Corporations Suffer Microsoft Activation Bug

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...."

Comments

Sweet.

[grub]

"You have successfully activated Microsoft Office 2000.
Your computer will resume crashing.

Re:Sweet.

[Anonymous Canard]

Isn't it fraudulent to sell someone a perpetual license for software that you've knowingly designed to stop working after two years?

Re:Sweet.

[Anonymous Coward]

Fraudulent? No. Costly? Yes. I worked as a senior technician in a manufacturing plant. The engineers wisely chose to replace reliable PLCs with a Windows based network of computer to control production lines. When the computers would stop because the "DHCP License" had expired, so did all production. Burden time was measured in $1000/hour.

Welcome to the age of Expireware.

Re:Sweet.

[JJahn]

I also have worked in a manufacturing plant (in my case an investment casting company). Wouldn't trust Winblows for anything important, client computers used it, but everything else was PLCs and OpenVMS on Alpha systems (incredibly stable btw)

Re:Sweet.

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, do you know what DHCP is?

Re:Sweet.

[Rosonowski]

I think he was trying to use it to make an analogy to the expiring nature of the liscence.

Re:Sweet.

[Mikeytsi]

I'm wondering why they didn't fire you guys then. You needed to either a) fix DHCP so your leases work properly, or b) USE STATIC IP'S.

Re:Sweet.

[racermd]

The expected lifespan of just about any desktop computer system in the corporate environment is 5 years (you can only deduct 1/5 of the computer's cost each year). That has more to do with how the IRS allows companies to use computers as deductions and less about the actual technology and/or software. As we all know, the real-world lifespan of a computer is more like 2-3 years until either the technology is no longer cost effective to support or newer and faster systems are just less expensive to purchase. I agree with your comment, however. The manufacturer should be responsible for the reliability and quality (kwalitee?) of it's products, whether hardware or software.

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.

[Jason Earl]

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).

Re:Sweet.

[MattCohn.com]

Microsoft didn't design it to stop working after any amount of time. In a number of countries it is a requirement that products are "registered" (this doesn't affect the UK).

As of April 15th Office 2000 SR1 no longer needs to be registered in those affected countries but it appears that things have gone a bit wrong.

Instead of bashing Microsoft, learn the facts.

Re:Sweet.

[binner1]

...and then bash Microsoft?

-Ben

Re:Sweet.

[MattCohn.com]

Yes.

Now you've got my point.

Re:Sweet.

[BeerGood]

What freaks me out is that I'm running Office 2000 using Wine and I'm having the same problem! What's up with that?

Re:Sweet.

[racermd]

Yes, MS should do it's own testing. But would you trust their testing with your large production envirionment? Would you trust anybody's testing? The answer should be, "no". The point I am trying to make is that any changes to a large working system/network needs to be viewed with a healthy dose of suspicion until it's been tested and proven to work with the environment it's going to be deployed in. Microsoft's testing can't tell you anything about that, which is why any IS/IT manager worth their salt implements a small testing lab that has a representational cross-section of all the systems on the network. As vast as MS's resources may or may not be, they would be unable to test every possible system and network configuration for problems. Not only would that be expensive, it would be time-consuming (which is even more expensive, as time=money). And then there's the possibility that MS's tests missed a crucial parameter on your network. The testing MS should be doing is *complementary* to, not a replacement for, your own testing.

I'm not saying that you'll find *every* problem when doing your own testing, but you do tend to find more than you let slip by. Preventing problems in the first place should be the primary goal of any IS/IT deparment in any organization, large or small. It should also be the written policy of every IS/IT department that any proposed changes to the production environment be tested and reviewed by the IS/IT staff. Problems that are solved before they get out of hand are most certainly less expensive (in terms of time and money) than just "firefighting" after problems arise. I speak from my own experiences on both sides of that fence.

As for the date issue, this is something that should have been caught by MS in their internal tests. Future-Date testing is pretty common, and either MS's QA team got sloppy or just doesn't care. Maybe a little of both. Lessons? 1: Avoid MS's sloppy products. 2: Be more careful in evaluating MS software if you can't avoid it altogether. Hopefully, even more of us will remember this lesson when next faced with this in a few months/weeks/days/hours.

Re:Sweet.

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't know what you're talking about. This bug is benign and easily fixed.

I'm glad you have nothing better to do with your life than poke at a successful company.

Re:Sweet.

[Jason Earl]

SR-1a has been available for *years*. How much testing do you think an office suite needs? The real lesson is to avoid programs that anti-piracy measures built in. Now, try telling that to management.

Re:Sweet.

[Anonymous Coward]

You can depreciate 100% of a technology purchase during the year of purchase in almost EVERY case.

Re:Sweet.

[ratfynk]

It is not only Microsoft that tries logic bombs to date its software, I have seen db inventory software that has a 3 year life span then mysterously starts to screw up. The problem with software licences is there is no particular clause in them that prohibits
logic bombs. As a matter of fact alot db linked accounting/billing software seems to get buggy just about the time the given software company issues a new release.

Re:Sweet.

[Anonymous Coward]

Shouldn't software upgrades just work? Oh yeah, we are talking about M$ here and not Macs :-)

Its not a "bug", its a "feature"

[amichalo]

This is actually a feature of Microsoft's "Office 2000 CFO" an internal product used only at Microsoft.

Half empty or half full - depends how drunk you are

Re:Its not a "bug", its a "feature"

[Anonymous Coward]

Get to know MS Service personnel. Your favorite dating line.

This hit us.

[sakailind]

This hit my company yesterday. We've got about 500 Windows 2000 workstations with Office 2000 and a site license. At the time we were negotiating I was arguing that we should be looking at free software and Linux, but was laughed at. While I'll agree it wasn't the best time for Linux on the desktop, this does have me pulling a 'I told you so' as hundreds of our employees are bugged each time they try to start office.

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.

[TopShelf]

If you have a Help Desk application that tracks hours related to working on this mess, you (and other customers) should ask for a reduction in your support costs to compensate for all the non-value added work your internal staff is having to do. Ideally, this sort of clause should be built into a purchase up front, and it would have to start with large customers, but MS (and other vendors) need to face some serious financial consequences for blunders like this...

Re:This hit us.

[Havokmon]

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.

Do you have a central fileserver? Granted I'm a Novell guy, but doesn't the SERVER time stamp the files?

The time-stamp shouldn't be an issue, but then again, I'm a Netware guy and that's how Netware works..

Re:This hit us.

[jsupreston]

Dear God, please don't set the server clock back. If you do, NDS will be barking, yelling, crying, whining for a very long time. I know. I had a guy helping me when I ran a large NetWare shop, and he did this once. Took a while to clean up his mess.

Re:This hit us.

[TheMidget]

OH my freakin god. they recommended you turn the clock back 2 years. Dude, some one should sue the pants off microsoft for lost of productivity for each hour ...

... of these two years, multiplied by number of employees!

Re:This hit us.

[afidel]

You assume everything is kept on the fileservers, not in most environments. Yes you want to save thing off to the fileservers for distribution and backup but most people work on their files on their local pc's. This is the situation at almost every shop I have been to.

Re:This hit us.

[pair-a-noyd]

Turn the clock back two years eh?
How about then sueing M$ for TWO YEARS lost productivity!!

Re:This hit us.

[w1r3sp33d]

This is why all users deserve to die. BOFH is your God now...

Re:This hit us.

[tempestdata]

hah! You're having trouble with your company not wanting to use Linux for the desktop. My company wants to have nothing to do with open source. They wont even let me use an open source library for an internal tool!
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.

Re:This hit us.

[Havokmon]

Dear God, please don't set the server clock back

No no.. Why would you set the server clock back? It's not the timestamps on the files that Office is reading, it's the PC's clock. When I write from a PC with a date of 01-01-01, to a server with today's date, the file created/modified will have todays date on it.

So you can change the workstations, and not affect your file's timestamps.

Re:This hit us.

[Havokmon]

You assume everything is kept on the fileservers, not in most environments. Yes you want to save thing off to the fileservers for distribution and backup but most people work on their files on their local pc's. This is the situation at almost every shop I have been to.

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 difference.

IMHO, in a Windows environment, MAP ROOT is a PITA.
But what are you using Windows as a file server for? Ahh, you're paid hourly :P

Re:This hit us.

[Ralph Wiggam]

That's not the deal they signed with Microsoft. The deal says that the company pays Microsoft a ton of money in exchange for using their software and technical support of that software. It would be nice if MS gave them a break for all the time the support staff spent dealing with bugs, but that wasn't the deal. If you even proposed that deal I would bet that MS would tell you to get lost. "What are you going to do? Not use Office?"

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.

[afidel]

actually our fileservers are netapps =) And no we can't force them to keep all their doc's on the fileserver. They are engineers and corp policy is all business critical files must have at least one recent copy on a backed up fileserver. Other than that we have no say and if we bug them about it we get yelled at for not being customer friendly. Of course when the managers have to pay thousands for HDD recovery service they generally get on their employees about running the backup software and trying to keep things on the server, but that lasts for about a quarter until they get their new budget and forget about the cost.

Re:This hit us.

[xanadu-xtroot.com]

The parent poster's The parent poster's company has made its decision. They should deal with it.

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.

[xanadu-xtroot.com]

Tell the users to

You have (L)users that actually listen to what you say? Dude, where do I sign up?

Re:This hit us.

[jkabbe]

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 difference.

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.

[Havokmon]

Tell the users to

You have (L)users that actually listen to what you say? Dude, where do I sign up?

I didn't say they listened, you have to tell them to cover your butt. ;) That's why I also said to change their default paths too, that double covers your butt, because now the users have to purposely save somewhere else.

Re:This hit us.

[JWW]

OpenOffice doesn't have an "L" word in it ;-)

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.

[Havokmon]

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 difference.

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.

[DarkZero]

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.

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 some other rate that can be proven through evidence instead of the unfounded claims of the client that is demanding a discount. Contracts for small, mid-size, large, and multinational businesses could have different set rates, a small percentage of the cost of the entire deal could be used as a penalty rate for all businesses, etc. The problem, however, is that A) this is not in the contract and Microsoft's clients are thus in no position to demand any sort of refund or penalty fee, B) Microsoft would never allow that sort of contract anyway because they have a de facto monopoly advantage in the workplace, and C) Microsoft would never make that sort of decision because both their older and hastily patched software is so horrifically buggy that they would lose tons of money on such a plan.

Re:This hit us.

[Blkdeath]

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.

Some steps to follow;

1. Move existing documents from C: to x: (network home directory)
2. Change application defaults to x:
3. (Optional) Set group policy to redirect "My Documents" to x:
4. Issue written instructions to save to x:, with backing from management (yours and theirs), accompanied with notice that only files saved to x: come with any guarantee that they will still be there the next morning (vis, if their computer goes south, you replace parts and re-image, but the server is backed up regularly)

The key is to remind all employees regularly (twice/year or thereabouts) in writing, and keep management abreast of the situation and the reasons for doing so to ensure maximal CYA. If they don't listen to you and they lose work ("HDD crashed? Sorry, we can't justify $3k for data recovery for your workstation. But it's ok, your work is all stored on the server, right?"), it's their problem, and their job on the line.

The BOFH approach, while fun, doesn't work terribly well with common users. You have to explain the situation to them and attempt to reason it out in language they understand. If they know more than you about these computers (then why aren't they doing your job?), ensure that they've received their bi-monthly copy of the computer usage guidelines and hope it never has to come to a head.

Re:This hit us.

[donutz]

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.

I hope you don't mean they make $250k/year amongst them all...otherwise that'd mean you're getting paid twenty-five hundred bucks a year apiece!

Re:This hit us.

[Jedi Alec]

ehmmm, doesn't turning the clock BACK two years result in lots of extra productivity? Just imagine how you'll feel looking at the deadlines...

Re:This hit us.

[Anonymous Coward]

He didn't.

I hope you have something better to say next time.

Re:This hit us.

[JJahn]

There's nothing that can touch you, but my experience is that then the boss will tell you to help the user recover anyway, even after you told them a million times to save on the network.

Of course in an ideal world you could just tell the users to fuck off, but that usually isn't great for keeping a job.

Re:This hit us.

[Anonymous Coward]

A simple run-at-startup batch that erases all new document files on C: will fix that.

"Where'd my file go?"
"Did you save it on S:?"
"No."
"Too bad. Save it there next time."

Re:This hit us.

[jkabbe]

Right, because as often as not it's the boss who lost his files....

Seriously, though, in recent years the tools to help direct the users to the LAN have gotten much better. I admit that my admin experience is somewhat dated.

Re:This hit us.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why there are MANY, many software companies out there that cannot, and do not offer a guarantee on their stuff. I believe Microsoft is no exception. Their two rebuttals, however antagonistic, could very simply be 1) we keep technical serviceman employed 2) we said from day one that there was no guarantee. I realize that those are somewhat cockneyed ways of putting their agenda ahead of their responsibilites, but in a courtroom, I'm almost sure they'd lean on those for defense.

Re:This hit us.

[pmz]

Ideally, this sort of clause should be built into a purchase up front, and it would have to start with large customers, but MS (and other vendors) need to face some serious financial consequences for blunders like this...

I thought nearly all software came without any warranty, other than one, perhaps, for physical media.

From now on, it will be up to corporations to negotiate financial consequences for Microsoft into their contracts. Individuals, of course, still get screwed.

Re:This hit us.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's like talking to a wall, though.

In Soviet Russia, the wall talks back to you!

I don't know why I had an urge to write that.

Re:This hit us.

[buffer-overflowed]

One shop I worked support at, we could format their hard drives, with no notice, and no reason. These people weren't supposed to be saving ANYTHING to the hard drive, since it wasn't backed up, and computers were cycled out every 3 years, so it wasn't uncommon for us to make enforcement rounds, format machines, reimage them, and if they lost a lot of work, well they had to make that up on their own, unpaid time.

I almost never saw work data on a hard drive. When I did, good bye data if you pissed me off.

That's the way to do it.

Re:This hit us.

[RoLi]

I can't believe somebody is really taking this advice seriously.

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 or get a warez MSOffice from mldonkey.

Re:This hit us.

[Latent IT]

Yeah, it's called "synthetic time".

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.

[Tingler]

I can only hope the Celeron machine that stores your paycheck data does not suffer the same fate.

I would recommend to you that you add this configuration to your "Will not work under these conditions" list. I add items like these as I learn just how badly certain companies handle their networks & files. For instance, I will not work anywhere there is even a hint of coax wire. I had to deal with it in the past & I refuse to work with it again. So in an interview, I ask my list of questions. If they answer wrong to any question, as far as I am concerned, the interview is over.

Re:This hit us.

[zanderredux]

Whoa! Easy!

In fact I tried that myself and, of course, never worked, but my boss at least cared to explain WHY they did things that way.

It stems from a well known theory (in the world of corporate finance and economy, at least) called "The Agency Theory".

In a few words: although management's mission is to increase the value of the company they work for (and thus increasing stock prices and revenues for its stockholders), the performance of these people is measured in terms of months or a few years, while corporate results from the stockholder's POV is measured in much larger periods.

"So what?" you might ask.

The thing is that since management's performance is measured in such shorter periods, managers will always tend to do things that make them look good, instead of making the company look good. It's a form of veiled conflict of interest.

