Corporations Suffer Microsoft Activation Bug 744
Uncle Bob writes "Trustworthy Computing, eat your heart out! As of the 2003-04-14 update, people are reporting that Office 2000 SR1a is now asking to be "registered" again. And again, and again. Very little information has been posted on the traditional news sites (the only link I could find was The Register. Note - The Register's story is not quite accurate, but the registration bug is real. Our company with approx 80,000 PCs has been hit...."
Sweet. (Score:5, Funny)
"You have successfully activated Microsoft Office 2000.
Your computer will resume crashing.
Re:Sweet. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sweet. (Score:5, Informative)
More interesting, however, is why these companies haven't tested their upgrades prior to deployment. Surely a company with 80,000 comptuers has a few system on which to form a small testing environment behind an internal firewall? "Upgrades" from MS shouldn't be exempt from security and stability testing prior to deployment. And just because MS says it's a fix doesn't mean that it will work with your company's configurations. In reality, this should be a non-issue as proper testing would reveal any major problems. The fact that this *is* an issue should be a wake-up call to all IT managers and those above them that proper testing is required on *ALL* software and upgrades.
Sheesh. Some people.
Re:Sweet. (Score:5, Informative)
This particular bug is triggered by the date. In other words, the testing procedure would have had to include moving the clock forward past a certain "magical" date.
Personally, I think that this sort of testing should be done by Microsoft. As far as I am concerned that's why you are paying hundreds of dollars a seat for their software. If this bug was triggered by the existence of some third party software then I could maybe see your point, but this is a simple bug in MS Office. The fact of the matter is that after a certain date certain versions of Office 2000 try to register themselves and fail (because Microsoft shipped a broken wizard).
Makes me glad (Score:5, Interesting)
That our company has switched over to OpenOffice exclusively. It's been a year since we switched over from Microsoft Office, and there have only had a handful of documents that have had MS Office/Open Office incompatibilities.
Plus, OpenOffice is totally free. Retraining was a non-issue. We told the employees when we switched over that they were welcome to use MS Office, but they would have to buy the software themselves and keep the licenses handy. There were no complaints about switching over after that.
So we can sit back smugly as all of our branches are unaffected and read stories like this without blanching :) If you haven't checked out OpenOffice [openoffice.org], I highly recommend that you do.
Re:Makes me glad (Score:5, Interesting)
How many companies donate money to OSS projects when they use it as replacement for proprietary products? With as little as 15% of the license-costs you'll normally pay for the commercial product (MS Office in this case), you can give most OSS projects a significant boost in their development.
Re:Makes me glad (Score:3, Insightful)
Indeed. If some organization could get 1/10th of the income Microsoft gets for MS Office, I'm sure they could develop an Office suite that kicks MS Office's butt, and still have a few billion $ left over for, I don't know, a couple Ferraris and Porsches for every member of the development team. The amount of money companies all over the world collectively pour into MS is ridiculous.
How complex are your documents? (Score:3, Informative)
I use Office for a variety of data analysis tasks, and I rarely have a document more complicated than a letter that doesn't get corrupted in some way when making the transition. Even simple graphs lose their axes (or worse). More complicated plots get completely corrupted. I've never had a powerpoint presentation that opened correctly.
Additi
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:But OpenOffice is actually NOT FREE? (Score:4, Informative)
Digging around will net you a patch [linux-debian.de] from Debian to remove the gpc requirement..
Re:Institutionalized Stupidity (Score:5, Informative)
This hit us. (Score:5, Informative)
The solutions microsoft has suggested to us thus far:
- Set the clock back two years. Means all our files have
bad datestamps, and interferes with our content management
system, so this is not an option.
- Go through a four page process to clean the registry.
This leaves you at a point where Office starts again,
but it is still complaining upon startup. IE you still only
have 50 times before you need to do this again.
- Install new site license key. They've promised we'll
get the opportunity to try that RSN. No idea if/when they'll
get us a key - they've been stalling on this one. It could
be that it's impossible without another patch first.
Are we happy? Oh noo....Re:This hit us. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:This hit us. (Score:5, Insightful)
From a practical point of view, who verifies the costs? What if I report to Microsoft that my 100 person support team spent two work days dealing with some small bug. And by the way, our support people make $250k/year.
