to simple arrogance, what Microsoft in infamous for.
 
T

Tom Lake

Only the software industry gets away with shoveling crap out the door

There's a joke around that says the day Microsoft makes a product that
doesn't suck is the day they start selling vacuum cleaners!

Tom Lake
 
O

Opinicus

Henry said:
What do YOU expect from Vista SP1?

Hopefully a Vista that I'll be willing to shell out money for. This is the
first version since I joined Windows with W95 that I haven't immediately
upgraded to. All the horror stories have got me scared.
 
K

Kerry Brown

Opinicus said:
Hopefully a Vista that I'll be willing to shell out money for. This is the
first version since I joined Windows with W95 that I haven't immediately
upgraded to. All the horror stories have got me scared.


You should check out the XP newsgroups. They are actually busier than the
Vista newsgroups with even more horror stories. A quick Google search for
Vista problems has 53 million hits, XP problems has 71 million, Linux
problems has 154 million,and OS X problems 174 million. By your logic they
are all to be avoided. In reality they all work pretty good and have
millions of satisfied users. Satisfied users rarely post to news groups :)
 
C

Chad Harris

Dear Juan--

There ain't no recovery console for Vista. It's as dead as Voldermort is
now. Maybe you could load the Recovery console onto Vista using the XP CD,
but having spent a lot of time with it, the RC is one of the most
ineffective remedies in most peoples' hands, and even in the hands of
advanced users, except for allowing you to run a chkdsk /r command outside
windows. The other dos commands are not of much use in the context of
fixing Windows. I've posted about 10 ways to try to repair a significantly
broken or non-bootable(these aren't always the same) Vista about 200+ times
in this group and the setup group as have others.

Instead of the Recovery Console are the Win PE environments, and in my
perception for fixing Vista the Win RE environments and other modalities
I've covered.


CH

A big shout out to Scootie Libby--the world's most gutless probationer.
Scootie is a rich white American whose investment banker daddy left him
millions and Tucker Carlson's rich daddy Richard a former local news anchor,
paid for Scootie's fine and his legal expenses.

Don't be an indifferent American; stop the explosions that slaughter the
children and families of your poorer members in Iraq. Those would be the
explosions you make sure your family doesn't get near.

Welcome to apathetic America (home of Redmond, Washington) where the
indifferent people get the Democracy they deserve:

FRANK RICH: I Did Have Sexual Relations With That Woman
New York 7/22/07

IT'S not just the resurgence of Al Qaeda that is taking us back full circle
to the fateful first summer of the Bush presidency. It's the hot sweat
emanating from Washington. Once again the capital is titillated by a scandal
featuring a member of Congress, a woman who is not his wife and a rumor of
crime. Gary Condit, the former Democratic congressman from California, has
passed the torch of below-the-Beltway sleaziness to David Vitter, an
incumbent (as of Friday) Republican senator from Louisiana.



Mr. Vitter briefly faced the press to explain his "very serious sin,"
accompanied by a wife who might double for the former Mrs. Jim McGreevey. He
had no choice once snoops hired by the avenging pornographer Larry Flynt
unearthed his number in the voluminous phone records of the so-called D.C.
Madam, now the subject of a still-young criminal investigation. Newspapers
back home also linked the senator to a defunct New Orleans brothel, a charge
Mr. Vitter denies. That brothel's former madam, while insisting he had been
a client, was one of his few defenders last week. "Just because people visit
a whorehouse doesn't make them a bad person," she helpfully told the Baton
Rouge paper, The Advocate.


Mr. Vitter is not known for being so forgiving a soul when it comes to
others' transgressions. Even more than Mr. Condit, who once co-sponsored a
bill calling for the display of the Ten Commandments in public buildings,
Mr. Vitter is a holier-than-thou family-values panderer. He recruited his
preteen children for speaking roles in his campaign ads and, terrorism
notwithstanding, declared that there is no "more important" issue facing
America than altering the Constitution to defend marriage.



But hypocrisy is a hardy bipartisan perennial on Capitol Hill, and hardly
news. This scandal may leave a more enduring imprint. It comes with a
momentous pedigree. Mr. Vitter first went to Washington as a young
congressman in 1999, to replace Robert Livingston, the Republican leader who
had been anointed to succeed Newt Gingrich as speaker of the House. Mr.
Livingston's seat had abruptly become vacant after none other than Mr. Flynt
outed him for committing adultery. Since we now know that Mr. Gingrich was
also practicing infidelity back then - while leading the Clinton impeachment
crusade, no less - the Vitter scandal can be seen as the culmination of an
inexorable sea change in his party.