This causes a number of distortions, such as people working to save their asses instead of saving company's. Decisions are taken so that they will not compromise their carreers. To accomplish this, they always choose to select an external vendor. This decision works as an insurance: if anything goes really wrong, they can blame the vendor (it's limited, but better than having no one to blame as in the case of OSS).

Having said that, I believe that the only way to get your company to use OSS is to convince the stakeholders of the value of OSS and change the way the managerial class is evaluated. No easy task, sure, but this shows that the move towards OSS cannot be pushed from the bottom up but the other way instead.

Do not waste your time on things you cannot change! Do as a friend of mine does: "the most important is the 15th and the 30th. Everything else does not matter!" (the 15th and 30th being the days of the month he gets paid)

Re:This hit us.

[Aetrix]

HOLY $HIT! Your support techs make $250,000 a year!?! You're kidding me!

That's 10x more than I make, and I'm a well-payed support tech for my area.

Christ, I don't think our server admins make that!

I thought the days of the dot-com boom were over.

Re:This hit us.

[jsupreston]

You know, I never tried that when I was running a Netware shop. We very rarely had to do any NDS maintenance due to time (other than my assistant changing the time AFTER he was told not to). Usually, if the time on the server was fast, I would wait until I had to do maintenance and take the server down, reset the dos clock, and reboot. Worked every time for me (the clock was never more than 5 minutes fast anyway...took longer than that to do a full ram count and initialize the raid array). Thanks for the tip about declaring a new epoch. I'll try to remember that if I need it in the future.

Re:This hit us.

[Havokmon]

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.

What the hell are you talking about?

OHHH you are ASSUMING these people use Outlook for email/calendar.
You're assuming they run programs that compare the time stamp on files to the system time.
You're assuming they use roaming profile shit

Don't assume. I'm merely pointing out that environments DO EXIST (the orginal post also said it interfered with their content mgmt system) where a correct workstation time isn't necessary.

If someone can't figure out on their own if this applies to them or not, then they're an idiot.

Re:This hit us.

[Snork Asaurus]

IANAL. Although I haven't had the (ahem) pleasure of reviewing such a contract from Microsoft, I have been involved in many others and damn near every commercial contract that I've ever seen indemnifies the vendor from "Incidental Damages" (such as what it costs to deal with and rectify a situation caused by a failure of the product) and "Consequential Damages" (like lost sales/profits or liability/legal costs) that are the direct or indirect result of the failure of the product. Now, many things in contracts are negotiable, but given MS's, um, market dominance (I'm being polite today), I imagine that not much can be negotiated with them in those areas.

Re:This hit us.

[JimFromJersey]

"Where did my paycheck go?"
"Did you delete the users files?"
"Yes."
"Too bad. Fired for cause"

Re:This hit us.

[SN74S181]

I bet the quilting and fishing enthusiasts didn't make pests of themselves.

Re:This hit us.

[SN74S181]

Me, I am hoping that some dweeb who posts advocacy comments on Slashdot isn't in charge of a support team with a $25M payroll....

Re:This hit us.

[Paradise Pete]

In Soviet Russia, the wall talks back to you!
I don't know why I had an urge to write that.

Hard to say for sure, but I suspect it's because you're doubly retarded. One, for thinking that joke is somehow still even slightly funny, and two, for lacking the ability to even properly grasp its form.

Re:This hit us.

[SN74S181]

In case you hadn't heard, no, the computer operator does not sit in a glass walled room in a white lab coat any longer. The computer operator no longer has the privledge of scheduling when 'jobs' will be run. It's not necessary any more for 'mere users' to adopt servile attitudes when around the computer operator.

And the 'mere users' are NOT going to put up with the clock being rolled back to those dark ages. Certain companies with control-freaks at the top of the corporate ladder might make that mistake, but their products can be replaced in the market by products from competitors not living their lives mired in a 1970's-era IT mindset.

Re:This hit us.

[dspeyer]

You clearly haven't worked with serious files....

When you have several gigabytes of data to process in a non-CPU-intensive manner, you can't affor to save everything to a central server. The time taken up by NFS (AFS,SMB,whatever) is too high. You want to get done today (or tommorrow, but definately not next week!). Now, you could copy the data from the server, process it, and copy the results back, but this takes extra time (and requires twice the hard disk space). Sometimes, it just makes sense to store vital data on workstations (and back them up periodicaly).

OTOH, the question here was MS Office files, and if those are this big, you've got other problems.

Re:This hit us.

[Havokmon]

When you have several gigabytes of data to process in a non-CPU-intensive manner, you can't afford to save everything to a central server.

I don't get it.. You are hardly using any CPU cycles, but at the same time can't process that data off a central server?

Non-CPU intensive manner? Did you mean it's just simple work on large files (such as importing tab/comma delimited text files to a database)?
You have users do this? AND run MS Office? That seems like an odd combination..

Sometimes, it just makes sense to store vital data on workstations (and back them up periodicaly).

IMHO, a 'workstation' is a place to work. Not to save data. 'workstations' should be able to be replaced without the knowledge of the user. Not for being sneaky, of course, but to allow a user with a bad 'workstation' to be able to get back to work asap.

Re:This hit us.

[mobileskimo]

Seriously. That's a large salary. What are the qualifications and do you have room for another? I designed entire double redudant networks for an entire continent (South America, 22 countries) for one organization in NY and didn't get paid half that. Maybe my negotiating skills aren't up to par but I don't EVER remember seeing numbers like that except in middle and upper management ;)

Re:This hit us.

[jedidiah]

Quilting and fishing enthusiasts don't generally discuss any issues that have any relevance to corporate operations.

Re:This hit us.

[Greyfox]

And what company was that aain? Are they publicly traded?

Re:This hit us.

[vrmlknight]

you sir are not well paid.. unless you are living in a 3rd world in which case i doubt they have many computer problems.

Re:This hit us.

[Ayandia]

And by the way, our support people make $250k/year.

"Show me a [support person] who makes [$250k] a year, and I'll show you...a resume."

I swear I'd credit whoever said that if I could recall.

Re:This hit us.

[Anonymous Coward]

Your reading comprehension sucks.

Re:This hit us.

[Anonymous Coward]

but their products can be replaced in the market by products from competitors not living their lives mired in a 1970's-era IT mindset. ... and then ...

I'm cobbling together an 8088 based single board computer. (see homepage)

Cognitive dissonance, anyone?

Re:This hit us.

[antiMStroll]

You're never applying for a job with the Consumer Protection Agency, are you?

Re:This hit us.

[SN74S181]

Nowhere did I claim my SBC was going to take over the world. Hell, I haven't been thinking of running an antiquated Time Sharing OS on it, but I guess I could bolt on the support hardware needed...

And SBCs aren't 'IT' in the first place. Embedded controllers aren't 'IT'. IT is things like copying and fax machines, information appliances like computers used primarily for word processing, spreadsheets, etc. You know, those boring uses for computers, using them like staplers and stuff.

I get pissed when my contracting agent refers to the work I do as 'IT,' particularly with the stench of death that has in the job market these days.

Re:This hit us.

[TopShelf]

Really, that's not an unrealistic number to use!

I could easily see charging an hourly rate for techs around $125, which would translate to $250K/year. Remember, from the corporate perspective, you've got to add in benefits, infrastructure costs (office space, equipment, etc.) and overhead while backing out training, admin, sick and vacation time from billable hours. So for a techie, you might have to cover $150,000 in total employee costs across something like 1500 billable hours a year. That puts you at the $100 per hour mark - of course, your mileage may vary...

Re:This hit us.

[The Raven]

That's because they don't want:

A) to be hacked from the inside by the evil haxx0rs attracted to working their by your Linux friendly workplace.

B) to be hacked from the outside by the evil haxx0rs who can easily hack your insecure Linux boxes.

Re:This hit us.

[HiThere]

And when the network goes down?
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.

[msaulters]

Yeah, that's what he meant... $2500/year each.

They're outsourced to India.

Re:This hit us.

[MadAhab]

Congrats. You just proved that you've never had to listen to either quilting or fishing nuts. If you had, you'd be snoring loudly.

I've been in a similar boat where the pesty thing that I did was NOT ASK FOR ANY FUCKING SUPPORT AT ALL. I quit and the whole department was dissolved within a few months, because only the helpless were left and it all imploded.

Re:This hit us.

[JWW]

My company actually does make some equipment (mainly materials) used for fishing, and many item s that would be useful to quilters.

Re:This hit us.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually I found that interesting... Thank you for taking the time.

An admin I know had to execute the above actions a couple of years ago on a relatively large NetWare network. The problem was with the master replica server which compounded things somewhat.

Re:This hit us.

[paj1234]

Your company sounds horrible. It doesn't sound like working there is making you happy. I think you should leave!

Re:This hit us.

[Ironica]

Did you mean it's just simple work on large files (such as importing tab/comma delimited text files to a database)?
You have users do this? AND run MS Office? That seems like an odd combination.

Actually, not so odd. In my last job I was doing a newsletter for one of the departments (we were a very full-service tech support department ;-). There was no actual page layout software on my computer, so I was creating this 8-page, image-heavy document in Word 2000 under Windows 2000. At first I was working off of our Windows 2000 Server, but the computer kept crashing, and took ages to save... so I finally gave up and copied it to the C: drive. (This was on a 10 GB network... it might not have been so bad on a 100 GB connection.)

We did generally have a company-wide policy of saving everything to the server, and we did have someone who lost a bunch of data when a virus ate her hard drive and she hadn't been saving to the server... which we didn't go to extensive trouble to recover. But there are definitely cases, particularly with MS Office, where working directly off of the server is not feasible. This means copying back and forth a lot, and at some points, your timestamp will be off, as will any revision history.

Re:This hit us.

[XSforMe]

Dont worry about it... my users do this too, I guess I could conclude that stupidity is universal.

There is one option that you could consider. Enabling roaming profiles. Profiles not only save their windows themes, but also the content of "My Documents" to the server every time the users log out.

Re:This hit us.

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh, if it were a real operating system (one designed to do something other than make your life a living hell), then you as the admin could just tell them not to use it and then

chown -hR root dir-they-should-not-use
chmod -hR og-rwx dir-they-should-not-use

Then they can be as dumb as they are inclined to be and forget what you said all they want, but they still will have to save their stuff on the server.

Re:This hit us.

[Alsee]

Log in, and select "Declare a new Epoch."

Pleistocene

-

Re:This hit us.

[Realistic_Dragon]

"That's not the deal they signed with Microsoft. The deal says that the company pays Microsoft a ton of money in exchange for using their software and technical support of that software. It would be nice if MS gave them a break for all the time the support staff spent dealing with bugs, but that wasn't the deal. If you even proposed that deal I would bet that MS would tell you to get lost. "What are you going to do? Not use Office?""

And there we have the exact reason that Microsoft should be broken up and some sanity returned to the market.

The software industry is fundamentally broken, and needs fixing.

Re:This hit us.

[rifter]

And when the network goes down?

It should not go down. If the whole network can even possibly go down at once, we are probbaly talking about a small network. Even then, we should be talking about minutes to bringing it back up or the people in charge are not doing their job.

Or when they disconnect their portable, and take it to a meeting?

When they bring the portable to a meeting, they should be jacking into the network. If they are offsite, they should be connecting home via a vpn.

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.)

Yes, badly designed, shoddily built, and poorly maintained environments. Come to think of it, in any environment "save everything to the server" is the best advice, and if there is a reason it does not work, it should be fixed.

Re:This hit us.

[rifter]

God, reading comprehension on Slashdot is about as common as common sense. The parent was syaing that, were he to submit a bill to microsoft for support costs, there is no way they can verify what he truly paid his support people. He is not saying his support staff really get paid $250k/year or indeed even that he has a support staff (of 100).

upgrade

[asv108]

To OpenOffice.org(No Reg Required). Openoffice is now to the point where it is more than adequate for 90% of MS Office users, especially those who just use word and powerpoint. For the other 10%, just keep using MS Office.

Re:upgrade

[dmccarty]

[...] those who just use word and powerpoint.

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

[Gareman]

90% compatible is a lot like 90% up time. Sounds good to management but it's unworkable in practice. I recently switched back to Office XP after using and touting OpenOffice with my tech buddies for the last six months. It's not quite there yet, but I'll be back.

Re:upgrade

[kris]

Yes, it is. I have been lecturing using OpenOffice Impress last year and this year, using Suse Linux 8.1 and OpenOffice 1.0.x on a Dell Inspiron 8100, and it just works fine, thank you.

The difference between me and that student you describe is that I do not try to bring my presentations to another format, but I am using sxi, sxw and sxc natively. OpenOffice is free after all, so if students want to use the slides they might as well install a copy. For those who don't want to, I do PDF exports.

Kristian

Re:upgrade

[Anonymous Coward]

Upgrade to 90% of the functionality ?

Isn't that exactly the same as a downgrade ?

Re:upgrade

[Planesdragon]

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.

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

[johnnyb]

That's true any time you transport documents - INCLUDING UPGRADING BETWEEN VERSIONS OF THE SAME PRODUCT. If you have different fonts, if you have different software versions, etc., etc. My guess is that he actually created it on _Linux_ using OpenOffice (Linux has completely different fonts) and then moved it to Office. Font issues (at least from my experience) do not exist on Windows OfficeWindows StarOffice conversions.

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

[asv108]

I've exported from OO to ppt several times without a problem. I think this kid was just using it as a creative excuse. I actually like OO Impress a lot better than PPT. The ability to export your presentation to flash in 1.1 beta is real cool. I also like the html export better too. The best part about impress is you can import any PPT template so your not stuck using templates only designed for OO.

Re:upgrade

[Anonymous Coward]

I am sure that if he had created it in OpenOffice and played it OpenOffice it would have been fine. Are you saying that it's OpenOffice's fault that Powerpoint scrunched up all the text???

Re:upgrade

[MeNeXT]

I wonder how many of those who laughed had a legal copy of MS Office?

Re:upgrade

[NecroPuppy]

I do know that the version of OpenOffice Calc that I have doesn't handle nested IF statements.

If it actually does, I haven't figured out how to get them to work...

Re:upgrade

[Anonymous Coward]

For most Word documents, it is better then Word. By most, I mean the memos, simple letters and reports that need to be done on a day to day basis. Graphics tend to work okay, never tried to do anything with a table of contents or index, so I don't know how well those come across. However, anything that has a macro is not going to work.

However, Word is not the killer app of Office. That distinction belongs to Excel, and until there is a spreadsheet that is as capable as Excel, and can import Excel spreadsheets (including the macros), Microsoft will rule to corporate office suite.

Re:upgrade

[abe ferlman]

Yeah, 1.1 beta is really nice. But don't expect it to do any better than wordperfect did when it was popular. It'll get 90% of it right. Test it if you need it to look right.

If you're giving a ppt presentation, use OOo to do the presentation or at least export it to html or something; IE is far more predictable for this sort of thing.

If OOo had monopoly penetration like MS does, it would certainly be ready for primetime. As it stands, if you're careful to test when it's critical then it's fantastic.

Perhaps there needs to be a minimal OOo viewer program (or even self-executing presentations) so that this sort of thing can't happen?

Re:upgrade

[Anonymous Coward]

You do realise that a lot of the stuff you complain about (E.g. the Smallcaps button/Menu item, page centering, word count etc. etc.) could be fixed. By yourself? Really; you even note in the "Good Stuff" entry that OOo is free and Free, so why not take advantage of that?