As nice as your proposal sounds in terms of fairness, any person or company has two choices in software:
1) Use Microsoft's products and take what they're given.
2) Don't use Microsoft's products.
The parent poster's company has made its decision. They should deal with it.
-B
Re:This hit us. (Score:4, Interesting)
I got the impression that is exactly what his/her/it's point exactly was. They locked themselves into software that they only use because "everyone else does". I know I'm in the same boat despite everything I (litterally) prove otherwise. I'm surprised (from time to time) that I haven't got canned yet. I've been told (essentially) that I can't even say the "L" word anymore. OK, fine. I still speak up on alternatives, and also PROVE that they are viable ones (Mozzie, OOo, etc.). It's like talking to a wall, though.
Re:This hit us. (Score:3, Interesting)
I do feel sorry for you about that, though. The Linux users group at my company had to shut down untder the same kind of threat. Funny thing, as they allow internally hosted employee group sites from quilting to fishing to almost anything you can think of, but LINUX, can't have a site for THAT.
Re:This hit us. (Score:3, Interesting)
There's definitely a way to implement this in the contract. As with any contract regarding constant service, from rental homes that require repairs to service contracts for air conditioners and heaters, a penalty for lack of service can be required either at a set rate, by percentage, or som
Re:This hit us. (Score:5, Insightful)
All the big wigs here think open source software is way too buggy to be trusted. At the same time I see them complaing about Microsoft bugs, and think to myself... "Lets assume for a minute that OSS is buggy, but atleast you are not paying for it!"
But I dont care. I tried on multiple occassions to save the company money by advocating the use of open source libraries, and enhancing existing libraries, instead of writing them from scratch or purchasing a commericial one. I was made dismissed as being another one of those 'linux geeks who have no understanding of how business works'. Who knows? perhaps they are right. But I'm never going to try to propose an open source solution to a problem to this company again. Besides, I realized, that if my suggestion DID save the company money, I wouldn't get much out of the savings, all of it would go into the pockets of the top few. Whats the point?
Anyway, as far as this bug goes. Microsoft will probably have a quick fix available on their website soon.
Passing the buck... (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, if they choose an open source product, if there is a bug, there's nobody to pass the buck too. So the manager is taking on the burden of responsibility if that software does have bugs in it. He'll be perceived as exposing the company to unnecessary risk just to save a few bucks.
This is part of an overall attitude problem in corporate america. Managers, generally, suffer more for a mistake than they gain for a success. Success is expected, that's doing your job. Failure is incompetence. Of course failure caused by an effort to get the company ahead of the game is still failure, so why take the risk. Hire contractors, and pay for software vendors because if there is a mistake you just dump the blame onto them, cut ties, and your job is secure.
Re:Passing the buck... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Passing the buck... (Score:3, Insightful)
If you propose something different, you will have to take the responsibility for it, no matter wether it's open or closed source.
bad attitude (Score:3, Insightful)
That mindset has always been silly and now it's dangerous. What happens to a moron who keeps buying stuff that sucks when he could get stuff that works for much less? Hmmm? The test case implementations of Linux enterprise wide are out and enough people know about them that it's in Forbes and the Economist read by the big dogs. The folks mindlessly clinging to
Big Blue to the rescue (Score:3, Interesting)
The parade is to dust that older sign saying "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM". Which also has exceptions but hush.
Get the management to contact IBM Services, a branch of Big Blue that make half the revenue of IBM these days. They would be very happy to discuss Linux sol
Re:Passing the buck... (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem with that argument is this: do you actually see Microsoft or any other software company actually _accepting_ laibilities due to bugs in their own software? So there's really no one to pass the buck to, regardless of who wrote the software, open or closed source. I guess at least you can _blame_ Microsoft and be somewhat out of the hot seat, but they would laugh at you if you want compensation for broken software.
Tie to grab (Score:3, Insightful)
The solution is rather obvious: when you propose an Open Source Software solution, you must also include the costs of paying someone else (such as IBM) to provide support.
Re:This hit us. (Score:5, Informative)
By implication, if you put the clocks on your workstation back two years to fix this Office problem you must *also* do the same to every other host those workstations talk to, like the Domain Controllers.