And it is President Bush who will be left holding the bag in history. As the
new National Intelligence Estimate confirms the failure of the war against
Al Qaeda and each day of quagmire signals the failure of the war in Iraq, so
the case of the fallen senator from the Big Easy can stand as an epitaph for
a third lost war in our 43rd president's legacy: the war against sex.


During the 2000 campaign, Mr. Bush and his running mate made a point of
promising to "set an example for our children" and to "uphold the honor and
the dignity of the office." They didn't just mean that there would be no
more extramarital sex in the White House. As a matter of public policy,
abstinence was in; abortion rights, family planning and homosexuality were
out. Mr. Bush's Federal Communications Commission stood ready to punish the
networks for four-letter words and wardrobe malfunctions. The surgeon
general was forbidden to mention condoms or the morning-after pill.



To say that this ambitious program has fared no better than the creation of
an Iraqi unity government is an understatement. The sole lasting benchmark
to be met in the Bush White House's antisex agenda was the elevation of
anti-Roe judges to the federal bench. Otherwise, Sodom and Gomorrah are
thrashing the Family Research Council and the Traditional Values Coalition
day and night.


The one federal official caught on the D.C. Madam's phone logs ahead of Mr.
Vitter, Randall Tobias, was a Bush State Department official whose tasks had
included enforcing a prostitution ban on countries receiving AIDS aid. Last
month Rupert Murdoch's Fox network succeeded in getting a federal court to
throw out the F.C.C.'s "indecency" fines. Polls show unchanging majority
support for abortion rights and growing support for legal recognition of
same-sex unions exemplified by Mary Cheney's.


Most amazing is the cultural makeover of Mr. Bush's own party. The G.O.P.
that began the century in the thrall of Rick Santorum, Bill Frist and George
Allen has become the brand of Mark Foley and Mr. Vitter. Not a single
Republican heavyweight showed up at Jerry Falwell's funeral. Younger
evangelical Christians, who may care more about protecting the environment
than policing gay people, are up for political grabs.


Nowhere is this cultural revolution more visible - or more fun to watch -
than in the G.O.P. campaign for the White House. Forty years late, the party
establishment is finally having its own middle-aged version of the summer of
love, and it's a trip. The co-chairman of John McCain's campaign in Florida
has been charged with trying to solicit gay sex from a plainclothes police
officer. Over at YouTube, viewers are flocking to a popular new mock-music
video in which "Obama Girl" taunts her rival: "Giuliani Girl, you stop your
fussin'/ At least Obama didn't marry his cousin."



As Margery Eagan, a columnist at The Boston Herald, has observed, even the
front-runners' wives are getting into the act, trying to one-up one another
with displays of what she described as their "ample and aging" cleavage. The
décolletage primary was kicked off early this year by the irrepressible
Judith Giuliani, who posed for Harper's Bazaar giving her husband a
passionate kiss. "I've always liked strong, macho men," she said. This was
before we learned she had married two such men, not one, before catching the
eye of America's Mayor at Club Macanudo, an Upper East Side cigar bar, while
he was still married to someone else.


Whatever the ultimate fate of Rudy Giuliani's campaign, it is the straw that
stirs the bubbling brew that is the post-Bush Republican Party. The idea
that a thrice-married, pro-abortion rights, pro-gay rights candidate is
holding on as front-runner is understandably driving the G.O.P.'s
increasingly marginalized cultural warriors insane. Not without reason do
they fear that he is in the vanguard of a new Republican age of
Addams-family values and moral relativism. Once a truculent law-and-order
absolutist, Mr. Giuliani has even shrugged off the cocaine charges leveled
against his departed South Carolina campaign chairman, the state treasurer
Thomas Ravenel, as a "highly personal" matter.


The religious right's own favorite sons, Sam Brownback and Mike Huckabee,
are no more likely to get the nomination than Ron Paul or, for that matter,
RuPaul. The party's faith-based oligarchs are getting frantic. Disregarding
a warning from James Dobson of Focus on the Family, who said in March that
he didn't consider Fred Thompson a Christian, they desperately started
fixating on the former Tennessee senator as their savior. When it was
reported this month that Mr. Thompson had worked as a lobbyist for an
abortion rights organization in the 1990s, they credulously bought his
denials and his spokesman's reassurance that "there's no documents to prove
it, no billing records." Last week The New York Times found the billing
records.