Re:upgrade

[ePhil_One]

... for 90% of MS Office users, especially those who just use word and powerpoint.

While I agree in a heartbeat that 90% of MS Office Users use Word Extensively, I kinda question both that PowerPoint is the second most used app and that 90% of folks use PowerPoint. Do you have any data for this?

I'd expect the Excel or Outlook to be the second most used Application; I know there were versions of Office that basically consisted of stripped down Word & Excel apps. While its not as intuitive as Word, I'd expect more folks to be managing lists and summing numbers than creating presentations

I'd say the spreadsheet functionality is far and away where they should concentrate Dev time once a decent WYSIWYG word processor is ready with good mail merge capability.

Re:upgrade

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

However it doesn't do this all the time. Just last week I wrote a fairly big presentation in OOo's Impress and ran it on Office just fine. The only problem I had was that the machine running PowerPoint didn't have the same fonts as the machine running OOo. Changing the default font led to a flawless run.

Re:upgrade

[asv108]

Outlook would probably be the second most used app. I wasn't stating that powerpoint is #2, i was just saying users who just use word and powerpoint should consider moving to OO. I'm not a spreadsheet power user, but from the various comments I've seen OO's spreadsheet is not up to snuff.

Re:upgrade

[sheared]

Unfortunately, I fall into the 10% catagory. Any chance something similar to Excel with Visual Basic for Applications will be available?

I couldn't do half the stuff I do today without the functionality of the VB apps created in Excel.

Re:upgrade

[Knara]

Well, the problem there isn't really the product, but the user's assumption about how it was going to behave at showtime.

Students are notorious for not planning ahead. If he'd done the footwork to see how his presentation was going to interact with the equipment available, and had run a practice session or two of his slideshow, this wouldn't be an issue.

Hell, competent people, even if they make it and present it in Powerpoint on the same laptop, won't go into a presentation cold.

Re:upgrade

[Anonymous Coward]

barely legible text. "I created it in OpenOffice and brought it into PowerPoint
So its *PowerPoint* which is not there...
R.

Re:upgrade

[franimal]

Even PDF bombs sometimes. I had a discrete math prof. who distributed class materials via PDF. They problem was many of the symbols that looked fine on his machine appeared as boxes for everyone else. What is that []? , =, +, - ... etc?

Re:upgrade

[Anonymous Coward]

Works for me:

=IF(B1=1;"Dummy"; IF(A1=1;"Stupid"; "Idiot"))

Re:upgrade

[johnnyb]

He needs to look into his program. What is happening is that his computer is not transfering his extra fonts to the PDF. This makes them bigger, but is necessary for a portable PDF. If he is using Mathematica, I know there is an option for this (although that may just be for Postscript).

Re:upgrade

[Anonymous Coward]

In school, probably most... I know at my college anyway a full fledged student copy of Office XP went for something like 10$ because of the campus license.

Re:upgrade

[cgenman]

The only way to _really_ be sure that something looks exactly right in two places is to use PDF.

An artist friend beginning his road through computer purgatory has been trying to send out his resume for several weeks now, to no luck. First it was the OpenOffice -> Word conversion ("But they're the same format!"), then it was the Mac Word -> PC Word conversion ("But it's the same company!"), then Word 97 -> Word XP bugs ("But it's the same program!"). Now that he's finally got an XP machine running Word XP, the job has been given to another person.

The only way to be _really_ sure that something looks exactly right is to use GIF or JPEG. If you are bringing a presentation in on a CD, converting all of your slides to GIF shouldn't pose too much of a problem.

BTW, this person claimed he was using OpenOffice, not StarOffice. StarOffice has far, far better conversions to and from MSOffice than OpenOffice does.

Re:upgrade

[JWW]

It could have just been a font issue. What he really should have checked is the fonts available on the presentation PC. I've seen this kind of thing happen with presentations created in PowerPoint, too.

That the class laughed at him is the disturbing part. It really brings home that "part of the club" mentality that is central to keeping hold of the monopoly.

Of course it always seem like when bugs appear for opensource products people point and say "See, its opensource, it sucks!!", but when windown programs break they willingly set the clocks back two years, or run through a tedious process to manually fix things, and say virtually nothing.

Re:upgrade

[JahToasted]

Exactly. Ever try to convert soemthing from powerpoint 2000 to powerpoint 97? Good luck.

Re:upgrade

[Anonymous Coward]

> An artist friend beginning his road through computer purgatory has been trying to send out his resume for several weeks now, to no luck. First it was the OpenOffice -> Word conversion ("But they're the same format!"), then it was the Mac Word -> PC Word conversion ("But it's the same company!"), then Word 97 -> Word XP bugs ("But it's the same program!"). Now that he's finally got an XP machine running Word XP, the job has been given to another person.

Another fine example of the power of simple, text-based resumes. Use the right tool for the right job (and a complex wordprocessor is almost never the right tool for a resume'.

Re:upgrade

[Anonymous Coward]

What he should have done is also brought and installed a copy of Open Office onto the computer he was going to make the presentation on.

I mean it isn't like he would have been pirating it or doing something illegal.

Re:upgrade

[Anonymous Coward]

> That the class laughed at him is the disturbing part. It really brings home that "part of the club" mentality that is central to keeping hold of the monopoly.

That class laughed at him because he offered a lame excuse for not having previewed his presentation on the equipment he'd be using, as any sensible person would. Nothing to do with any tinfoil hat-based "part of the club" mentality.

Re:upgrade

[Thoguth]

Yeah, well what would the presentation look like if he'd made it in MS Office then got locked out of it?

The point here is, you can't use MS Office until the patch comes out, so there's no better time to get OOo on peoples' computers and get some work done.

MS Office: doesn't work, can't do anything
OpenOffice: Import/export are a little gimpy, but at least you can get work done with it. (oh and you never have to worry about Activation-related problems again ever)

Should be a no-brainer.

Re:upgrade

[iabervon]

Why exactly does PowerPoint support scrunched up, barely legible text? What are the chances that a user actually wants this, let alone a user who didn't specifically ask for it?

Not that this is a MicroSoft-specific complaint; why do all of the web browsers I use let web pages choose ugly fonts? Being nice to look at is much more important than being exactly what the page specifies. It's not like I browse the web for the fonts...

Re:upgrade

[Anonymous Coward]

Jesus of Nazareth did not die so we could enjoy eggs and chocolate bunnies!

There was no fucking jesus h. christ you simple feeb! jesus is a fiction, like the easterbunny - GROW UP AND THINK FOR YOURSELF!

Re:upgrade

[jez9999]

Your comment is utterly idiotic. What do you expect MS to do, put in a 'font prettiness' algorithm to decide whether it's attractive enough? Or only let certain fonts be dispayed, 'nice' fonts? Giving them yet more control over YOUR computer.

Re:upgrade

[NecrosisLabs]

You have to be careful that the font doesn't have the "do not embed" bit set, otherwise that can still bite you on the ass.

Re:upgrade

[juhaz]

Historians seem to think that Jesus was quite a real person.

Sure, I don't think he wasn't son of non-existing God, but he existed.

Re:upgrade

[b17bmbr]

if he'd have just shown it in openoffice, he'd have been fine. i import lots of ppt's into OO.o and they import fine. i haven't exported much, but basic stuff works. but hell, that i sthe point. if you use OO.o, USE OO.o.

Re:upgrade

[muleboy]

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.

A student in kinetics class giving his final presentation yesterday had to write equations on the board because Powerpoint is not compatible between the Mac and PC version. It is difficult to verify that the presentations will look right because the prof wants us to send him the Powerpoint files via email the morning of the talk. I have seen similar problems with OpenOffice. My conclusion is that neither OpenOffice nor Microsoft Office is ready for prime time.

Re:upgrade

[CvD]

Hear ye hear ye. A bunch of my fellow students and I have been using Prosper, a slide making package for LaTeX. Only it doesn't look like the regular slide package that comes with LaTeX. Very slick, not at all boring or bland. And of course with all the equation power of LaTeX. And they're not hard to make either.

The output is PDF files, which for presentations can be displayed easily in fullscreen on anything that will display PDF files. We have recieved many comments on how slick the presentations look, especially the equations which are unequalled by any MS package.

See the screenshots. The Contemporain and White Cross styles are very beautiful.

Have fun!

Cheers,

Costyn.

Re:upgrade

[EvilTwinSkippy]

That proves that OpenOffice works every bit as well as PowerPoint. If I had a nickel for every time one of our rentals clients would bring in a powerpoint and it spontaneosly exploded 20 minutes before a major presentation I'd be retired and handing out Linux advise full time.

Re:upgrade

[Anonymous Cow herd]

Oh my god, there's a math professor who doesn't use *TeX???? :-o

Re:upgrade

[Cromac]

Upgrade to 90% of the functionality ?

Isn't that exactly the same as a downgrade ?

Is it a downgrade if the product with 100% functionality (aka features) doesn't run? That would seem to be 100% features / 0% functionality vs 90% features / 100% functionality.

Re:upgrade

[MattCohn.com]

...

PowerPoint made the format.
It's POWERPOINTS format. OpenOffice is only using it.

If PowerPoint couldn't read the file correctly, it's because OpenOffice didn't save it right.

Re:upgrade

[Platinum Dragon]

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.

Should've checked the fonts on the machine he intended to run the presentation on beforehand. I always did that before running presentations made in OO. Hell, you have to do this with any presentation that's run on a computer different from the one it was created on, since there is no guarantee both machines will have the same fonts. The fonts should be your only issue that doesn't involve forgetting to bring the images along, however.

Incidentally, using TrueType support under Linux can go a long way to getting around this, since you can (illegally) bring whatever fonts you need with you on floppy or CD and install them before doing your presentation.

Re:upgrade

[sunhou]

I'm a math prof, and I use LaTeX, but I convert stuff to PDF before putting them on my web page for my students, since I think they have an easier time seeing pdf files on their computers than they do with dvi or ps files.

My pdf files used to look ugly on the screen (but print OK) when I used latex -> dvips -> ps2pdf I guess because of font madness that I never understood, but now I use pdflatex directly. That makes the text look good, but figured that I include in my documents don't get resized properly (I use \includegraphics from the graphicx package). Oh well, I can't win them all.

Re:What is true, then?

[xanadu-xtroot.com]

If the Reg is false, then what's the true story?

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...).

Ahem...

[Ace Rimmer]

Nice bug. They really encourage people to pirate so-called corporate versions (no activation needed).

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...

[Rick.C]

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.

BSA definition of win users:

winter - yup

wine - uh-huh, tax 'em

wind - yeah! guaranteed revenue

Winnie the Pooh - double tax 'em - sounds like 'pooter

Winchester - tax 'em retroactively back to 1868

Re:Ahem...

[Phronesis]

They really encourage people to pirate so-called corporate versions (no activation needed).

Read the article. This bug affects only the corporate versions:

The problem appears to centre on the Select Customer - ie. non-academic volume licence purchasers

Re:Ahem...

[NickFitz]

Nice bug. They really encourage people to pirate so-called corporate versions (no activation needed).

If you check out the Reg story, you'll see that the bug causes those corporate "no activation" versions to demand activation. That is the fundamental problem.

Re:Ahem...

[Anonymous Coward]

What? Office isn't $500! It came for free with my friends computer and he let me borrow the CD!

Piracy on the rise

[zmcgrew]

Do you think Microsoft wonders why there's been a sudden surge of people registering too many times per liscence with the same key? =)

I didn't want to register more than once... The software made me do it!

sue?

[adamruck]

how long before someone sues microsoft for lost time/effort , 80000 pc's for a single company.. how many pc's total? Could it be in the millions?
The only thing I can think of protecting mircrosoft would be the EULA, but im no expert in that area.

Re:sue?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hell yes. Who does the EULA apply to? The End User! Is the Company or the Operator the End User? Hard, but if you argue that it's the Operator, and the Company is losing money due to that situation created by Microsoft, well, it's up to Microsoft to cover the costs because the silly EULA "contract" is between Operator and MS, not Damaged Party / Company and MS.

Re:sue?

[bwalling]

The only thing I can think of protecting mircrosoft would be the EULA, but im no expert in that area.

That's exactly what is protecting them. They make no warranties and assume no liabilities. As far as they are concerned, they product may not even work. Beautiful, isn't it.

Re:sue?

[Anonymous Coward]

That and the fact that companies that large should have purchased the corporate version.

Re:sue?

[geekoid]

80000 pcs, thats a loss 0f 166 man days per MINUTE.
Sure they got there EULA clause, but I would really like to see a fortune 500 go after MS to test that little clause in court.

Re:sue?

[Sloppy]

Microsoft isn't the correct party to sue over this.

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.

Re:sue?

[Kjella]

In general, I don't think anybody has managed to sue for damages due to bugs. Unless you can prove gross negligence or malicious intent, very doubtful. And people expect software to be buggy, so I doubt any bug will fly. Oh and expect it to take longer than the anti-trust trial, with a kazillion legal documents, expert witnesses and an army of lawyers more intimidating than the US Army ;)

Kjella

Re:sue?

[PhxBlue]

Actually, given such high stakes, a company's legal department might be inclined to challenge the legitimacy of EULAs and/or click-through agreements. We can hope, anyway.

Re:sue?

[weeboo0104]

In general, I don't think anybody has managed to sue for damages due to bugs

I think they have. Remember in 98 or 99 when grocery stores started trying to process credit card with an expiration date after 2000? I heard there were several cases of the registers crashing when the cards were run and needed a supervisor to reset them. I think it might have been NCR that got sued.

Anybody else remember anything like this?

Re:80,000

[npietraniec]

Yes, and imagine the hell (and cost) when all 80,000 users are confused about how to use their computer and half of their complex .doc and powerpoint documents don't work right.

Cracking down on Piracy?

[jamesjw]

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.

Re:Cracking down on Piracy?

[NickFitz]

maybe they got the licence code crossed with the auto save

Or the Office Assho^H^Histant...

It looks like you're a dirty stinking software pirate. Do you want some help erasing your hard drive?

Re:Cracking down on Piracy?

[Anonymous Coward]

or indicating that any company that doesn't report this problem is using pirated m$ office.

Re:Cracking down on Piracy?

[Idarubicin]

would you like to enter it again now? [Yes] [Yes] or [YES!]

That's the sound of Bill Gates having an orgasm when he thinks about how much money your company paid for a broken copy of Office.

Pay me! Pay me!

[wizardmax]

I wander if you have to pay again? :) PAY! PAY! PAY! Muhahahaha

Could be worse...

[Bush_man10]

Thanks be to god that MS hasn't started storing registration information in "bad blocks" on the bootsector of your hard drive. No amount of registry cleaning would be able to work around that solution. It would be a lot worse if MS attempted to do that. 80,000 low level format's....yeah...and then you would have 80,000 Linux installations i'm sure :)

Re:80,000

[xanadu-xtroot.com]

Imagine the savings this company could reap by switching to [snip OS to make this more a real issue (yes, I love Linux but that obviously doesn't apply in this topic)] and some kind of OpenOffice product.

I thought the exact same thing, brother. I'm *really* trying like hell not to forward this story to my Upper-Aboves and include a link to OpenOffice in the message body...

Viral

[fobbman]

Who's viral now, Mr Gates?

