There are a number of home users and business users who don't give a
damn, Lang, about Aero or the juvenile sidebar or any of the
superficial Mickey Mouse things that the Vista synchophants in and out
of MSFT keep jumping up and down with like cheerleaders on IV meth, and
are more concerned why Dan Stevenson, Lead Program Manager from the
Vista Lead Storage PM can't get System File Checker working and in
conjunction with Desmond Lee, Program Manager for the Win RE team, can't
get Win RE's startup repair to work a large percentage of the time when
XP's Repair Install works.
If home users or any users want flash, they should dig into some games.
When this lipsticked pig gets out of the Redmond barnyard, this pent up
demand will plumet.
When people find out the Explorer Shell is less than stable, they won't
be jumping up and down about Aero or the pathetically deployment of UAC.
UAC will be turned off by people in droves because of its unweildy
deployment that simply interrupts production. Many of these
400K+clients have had ample tools to confer security on their systems,
and if it's not getting done I'd blame whomever they pay to run their
IT.
When Blaster hit, it shut down the United States' 2nd largest rail
system for 24 hours. I wouldn't have been jumping up and down to give
those CTOs and Sys Ads Christmas bonuses.
CH
I work on a project which has 400K + clients (yeah, not a typo). They,
the customer, are already screaming for Vista. Not for Aero. For
security. That's a tenth of the projected Vista desktops. And, yeah, all
400K won't get Vista at one time, but it's a target, a projection, if
you will. Most home users will want Vista for the flashy stuff, Aero in
all its glory. Nothing wrong with that...
<Sidebar ON>
I'm downloading SUSE 10.1. I've been downloading it now for about 20
hours. About 100MB's to go and it'll be another 45 minutes. Or so the
D/L progression dlg box tells me. What's that have to do with Vista?
Not much, but, from an end user POV, geez, I D/L'd Vista in a couple of
hours. SUSE distro point must be low bandwidth or not able to handle
the traffic. WhatEVER! Most folks would've given up by now. And, yes,
others may be seeing faster D/L times... but this is my experience and
it ain't great. And we'll see what kind of "Out of Box" experience I
have when I install SUSE Linux. Somehow, I think the Vista BETA will
hold up pretty good to the SUSE production code.
<Sidebar OFF>
Lang
MSFT has absolutely no choice. Crossing your fingers has nothing to do
with it. Every qualitypredictor is that sales and migration are now
projected way down. News is out that MVPs and Major book authors have
torn apart the arrogant roadmap drop the byzantine and convoluted
branches of RC1 around Sept. 7 or so, and then a little more than a
month later to slap lipstick on a systemically very sick pig and call
it Vista.
The slide projecting 400 million Vista desktops in 24 months MSFT was
privately circulating has pretty much fallen on the wishful thinking
scrap heap.
Corporations Look Before They Leap to Vista [You can bet your
round little start button in megathousands of numbers they will when
they realize how sick it is]:
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1941463,00.asp
"Large businesses will get the first crack at upgrading to
Microsoft's new Windows Vista operating system. But chances are that
they'll still be the last to widely adopt it."
Vista is Constantly Having to Say We're Sorry and Lame/MSFT
Reparations Schemes
MSFT gets into the semantics game:
Opinion: When is a reparation not a reparation? Apparently, when it's
a "customer incentive" program.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2000814,00.asp
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2003474,00.asp
"
Instead, Microsoft has chosen to trot out Sunny Jensen Charlebois, the
product manager for its worldwide licensing and pricing group, to
anyone who will listen, so she can deny that any such thing is
planned, and to reinforce the message they want heard, which is that
Microsoft always offers programs to drive adoption when it rolls out a
new Windows operating system.
Here are more details on exactly what Microsoft told us-based on a
transcript of an interview with Allison Watson, the corporate vice
president of Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Group, which I recorded at
the annual Microsoft worldwide partner conference in Boston in July.
When asked how Microsoft planned to address the fact that the delay in
releasing products like Vista and Office would significantly impact
partners and their customers who have volume licensing agreements and
Software Assurance, Watson said: "We have already identified all of
the customers who fall into these buckets and associated partners.
"And, starting two months ago, the worldwide field was empowered with
offers and incentives and a commitment to partner and customer
satisfaction around these issues," she said.
Watson did, however, also try to downplay the effect of product delays
on enterprise customers with volume licensing agreements, and the
partners who work with them, saying that for them it is less about
when a piece of software ships and more about how the software is
delivered and supported and affects the entire product family and
their platform."
