I fully appreciate the value of MVPs and their sites Bill. I've been a
beneficiary of them for years, but I've also passed them onto hundreds if
not thousands of people who aren't in the same kinds of lops as people who
huit the newsgroups or what I would call "windows enthusiasts" (the many
people who want to be efficient pc users but who have a lot of other
interests and may not spend as much time.
They have also been doing "bump and runs "on me when I am constructively
critical of MSFT. A bump and run is to use either the MVP access or get
someone who can to block posts in response. That's the height of cowardice
and it's exactly what Mike Hall MVP did early yesterday morning.
But ***lately here, I've seen a lot of self-righteous ellite, effete
condescending behavior from some MVPs (not all and never someone like Colin
who has done a remarkable job sharing as much information as he possibly
can)
and so I thought I would recognize it. It came as a response to any
criticism at all concernig MSFT, and I've had counteless ways to see that
while most of the MFST personnel I know in person would never be offended by
critiism that was constructive but there seems to be a special type of
genetics that seems to be in the makeup of the people at the Redmond campus
who consider themselves so elite and so special that they lash out at any
hint of criticism that comes their way in a variety of permutations and
combinations.
If you look at these "unofficial" guidelines from Robert McLaw's
http://weblogs.asp.net/rmclaws/archive/2005/04/03/396941.aspx
many of which should apply to anyone posting, I see a lot of the don'ts
violated and a lot of smug posts by some MVPs as to
Fixes--that's new I didn't see that in the past where instead of just
telling them the obvious fix that most of us could come up with who have
been kicking Windoz around for a while giving them a smug snub.
This self-righteous obsession and hand ringing of MVPs and others (I can
understand the others getting a convoluted thought process going on this but
MVPs lol) with people getting Betas off Torrents or wherever. That's just
insane. Microsoft could not possibly care that someone has a beta vista on a
box. I don't care how exclusive someeone tried to make a TBT on a group
feel--basically besides Connect content the only thing they didn't want
public were newsgroup posts and most of the time I nave no idea why.
My philosophy is life is short and if someone could learn from something why
not share it. You're MSFT; don't you want to enable as many people to become
better Windows users as possible in the spirit of Gates giving computers to
school systems or money to school or helping cure a disease that hasn't been
cured by the medical establishment? So who the hell cares if Bozo and Suzy
download build whatever from a torrent--it's a frigging beta and although
MSFT did decide to get paid for shipping and downloads a bit there at the
end with Office Betas, basically betas aren't being sold in stores to my
knowledge--although I know some people were nuts enough to buy some on Ebay
or Craig's list or wherever (but fools and their money are soon parted and
often).
I didn't understand for the life of me as well why the many Beta chats
weren't immediately posted on a public site or sites to enlighten the
masses--I saw all of them and I didn't see any downside to MSFT but they
haven't done it. Jill Zoeller has a few on her site; Josh has some on his
Windows Connected site, and there are probably others but why would you
withold an educational resource like that. People spent time putting the
chats on; why not share the learning material. I suppose I could post links
to all of them here.
They like to be in control at Redmond. They turn over personal information
to DOJ and they lie about it. They hire people like Ralph Reed at $27,000
per month--that will cover Vista Ultimate and Office Enterprise, Small
Business Server and Longhorn Server and Visual Studio Premium and the 27
associated apps and servers with Office 2007 and valet parking in Seattle
for a year and more.
Reed directly partnered with Abramoff and Tom Delay to enslave women in the
Marianas islands like some of the more gruesome "Without A Trace" episodes.
And don't tell me that Ballmer with a few billion and Gates with a few
biillion and all those millionaires like Raikes, Kevin Johnson, Ozzie,
Sinofsky, Mehdi, Chrapty etc. can't make a fe and I mean very damn few phone
calls and find this out. They didn't care. And I've documented what I just
said several times on this group.
I find this disingenous and dishonest behavior a real constrast with the
arrogant elitist attitude that comes out of Redmond. I think it should be
represented.
If you think when MSN turns searches over to the Chinese governent they
don't do it so they can sell software and the consequences to the people in
China be damned, you're really naive. That's blood money just as diamonds
are in the new movie.
They also refused to fix a ton of bugs, and they get absolutely livid when
the subject is mentioned that they know very well. Their business types like
Di Valerio go out of their way to screw their core home customers by making
damn sure that the OEMs that sell what is projected to be about 400 million
Vista OEM preloaded desktops (there was a 20% increase in MSFT profits last
quarter from OEM preinstalls and a 20% decrease from retail sales of
windows). They take this out on a very unsuspecting public who doesn't
unfortunately backup well (we all hope that One Care and Vista will
encourage them to do that although inexplicably they dumb down the backup).