Crack

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a crack for SR1a that gets rid of the registration, but you can't update to any service packs or anything because the file it modifies gets overwritten. The crack can ONLY modify the SR1a file. Oh well.

Y2K bug?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like a retroactive Y2K bug. Once again, Microsoft is at least 3 years behind in their technology..

Re:What is true, then?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

"Not quite accurate" means exactly that. Parts of it are false and other parts are questionable. For all we know this whole story could be bullshit. I just looked on Microsoft's home page and saw no mention of this "bug". If it was really that bad they'd replace their front page with a clear and concise instructions on how businesses can fix the problem. Pffft, yea right. ;-)

Where is this in the TCO?

[haystor]

Every time I hear that software price is only a small consideration in TCO, I wonder where licensing administration goes in that TCO. Be sure to file this one in there too.

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."

Re:Where is this in the TCO?

[Alien Being]

GREEAAAT, 500 it is!

Re:Where is this in the TCO?

[steve_l]

I agree. our IT dept is fussy as anything over windows licenses, even borrowing the CDs for an install is a sign-out sign in effort.

But Linux? they have a stack of the disks they burned themselves, preconfigured with the apps you need. I just go down and ask for one, install it where I like. No audits, no license tracking, nothing.

Re:Where is this in the TCO?

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhmm,

You watch too much tv. ...

umm,

mee too.

Piracy

[wiggys]

Yet another example of how ordinary consumers can be hurt by anti-piracy measures.

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

[daveodukeo]

It just goes to show that as long as the companies make having a legit product MORE difficult to maintain and use than a stolen one, people will continue to steal!

Re:Piracy

[rusty0101]

You missed:

Programs that write authentication keys to boot sectors of the hard disk, breaking boot loaders other than the Microsoft mbr.

Re:Piracy

[Andrewkov]

And programs that require a USB or parallel port dongle to function ... kinda leaves you screwed if you have a slightly older PC with no USB support (Cubase comes to mind).

Re:Piracy

[Anonymous Coward]

Where do companies like VMWare, Curious Labs, Microsoft and Alias fit in? They cancel ebay auctions for their products on sight, claiming you first need to send proof to them AND ebay that you have a real copy. Some don't even allow you to resell at all, claiming it's an anti-piracy measure!

I've been bitten by all four companies, and it eventually took a $290 action from my attorney to be able to sell $2500 worth of software!

Re:Piracy

[Anonymous Coward]

Also lets not forget

1. Tax software that writes to undocumented sections of the harddisk, possibly corrupting your data.
2. CD-R drives that cannot be used to burn CD's because some brain dead DRM software found its way onto your computer.
3. Phones that restrict what you can and can't send.

Boy am I glad I got into IT! Gee, its such a fun, fast paced, yet relaxed enviroment to work in!

Re:Piracy

[earthforce_1]

You forgot to mention the accursed dongle, which (fortunately) has for the most part disappeared from common use.

Have you evern seen a PC with a big chain of those stupid things hanging out the back of the parallel port? Remember trying to figure out how to arrange them, so they don't interfere with each other?

Re:Piracy

[wiggys]

I also forgot the dreaded LENSLOCK which plagued Sinclair Spectrum owners in the 1980s.

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 only had 3 chances of getting it right. If you didn't THE COMPUTER WOULD RESET! And as the game was loaded from tape you had another 5-7 minute wait ahead of you.

In the end I bought a microdrive unit and a snapshot interface and saved the game to microdrive once I'd got past the copy protection. Happy days!

Re:Piracy

[p3d0]

Just last night I tried to watch a DVD that complained it was in the wrong region. Funny, the other three DVD in the set played without any problems.

Re:Piracy

[Hobophile]

games which won't work with certain CD drives thanks to the way the Safedisk copy protection system works,

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

[usotsuki]

Macrovision's not *that* hard to crack, is it? Just boost the Composite Video signal. My signal booster cost me $30 from a catalog.

-uso.
Copying DVDs to videotape is a hobby!

Re:Piracy

[Anonymous Coward]

We are all potential criminals in this police-state we have allowed to evolve. If you protest you are unpatriotic. If you pirate=terrorist.

New 'Law and Order' series: BSA Investigations

Re:Piracy

[jeffy124]

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.

That has to be one of the most insightful comments ever stated on slashdot. good show!

Re:Piracy

[wiggys]

A friend of mine bought Command and Conquer on the budget range recently. It wouldn't work - came up with a strange error message about a .TMP file.

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 like a software pirate even though he paid real money for the game!

Re:Piracy

[ergo98]

Personally I would prefer dongles if they insist upon copy protection: Generally you plug them in and forget about them, and if you rebuild your PC, or buy a new PC, there's no reactivation and trying to plead your case BS. In the era of USB one would think that dongles, about 20 cents of hardware, would be common.

Re:Piracy

[Anonymous Coward]

Every computer manufacturer has sold USB-capable computers since at least 1999.

Four years is ancient.

Re:Piracy

[gid]

This is one thing I LOVE about id Software. When Quake3 first come out, it required the CD for single player, and a real key for online game play. But after 6 months or so, the patch they released didn't require the CDROM at all. And when enough legit people were having trouble with their reg keys, they actually turned key authentication off. ( I think q3 1.17 - ~1.3x or something didn't use key auth at all) Of course they don't announce this information, it just kind of happens silently and only people "in the know" are aware.

They support users well. I wish they would support the mod community a bit better, and maybe have a guy or two that does nothing but work with/help out popular mods, to track down quake3 engine/scripting bugs, or what not.

Re:Piracy

[Anonymous Coward]

Four years may be ancient for you, but casual computer users typically keep their systems longer. A friend of mine is still using her PC from 1996 and it still does exactly what she needs. My sister is still using her IBM PC from 1997 - with cable modem no less.

Re:Piracy

[Andrewkov]

True. You can also buy PCI USB cards, which I had to do on my dual CPU machine (two Intel P2-450 Xeon CPU's, it used to be a server but is still fast enough to be a workstation even though the machine is probably 5 or more years old). But the point is that it's a pain in the ass for legitamte users to deal with all the crapy copy protection schemes. When you get used to free software, it's really painful to go back to the Windows world.

Re:Piracy

[irix]

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 like a software pirate even though he paid real money for the game

I run Windows on my gaming machine, and I don't have a problem shelling out for games that I like to play.

However, even when I own a legit copy of the game I prefer to get the No-CD crack when I can. I hate trying to find the right CD and putting it in every time I want to play a different game.

Re:Piracy

[Anonymous Coward]

This is one of the reasons I don't buy computer games anymore. Why hassle with it? Get your brand new game home and unwrap it, and hope I have the correct operating system, the correct version of that operating system, the correct version of my videocard driver, my soundcard driver, my cdrom driver, hope I have the right version of directx, hope my cdrom is compatible with whatever stupid cd copy protection they are using, hope I don't lose my cdkey before I have to reinstall the game again. Oh, not to mention hoping my hardware is powerful enough for whatever latest 3d special effect texture trick the game is using;

Compare this to my nintendo, or my ps2. I go to the store, I buy the game I want, I take it home. I put it into my console, turn it on, and I'm playing.

Console systems are lightyears ahead of computers as far as user experience goes with games.

Re:Piracy

[3.1415926535]

Yeah, in a similar vein, the Windows version of Descent 3 prompts you for the CD when you try to start it, but the Loki port only prompts if you have it set to play the intro movie, and even then it gives you a cancel button that skips the movie and goes straight into the game. Yay Loki!

Re:Piracy

[Ignorant Aardvark]

I bought a legitimate version of WarCraft III for the cdkey so I could play online. Then I downloaded a hacked image file I could load up using DAEMON Tools so I didn't have to swap CDs so much.

Re:Piracy

[tshak]

I agree with you on almost every point except the first: products which won't work after 30 days until you "activate them" (Win XP, Office XP, Autocad, etc),


Activation is easier than typing those rediculously long, error prone serial numbers (granted, in XP you have to type that in too!) I have 2 Windows XP machines (I finally switched about a month ago) and I was all up-in-arms about activation, until I actually did it. If you are on the Internet, you have to click the "OK" button during install when asked "do you want to activate". Then you have to wait 2-3 seconds. Otherwise, you have to call a 24hour toll-free support line in which you have to wait on hold for about 5-10 seconds before you can get your activation key.

Personally, I think that product activation for smaller products like an OS is a waste of time for the makers of the software because it's still trivial to pirate the software. However, I would not call product activation an area in which consumers are "hurt" by anti-piracy measures.

Re:Piracy

[snilloc]

Everybody grab a copy of the April 18th Entertainment Weekly (the one with the Matrix 2 cover). Check out Joel Stein's article about the PSA regarding movie pirating soon to be shown in movie theaters. (Shown, ironically, to people who have almost by definition paid to see the flick.)

My favorite line from the article?
"I vowed right then not only to pirate a movie but also to find a way to use the Internet to steal directly from Jack Valenti's home." (In response to some asinine remark by Valenti)

Re:Piracy

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, activation wouldn't be a horrible thing in itself, but the way Microsoft has done it -- you activate, but if you change enough parts from your computer (in some cases, one HD swap will do it), it will require you to call and "re-activate." This has proven to be a major headache for me when upgrading my main PC's harddrive from 20GB to 120GB. It's just another step that I really don't want to deal with. BTW -- I run Linux as my primary desktop environment. I run windows because there are some programs you simply cannot find an equivalent for (or force to run) in Linux.

Re:Piracy

[Obiwan Kenobi]

My favorite was the ole "Turn to page 37 in the manual and read the third word in the second paragraph" that X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter (and their respective titles) and X-COM used.

I can't tell you how many times I had to copy that stupid manual so my friends could play X-Wing after they lost/threw away/little brother destroyed their old one.

Re:Piracy

[thejot]

Actually, CD check has been disabled in the latest beta patches for Unreal Tournament 2003 which should be final very soon.

Re:Piracy

[Anonymous Coward]

No USB? Then use the "parallel port dongle" YOU mentioned.

Sheesh.

Re:Piracy

[mrtroy]

That happens all the time, in every facet of life. The bad apples spoil the bunch. I am not saying I have ever bought software...or that I havent...but in every aspect of life everyone is penalised for the crimes of others.

Why does it take me 4 hours to get through an airport now?

Deal with it, there will always be those who break the rules, and there will always be those trying to prevent them from doing so.

You dont complain about security guards at banks, so dont complain about anti-piracy methods!

Re:Piracy

[angle_slam]

programs which require you to enter a particular word or phrase from the manual every time you want to use it,

Do companies still use this? I remember having to do this for games in the 80s, but I haven't seen a game that had that "feature" in at least 15 years.

Re:Piracy

[uberdave]

Most 486s don't have PCI slots.

Re:Piracy

[indiigo]

What I do:
Find a way around the protection.
Play and beat the game (there isn't a game out there that can't be beaten within 2 weeks)
Return the game. If they bitch about returning the game I threaten to fight them with my credit card guarantees, better business beureau. Eventually they will get the point. I've done this a few times, not on every game, because not every game has these types of protections, and a lot of producers deserve my cash, but I won't stand for getting crap after I've laid out $40+.

Re:Piracy

[fermion]

games which install fully to your hard-drive but require the CD in to be played,

I know that games makes tons of money, and people who like to play games will pay a bunch of money in hardware and software just for the privilege to play those games.

OTOH, I wonder how many people are like me. I own the vast majority of the software I use, but have little patience for features that stand between me and using the software. I used to buy games on a regular basis before the copy protection is so cumbersome. Simcity is a good example.

I understand the need for copy protection on certain large very expensive packages that are sold one at a time to a small market. My patience is ended at these little $100 packages that are supposed to sold to hundreds of thousands of people. It is insulting, abusive, and disrespectful to the customer.

CDs which stop you from making a legal backup copy,

The other day I was at a small (about 100 people) concert local concert. As I usually do, I go to look to see if there are any CDs I want. While looking at the CDs, I notice one of them marked with some sort of MS branded technology. I immediately think, is this going to play on my car CD player? Is this going to play on my non MS computer? Am I going to be able to transfer this to my computer, which is my primary music player? Needless to say, I left that CD there, and very nearly did not buy a single CD from those musicians. I pay for entertainment and art, not complications

Re:Piracy

[Anonymous Coward]

Just do what I do, and store the CD images on a fileserver (Samba) and use Daemon Tools to mount them. No more fighting with my brother over game CDs. Now if I could only find a secure and fast way for my friend across town to connect, I'd be all set.

Re:Piracy

[ryanwright]

Most 486s don't have PCI slots.

I beg to differ. Last night, I had four 486 DX4/100 motherboards sitting at my house, all with PCI slots. Today, I have three, because I've sneakily hidden one of the worthless pieces of crap in a magazine rack in my neighbor's bathroom. Tomorrow, I shall hide one behind his couch.

If you were my neighbor, this could be a great lesson in late model 486 bus architectures.

Re:Piracy

[The Creator]

You dont complain about security guards at banks, so dont complain about anti-piracy methods!

I remember one day i was at the bank. The security guards there suddenly(due to an error in their training) forced all the ligitimate costomers out of the bank and in to the street, then they blocked the door so noone could get in. Stopped everyone from getting any business done that day. The security guard vendor had to come to the bank and replace the guard before the bank could open again.

Re:Piracy

[Suidae]

I had one like that. You had to match up three pictures from various pages of the manual. I just copied the bitmaps out of the resource file and set up a program to display the approprate sequence for each page. Much easier than digging up that silly manual all the time.

Are any products using USB dongles yet? Seems like dongles would be a little more popular with USB, since you don't have to worry about passthrough connections.

Re:Piracy

[realdpk]

When was the last time a security guard, who's seen you nearly every day for the past 2 years (ala MS Office being run nearly every day for the past 2 years), suddenly refused entry and demanded you show your ID again, and prove that you have an account there?

If that's ever happened, it's time to find a new bank.

Re:Piracy

[tshak]

If you had to activate to swap a HD, that is a bit annoying. AFAIK it should take 2-3 major hardware changes within a 90 day period to require reactivation.

Re:Piracy

[istewart]

I'm running OS X, and I used Disc Copy to make a normal (albeit read-only) .dmg image of the WC3 CD and it works seamlessly with the game. I don't need to have the physical CD anywhere near the computer. However, when I tried to burn the dmg for my Windows-using friend, he said the CD wouldn't work at all. I don't know whether this is due to Disc Copy, Securom, or both, but I do know a plain-vanilla Mac image works just fine with OS X.

Re:Piracy

[marauder404]

Bad people always spoil it for the rest of us. You're not thinking broadly enough. If people didn't hijack airplanes, we wouldn't have to stand in line for 15 minutes before boarding a plane and being paranoid about security. We wouldn't need passwords or PINs. Or SSH. Or door locks. Or car alarms. Or confidential envelopes. Or armies. If you think about, we spend a HUGE amount of our time and effort EVERY DAY to fend off the people that want to do us harm.

And to counter your argument, anti-piracy measures help ordinary consumers by keeping the company profitable and bring around additional products that benefit the consumer or reducing the cost of a product or service. It, like everything else, goes both ways. Would you have bought the game if it cost $100 instead of $50 but it didn't come with all the copy protection stuff?

Re:Piracy

[Anonymous Coward]

"games which install fully to your hard-drive but require the CD in to be played,"

nothing new. Games have been doing this for as long as hard drives existed. Key disk copy protection goes back tot he 5.25" Disk era!