No one is stepping more boldly into this values vacuum than Mitt Romney. In
contrast to Mr. Giuliani, the former Massachusetts governor has not only
disowned his past as a social liberal but is also running as a paragon of
moral rectitude. He is even embracing one of the more costly failed Bush sex
initiatives, abstinence education, just as states are abandoning it for
being ineffective. He never stops reminding voters that he is the only
top-tier candidate still married to his first wife.


In a Web video strikingly reminiscent of the Vitter campaign ads, the entire
multigenerational Romney brood gathers round to enact their wholesome
Christmas festivities. Last week Mr. Romney unveiled a new commercial
decrying American culture as "a cesspool of violence, and sex, and drugs,
and indolence, and perversions." Unlike Mr. Giuliani, you see, he gets along
with his children, and unlike Mr. Thompson, he has never been in bed with
the perverted Hollywood responsible for the likes of "Law & Order."


There are those who argue Mr. Romney's campaign is doomed because he is a
Mormon, a religion some voters regard almost as suspiciously as Scientology,
but two other problems may prove more threatening to his candidacy. The
first is that in American public life piety always goeth before a fall.
There had better not be any skeletons in his closet. Already Senator
Brownback has accused Mr. Romney of pushing hard-core pornography because of
his close association with (and large campaign contributions from) the
Marriott family, whose hotel chain has prospered mightily from its X-rated
video menu.



The other problem is more profound: Mr. Romney is swimming against a swift
tide of history in both culture and politics. Just as the neocons had their
moment in power in the Bush era and squandered it in Iraq, so the values
crowd was handed its moment of ascendancy and imploded in debacles ranging
from Terri Schiavo to Ted Haggard to David Vitter. By this point it's safe
to say that even some Republican primary voters are sick enough of their
party's preacher politicians that they'd consider hitting a cigar bar or two
with Judith Giuliani.
___________________________________

MAUREEN DOWD: A Woman Who's Man Enough
WASHINGTON 7/22/07

Things are getting confusing out there in Genderville.

We have the ordinarily poker-faced secretary of defense crying over young
Americans killed in Iraq.

We have The Washington Post reporting that Hillary Clinton came to the floor
of the Senate in a top that put "cleavage on display Wednesday afternoon on
C-SPAN2."

We have Mitt Romney spending $300 for makeup appointments at Hidden Beauty,
a mobile men's grooming spa, before the California debate, even though NBC
would surely have powdered his nose for free.

We have Elizabeth Edwards on a tear of being more assertive than her
husband. She argued that John Edwards is a better advocate for women than
Hillary, explaining that her own experience as a lawyer taught her that
"sometimes you feel you have to behave as a man and not talk about women's
issues."

We have Bill Clinton, who says he'd want to be known as First Laddie,
defending his woman by saying, "I don't think she's trying to be a man."

We have The Times reporting that Hillary's campaign is quizzical about why
so many women who are like Hillary - married, high income, professional
types - don't like her. A Times/CBS News poll shows that women view her more
favorably than men, but she has a problem with her own demographic and some
older women resistant to "a lady president" from the land of women's lib.

In a huge step forward for her, The Times said that "all of those polled -
both women and men - said they thought Mrs. Clinton would be an effective
commander in chief."

So gender isn't Hillary's biggest problem. Those who don't like her said it
was because they don't trust her, or don't like her values, or think she's
too politically expedient or phony.

There is a dread out there about 28 years of Bush-Clinton rule. But most
people are not worried about Hillary's ability to be strong. Anyone who can
cast herself as a feminist icon while leading the attack on her husband's
mistresses, anyone who thinks eight years of presidential pillow talk
qualifies her for the presidential pillow, is plenty tough enough to smack
around dictators, and other Democrats.

John Edwards and Barack Obama often seem more delicate and concerned with
looking pretty than Hillary does. Though the tallest candidate usually has
the advantage, Hillary has easily dominated the debates without even wearing
towering heels.

When she wrote to Bob Gates asking about the Pentagon's plans to get out of
Iraq, it took eight weeks for an under secretary, Eric Edelman, to send a
scalding reply, suggesting that she was abetting enemy propaganda. But Mrs.
Clinton hit back with a tart letter to Secretary Gates on Friday and scored
something of a victory, since he issued a statement that did not back up his
own creep.

Maybe Hillary has had her tear ducts removed. If she acted like a sob sister
on the war the way Mr. Gates did, her critics would have a field day.