Gartner Blog : MSFT in Stonewall Mode and the Shoes Will Drop on it
Hard
http://vista.blog.gartner.com/blog/index.php?itemid=1107
August, 2006 04:38 PM EST
Microsoft Says "No" to Reparations for SA Customers Due to Vista,
Office Slips
Posted By: Michael Silver, Research VP
"Microsoft has sold its Software Assurance (SA) program largely based
on a "Trust Me" platform. The company doesn't guarantee that a new
version of a product will be delivered during the term of the
customer's SA contract. Although Microsoft has tried to add value to
SA since it was first announced in 2001 (when the only benefits were
new product versions and spread payments), for most organizations,
unless they get new software releases, a three-year SA agreement does
not make financial sense. They have had to trust that Microsoft would
ship a new release during their contracts or would add sufficient
value to make it not matter. For many customers that renewed Office SA
in September, October, and probably November 2003, Microsoft has done
neither. These customers got Office 2003 as part of their prior SA and
will not get Office 2007 unless they renew. Most Windows client SA
holders have not gotten a new release during their last renewal,
either, due to Windows Vista's delays, but it's the Office 2007 slip
that's bringing this issue to a head.
I spoke with a client in this predicament recently. This client has
tens of thousands of users and paid Microsoft millions of dollars for
Office SA during the past three years. Understandably, this client is
not happy. Thus far, Microsoft is stonewalling the customer's request
to "make good" before discussing renewal. Press reports on 8 August
indicated that Microsoft was finally relenting, but Microsoft insists
that this is not the case. As previously, company says it is
discussing the situation on a one-to-one basis, but thus far, our
reports indicate that Microsoft will not discuss the issue unless it
is in the context of a new renewal. Understandably, companies want
satisfaction before they even think about renewing. Does this fall
into the realm of "fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on
me"?"
They are in big sales trouble and they know it. They will be making
concessions out the wazoo, and they will increase exponentially when a
significant number of people who know how to drill Vista at the
surface and open the hood start analytically cataloging failed
features.
Right now, this moment, in 5506 and the daily builds beyond, they
cannot get Win RE their major recovery tool to work reliable a
signifcant percent of the time, nor can they make another old standby
as a repair tool since Win 98 SFC (Windows File Protection) work in
their daily Vista builds.
Help is very incomplete; and extremly signficant is the fact that
every build is having a slow explorer shell response and the explorer
shell is unstable and breaks causing not only multiple Windows
Explorer Problems but also internet connectivity problems
necessitating frequent workarounds to run IE as elevated at first and
then used tabbed browsing to continue opening windows.
Marketing is lamely turning to a very flawed deployment, UAC which is
gong to cause huge consternation and huge help desk time wastes and
huge home and small business confusion, and such pre-teen targets as
Side Bar gadgets which have been around since the 1980's free by 3rd
party with exponentially more sophisticated functionality and such
superficial features that add little to the OS's working like Aero
Glass. They sure have gotten more than their bang out of Aero Glass.
They are also redduced to marketing something as lame as putting
Windows Live links into Vista, for those not able to learn and type
www.live.com which is a very sophistcated and complex url to commit to
memory.
These superficial features, hardly needed, are a great diversion from
the train wreck Vista has evolved to.
CH
Congratulations USA "Numbers of Civilian Deaths Highest ever in July
in Iraq" You have the highest quality killing machine Bush and his
morons can manufacture.
Number of Civilian Deaths Highest in July, Iraqis Say
By EDWARD WONG and DAMIEN CAVE
New York Times
August 16, 2006
Casualties
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 15 - July appears to have been the deadliest month
of the war for Iraqi civilians, according to figures from the Health
Ministry and the Baghdad morgue, reinforcing criticism that the
Baghdad security plan started in June by the new government has
failed.
An average of more than 110 Iraqis were killed each day in July,
according to the figures. The total number of civilian deaths that
month, 3,438, is a 9 percent increase over the tally in June and
nearly double the toll in January.
The rising numbers suggested that sectarian violence is spiraling out
of control, and seemed to bolster an assertion many senior Iraqi
officials and American military analysts have made in recent months:
that the country is already embroiled in a civil war, not just
slipping toward one, and that the American-led forces are caught
between Sunni Arab guerrillas and Shiite militias.
The numbers also provide the most definitive evidence yet that the
Baghdad security plan started by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki
on June 14 has not quelled the violence. The plan, promoted by top
Iraqi and American officials at the time, relied on setting up more
Iraqi-run checkpoints to stymie insurgents.
The officials have since acknowledged that the plan has fallen far
short of its aims, forcing the American military to add thousands of
soldiers to the capital this month and to back away from proposals for
a withdrawal of some troops by year's end.
The Baghdad morgue reported receiving 1,855 bodies in July, more than
half of the total deaths recorded in the country. The morgue tally for
July was an 18 percent increase over June.
The American ambassador said in an interview last week that Iraq's
political leaders had failed to use their influence fully to rein in
the soaring violence, and that people associated with the government
were stoking the flames of sectarian hatred.
"I think the time has come for these leaders to take responsibility
with regard to sectarian violence, to the security of Baghdad at the
present time," said the ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad
The American military in recent weeks has been especially eager to
prove that Baghdad can be tamed if American troops are added to the
streets and take a more active role - in effect, a repudiation of
earlier efforts to turn over security more quickly to Iraqis.