And if you put the clocks back on the DCs, every machine they talk to must have their clocks put back, and so on. Pretty soon, you're going to have to put the clocks back for a significant portion of your entire computing infrastructure.
Which means that people are going to start getting very confused (and concerned) when web frontends, emails and other documents from affected companies start showing dates in 2001...
I guess we can call this the Real Millennium Bug.
Anyone seen any cases yet?
Re:This hit us. (Score:5, Informative)
That Microsoft is even suggesting that workaround is insulting.
Re:This hit us. (Score:5, Funny)
Does this mean I can get my dot-com job back?
Hit most of my ex-clients too (Score:5, Interesting)
So far, one really big ex-client with 20000+ office2k installations has had their help desk swamped with calls from clueless/scared secretaries and PHBs. Since this place exists just to create huge amounts of worthless documentation, no M$Office means no work is getting done. Aparently there was a lot of screaming and shouting in the IT department yesterday, stress levels are through the roof, and finger pointing is the only activity going on.
Despite a huge support contract with the beast from redmond, they haven't been able to get a real response (they also got the set the clock back idiocy, which doesn't work). I've told the big boss to keep track of lost time, and to smack the M$ sales slime for the bill next contract renewal time. Guesstimates from the M$ support people is that they may have a fix to be rolled out by hand on all 21200 machines by the end of next week, at the earliest. So much for a 2 million euro/year support contract.
the AC
Re:Hit most of my ex-clients too (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't understand. What kind of place would install an update on 20,000 computers without testing it first? Somebody (besides Microsoft) fucked up big.
Re:Hit most of my ex-clients too (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hit most of my ex-clients too (Score:3, Funny)
The PHB's will never know and it will solve the problem ;-)
Re:This hit us. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:This hit us. (Score:3, Insightful)
And you didn't fix it? That's just bad networking.
MAP ROOT S:=SERVER/Volume:USERS/$USERNAME
Tell the users to save ALL files on S:\. Now set your office prefs default directory to S:, and 99% of the time the user won't even know the di
Re:This hit us. (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, they won't notice the difference because they will still save the files on their C drive. At least that's been my experience.
Re:This hit us. (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, they won't notice the difference because they will still save the files on their C drive. At least that's been my experience.
I've been doing this at different companies for 7 years from Win 3.1 to Win2k. If they have files on C:, move them to S:, change their default save locations, tell them to save everything on S:. S: is their personal home directory.
Once their default locations are changed, they have to PURPOSELY save to c:. If you've informed them in writing, AND you've made these default changes, any lost files due to workstation issues is entirely the fault of the user. They can bitch an moan all they want, but if you lay it all out for them, there's nothing that can touch you.
You can say, "Hey, I did this, this and told them that. Their workstation is configured to save on the server, and that user decided not to. There isn't anything more that can be done, they need to change their habits."
If need be, include the S: drive notification with the information you give new users (passwords/email addr/etc). Make it a template, standard form, whatever. Make SURE they know saving on C is nothing less than reckless.
Re:This hit us. (Score:3, Insightful)
Or when they disconnect their portable, and take it to a meeting?
Sorry. There's lots of environments where "save everything to the file server" is *really* bad advice. (And of course, many where it's good advice.)
Re:This hit us. (Score:3, Informative)
Some steps to follow;
Re:This hit us. (Score:5, Interesting)
For those of you who don't know how NDS works (and probably don't care), I'll spill some of my useless knowledge on you.
So, let's say you set the clock back on a Novell server. Most NDS transactions are timestamped, to allow auditing, and other such nice things. The problem is, let's say you set your time back now - it's 4/17/03, 12:40pm, and you set it back to 4/17/00, 12:40pm.
NDS isn't exactly *stupid* - it has transactions leading up to 4/17/03, and time very rarely goes backwards like that. So the server is forced to issue "synthetic time", so every transaction takes place a very short ammount of time after 4/17/03, 12:40:0000, then 12:40:00.01, 12:40:00.02, and so on. This will *never fix itself*...
Well, until 4/17/03, 12:40:xx.xx pm, when things catch up. Then everything will be fine.