It made me really smile when I saw Jill Zoeller write that they dumb down
backup in Vista because they didn't think users were savy enough to use a
browse button to backup files so they didn't allow backup at the file level
and I couldn't help thinking if Jill can find lipstick in her purse, then a
user is savvy enough to use a browse button). Give me a real break there.
I'm betting Jill could find the lipstick as well. And if she can, then
users could have benefited by a backup that backs up at the file level.
Regardless, the one care team had research and Redmond Vista/MSFT has
research that as high as 65-80% of users in homes don't backup. They don't
use all the convenient imaging methods as regulars do here. Or for whatever
reason they don't simply burn but the advent of wide spread DVD burning
should make this much easier hopefully.
Ah loves it when the MVPs defend mediocrity for Swag.
Wake up America. You have a sociopathic, psychotic moron playing with the
lives of thousands of your fellow Americans. Whatcha gonna do--put yo head
in the sand? If it was your Vista booting, or your One Care working, you'd
be expending a helluva lot more effort wouldn't you--come on--you know
that's right unless you're from predominantly small town ethnic miinority
America that has their sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, and grandmothers
and grandfathers actually being redeployed at stake:
This is how it is. Typical American sheep: Uh Uh Uh isn't civil war don't
it have to have Lincoln and Grant and cannons and a Confederate flag in it
and like uniforms? Ah gotta go shoppin' for some bling and a duo core.
Frank Rich Has He Started Talking to the Walls? Sunday December 3, 2006 New
York Times
IT turns out we've been reading the wrong Bob Woodward book to understand
what's going on with President Bush. The text we should be consulting
instead is "The Final Days," the Woodward-Bernstein account of Richard Nixon
talking to the portraits on the White House walls while Watergate demolished
his presidency. As Mr. Bush has ricocheted from Vietnam to Latvia to Jordan
in recent weeks, we've witnessed the troubling behavior of a president who
isn't merely in a state of denial but is completely untethered from reality.
It's not that he can't handle the truth about Iraq. He doesn't know what the
truth is.
The most startling example was his insistence that Al Qaeda is primarily
responsible for the country's spiraling violence. Only a week before Mr.
Bush said this, the American military spokesman on the scene, Maj. Gen.
William Caldwell, called Al Qaeda "extremely disorganized" in Iraq, adding
that "I would question at this point how effective they are at all at the
state level." Military intelligence estimates that Al Qaeda makes up only 2
percent to 3 percent of the enemy forces in Iraq, according to Jim
Miklaszewski of NBC News. The bottom line: America has a commander in chief
who can't even identify some 97 percent to 98 percent of the combatants in a
war that has gone on longer than our involvement in World War II.
But that's not the half of it. Mr. Bush relentlessly refers to Iraq's "unity
government" though it is not unified and can only nominally govern. (In
Henry Kissinger's accurate recent formulation, Iraq is not even a nation "in
the historic sense.") After that pseudo-government's prime minister, Nuri
al-Maliki, brushed him off in Amman, the president nonetheless declared him
"the right guy for Iraq" the morning after. This came only a day after The
Times's revelation of a secret memo by Mr. Bush's national security adviser,
Stephen Hadley, judging Mr. Maliki either "ignorant of what is going on" in
his own country or disingenuous or insufficiently capable of running a
government. Not that it matters what Mr. Hadley writes when his boss is
impervious to facts.
In truth the president is so out of it he wasn't even meeting with the right
guy. No one doubts that the most powerful political leader in Iraq is the
anti-American, pro-Hezbollah cleric Moktada al-Sadr, without whom Mr. Maliki
would be on the scrap heap next to his short-lived predecessors, Ayad Allawi
and Ibrahim al-Jaafari. Mr. Sadr's militia is far more powerful than the
official Iraqi army that we've been helping to "stand up" at hideous cost
all these years. If we're not going to take him out, as John McCain proposed
this month, we might as well deal with him directly rather than with Mr.
Maliki, his puppet. But our president shows few signs of recognizing Mr.
Sadr's existence.
In his classic study, "The Great War and Modern Memory," Paul Fussell wrote
of how World War I shattered and remade literature, for only a new language
of irony could convey the trauma and waste. Under the auspices of Mr. Bush,
the Iraq war is having a comparable, if different, linguistic impact: the
more he loses his hold on reality, the more language is severed from its
meaning altogether.