Re:Piracy

[Anonymous Coward]

I have several 486's with EISA slots; Remember those?

Re:Piracy

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats the problem with all this junk - the companies are basically turning their paying customers into thieves, and, as the RIAA/MPAA have proven, they have no problem calling their customers this.

Re:Piracy

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

It's also ironic that the people paying for the game are the ones who get screwed. A friend of mine used to buy games because he wanted to support the game companies, but was unable to play many games with his other friends because they had illegal copies. Everyone else was playing 8-player network games, but he couldn't play with them because of version mismatches or other problems. He's now stopped buying games because of this - he just gets a copy from someone else, and doesn't have any problems (he also doesn't have to deal with Safedisc, Securom, etc., and doesn't need to insert the CD every time he plays).

Re:80,000

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm... I may acidently spam a load of companies.
Hit by the office registration bug, try OpenOffice, free and NO REGISTRATION REQUIRED.

Re:80,000

[bigpat]

I'd say between 4 to 8 million dollars(probably over a 4 to 5 year year period given the lifetime of PCs in corporate environments), but only if Dell would only offer workstations with Linux preinstalled for less than those with windows.

Dell is the next windows gatekeeper.

Draconian verification

[Platinum Dragon]

Microsoft just wants to be absolutely sure you really purchased a licence for that copy of Office you're running, and you're not a communist pirate pig-dog who hasn't coughed up tribute to the God of your computer, He Who Controls Windows.

Change the system time !!!

[Anonymous Coward]

This service pack is supposed to be Microsoft's answer to software piracy...yet changing the system clock back 2 years will enable people running illegal copies to continue to use it ?

Microsoft products are like some big ghey shareware program you have to re-set your system clock to continue to use their buggy half-assed bs programs.

Am I missing somthing here or did I drink too much beer while watching the Leafs loose to Philly last night :(

Re:Change the system time !!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Great game, huh?

Re:Change the system time !!!

[Anonymous Coward]

No, everything is right in the world when the Leafs lose, the Sens win and then CuJo plays like shit and is swept out fo the playoffs.

I'll save my celebrating for when the Sens wreck the Islanders tonight.

Re:80,000

[Anonymous Coward]

If they're using Access to manage any important data, then they're already five years too late on learning a new way of doing it. Really, havn't we all learnt yet? Using Access for anything important is a bad idea. Especially if you have more than one person using it at any one time.

Not cost effective

[Phelan]

With a company that large support costs would be substancial. We both know they are not shelling out a per computer licensing fee, but probably have site licenses that are actually rumored to be cost efficent. [we use SuSE on all our servers, and some of our desktops but we are also significantly smaller and did not change systems mid stride]

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

[s20451]

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.

I thought this was the point of the Red Hat certification program, to develop a class of linux techs who didn't have to be gurus?

Re:Not cost effective

[TummyX]

I wonder how much (in support costs) reactivating windows again and again and again and again would cost? hmmm!

Re:Not cost effective

[nolife]

At my current employer we support MS Office, but we also support various additions to MS Office, Wordperfect, Lotus Notes, Groupwise, Outlook, 20-30 trade specific applications (accounting apps, HR apps, Faxing applications,etc..), 15-20 web applications, and various other random software packages. These other applications need to be trained on and learned by everyone also. Why do people assume the everyone is born with the ability to use MS Office and would struggle more then normal for anything else? 95% of our support calls for MS Office are formatting, numbering pages, inserting symbols, page layout, and TOC, TOA issues. We would get these calls for ANY freaking office package we used. I would say that initally (maybe a month or two) it would be rough but after that is would be business as usual.

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.

Re:Not cost effective

[BenEnglishAtHome]

I don't know what the acceptable standard is ..., but lets say 100 users need a support staff of 3-5 people...

According to my employer, 100 users need about 0.8 support staff folks. If idle hands are the devil's workshop, we must be awfully righteous.

:-)

Re:Not cost effective

[ProteusQ]

This is where businesses, schools, and any other organization with an IT department needs to look at The Big Picture, i.e., the next five or ten years, instead of what's just on the plate until the fiscal year end.

UNIX experts may cost more than their point-and-click counterparts, but after the year-long agony of converting to a system that actually works, the next nine years are plain sailing (at least in comparison to the turbulence brought by M$ and friends).

It's just like highway construction. Everybody bitches during the two years it takes to get the job done. After that, everyone loves the smooth highway...

Fata viam invenient

Re:Not cost effective

[Phelan]

I am assuming that this companies staff is already trained in MS Office. Hence, I am considering the re-training cost to another office suite / OS.

Re:What is true, then?

[fubar1971]

doesn't get *EVERY TINY LITTLE DETAIL*

That's why I don't read The Register. It's kind of like saying Entertainment Tonight is the News

Re:80,000

[Anonymous Coward]

this comment should never have been modded up. Rather than to Moderate it "overrated" as I believe it is, I chose to forgo my moderation privileges in this story to express my disgust.

This comment is not even close to being "insightful" its simply a whore's ploy to suck up to the slashdot mentality by offering a canned statement. For this opinion to be insightful, some sort of evidence would have had to be expressed.

Furtthermore, if this was in fact a satire of the slashdot community, as I must wonder if it is, then that should have been made far more apparent. /Grumble

CollegeBlows.com: Because College Blows.

This is only the beginning.

[Chocolate Teapot]

Within a couple of years you will not even be able to log into windows without standing with your hand on your heart, pledging allegiance to the gilded image of Chairman Gates and singing the anthem. All together now...

"Developers, developers, developers, developers.."

Re:This is only the beginning.

[apoupc]

oh you have the beta version too?

Re:This is only the beginning.

[Nate Eldredge]

ITYM "Lawyers, lawyers, lawyers, laywers..."

HTH, HAND, etc.

Psycho linux zealot morning news.

[Anonymous Coward]

Just wait till MS releases another patch through windows update, problem gone... But i guess this kind of news gives you psycho zealots something to do in the morning doesnt it? Lets talk about all the little annoyances Linux has... oh wait its so perfect. Nothing on linux ever has glitches, security bugs, inconsistencies, misconfigurations... its 100% perfect to the core.

You people make me wanna go outside and kill kittens.

Re:Psycho linux zealot morning news.

[Anonymous Coward]

Open office has no problems with activation.

Sure it's absolutely useless, but you dont have to activate it!

Re:Psycho linux zealot morning news.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh ok! Lets switch to it then! So we can get nothing done but have it activated.

Re:Psycho linux zealot morning news.

[Anonymous Coward]

Back to work you MS schill! Bill's looking over your shoulder.

Re:Psycho linux zealot morning news.

[Anonymous Coward]

Whatever nutjob. I dont work for ms. Reply with something constructive for a change.

Re:Psycho linux zealot morning news.

[Anonymous Coward]

Right. Linux is absolutely perfeSEGMENTATION FAULT

Re:What is true, then?

[Amer]

I think you are 'not quite accurate'...

Re:What is true, then?

[uberdave]

If it was really that bad they'd replace their front page with a clear and concise instructions on how businesses can fix the problem.

Assuming Microsoft knows how to fix it.

Shocking

[Anonymous Coward]

The Register's story is not quite accurate

Doesn't that go without saying?

Planned obsolecense...

[alchemist68]

Micro$oft was looking for a way to force people to upgrade to the new licensing plan. Looks like they've found a way. Bastards.

I, however, am unaffected by this tragic event. I'm a happy Apple Macinotsh owner who uses Mac OS X and OpenOffice.

Really, there is no reason why corporations have to stay with M$; OpenOffice is good enough for the average business user.

Re:Planned obsolecense...

[Anonymous Coward]

OpenOffice is slower than hell on all but the fastest Macintosh with OS X. I tried it on my 700Mhz iBook w/256MB ram and it was in slow motion, totally unusable. And the installer is utter crap. You can't just leave it to install, you need to babysit it and authenticate as root every 2 - 3 minutes. You can putt along with Openoffice all you want, with my sympathy.

ho hum

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you expect from microsoft? seriously.

Any company still using microsoft products deserves what it gets.

Corporate

[LittleLebowskiUrbanA]

I'm not in the corporate world yet so I don't know but what is holding back corporations from adopting OpenOffice or StarOffice? Excel? You can't say corporate support because doesn't Sun offer support for StarOffice?

Re:Corporate

[jwjcmw]

Three things that I think are standing in the way of adopting OpenOffice or StarOffice....

Fear of compatablity
While it may seem rediculous, as there are definite incompatabilities between versions of MS-Office, no one wants to have a file that they produce not be able to be read by a client because they chose something other than Microsoft. Blaming the incompatability on MS is fine, but they don't want the blame put on their decision

Office customization
Many corporate environments have customizations that they have done to MS-Office, whether it is COM Outlook Add-In's, Excel vba macros, custom Word styles, that they have invested a lot of time and effort into. Generally those customizations will work with upgrades to MSOffice, but none of them would translate to OpenOffice or StarOffice

Outlook/Exchange
Outlook is still ahead of open source collaborative email/scheduling/planning applications, especially when combined with Exchange. However, most people who use Outlook don't use but about 1% of the functionality that is possible with it. My personal opinion is that someone could come up with an Outlook killer, but not by copying outlook (Evolution), but by coming up with a radical new interface, especially one that integrated more workflow into it. Don't ask me about details, though.

Re:Corporate

[geekoid]

momentum. I've been in the corp world for a long time, and it is very hard to break corporate momentume. We do it this way becase we do it this way. Everybody is on edge for fear of losing there jobs, nobody wants to make a decsion that turns out bad so they just 'go with it'. I have yet to see any corporation I have work at use a feature that they could get in OpenOffice. Hell, I have yet to see anything that couldn't be done in a standard Linux install. Except VB, and as someone who has the dubious pleasure of programming in it, I wouldn't really miss it. It is nothing more then a lock in product for Windows. Is it any surprise that it vb.net is almost the same as C# now that MS can use .net as a lock in product for windows?

Re:Corporate

[Anonymous Coward]

last i checked calc only supports 32000 lines-we've got spreadsheets bigger than that.

The biggest problem we are having in the attempt to move over to openoffice is trying to get it to play nice on a multi-user setup on win2k. i'd like to install once, and any user that logs on to a new pc (we have many shared pcs) can use the program without install prompts.

Re:80,000

[nmg196]

Anyone that thinks OpenOffice is good enough to deploy on that scale hasn't used OpenOffice.

Anyone that mods this down probably also hasn't used OpenOffice.

Remember: OpenSource is only free if your time has no value...

Did anybody noticed the icon on top of the page?

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny! On main page you see the evil Bill gates on this one you see bill gates with a bug over him!
LOL Slashdot hummor!

good example!

[JaredOfEuropa]

This is one good reason why things like online registration and verification (like Windows XP has), and certain flavours of DRM, are flawed. There's the obvious privacy concerns as well, but this is a good example to show your friends, family and bosses why this stuff is bad. They might care less about privacy and rights, but they will care that, when a registration or DRM scheme will screw up, you will not get the benefit of the doubt!. Instead you will be locked out of your system and/or data.

This is a problem that PHBs, legislators and your dear old granny can understand, so spread the word.

Re:good example!

[sheldon]

"This is one good reason why things like online registration and verification (like Windows XP has), and certain flavours of DRM, are flawed."

Not that I disagree that online verification does have it's share of problems.

But exactly how is this an example of that when Office 2000 uses neither?

Re:good example!

[JaredOfEuropa]

Doesn't have to be online... Remember when Office XP decided to lock out users because the hardware had changed? (Some users had merely swapped a battery for a CD player in a laptop).

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

[stratjakt]

That outside of the register and slashdot there's no mention of this bug? Google turns up empty, nothing in the MSDN.

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.

Re:Why is it

[frinkster]

I have yet to hear anybody here (in a company of ~100,000 employees) be affected by this. I just fired up Word and checked the version. Yep, Office SR-1 running on Windows 2000.

This may not be as widespread as MS haters hope it is.

Re:Why is it

[Anonymous Coward]

SR1a you fucking dolt.

Re:Why is it

[Anonymous Coward]

else it would be major news and be covered by mainstream media

Hmm... did someone issue a press-release about it? The media is incapable of independent thought.

Re:Why is it

[rabidcow]

Related stories?

• http://www.vnunet.com/News/1140296
  
• http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/04/17/10501 72679775.html
  

Re:Why is it

[spinlocked]

Apparently it's affecting few systems, and not every install of SR1a

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.

Re:Why is it

[paul7e]

Check again - the article says SR-1a

Re:Why is it

[CybSirius]

Maybe mainstream media is silent because they cannot start Office...

Re:Why is it

[Anonymous Coward]

> Related stories?

Hardly. Both of them deal with security patches for the various operating systems, nothing about Office 2000, the subject of the main article.

Re:Why is it

[mblase]

That outside of the register and slashdot there's no mention of this bug?

Maybe all the other sites use MS Word to compose their HTML pages.

Re:Why is it

[jedrek]

I get messages to register, I ignore them.

Re:Why is it

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess you have never heard of dll hell and that wonderful Microsoft "innovation", the registry!

Prove to me that a bug in Windows 2000 cannot possibly affect something as fundamental as activation of Office and vice versa.

Given Microsoft's bizarre way of designing software any bug that requires a gigantic registry hack to fix, must be screwing around with both the OS and applications in completely unpredictable ways!

Re:Why is it

[babbage]

Yeah, laugh it up, wise guy. You may just be kidding, but you may be more on target than you realize.

Picture, if you will, a web publishing system built around Word95 macros. Not Word97 or higher -- Word95 only.

"The horror..." :)

Re:Why is it

[steve_l]

you know, I wonder how many of these big F50 companies have to move to Linux on the desktop before we get a 'critical mass' of Linux desktops. Once one 80K seat company moves to linux+openoffice and gets the cost savings (no licensing, no SQL slammer), they probably follow up by abandoning NT server (no exchange, no SQL server, no IIS) and the savings ramp up.

Then it becomes an example for other companies to follow -or suffer a cost penalty for not doing so.

Re:Why is it

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe they just don't think yet another MSFT problem to be a problem. It's not like this is the first or even the most severe and it doesn't transmit itself ... you have to actually buy (or pirate) it ... so it won't affect every computer on the planet; just the ones running Windows. And what's newsworthy about that?

Oh ... by the way ... they had a war last week and some of the media got distracted from really important stuff like this software bug by the chance to show maimed people and bombs exploding.

The major media have always been a bit slow on the draw with computer news. They are doing the best they can ... so try to cut 'em some slack ...they have only so much ink, only so many talking heads and only a very few minutes between commercials.

Re:Why is it

[Wolfrider]

> 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.

--Can we possibly hope for all of the above??

Re:Why is it

[randolph]

To begin with--I used to do customer service--most problems aren't reported. On top of which, a firm that talks about such things in the press is going to have problems with MS come contract renewal time. And any hope of a settlement from MS depends on not talking publicly about the problem.

Re:80,000

[Anonymous Coward]

And Windows XP/Office 2000 is only $900 if your time has no value. :)

Did you say..... Oh.

[gosand]

Within a couple of years you will not even be able to log into windows without standing with your hand on your heart, pledging allegiance to the gilded image of Chairman Gates and singing the anthem.

Dang, I thought you said gelded .