Never fear! You can fix this. After you roll your clocks back, just run dsrepair with the -a switch (which allows you to do the stupid things - but for the really stupid things, you can use the switches -xk2 -xk3), and pick advanced options -> Global Schema Operations. Log in, and select "Declare a new Epoch."
Then you're just really telling the Novell server, yes, strange as it may seem, time *did* go backwards. And it deals with it.
I really don't know why I bothered to write that.
Re:This hit us. (Score:4, Informative)
You have so much problems - Emails with the wrong date which make you look stupid (and may cause to not be read at all), programs complaining about files made in the future, confusion about which day is today ("but my calendar said that the 8th was saturday") and lots of other problems.
Just download openoffice [openoffice.org] or get a warez MSOffice from mldonkey.
Re:This hit us. (Score:3, Funny)
What Y2K issues?
Re:This hit us. (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft's entire marketing scheme counters this rather wise statement. They want people to use automatic updates. They want to be able to push out EULA upgrades at will. They want this control over companies very badly.
It's too bad that the companies only learn after it is too late.
Re:This hit us. (Score:5, Informative)
The problem here is that the software has a bug which only triggered after a certain amount of time / a particular date goes past / can't validate it's existence with Microsoft HQ / whatever.
It is quite simply not feasible to test for this kind of problem.
Moreover, if you were running open-source software you wouldn't have to worry about the license-management systems screwing up -- there aren't any -- and you'd most likely have a solution in a much shorter time.
(``Change the clock on affected PCs'' is _not_ a solution -- see my other comment [slashdot.org] to this story.)
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Yay for not upgrading (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Yay for not upgrading (Score:3, Funny)
Well, I'm using Office 97. Nothing wrong with it. So there.
Re:Yay for not upgrading (Score:3, Funny)
At least you could read your tablets if *your* deranged money shuffled them.
Re:Yay for not upgrading (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Yay for not upgrading (Score:4, Funny)
Monkeys?
Smoke signals?
You all poofters make me sick!
All we ever had to work with was "grunts"!
For our LAN, we'd sit around the fire and "grunt" at each other.
Our fileserver was a special member of the tribe called the "shaman" who would remember the important "grunts".
But he does an awful lot of mind-altering mushrooms and cacti, so he doesn't always remember too well.
We're contemplating a reveloutionary failover technology where the "shaman" has a "apprentice" who he teaches all his remembered "grunts", but that's running into political resistance in the boardroom.
And don't even get me started on networking! Why, it takes three weeks for a shaman to walk over to another tribe, in the snow, uphill both ways, in his bare feet, on sharp, still hot, volcanic rocks and half the time the eat him when he gets there!
And that's the way we likes it!
It's not a bug, it's a feature... (Score:5, Funny)
QC? (Score:5, Insightful)
My company is not affected, though. We have a few Office 2000s installed, but they work without trouble. My school, on the other hand, changed to OpenOffice a year ago. Guess that's the safer choice for now ;)
But seriously: If Microsoft keeps making mistakes like this one (which effectively costs a LOT to large companies), they're pretty much giving away a huge market share to open source. Thank God they are (still) so incompetent!
Re:QC? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:QC? (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, this is more an indication that MS doesn't have anything resembling a QC department.
This bug appears to be affecting so many people with such a clear cause-and-effect relationship to the upgrade, that I doubt anyone at Microsoft even tested the damn patch!
Perhaps more plausible is that internal Microsoft software doesn't have "activiation" or "licenses", meaning that even if they did try to test the patch, they really didn't te
open office (Score:5, Funny)
Set your clock back as an interim fix! (Score:3, Funny)
Why do corporates put up with this shit??!!??
Simpson: Nelson: Ha-Ha ! (Score:5, Funny)
upgrade (Score:5, Informative)
Re:upgrade (Score:5, Insightful)
Is OpenOffice really there yet? During our final presentation last week in a CS class, a fellow was trying to explain to the teacher why his entire presentation featured scrunched up, barely legible text. "I created it in OpenOffice and brought it into PowerPoint," he explained, as the class laughed at at him.
I'm not saying that it's not a good product, but is it ready for prime time?
Re:upgrade (Score:4, Insightful)
The student deserved it. He should AT LEAST have ran through it once on the presentation setup, to catch any bugs like that. (We do that here at work, and we all have the exact same system.)