When the president persists in talking about staying until "the mission is
complete" even though there is no definable military mission, let alone one
that can be completed, he is indulging in pure absurdity. The same goes for
his talk of "victory," another concept robbed of any definition when the
prime minister we are trying to prop up is allied with Mr. Sadr, a man who
wants Americans dead and has many scalps to prove it. The newest
hollowed-out Bush word to mask the endgame in Iraq is "phase," as if the
increasing violence were as transitional as the growing pains of a surly
teenager. "Phase" is meant to drown out all the unsettling debate about two
words the president doesn't want to hear, "civil war."
When news organizations, politicians and bloggers had their own civil war
about the proper usage of that designation last week, it was highly
instructive - but about America, not Iraq. The intensity of the squabble
showed the corrosive effect the president's subversion of language has had
on our larger culture. Iraq arguably passed beyond civil war months ago into
what might more accurately be termed ethnic cleansing or chaos. That we were
fighting over "civil war" at this late date was a reminder that wittingly or
not, we have all taken to following Mr. Bush's lead in retreating from
English as we once knew it.
It's been a familiar pattern for the news media, politicians and the public
alike in the Bush era. It took us far too long to acknowledge that the
"abuses" at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere might be more accurately called
torture. And that the "manipulation" of prewar intelligence might be more
accurately called lying. Next up is "pullback," the Iraq Study Group's
reported euphemism to stave off the word "retreat" (if not retreat itself).
In the case of "civil war," it fell to a morning television anchor, Matt
Lauer, to officially bless the term before the "Today" show moved on to such
regular fare as an update on the Olsen twins. That juxtaposition of Iraq and
post-pubescent eroticism was only too accurate a gauge of how much the word
"war" itself has been drained of its meaning in America after years of
waging a war that required no shared sacrifice. Whatever you want to label
what's happening in Iraq, it has never impeded our freedom to dote on the
Olsen twins.
I have not been one to buy into the arguments that Mr. Bush is stupid or is
the sum of his "Bushisms" or is, as feverish Internet speculation
periodically has it, secretly drinking again. I still don't. But I have
believed he is a cynic - that he could always distinguish between truth and
fiction even as he and Karl Rove sold us their fictions. That's why, when
the president said that "absolutely, we're winning" in Iraq before the
midterms, I just figured it was more of the same: another expedient lie to
further his partisan political ends.
But that election has come and gone, and Mr. Bush is more isolated from the
real world than ever. That's scary. Neither he nor his party has anything to
gain politically by pretending that Iraq is not in crisis. Yet Mr. Bush
clings to his delusions with a near-rage - watch him seethe in his press
conference with Mr. Maliki - that can't be explained away by sheer
stubbornness or misguided principles or a pat psychological theory. Whatever
the reason, he is slipping into the same zone as Woodrow Wilson did when
refusing to face the rejection of the League of Nations, as a sleepless
L.B.J. did when micromanaging bombing missions in Vietnam, as Ronald Reagan
did when checking out during Iran-Contra. You can understand why Jim Webb,
the Virginia senator-elect with a son in Iraq, was tempted to slug the
president at a White House reception for newly elected members of Congress.
Mr. Bush asked "How's your boy?" But when Mr. Webb replied, "I'd like to get
them out of Iraq," the president refused to so much as acknowledge the
subject. Maybe a timely slug would have woken him up.
Or at least sounded an alarm. Some two years ago, I wrote that Iraq was
Vietnam on speed, a quagmire for the MTV generation. Those jump cuts are
accelerating now. The illusion that America can control events on the ground
is just that: an illusion. As the list of theoretical silver bullets for
Iraq grows longer (and more theoretical) by the day - special envoy,
embedded military advisers, partition, outreach to Iran and Syria,
Holbrooke, international conference, NATO - urgent decisions have to be made
by a chief executive who is in touch with reality (or such is the minimal
job description). Otherwise the events in Iraq will make the Decider's
decisions for him, as indeed they are doing already.
The joke, history may note, is that even as Mr. Bush deludes himself that he
is bringing "democracy" to Iraq, he is flouting democracy at home. American
voters could not have delivered a clearer mandate on the war than they did
on Nov. 7, but apparently elections don't register at the White House unless
the voters dip their fingers in purple ink. Mr. Bush seems to think that the
only decision he had to make was replacing Donald Rumsfeld and the mission
of changing course would be accomplished.
Tell that to the Americans in Anbar Province. Back in August the chief of
intelligence for the Marines filed a secret report - uncovered by Thomas
Ricks of The Washington Post - concluding that American troops "are no
longer capable of militarily defeating the insurgency in al-Anbar." That
finding was confirmed in an intelligence update last month. Yet American
troops are still being tossed into that maw, and at least 90 have been
killed there since Labor Day, including five marines, ages 19 to 24, around
Thanksgiving.
Civil war? Sectarian violence? A phase? This much is certain: The dead in
Iraq don't give a damn what we call it.