Re:Did you say..... Oh.

[usotsuki]

Heh, that's a clever one *g*

-uso.
Gates made into a eunuch? :\

We don't have this problem where I work...

[Znonymous Coward]

but then again, we aren't idoits.

Re:We don't have this problem where I work...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I can't imagine the system clock would be a big problem on a roto rooter machine.

Re:We don't have this problem where I work...

[Znonymous Coward]

Yea, except we don't have indoor plumbing here in Kansas.

Re:We don't have this problem where I work...

[TitanBL]

Not Idiots huh? You mean you are not running Microsoft machines?

Re:We don't have this problem where I work...

[Anonymous Coward]

Idoit troll?

Re:We don't have this problem where I work...

[Anonymous Coward]

but then again, we aren't idoits.
Can I quote you on that? ^^^^^^^

Re:We don't have this problem where I work...

[Znonymous Coward]

[Insert foot into mouth.]

Re:My 1st XP BSOD - data saved by Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Try using the Repair option in XP (Boot off XP CD and press R at the prompt)and use 'FIXMBR' and 'FIXBOOT' tools. That may help. If not try doing a quick format and then recover the data using recovery tools like Easy Recovery.

Secure Computing

[rf0]

Well least it gets round the problem of any pirated software. No one can run anything now :)

rus

Just a bug

[Call Me Black Cloud]

Yes, it's annoying, but this too shall pass and the software will be better for it.

Sure, free is nice for consumers but it's a crappy business model. More and more companies are going to implement license protection schemes and these things will come up. Eventually the bugs will be worked out...

I like open source and free software and use assorted free libraries and tools in my day-to-day programming. I even have OpenOffice on my computer at home (because I installed my 1 copy of Office XP on my wife's computer, though if I had to do heavy duty work I'd have to get Office). I think the flaw in the open source food chain is the food part, as in, who is buying the food? At some point money has to enter the picture because there's no such thing as open source or free food (excepting dumpsters). I don't think this business model:

Write free software

Sell services for that free software

Profit!

will be enough to keep all the open source coders fed. It smacks too much of the "attract visitors with free stuff then sell ads" model.

I think license protection is a necessary thing. People should get paid for their efforts. That keeps food on the table and allows free software to be written for the love of it.

Re:Just a bug

[ctid]

How do you explain the following?

• Linux
  
• Apache
  
• MySQL
  
• Zope
  
• Python
  
• The Gimp
  
• Knoppix
  
• This could be a very long list
  

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?

Re:Just a bug

[stephenbooth]

I think the model that a lot of companies seem to be followiong these days in relation to open source is far more viable than your example of the "Free content with ads" model. It's more like:

• Write Free Software (you can miss out this step and just ally with an existing free product).
• Write non-free addons for free software that a lot of people are going to want
• Offer support, documentation &c for free software and the non-free addons
• Profit!!

People get hooked in by the free product and are usually fairly happy to pay a reasonable fee for support and addons that add functionality that they want/need. I object to paying 500ukp for Microsoft Office, partly, because I know I'm never going to use most of the functionality. I like OpenOffice.org but realize that it doesn't have quite all the functionality I want (before anyopne suggests it, I'm not a coder so probably couldn't write the functions I want myself), doesn't come with support and doesn't have a bound printed manual &c. I don't mind paying 60ukp in PCWorld (or Dixons or whereever), less in other places, for StarOffice so I can get the support from Sun and the extra addons that I'm actually going to use because I want them.

Stephen

Re:Just a bug

[Call Me Black Cloud]

My point is that all software cannot be free because money has to enter the system at some point. Programmers need food. Food requires money. Adding value through services (RedHat, MySQL) will not support all the programmers working on free software. Therefore those programmers must be getting money from somewhere. Looking at The Gimp homepage, Spencer Kimball has an e-mail address at xcf.berkeley.edu. This is where his money comes from.

My bigger point is that not only is there is a place for commercial software but that it is necessary to have commercial software for free software to exist.

Re:Just a bug

[mark-t]

"People should get paid for their efforts. That keeps food on the table and allows free software to be written for the love of it."

Fair enough, and if you demand to be paid for every last line of code you write, that's your choice. Not all programmers do this, however.

One of the chief reasons for wanting to *NOT* be paid for a particular project is that the person doesn't have to worry about deadlines, or having to compromise on issues only for the sake of economy. The programmer doing it for the sheer joy of programming and can take his time, making sure that known bugs are actually fixed before releasing a product, and does not have to concern himself with conforming to a pre-arranged release schedule that is, more often than not, several weeks or months too soon. In fact, the sheer magnitude of pressures that a professional programmer often faces almost daily only serve to make the relaxed atmosphere of an unpaid programming job that much more attractive to one who really does love to program.

There are many other reasons to prefer to not be paid for a programming project even if one is a professional programmer, and if you have problems coming up with fewer than 2 or 3 of them, you might want to try remembering why you became a programmer in the first place (unless, of course, it was only for the money).

Re:Just a bug

[mccabem]

That's not really the open source model...

*The* open source model (if we can phrase it in a nutshell) is that coders create source code and give it out for free.

The "support for profit" model is merely an adjunct to the open source model.

Red Hat and a few other have made a success out of it, some others have not. This makes no direct reflection on open source at all.

Have fun!
-Matt

Re:Just a bug

[dissy]

> How do you explain how they got to be excellent products, given your "business
> model" argument?

Well in all fairness he is right, for the most part none of those items are making the creators money by having the software sold.

Some of those packages are making money for the company in other ways, but none of them are rich compared to say MS or Apple or what have you.

BUT
Business modal = making money
Having excelent software has nothing to do with either of those two points unless the creator wants it to. And that is why those software packages exist. They were never made to make money, they were made because the creator wanted to have something that worked well for them, and thankfully they shared it and it works just as well for most of us too.

Free software isnt made by business people, its made by people that want or even need the software, or possibly (heaven forbid) enjoy making software. None of those things are part of a business modal.

Its fortunate for us that business does not make the world go round, and isnt as importaint as businesses would like to think.

Where as the grandparent poster says free software isnt a good business modal, I say hes right and we dont care because one should always use the best software for the job, no matter if the software was made to make the creator rich, or made just cuz the creator wanted to make it.

Re:Just a bug

[Anonymous Coward]

Gee, this sounds a lot like how the MS model has worked. Write DOS and get it on every computer so people want (or need) to buy DOS programs.

Then you move it up to Windows. Now that it is on everybodys computer we want (or need) to buy Windows programs.

Of course the people writing the freebee base can also write the best add-ons for it.

The hard step is to get people to switch from Windows to Linux, like they switched from DOS to Windows. Can be done, but will take time and there will have to be the want to switch.

Re:Just a bug

[zerocool^]

How do you explain how they got to be excellent products, given your "business model" argument?


It's not terribly hard to make good software. Therefore, it is easy to make good, free software, if your time is worth nothing.

I'm all about open source, but let's also remember that these products got to be excellent because a lot of people sacrificed days of fishing so they could sit at home and not get paid while working.

That's the difference in the business model.

~Will

Re:Just a bug

[ctid]

It's not terribly hard to make good software. Therefore, it is easy to make good, free software, if your time is worth nothing.

My list included Linux and Apache. Are you suggesting that it wasn't terribly hard to write them? What are you talking about? The fact is that those excellent tools exist, despite the fact that the developers didn't get paid to write them.

That's the difference in the business model.

This doesn't mean anything in the context of what I said and what you said.

The first poster said that you had to pay for good software. I was pointing out that this is not true, given the examples I mentioned. Nothing you have said addresses this point.

Re:Just a bug

[ctid]

My point is that the only part that the creators of free software are interested in is:

• Write free software
  

You added the stuff about business models. My point is that even without the business model part (the Profit! part, if you like), the excellent software is still there. As far as I can see, it's not going to go away.

Re:Just a bug

[Anonymous Coward]

Free software is sometimes subsidized by companies, government institutions, etc. sometimes it is done in the private free time of people, sometimes it is part of a research project in an educational institution. There is nothing bad with the job description not including the topic "creating free software". There is nothing bad when a company diverts a miniscule amount of their resources towards free software - in the same way as there is nothing bad when a company pays scientists for doing basic research and publish papers about it. There is also nothing bad when people working for government institutions write free software, as they are payed by taxes and free software is for the benefit of everybody.

I don't see how free software needs commercial software to exist. Free software was there before companies like RedHat existed. RedHat is not essential for free software although it helps a lot.

Re:Just a bug

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey you biased, and bigotted religous fags! This guy has a valid point, but because he doesntget down and stroke the almighty Open-Source cock you mod him down to troll?

You want a troll? Here is a troll.

What are all you whiney open source freaks so afraid of? Is it because you couldnt compete in highschool? You want to compete based on price? Is that it? Well if free is so great .. how about finding some free women instead of paying the "license fee" assoicated with the women of the night you need to frequent?

Re:Just a bug

[stephenbooth]

I think where the change will happen is where the cost and pain of switching to Linux (and other non-MS/non-Windows based products) is significantly less than the cost and pain of staying with Windows. At the moment the cost and pain is too high; many companies have got all these support techs who know how to support Windows but have probably never used a command prompt in their life (don't laugh, I know these people; I'm one of the people who gets called in to fix their mistakes). Retraining them to work with Linux (or any other non-Windows OS) is just too expensive right now.

Organisations are slowly switching over to open source. The public sector seem to be the ones leading the charge, this is probably due to their costing models which let them (in the UK at least) ignore staff retraining/recruitment costs in new software aquisitions. There will come a point where enough organisations have switched that it's economical for training companies to start opffering low cost mass training courses which will lower the bar for other organisations and the trickle stands a chance of becoming a flood.

Stephen

Re:80,000

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember: Your own experience is not imperical evidence

You know, facts. Things you need to use to back up a statement.

Also putting something in bold does not make it true.

Re:80,000

[AssFace]

My mom used to work with a division of IBM and when I heard how large just their NC buildings were, I thought the same thing - wow, now I see where MS makes its money.

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.

One word for corporates:

[Anonymous Coward]

StarOffice.

Nobody ever been fired for buying Microsoft...

[WetCat]

I think that will happen soon...

Poor Journalism

[DownTheLongRoad]

One source at a major global energy company told us many of the corporate's 70,000 Windows 2000 PCs have been affected.

This is almost bad enough to be done by the Slashdot editors. Seriously, if cnn.com or nytimes.com were this vague, people would be crying bloody murder.

Re:Poor Journalism

[sirinek]

Yes, but this is the Register we're talking about here, the "Enquirer" of the IT industry.

Re:office? hah

[usotsuki]

What, you want to replace these PCs with Commodores?

-uso.

Neither are they

[mrscott]

It's very likely that the people suffering from this problem aren't idiots either. In fact, I would go so far to say that some of them are probably very intelligent people who are trying to provide a service to their organizations.

Re:Neither are they

[Znonymous Coward]

Sorry, there dosen't seem to be a Microsoft Knowledge Base article on this "bug" even though it surfaced 3 days ago. If's not a listed as bug, it's an operator error.

Re:Neither are they

[Shaper of Myths]

Google Cache is your friend...

Re:Neither are they

[Znonymous Coward]

Not the same issue.

How to fix...

[Anonymous Coward]

search the net for a crack.
That's how.
I bet you M$ will issue a clone of that crack to fix the problem. Instead of saying "Warez R us", it will say "Microsoft, please register this fix, in order to continu in using it".

WRONG!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a moderator too, but here's my anonymous post! I have been using Openoffice to work on a powerpoint presentation this week. It's conversions are near perfect. Documents read fine. Word users would have little or no problems with a transition.

And any small problems are surely worth $300/user/year, AND bugs like what this article is about.

A microsoft article on this...

[TWagers]

I work for the help desk of a company that supports 30,000 windows PC's, and while we have never officially deployed or distributed Office 2000, we do have a few users that have it installed. We got an advisory from our backline support that this problem is discussed in a technical article Microsoft provided to its partners. The partner-level article is 816642 - You Cannot Register Office 2000 After You Change the System Date. The link is https://premier.microsoft.com/premier/library/defa ult.aspx?path=/premier/kb/en-us/816/6/42.ASP?KBID= 816642 , but if you don't have premium support, you can't view it, and I can't find a mirror of it via Google. The cause? Well, the issue appears related to the "End of life" code written into the product, which is what that article discusses. Apparently, Microsoft coded Office 2000 to 'expire' and to need to be reativated at some point, but apparently there's a glitch in that code that causes it to happen over and over again.

Re:A microsoft article on this...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well that end of life will be great when they change file formats once again and nothing can be used to read old file formats since the use of the DMCA won't allow for such software to be written eventually. Say goodbye to your data. It's not yours anyway, it's Microsofts.

Re:A microsoft article on this...

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

This is kind of scary. As an anonymous poster said, this is very bad given Microsoft's history of playing with file formats to disable backwards compatibility and force upgrades. Before you could coast on your old version - I had office 95 on my laptop forever, the only reason I went to office 97 was native mousewheel support (the scrollbar hacks never worked right for me in Office 95). I'd still be on office 95 if I could get scrollwheels and doc compatibility. So now MS has essentially put an expiration date in the software you purchased (ahem, purchased a license to). They can tell the reactivation servers to not accept this older version any time they want.

I think the big story is not the glitch, but that businesses really should look into the ramifications of now being forced to upgrade at Microsoft's behest, or risk losing their old data.

Re:A microsoft article on this...

[pjrc]

Well, the issue appears related to the "End of life" code written into the product, which is what that article discusses. Apparently, Microsoft coded Office 2000 to 'expire' and to need to be reativated at some point

That's the best news I've heard yet today. When this time comes, a whole lotta folks are going to be questioning wether they wanna pay again or install openoffice.

Oh bloody hell.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Our company with approx 80,000 PCs has been hit...."

Maybe if your SysAdmin had spent some time testing the patch first, you wouldn't be in this situation now.

Here's the quick guide:

• Download patch
• Install patch on isolated development machine
• Test
• Test again.
• Test again.
• Document.
• Install patch on different isolated development machine.
• Test
• Roll out to live system.

If your company needs some sysadmins with a clue, I'm sure you can find some over at Kuro5hin.

Re:Oh bloody hell.

[vegetablespork]

But Microsoft sells their products as being so easy to use and deploy, that companies shouldn't need (and therefore shouldn't have to pay for) "sysadmins with a clue."

Re:Oh bloody hell.

[realdpk]

You forgot to describe the Test process. In this case it would include:

* 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?

Re:Oh bloody hell.

[Anonymous Coward]

Clue... Do you have one? OK smartass, how many times have you tested a patch with your clock set to each day of the year, next year, the following, etc? SR1 came out 2 years ago! Have you ever tried to test every functionality of ALL Office products for every day of the next 5 years? Your ignorance is truely evident... I wouldn't hire you to test my mouse buttons.

Re:Oh bloody hell.

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe if your SysAdmin had spent some time testing the patch first, you wouldn't be in this situation now.

How much time would be enough? The bloody thing was rolled out two years ago. I generally tell people to wait until the first service pack is available to install MS software, but I don't usually tell them to wait until it's on the verge of being obsolete!

Should have used XP

[Andrewkov]

They should have used XP, haven't they heard the commercials? It costs less!!

Re:Should have used XP

[the-erm]

I heard they are going to try and charge rent on the next one. Something like $10 a month for the home edition, and $20 for professional.