OoO isn't quite ready for prime time yet (see last 2 journal entries). It's getting better and better, but it's still behind Office in too many areas to perform a coup.
Re:upgrade (Score:5, Insightful)
The only way to _really_ be sure that something looks exactly right in two places is to use PDF.
THe same thing would have likely happened in many other cases not involving StarOffice at all.
I'm not saying StarOffice is perfect, but people seem to be blaming StarOffice for every little problem they have, completely ignoring the times when they happen on their current system, or even when it might not be StarOffice that's at fault.
One thing I love about the latest StarOffice beta is that it allows you to convert PPT files to Flash for web usage - that's a cool feature!
Re:upgrade (Score:3, Informative)
Re:upgrade (Score:3, Insightful)
Ahem... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm looking forward to a day when BSA (and other above-law organisations) will enforce all win users to buy ms licences for everything they use. That'd be a happy day for Linux.
Re:Ahem... (Score:3, Insightful)
Read the article. This bug affects only the corporate versions:
sue? (Score:5, Interesting)
The only thing I can think of protecting mircrosoft would be the EULA, but im no expert in that area.
Re:sue? (Score:4, Insightful)
The lawsuit should be by the stockholders of a company, against execs that sign large licensing agreements with Microsoft after this incident. Microsoft fuckups are now a historically established and well known problem. Only an incompetent (or corrupt?) executive would flush company equity down the drain like that, or take such huge risks in the future. That would be wilfully negligent mismanagement of someone else's assets.
I hate to say it... but it might be worthwhile to examine such an executive's own portfolio, to see if they have anything to personally gain by transferring funds from the company where they work, to Microsoft. Although I'd certainly hope it's not the case, it may be that there's more going on than mere negligence.
Nah, I'm being paranoid. Nobody running a large company would do anything against the interests of stockholders for their own personal financial gain. Just forget I said it -- it's so inconceivable.
Cracking down on Piracy? (Score:5, Funny)
I think Microsoft have gone a little overboard this time.. maybe they got the licence code crossed with the auto save..
"It has been fifteen minutes since you last entered your licence number, would you like to enter it again now? [Yes] [Yes] or [YES!]"
-- Jim.
Where is this in the TCO? (Score:5, Interesting)
I've also never seen acquisition costs for free software, "well I've got a meeting with the vendor this afternoon. we're gonna haggle over the price of 20 seats."
Piracy (Score:5, Interesting)
So far we've seen:
products which won't work after 30 days until you "activate them" (Win XP, Office XP, Autocad, etc),
games which install fully to your hard-drive but require the CD in to be played,
games which require a CD key to be played online (try playing a second-hand game online!),
games which won't work with certain CD drives thanks to the way the Safedisk copy protection system works,
programs which require you to enter a particular word or phrase from the manual every time you want to use it,
CDs which stop you from making a legal backup copy,
DVDs which only work if you are in a particular region, or use a particular OS, not to mention Macrovision problems
etc etc. Yet the people who pirate products rarely have any of the above mentioned problems. OK, so they have to keep up-to-date with keygens and no-CD patches, but my point is that ordinary consumers are penalised for the crimes of others.
Re:Piracy (Score:5, Informative)
I am going to second this point, as it truly is one of my pet peeves.
The new Securom 4 is absolutely awful about this. I have many friends whose brand new games will not play because Securom tries to do things with their brand new CD-ROM drives that those drives just don't handle well.
What are these customers supposed to do? Buy a new CD-ROM drive? What if that one doesn't work either?
The one solid workaround that I have found is to use Daemon Tools in conjunction with a product like Alcohol 120% to create a perfect MDS image of the CD.
Let's face it. With names like "Daemon Tools" and "Alcohol" these products are clearly not targetting your casual software buyer, who is just as likely as a pirate to be locked out of a game he legally purchased. They won't know what's going on, they just know that their game doesn't work 90% of the time. Oh, and good luck returning that opened software if they simply can't get it to work at all.
The irony here is that anyone who makes an effort to play games illegally is probably familiar with these tools, which is to say precisely the people Safedisc, Securom and others are trying to stop.