The American command has added nearly 4,000 American soldiers to
Baghdad by extending the tour of a combat brigade. Under a new
security plan aimed at overhauling Mr. Maliki's efforts, some of the
city's most violent southern and western areas are now virtually
occupied block-to-block by American and Iraqi forces, with entire
neighborhoods transformed into miniature police states after being
sealed off by blast walls and concertina wire.
When the tally for civilian deaths in July is added to the Iraqi
government numbers for earlier months obtained by the United Nations,
the total indicates that at least 17,776 Iraqi civilians died
violently in the first seven months of this year, or an average of
2,539 per month.
The Health Ministry did not provide figures for people wounded by
attacks in Baghdad but said that at least 3,597 Iraqis were hurt
outside the city in July, a 25 percent increase over June.
United Nations officials and military analysts say the morgue and
ministry numbers almost certainly reflect severe undercounting, caused
by the haphazard nature of information in a war zone.
Many casualties in areas outside Baghdad probably never appear in the
official count, said Anthony H. Cordesman, a military analyst at the
Center for Strategic and International Studies, a research group in
Washington. That helps explain why fatalities in Baghdad appear to
account for such a large percentage of the total number, he said in a
recent report.
The United Nations has been tracking civilian casualty figures by
collating numbers from the Health Ministry and Baghdad morgue. Last
month, it announced that the Iraqi government's numbers indicated that
3,149 violent deaths had occurred in June, or an average of more than
100 per day.
The statistics were significantly higher than previous civilian death
tolls, and indicated that the news media had drastically underreported
the level of violence in Iraq. The United States government and
military have declined to release overall figures on Iraqi civilian
casualties, or even say whether they are keeping count.
But Iraqi and American officials agree that civilian deaths had been
much lower before wide-scale sectarian violence erupted after the Feb.
22 bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra, and has only gotten worse.
In recent weeks, Ambassador Khalilzad and top generals have warned
that the country could slide toward full-blown civil war, especially
if the capital continued fragmenting into ethnic or sectarian enclaves
controlled by militias, as has been happening for months.
Much of the responsibility rests on Iraqi politicians, many of whom
have ties to militias, Mr. Khalilzad said. "I believe that there have
been forces associated with people in the government from both the
Shia and Sunni sides that have participated in this," he said of the
violence.
Iraqi politicians are furiously lashing out at one another. On Monday,
the speaker of Parliament, a conservative Sunni Arab, said he was
considering stepping down because of animosity from the Kurdish and
Shiite political blocs.
The move to oust the speaker, Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, appears to have
thrown the Sunni Arab bloc he belongs to, the Iraqi Consensus Front,
into disarray. On Tuesday, a senior member of the bloc, Khalaf
al-Elayan, said the bloc rejected any call for Mr. Mashhadani's
resignation. Another Sunni leader, Adnan al-Dulaimi, said in an
interview that Mr. Mashhadani should step down. Mr. Dulaimi is
considered a possible replacement.
In Karbala, Shiite gunmen and Iraqi military forces exchanged gunfire
for several hours near one of Iraq's holiest Shiite shrines. Witnesses
said the fighting forced the Iraqi Army to block entrances to the city
and impose a curfew, prohibiting all cars and warning residents not to
carry guns.
In Mosul, a suicide bomber detonated a truck packed with explosives,
killing at least 5 civilians and wounding nearly 50 near the offices
of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the party of President Jalal
Talabani.
One of the deadliest attacks in recent weeks took place in southern
Baghdad on Sunday night, when bombs, mortars and rockets killed at
least 57 people in a Shiite neighborhood, according to Iraqi
officials. The American military said Tuesday that the death toll had
grown to at least 63 and that the cause had been identified: two car
bombs that ignited a gas line.
A day earlier, the American military had said the deaths were due
solely to a gas-main explosion and not to any attack. A spokesman now
says that conclusion was based on "incomplete information."
The well-organized attack came despite the fact that American and
Iraqi troops have flooded areas of southern Baghdad.
Sahar Nageeb and Qais Mizher contributed reporting for this article.
http://money.cnn.com/services/tickerheadlines/for5/200608171502DOWJONESDJONLINE000772_FORTUNE5.htm
August 17, 2006
DOW JONES NEWSWIRES
Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) is in talks with its partners about offering
computer buyers coupons that could allow those who purchase new PCs
around the holidays to upgrade for free to its upcoming Windows Vista
operating system.
Vista isn't expected to reach consumers until January and some
industry watchers have expressed concern the release date could weigh
on sales of PCs during the important holiday season.
"We are talking with all our partners about plans for an offer, but
those discussions are ongoing and we have nothing more to share at
this time," a spokesperson for Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft said.
--
Michael
______
"The trouble ain't that there is too many fools,
but that the lightning ain't distributed right."
- Mark Twain