This is a fictitious rumer, I just made it up.

www.the-erm
Artists Against the RIAA

Re:80,000

[RealityMogul]

Imagine the savings if they tested the update on one machine first before deploying it company wide. Sounds like all the testing that was needed was trying to open the program after installing the update.

Testing...?

[Blarfy_Snarflepoop]

Was this something that could have been discovered by testing the patches before they were rolled out?

Re:Testing...?

[SpaceLifeForm]

Sure, if you want to roll your clocks forward. Do *you* want to test *ALL* of your software with the date set forward say 1 month, 2 months, 3 months, etc? How *FAR* do you continue that process?

Why should you have to go through that headache?

Then, what happens when you get the latest weekly patch? Yep, you start all over! At some point, you will always be testing, never deploying.

Hell, you might as well have stuck with 98.

You would think it would be a simple fix

[scruffy]

You would think that all Microsoft needs to do is to twiddle a bit or two to change the value of the comparison or calculation that misuses the date.

Re:You would think it would be a simple fix

[CTalkobt]

>> You would think that all Microsoft needs to do is to twiddle a bit or two to change the value of the comparison or calculation that misuses the data.

Sorry, but this sounds like

You would think that all that needs to be done is to reach in and twiddle the and finaggle the tumor inside your head so that your brain will function correctly. Where's a knife, I'll do it. :-)

You're obviously not a programmer, aren't you?

Re:You would think it would be a simple fix

[pair-a-noyd]

It *IS* a simple fix.
You just put Linux installation CD #1 into your CD drive and press the reset button.
Follow the prompts and ALL of your windows problems will shortly be fixed!

Presto!!

Re:You would think it would be a simple fix

[scruffy]

"Fix" was too strong a word. I should have said "workaround". I'm sure Office works perfectly fine without a registration test. Certainly, they could find some "easy" way to make it not pop up in this case.

three words..

[pair-a-noyd]

HA HA HA!!!!

Once again...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's been proven time and time again but greedy software corps just don't get it. I've seen this time and time again since the old CP/M and Apple II days.

Repeat after me:
"Copy protection does NOT prevent piracy enough to make up for the inconvenience suffered by and resulting ill will of legitimate customers. Never has, never will."

Re:Once again...

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft has ~$50 billion in cash!

They couldn't care less about mere customer's inconvenience!

Re:Once again...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, if they keep this insanity up, this too shall pass!

Document Formats

[rf0]

This is the reasons why I always ask people if they are sending me something either to do it in plain text, RTF or PDF. With this I'm almost guarenteed to get someting I can read. If they really really want to use something else I say bung up a webpage and I might look at if it renders correctly.

Rus

Could't this have been seen in prerollout test?

[BSDZilla]

So a Microsoft update contains a bug. I have no fond memories of Microsoft Service Packs en SR's, they have a long history of introducing bugs in the process of fixing others, so we had the habit of actually testing the stuff for a few weeks, before rollout. I can't even begin to understand why a company would not take such a precaution before introducing this to EIGHTYTHOUSEND pc's!

Re:Could't this have been seen in prerollout test?

[pair-a-noyd]

but this isn't a bug, it's a feature!!

Re:Could't this have been seen in prerollout test?

[Dragonfly]

Could't this have been seen in prerollout test?

Not unless a)you had access to the source and picked through it with a fine-toothed comb looking for such time-bombs, or b) your testing process included setting your computer's clock forward one day at a time for the rest of time.

Seeing as this problem manifested itself on thousands of unrelated or unconnected computers at the same time, it is reasonable to conclude that it is triggered by a specific date or a set amount of time passing. There is no way to test for this unless you already know it's there.

Re:What is true, then?

[Anonymous Coward]

The dude didn't say "false", he said "The Register's story is not quite accurate, but the registration bug is real.".

Okay, so.. what's the accurate story?

Don't forget the floppies!

[scatter_gather]

floppies with incorrect sector sizes
tracks with so much data they overwrite the first sector
a sector with a hole blasted in it with a laser

Locks are to keep honest people honest. They are obviously useless for anything else.

Re:Don't forget the floppies!

[electromaggot]

...and don't forget the copy "protection" -- or should I say "retribution" -- on a few ANCIENT Commodore 64 games ("Raid Over Moscow" as I recall):

Pirate the game and then when you run it, if it can detect it's been copied, it RUINS your floppy drive! It did so by exploiting a mechanical bug in the 1541 drive, whereby it's possible to move the read head beyond its maximum range of travel... and the drive cannot get it back! Hence your drive would no longer work, so you'd have to take it in for service -- unless you knew that you could fix it by opening up the drive and simply pushing the head back toward the middle of its rail with your finger. (Think how many computer shops overcharged 1980s-pirate-wannabes for that one!)

I'm surprised Microsoft hasn't resorted to something similar. :-)

Re:Don't forget the floppies!

[Anonymous Coward]

floppies with incorrect sector sizes

Yes, I remember these on my old Commodore 64, the ones that caused the dreaded "head knock" on the 1541 disk drive.

Ah, memories ...

Strange...

[Eric_Cartman_South_P]

I'm running Office 2003 on Longhorn, and I'm having no problems regarding registration!

Re:Strange...

[AvengerXP]

Put your penis back in your pants and step outside the vehicle please. No seriously, why don't you post your system specs while you're at it.

Re:Strange...

[Eric_Cartman_South_P]

No seriously, why don't you post your system specs while you're at it.

OK! My newest rig:
486 DX/66 with 8 MB ram, Trident 516kb VGA video card, not one but two 5 1/4 floppy drives, 40 mb full height hard disk, Dos 6.22 with QEMM memory manager (614 free in lower memory, all TSR's loaded in HMA or UMB), mouse, keyboard, 9600 baud modem, Near Letter Quality 9 pin Citizen color printer, PC Tools to keep it all running, Stacker to double the disk drive space, and PKZip 2.04g to compress all those Scam! magazine and Pr!mal warez I leech from the Boards with ZModem and store on my floppies.

Think it's time to upgrade anything?

Re:Did anybody noticed the icon on top of the page

[Anonymous Coward]

No it was obscured by the giant .NET ad

Irony

[chundo]

The most amusing part of this article is the fact that right now, I am looking at a rather large advertisement at the top of the page trying to sell me Office 2000.

Boy, did that advertiser not get their money's worth...

-j

Re:80,000

[Anonymous Coward]

yer a jerk, always have been, always will be. FOAD.

pardon the stupid question....

[dmnic]

how many versions of Office 2000 exist?(besides standard, professional, etc)

my Office 2000 Professional has never required any activation/registrastion over the course of the 4 years its been in use here.

was this "end-of-life" code added in some service pack or SR?

this is also begs the question others have asked: why didn't the sysadmin test this patch?!

clueless paper mcse's...

Re:pardon the stupid question....

[DJPenguin]

So as part of testing a new patch for a rollout, you step forward a day at time and make sure it all still works for every, what, 365 days? 1000 days? Sounds like a nice way to waste a week.

Re:pardon the stupid question....

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do people keep asking "Why didn't the admins test this patch?" ?

I'm sure they did. Tell me, would YOU keep rebooting and advancing the clock on the computer just to see if some day in the future the software was going to stop working from some obscure bug?

This isn't something that comes about by accident, this is something that Microsoft put in the code...on purpose...to disable the product at some future date. You're not SUPPOSED to realize it's there. Normal software just doesn't up and kaput for no reason because the date changes (except Y2K, but I won't go there)...

Guys, give the corporate admins a break: This is NOT their fault, it's Microsofts.

Re:pardon the stupid question....

[MacDaffy]

So as part of testing a new patch for a rollout, you step forward a day at time and make sure it all still works for every, what, 365 days? 1000 days? Sounds like a nice way to waste a week.

When I was testing software, I'd roll the clock forward a number of years during beta or final candidate to see what would happen. Any good testing organization has some cases like this in their boundary condition scenarios. Some time-critical programs--especially those coded as system software/utilities (alarms clocks, etc.) are rolled forward to within a few minutes of the system's "drop-dead" date to make sure any errors are handled.

If the program cacks after rolling the clock forward ten years, then you'd halve the roll-forward time and try the test case again until the behavior stops. You then have a range within which to test.

You don't have to be paranoid to test software, but it helps.--Me

CF Iraq, Palladium, the DMCA: Silence != Not Real

[FreeUser]

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.

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 ... far better to have used

I don't understand

[Quill_28]

I have always mantained the piracy has help MS more than anything else.

And that if people were forced to follow MS letter of the law, they would switch.

I am also not anti-MS and consider them to be quite nimble and smart business-wise.

But I don't understand why they are doing this sort of thing.

Do they feel their hold is strong to not worry about folks dumping MS products.

If you wanted MS to go bankrupt, I would think product activation would be your great hope.

Or do they feel they can keep their hold on big businesses and who cares if a few users or small businesses look elsewhere?

Any insight?

Re:I don't understand

[Anonymous Coward]

It's called "drinking your own Kool-Aid".

Microsoft marketing has been stating for quite a long time that the reason people choose Microsoft products is due to superior features/reliability/price. As far as they're concerned, file format lock-in, monopoly inertia, monopoly bundling, restrictive OEM contracts, etc, are just boogeymen thrown about by the competition. They never happened. And even if they did, they didn't affect anything.

In this make-believe world, Microsoft is not helped at all by piracy. If you clamp down on piracy, people will grudgingly break down and pay for your products because they clearly want them (proof: because they use them now, just without paying for them). Microsoft has been around long enough that marketing spin is being institutionally re-digested as fact.

It's very funny when you think about it. When you re-write the history of how you got where you are today, and you actually believe it, you run the risk of losing what you have today. But somehow the urge is unavoidable.

So yes, there's no question stopping piracy will damage MS severely, particularly in poor countries or not-so-poor countries with weak economies. And when it does, they'll think it's because the competition suddenly got stronger. Utterly clueless.

Re:I don't understand

[Quill_28]

Intelligent reply. Why post ac?

Also the point about believing their own hype is well taken.

Re:80,000

[TWagers]

I'm replying to this comment up here instead of the dozen or so I see lower down because people will probably see this one first. =)

There IS a cost to OpenOffice, and it's a steep one. In my company, they are thousands and thousands of PC's and Laptops, and tens of thousands of employees marrily plunking away with MS Office. They know the application. They are comfortable with it. They are lots of people around them that can answer questions about it, and they are literally millions of docoments created with it that *work*.

Now, if you try to deploy OpenOffice, chaos on an immense scale would result - Documents would be screwy, people would be lost and confused, and productivity would drop like a rock. Morale would drop since people couldn't do their jobs, and god help us if people couldn't access the terabytes of mail stored in Outlook .pst files. When you add up the lost productivity and support and training costs, it would easily be in the tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars.

Free software is free for folks like you and me, but in the hands of the barely-computer literate, the costs can be enormous.

testing

[freddej]

Doesn't companies test their servicepacks before they apply them on 80k machines?

Maybee thats just me

Re:testing

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah! But they ALL trust Microsoft!

Remember that these people are (or were) all preferred customers who bought the software on the understanding that they wouldn't have to activate it and that they would have a Microsoft representative on hand to fix their every software problem in a heart beat!

Uh! Oh!

Fools

[meltoast]

For all you monkeys out there...install SR1 then just add sp3.

Re:Fools

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but what do you do to solve the problem, shit-for-brains?

Licensing question: Site vs. Single?

[GreenEggsAndSpam]

If you purchase a site license, and use the key from an individual install, is this still legit?

I'm working in an organization which has only 400 or so computers (Half seem to be laptops, the other half old p-200 systems), and I've been installing with a license from a standard retail box. Scripted install helps, as does a standard install... but is this legal in the eyes of M$? Good thinking, or simply a Bad Idea(TM)?

SHUT THE FUCK UP

[Anonymous Coward]

jesus, you really have no life do you? Did it take all morning for your write that up?

do you get off on getting modded up? You must jack off every time you get a mod point.

Please, fuck off and die, thanks.

Re:SHUT THE FUCK UP

[Anonymous Coward]

Medication Time! There now thats a god boy take your pills and go to sleep.

Passing the buck...

[sterno]

The reason that they won't touch OSS is because they perceive risk to their careers in going with it. It's not that OSS is more or less buggy, it's a matter of them having to take the blame if it goes badly. If you buy from a proprietary software vendor, then you've got somebody that you are paying, that you can yell at if things go wrong. The decision to use their software won't ever be questioned, and either they'll be made to fix it, or another vendor will be chosen. The decision to pick that vendor will likely never be questioned as long as the manager can show some due diligence in making the decision.

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...

[Gauchito]

But that's what companies such as Redhat use as their business model. They don't only sell support, they also sell responsibility, and provide a target for managers to blame so they can tell they're managers it's an outside problem, and then they can say that any other delays they're having (whether related or not) stem from that.

Re:Passing the buck...

[RoLi]

Completely wrong. This is not open source vs. closed source, this is established vs. "different".

If you propose something different, you will have to take the responsibility for it, no matter wether it's open or closed source.

Re:Passing the buck...

[virtigex]

The solution to this (adopted by companies such as Sun, IBM & RedHat) is to sell open source software at a price that undercuts the established alternative, but is still enough to maintain credibility. The mindset in the US is that if something does not cost much, it is not valuable.

Re:Passing the buck...

[Surak]

Right. General Motors has a policy against using 'freeware' (their definition of freeware includes OSS), but they use CIFS 9000 (HP's re-labeled version of Samba) as a major part of their DFS network. They wouldn't be caught *dead* using Samba, but using CIFS 9000 is okay because they can blame HP if something goes wrong.

HP is basically telling GM in this case that they are fully willing to take the blame for any bugs that Tridge and Co. missed. That's what they're selling...a shoulder to carry the weight of the blame.

Pathetic isn't it?

Re:Passing the buck...

[Anonymous Coward]

The unfortunate thing is that even if you have someone to yell at, in almost all but the most extreme cases where you actually have contracts that say that they have to provide working software, they have no obligation to help.

Fortunately, in our company the engineers decide what components to use - and we prefer open source, because when we run into problems, fixing it ourselves is always easier.

Almost every single closed source library we have ever used has had problems we've had to work around, sometimes with the assistance of the vendor, often not.

Re:Passing the buck...

[SubtleNuance]

I had to pay like $12,000 for HP-UX C Compiler... guess what it was?

Re:Passing the buck...

[cshoes]

That's the problem though. What is Microsoft on the hook for here? From what I've seen, posters who are admining networks are just sitting around waiting for MS to patch. Read your EULAs, MS has no responsibility to you to fix broken software on any time line. So how is this diferent then OSS?

Re:Passing the buck...

[Jeff DeMaagd]

On the other hand, if they choose an open source product, if there is a bug, there's nobody to pass the buck to.

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.

Re:Passing the buck...

[unclethursday]

The way I've always seen it, however, is not that the distros are selling the software itself, but rather the technical support for said software.

Redhat, Debian, etc., all sell the software packages (Linux Kernel, X, and other software) at very low costs. But you can also download any of the ditros' versions for free from their web sites.

The big thing, however, is the tech support. You can download the software for free, but you have to pay for tech support. If you buy the official software packages from the distros, then the tech support is included (although I'm not sure if it is for a set time beofre needing to pay again or not).