Most asinine of all is that the games which have CD-keys and are more or less entirely multiplayer oriented -- Warcraft 3, Unreal Tournament 2003 -- have for some reason adopted the most bleeding edge versions of Securom. Anyone serious about the game is going to need a legitimate copy of the game in order to have a valid CD key! Why force them to have the real CD inserted as well?
So far Bioware, with Neverwinter Nights, gets my award for the most clued-in company in this regard. NWN shipped with Securom 4 support, which was almost immediately disabled by the first patch.
I only wish Blizzard would do the same for Warcraft 3, so I could stop explaining to my friends that everyone gets those "Please insert the game CD" messages, and that their options are: repeatedly click 'OK' until the stars align properly and the game decides you're not evil; or, use an MDS image with Daemon Tools and you won't have any more trouble.
Re:Piracy (Score:3, Interesting)
I looked on the net and discovered it was a SafeDisk problem - his CD drive wasn't behaving in a way which was compatible with Safedisk.
He could have returned the game to the shop, bought a new CDROM drive and hoped for the best, or resorted to www.gamecopyworld.com for a no-CD crack. In the end he chose the latter option, but he told me that he somehow feels
Re:Piracy (Score:3, Interesting)
Basically you got a piece of plastic which you had to fold and place onto your screen. You then had to line the plastic up with certain pixels and then look through the LENSLOCK device to "read" the scrambled symbol on screen.
Bear in mind that you plugged your Spectrum into your TV set, and you might have a 14" portable telly or a whopping great 30" beauty. In most cases (I think Elite was one of the culprits too) you
Re:Piracy (Score:3, Insightful)
If that's ever happened, it's time to find a new bank.
This is only the beginning. (Score:5, Funny)
"Developers, developers, developers, developers.."
Did you say..... Oh. (Score:5, Funny)
Dang, I thought you said gelded [reference.com] .
good example! (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a problem that PHBs, legislators and your dear old granny can understand, so spread the word.
Re:good example! (Score:5, Interesting)
The cause of the potential problems in this area when using DRM and online product activation is not the same as the registration thingy in Office 2000, but the result is the same: you are locked out of the product. Tell people about how product activation may lock you out of your own computer or data, and often you get the reply "surely they won't screw up that badly, and surely they wouldn't lock you out completely?". If they tell you that, counter with this example.
Why is it (Score:5, Insightful)
Apparently it's affecting few systems, and not every install of SR1a, else it would be major news and be covered by mainstream media, and there'd be a downloadable patch or something.
Could it be some sort of user error? Installing as an unprivelidged user, or using some automated registry cleaner? Or Gator? Gator wrecks a lot of stuff, ya know.
It isnt affecting anything in our office, or any of our clients.
Is it possible that linux zealots are making a mountain out of a molehill? Nah, that's unpossible.
CF Iraq, Palladium, the DMCA: Silence != Not Real (Score:5, Insightful)
Or (much more likely) many of those same "news" organizations use the very product they cannot use today.
Though I say that somewhat tongue in cheeck, it is quite possible Microsoft is excersizing its economic and legal muscle (threat of lawsuits etc.) to keep a number of customers and news sites quiet.
Another factor is quite possibly that most people (rightfully) mistrust Microsoft and only upgrade when they are compelled to (e.g. purchasing new hardware, renewing a support contract with the Evil Empire, and so on). That being the case, most people who have stayed away from XP (the majority of Windows users), and those who are running old-enough versions to be unaffected, will not have been so crippled. This time.
Whatever the reason, this is akin to the lack of DMCA criticism seen in the mainstream media (which is a part of the very cartels benefiting from the DMCA), the lack of skepticism in the reporting of "trusted computing", "DRM", "Palladium", et. al. Clearly it has been reported in a couple of places, and very obviously it is affecting a fair number of people.
Silence doesn't mean nothing is going on. The fact that a few journalists have enough integrity to point out a story others either can't, or won't, report doesn't mean there is nothing going on. Did you really expect MSNBC to say something bad about Microsoft's core strategy ("trusted" computing)? They may hold their punches on bug reports and security alerts, but with something this important to their long-term monopolistic strategies you can bet they'll pull all the stops out to keep things as quiet as they can. We have seen such strong-arm tactics in the past WRT PC Magazine and others, back in the late 1980s and early 1990s when Microsoft was building its first monopoly. Expect to see such successful tactics used in a similair fashion as Microsoft seeks to encode its monopoly into every PC at the hardware level, and into every program at the software level through trusted key exchange and encryption protocols (Palladium, TCPA, DRM, etc.).