Even in an era when male politicians can mist up with impunity, it was
startling to see the defense chief melt down at a Marine Corps dinner
Wednesday night as he talked about writing notes every evening to the
families of dead soldiers like Douglas Zembiec, a heroic Marine commander
known as "the Lion of Falluja," who died in Baghdad in May after giving up a
Pentagon job to go on a fourth tour of Iraq. "They are not names on a press
release or numbers updated on a Web page," he said. "They are our country's
sons and daughters."

The dramatic moment was disconcerting, because Mr. Gates, known as a decent
guy who was leery of the Bushies' black-and-white, bullying worldview, has
clearly been worn down by his effort to sort out the Iraq debacle. He and
Condi, who worked together under Bush I, have been trying to circumvent the
vice president to close Gitmo without much success, while the president
finds ingenious new ways to allow torture.

Mostly, though, it was moving - a relief to see a top official acknowledge
the awful cost of this war. The arrogant Rummy was dismissive. The obtuse W.
seems incapable of understanding how inappropriate his sunny spirits are.
And the callous Cheney's robo-aggression continues unabated. (What could be
more nerve-racking than the thought of President Cheney, slated to happen
for a couple of hours yesterday while Mr. Bush had a colonoscopy? Could it
be - a Medal of Freedom for Scooter?)

Mr. Gates captured the sadness we feel about American kids trapped in a
desert waiting to be blown up, sent there by men who once refused to go to a
warped war themselves.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------






Dear Henry and friends:

I expect that Microsoft delivers the possibility to all, to boot to an
equivalent to the old XP "Recovery Console", in order to survive to
some Registry related crashes. This is essential for all the poor guys
like me, that received some un-useful "Hard Disk Recovery CDs" from
their computer manufacturers, instead of a bootable Vista DVD.

Henry said:
Previous "Service Packs" have often been software rewrites - in
file size nearly a re-install. Those rewrites have benefited
from an infinity of combinations of hardware, software, user
settings/errors, and from an army of professional malware
defenders fighting guerrillas who attack vulnerabilities just
for the fun of it.

Considering past SPs, I wonder what Vista SP1 will include.

My guess is that SP1 will not add much in the way of security,
but will push it further into the background and less intrusive.
Perhaps massive usage data will enable security functions to be
safely trimmed and made faster for most.

Will SP1 add stability? Vista overall seems to be very stable
for most, though - again - perhaps massive usage data will
support further stability enhancements.

What about functionality? I've seen interest in capabilities not
available from the present Vista - perhaps some will be added
once usage data suggests it's safe to do so.

And speed? Well, my Vista installation is as fast as XP Pro, but
everyone wants more speed. I think this is a primary goal for
Microsoft, who knows that consumers want faster operation -
particularly boot and shutdown times. The only thing worse than
"slow" is "STOP!", so there are pauses throughout Vista to
permit checks and cross-checks. Experience will permit
streamlining of such precautions and I therefore expect Vista
SP1 to "take off".

Microsoft collects massive data because most computers call
home, and MS information collectors watch discussions, monitor
corporate usage, are intimate with major software companies, and
collect information from professional repair services. With all
that since Vista was released, I'd guess that plans for SP1 are
pretty firm by now.

What do YOU expect from Vista SP1?

And, of course, when do you think SP1 will be released to
non-Betaphiles like me?

Henry

-------------------
PS
Though Microsoft bashing is an international sport, it's one of
the world's most successful companies and a monument to American
entrepreneurism and brainpower (credit goes to the Israeli
Microsoft groups for much of the latter). Such companies as
Microsoft, Boeing, Walmart, Dell, Exxon, Verizon, and GE take a
lot of heat, but I admire and respect such achievement.
Thanks
Juan I. Cahis
Santiago de Chile (South America)
Note: Please forgive me for my bad English, I am trying to improve it!
 
C

carl feredeck

Kerry brown... your propaganda only applies for the weak minded.
You are not fooling anyone here.. go fool yourself in front of the mirror
instead!

Lets play your stupid little game and compare XP with Vista-Crapista for a
moment...

Vista has roughly 5% of the market,
XP has roughly 85% of the market.

This means that your 53 million hits are from only 5% of the market.
XP dispite that is has 1700% more of the market it only has 30% more
posts....

That means VISTA IS A PEICE OF CRAP that should never have been released in
this state.
And that also means you are a blind fool that follows the drumbeat of
Microsoft without using your brain
to see that vista is c-r-a-p. MVPs are starting to get on my nerves!
 

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