Whether or not this particular instance is an example of such strong-arm, corporate censorship and intimidation isn't really important (I merely point out that such things have come out of Redmond in the past, and can be expected to again), it is important to remember that, in a Palladium/TCPA/DRM/Microsoft world, the ability of anyone to report any kind of failure of this kind will be reduced to zero as more and more people adopt such crippled technologies. For purely technical, if not both technical and political/litigious, reasons.
The only real protection for people's data, freedom (including that of expression), and their ability to use the hardware and software they have purchased is to use uncrippled software. Right now those choices are limited to Apple and Free Software (on the consumer end), and to various non-Microsoft systems on the higher end (workstation/server). Of all those, only free software is guaranteed to remain uncrippled in perpetuity; all of the others can (and will, if it is deemed to be profitable) cripple their software at any time in the future whenever they so desire.
Which is why anyone taking a long term view toward protecting and preserving the integrity and accessiblity of their data must at least consider using free software, and deploying it wherever possible.
Open formats are good (and important), but open implimentations are really required for true safety. What good is an open format if only one company has adopted it, no free software to read it exists, and that company goes under? Not much, particularly if that format is difficult or cumbersome to impliment. Now you get to pay someone to reimpliment that open format in order to get at your data
Re:Why is it (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Why is it (Score:5, Informative)
If you RTFA, you'll notice that it is affecting corporate users running Microsoft Select software. Microsoft Select is a bulk licensing scheme which saves corporations from all that tedious mucking about with license keys (a practical impossibility with this size of user base).
I happen to know the 'global energy company' which is mentioned in The Register article. They pay Microsoft a huge sum of money for their software and this is going to affect their relationship significantly - they are not amused. I expect there will be a significant discount on future licenses, a large penalty payment or a very high profile public relations disaster for Microsoft.
Secure Computing (Score:5, Funny)
rus
A microsoft article on this... (Score:5, Informative)
If sun had a clue.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Set the clock back? NO! (Score:3, Informative)
Not a bug.. (Score:3, Funny)
Similar bug in original Office 2k (Score:3, Informative)
Within the first few seconds of running Office, users are prompted with the one line message:
"Do you wish to register Microsoft Office 2000 Professional?"
Whether the users click Yes or No, Office (whether it be Word|Excel|Access|Publisher|Powerpoint) just simply exits.
It had me confused for a bit, until I realised that you have to log on to the machine as
Once this has been done once per machine, Office 2000 has worked fine for us.
Presumably this simple fix no longer applies for Office 2000 SR1a, since it made a Slashdot post.
Further Implications (Score:3, Interesting)
MS has effectively been able to disable an application suite that has been purchased, based on a date.
It won't take much more for them to figure out how to make it so that its part of an application service pack update.
And how much harder would this be to tie into an OS. Instead of a blue screen of death, you'd get nothing. Heck, imagine trying to boot your system and getting nothing.
Some say MS would never do this, that it would hurt the market too much.
But how many people don't rush out to get the new OS, who stay 2 or more versions behind, who really don't care about upgrading.
The next update you get from MS could render your system inoperable after a few years. ***wisecracks left out***
"Hmm... we need to disable Win2k systems so that we can drive market sales for our next OS we release in 2005."
Re:What is true, then? (Score:3, Informative)
The dude didn't say "false", he said "The Register's story is not quite accurate, but the registration bug is real.". What part of that did you not get? The article referenced doesn't get *EVERY TINY LITTLE DETAIL* right, but the fact still remains that this is something that I get to look forward to getting calls and e-mails about in the VERY near future (I'm the Admin...).
Re:80,000 (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:80,000 (Score:3, Insightful)
Dell is the next windows gatekeeper.
Not cost effective (Score:5, Insightful)
The main cost here would not be the licensing, but rather the training until the same level expertise is reached with the new system for the workstation user (lost man hours, actual cost of training etc.) and support costs.
I don't know what the acceptable standard is of system administrators to users, but lets say 100 users need a support staff of 3-5 people (depending on the field of expertise, shifts, back up personel, crisis management etc.) to gurantee uptime somewhere near 99.9% of the time. The avg. college kid can probably work as an intern in a lot of these when it comes to M$ based solutions, but when you go off into the world of Unices, where people actually need to have a basic understanding of what is happening support costs (and the avg. wage of the staff) would skyrocket. So grudgingly, I have to say that Open source would probably not be the answer for them, unless they phase it in through usual upgrade cycles and develop an efficent system for training (and that is very much an 'if')
Re:Not cost effective (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the the training costs and issues with switching office packages is nothing but FUD. There may be issues with a different office package not working with existing applications or addon's but that is a different issue all together and that is not limited to just office packages.
You missed a factor (Score:3, Interesting)
Right (if the licencing costs are not REALLY high.) But the training is once and the support costs are ongoing. Support cost differences quickly dominate once you're over the hump.
[... assume] 100 users need a support staff of 3-5 people [...] The avg. college kid can probably work
Re:80,000 (Score:5, Interesting)
Then I wondered about switching to Linux and how much that would *save* them.
I mentioned that to my mom and she said that they discussed it many times, but they ran figures on how much money they spent/lost just switching from one *program* to another (training and help desk support), let alone to a whole new operating system.
She was in the department that hired temps and they used software that scanned in resumes and then fed them to a database and allowed searches on it and such. At the time, I worked for a company that had a superior product to what they had, it was cheaper, and had a better UI. She said in order for them to switch (after they looked into it), due mostly to training, it would add on over $2million in costs to the overall price - and their current system "worked" so they were going to change. And that was just her group which was "only" a few thousand people.
You could argue that were the software easy enough to work with, you wouldn't need to train the users... but if you think that way, you give the users WAY too much credit - something one learns quickly in the software industry - if you are writing software for end users, remember that your end users are fat dumber than you can ever estimate.
Essentially the only way you could switch (easily and cost effectively) over an office is if it were very small, and if the users were already relatively tech savvy.
for the most part, any savings in OS and program cost is lost in productivity lost during the switch and the increased support for people that are essentially all newbies at that point.
Apple/Orange comparison. (Score:4, Insightful)
I mentioned that [...] and she said that they discussed it many times, but they ran figures on how much money they spent/lost just switching from one *program* to another (training and help desk support), let alone to a whole new operating system [,,,]
Their concerns are genuine. But their experience has no doubt been largely with switching between one Microsoft- or Mainframe-based application and another. Things may have changed a lot.
It's a pity she's no longer with IBM. Since they're now spending billions on Linux support her department would have a well-funded in-house helper and upper-management buyin for an experiment the next time the issue came up. (And her department's management would get interdepartmental-cooperation brownie points for trying it, too.)
Such an experiment for IBM would be a benefit regardless of the outcome. If it failed, the Linux people could analyze why and help the open-source community fix it. If it succeeded they could trumpet it to the business world in their next press push. B-)
Re:Just a bug (Score:3, Insightful)
All of these are excellent products and I can have them for nothing if I want. How do you explain how they got to be excellent products, given your "business model" argument?
Four Licensing Schemes/ Three versions (Score:5, Informative)
These can be purchased under four licensing levels:
1. Individual Retail: High unit cost, includes CD, with single-use registration key.
2. Open: Lower unit cost, CD bought separately (C$30), multiple-use registration key.
3. Select: Even lower unit cost, CD included, no registration required.
4. Enterprise: Select with Software Assurance.
Note that it is only the latter two where registration should not be required that are being affected.
Re:Confusion... (Score:4, Informative)
For instance, MOUS testing software is *extremely* picky, and must be installed onto a machine with Office 2K SR1 SP2. STAB @ that.
Re:Oh bloody hell. (Score:3, Funny)
* Advance clock by 1 month - run program
* Advance clock by 2 months - run program
* Advance clock by 3 months - run program
* so on up to 5 years
Do you know of any testing methodologies which include something like this, other than for say.. a clock program? What do you do if the problem only happens on certain weeks? Certainly possible given that this is time based. Do you test for every week? Every day?