So the distros aren't selling the GNU/Linux OS itself, since it is free to get from them or anyone else at any time, but the technical support to ensure it runs properly upon your system(s).

Uncle Thursday
---Technically, I may be wrong. Actually, I may also be wrong.---

Re:Passing the buck...

[Glorat]

The argument about not touching OSS is correct. Where I work we have a policy that we may not use OSS at all unless we buy it off a large vendor with money (Redhat, Borland etc). Then if something goes wrong there is someone to blame. If there is a lawsuit surrounding the program, that also goes to the vendor.

Re:Passing the buck...

[Pfhreakaz0id]

of course they don't actually accept responsiblity. No software vendor ever does, at least that I've ever seen. But that isn't the point. They don't have to. No one expects them to. But it is still an out for the manager in question. He can just say "stupid microsoft.... blah, blah, blah."

Re:Passing the buck...

[Anonymous Coward]

"The mindset in the US is that if something does not cost much, it is not valuable"

Isn't this how a competitive open market should work? I don't completely disagree with your point, since it still depends on how you calculate value and cost.

Re:Passing the buck...

[L7_]

it also probably didn't calculate double precision number correctly past the 13th decimal.

you should check, then get back to your HP-UX dealer. ;)

Re:Passing the buck...

[4of12]

...it's a matter of them having to take the blame if it goes badly.

Which is why, if you really want to make the point of how OSS can be beneficial to your business, seek forgiveness after the fact rather than permission before the fact of introducing OSS.

You have to assume some risk and responsibility. It's too dangerous for your manager to do so. They can't invest the time to educate themselves on the rapidly reducing risks of a new technology. So, you bring up a tiny Linux stealth server and tailor it to do some small task well (crunch through a database and produce some plots on the web that show the upper management something they didn't know before but really like to know now; be creative and think about what you can extract that they would really find interesting.)

When you show the higher ups how OSS is already actually doing something useful for the business, hasn't been down over a period of time long compared to rebooting and repatching Windows servers, doesn't require licensing costs now or evermore, can be customized as much as you like without signing some NDA in blood, then they're likely to forgive you for your good deed.

Then, since no good deed goes unpunished, you'll be asked if you can do more projects on those OSS based systems.

Re:Passing the buck...

[paj1234]

Let them yell at Red Hat.

Re:Passing the buck...

[slam smith]

The reason that they won't touch OSS is because they perceive risk to their careers in going with it. It's not that OSS is more or less buggy, it's a matter of them having to take the blame if it goes badly.

Of course this is useless if the vendor goes out of business on you. (This happened at least twice to my company)

Or if the vendor sues you, because they don't approve of the way that you are using the product. (happened at least once to my company)

Or if the vendor refuses to support you because the product is too many revisions back. (I can't even count how many times this has happened to my company)

What I find laughable about the whole thing is if you took the money paid for these license fees, even a relatively small company could hire a small army of developers to do nothing but enhance open source software for thier own use as well as others. And still save a heck of a lot of money.

Re:Passing the buck...

[fferreres]

You can't buy specific libraries from Red Hat. You ass is somewhat covered in general, but when you are making specific bets at specific libraries I guess the panic factor (or blamability) grows stronger. Also, there's a lot of people that do not OSS is not about turning the software industry into alstruism or religion, but about something more reasonable in term of efficiency.

Re:Passing the buck...

[fferreres]

If I where in a position to choose who to blame, in one side a 100 billion company, and in the other side, two kids asking for some hardware because they only FTP server went dead, then I'd choose Microsoft.

Large companies don't want the long, sensible answer, they want to quickly be able to point the finger at someone (Microsoft, or whoever allowed OSS to be used) and be gone. That's how they usually deal with problems, and this is nothing that may come to you as new. The details can be worked out afterwards.

I am not saying that line of reasoning is right, but that it's usual, so some people feeding kids think they are more secure beign able to blame a large company (not to be able to get the lost productivity back). This is where IBM, Oracle and some others come to play. OSS image must improve to the point where one can simply state "we are using what the most sucessfull companies use" and carry on to apply the patch that by then is surelly available...

Re:Passing the buck...

[randolph]

Actually, MS has, I believe, settled many claims for this kind of problem. However, part of such settlement agreement is usually non-disclosure (a common practice in such matters--MS didn't invent it.)

The settlements, however, make no difference to the employees whose work has been compromised by the problems. When one considers that line employees are usually evaluated on their output, and that MS doesn't compensate them for lost time or sheer frustration, management's ability to get settlements from MS makes much less difference.

Re:CF Iraq, Palladium, the DMCA: Silence != Not Re

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft is excersizing its economic and legal muscle (threat of lawsuits etc.) to keep a number of customers and news sites quiet

That's a typical zealot load of shit, every time theres a major hole in windows or a problem it hit's the news.

I don't believe in open source.

[subzerohen]

Never mind the GNU project was started 20 years ago. Never mind the Free Software Foundation was founded 18 years ago. Granted 20 years is a long time for something to exist when it is impossible but I don't believe in open source.

The people who work on that stuff are so enlightend that they can survive on water and code alone. How are us regular programmers supposed to survive? That's right they can't and to back up that assertation I'll say that I don't believe in open source.

Something is obviously wrong with Netcrafts statistics. Apache can not have a 60% marketshare because I don't believe in open source.

[/sarcasm][/frustration]

ESR has written a paper that "analyzes the the economics of open-source software. It includes some explosion of common myths about software production economics, a game-theoretical account of why open-source cooperation is stable, and a taxonomy of open-source business models."

Re:I don't believe in open source.

[Call Me Black Cloud]

In general, it's an interesting article. It seems to support my contention that not all software can be free (that money needs to enter the system at some point) and there is a place for commercial software. Thanks for the link.

Re:I don't believe in open source.

[subzerohen]

Free != free

My Dads old employee used to have a really good CAD program for designing chips. It was developed inhouse. They could have sold it but management said: "We are a hardware company not a software company." Now they pay $10K per seat for similar software.

90% of developers don't produce software that is sold by the companies they work for. They produce software that the company uses. Anything that can lower development costs is a good thing.

Re: You have to consider

[Anonymous Coward]

You have to consider whether you are
using a word processor/spreadsheet/presentation
software package when you don't need to.
I'm so sick of people sending me word docs
when they could have sent plain text or a
pdf.

Not new licensing plan... New Office 2003 release

[Anonymous Coward]

But their timebombed code in 2000 SR1a missed the mark by a few weeks.

Companies and OSS

[jkabbe]

In my experience companies don't like open source software because they have no one to complain to if something goes wrong with it. If they buy software from MS they can complain to MS. Not that MS will ever actually do anything about it, but at least they feel better about having complained because they feel like that have some control over the situation. Yep, that's how business works alright - illusions of power.

I keep hearing these commercials...

[Mantrid]

Every so often on the radio I'll here an Office XP commercial...it goes something like "blah blah blah...buy Microsoft Office XP with our next computer, it's cheaper". I always wondered "Cheaper than what?", well if you're stuck with this problem then I guess the answer is "Cheaper than 2000".

Re:I keep hearing these commercials...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, they're comparing their prices to their own prices. They are stating the stupidly obvious which is that OEM copies of Office cost less than retail copies.

In my opinion, it's deceptive advertising.

Re:I keep hearing these commercials...

[torgosan]

Realizing you're paraphrasing, I wonder if your comment "...buy Microsoft Office XP with our next computer...." isn't really a gaze into the crystal ball, given Palladium etc. Interesting.

In other news...

[mysticgoat]

Microsoft reports a major surge in new installations of its flagship product, Microsoft Office.

Frankly, we're astounded," reports a high level source at Microsoft. "We thought our market penetration had reached the point where new registrations of this fine product would be tapering off. But this week we've found we need to shift more of our corporate resources into handling all these new registration requests. Apparently there was a lot of pent up demand for our product."

"It is really quite gratifying to see this proof that the world does appreciate a fine software product."

Microsoft Office is a suite of office productivity tools that increase the speed, efficiency, and effectiveness of engineers, physicians, lawyers, and other highly trained personnel, as well as their ancillary staff. It is equally well suited to the Board Room, the R&D Facility, and the Day Care Center, where "Clippy" is a well liked playmate of many a toddler.

You missed a factor

[Ungrounded Lightning]

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.

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 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

I think you're off on using an intern for support. That misses the added costs incurred when he hits the problems he CAN'T handle correctly - both the added costs of worker/application/business-process downtime while he calls for more trained help and the added costs ditto.

But the BIG thing your analysis missed - which the TCO studies funded by others than Microsoft catch - is the effect of the higher reliability of open-source solutions. This reduces costs two ways:

First: Though you need people who know what they're doing, you need a MUCH SMALLER NUMBER of them, because they put in much less time per-machine.

Second: Because things don't fail as often, your business processes have LESS DOWNTIME. So you get back a LOT of productivity in those hundreds of workers who spend more of their time working and less of it waiting for the helpdesk.

That last factor is another component of why open-source has achieved penetration in servers first. Different functions have different costs of downtime. For a generic worker it varies a lot depending on your particular business and the workers function in it, while the costs accrue in one department and the benefits in another. For a server - especially a business-critical-function server - the costs of downtime are almost always very high, while the server is bought and administered by the same department that handles its maintenance, making all three components of its TCO visible to the same bosses.

Site vs. Single? Answer: Neither.

[955301]

Good thinking, or simply a Bad Idea(TM)?

Bad Idea: Here is where you are going wrong:

I've been installing [Microsoft software]

Stop doing this and you won't run into the issue any more. The people using the old p-200 systems will be particularly thankful.

Re:Site vs. Single? Answer: Neither.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm afraid a P-200 will not run stuff like Linux and Openoffice very well. At least it will be slower than MS Office!

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Two Words:

[Anonymous Coward]

Seeing as most corporations will not allow open source office suites to be used

"Lotus SmartSuite"

Thank you and have a nice day.

Re:Two Words:

[Anonymous Coward]

Two more words:

"is crap."

If sun had a clue....

[thogard]

If sun knew what was good for them, they would fedex a copy of Star Office with a license allowing the company to use the current version forever for free to every major company that got nailed by this. If any of thouse compaiens took the StarOffice solution, then they would be making a killing on license fees with the next version or else they are out the cost of a fedex packet and a CD. Considering how much sun sends out anyway, it makes me wondering whats going on inside their marketing department... Oh never mind its a marketing department so nothing useful is going on.

Re:If sun had a clue....

[Anonymous Coward]

and that CD would already be installed on a low-end demo system that sun would also ship - the company would have no excuse to try it out.

Re:If sun had a clue....

[jasonzzz]

could get expensive. Most corporate licenses from M$ requires lumpsum payment of the rest of the licensing fees even if you decide not to use them anymore.

Re:If sun had a clue....

[thogard]

If you have 30,000 workstations and you chose to cancel the Office part of it next year, you will save a large fortune. Because Office is a major part of the rest of the licenses, its could be much cheaper for the company to default on the license terms and relicense a small subset. This is what they have expensive lawyers for.

After you click the "Register Later" button...

[rirugrat]

You get a pop-up ad to upgrade to Office XP. Honest!

Chris

Re:After you click the "Register Later" button...

[Anonymous Coward]

Gee, I found that Office XP was cheaper at this new webstore I found called "KazaaLite" than any other place I looked. I mean like really, really cheap.
So cheap that I could like make hundreds of copies on generic CD's and give it away to people everywhere.

I like to drop free copies of XP and Office XP into shopping carts in the parking lot at Kmart and Walmart.
Why not? Heck, the price was right!!

Apple/Orange comparison.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

I wondered about switching to Linux and how much that would *save* them.

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-)

Makes me glad

[nigel.selke]

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, I highly recommend that you do.

Re:Makes me glad

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll bet you $10 that his "office" consists of him and his pear-shaped buddies eating cheetohs and playing tuxracer in his mom's basement.

Re:Makes me glad

[wo1verin3]

wtf is wrong with playing tuxracer?

Re:Makes me glad

[MonoSynth]

Makes me wonder...

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing if you are a pasty white sweaty no-life loser nerd.

Re:Makes me glad

[eodmightier]

Hahahaha.. Seriously, I'd love to see some decent sized organizations with Open Office. If I could find one organization with atleast 30 people all using open office, then I'd be one step closer to convincing the CEO that we could go Open Office.

Re:Makes me glad

[malfunct]

You have a point, and that point basically shows why "free" software can't survive without commercial software in the world as well. Many of the people that contribute to OSS projects are either training for or making money at a job at a commercial close source company, if they didn't have that income or hope of income they would probably not be working with computers.

Re:Makes me glad

[fmaxwell]

I'll bet you $10 that his "office" consists of him and his pear-shaped buddies eating cheetohs and playing tuxracer in his mom's basement.

Why would you bet that? OpenOffice.org has the support of Sun Microsystems and is a polished, professional product. Why would you doubt that a serious business would consider such an office suite?

Have you ever priced Microsoft Office? The cost is exorbitant and only getting worse. On top of that, there is the ever-present threat that Microsoft or the Business Software Alliance (BSA) will swoop down and demand a software audit. Of course businesses are looking for more reasonably priced alternatives that don't require the company to participate in "software audit" witch hunts conducted by Microsoft and/or the BSA.

Given your lack of understanding of the above, a safer $10 bet would be that every piece of software you've ever purchased supports a joystick.

Re:Makes me glad

[graznar]

Hahahaha.. Seriously, I'd love to see some decent sized organizations with Open Office. If I could find one organization with atleast 30 people all using open office, then I'd be one step closer to convincing the CEO that we could go Open Office.

80% of my school uses open office. there's 35 people in my class...maybe you should do some more statistical research before you try to convince your CEO. :) it might help your case ;)

Re:Makes me glad

[error0x100]

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.

Re:Makes me glad

[Anonymous Coward]

We have over 5000 people across Canada and are doing a very wide test of OpenOffice with only very minor issues.

Re:Makes me glad

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would you bet that?

because open office is nerdy, thx

Re:Makes me glad

[Anonymous Coward]

.8 * 35 = 28

Nope, still less than 30.

Re:Makes me glad

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but 5000 Canadians = about 3 Americans in brain power.

Re:Makes me glad

[CynicTheHedgehog]

Depends on your definition of "survive". As long as somebody is sufficiently motivated by philosophy, politics, prestige, or just plain cheapness open projects will continue to evolve. Some people code for *fun*...at least it's a hobby you don't have to sink a lot of money into.

Now, if by "survival" you mean market domination, then as long as people are willing to put up with bugs and security flaws in order to have the latest incarnation of every feature possible open source will lag behind in adoption.

There are a million reasons to write code and history has shown that money is probably not the best one in terms of robustness, security, and longevity.

Re:Makes me glad

[fmaxwell]

because open office is nerdy, thx

What the f*** does that mean? It's an office suite that works well, is free, runs on everything from Windows to Solaris, and is supported by Sun. How is that "nerdy"?

Re:Makes me glad

[Anonymous Coward]

Please, don't feed the trolls.

Re:Makes me glad

[Anonymous Coward]

Brain power? It looks like you mispelled "mass".

Re:Makes me glad

[Anonymous Coward]

Buddy, read some websites & get with the program!

Just finished a job that started over 1 year ago.

To move a UK Coach and Bus company off Office and Exchange onto OpenOffice, Mozilla & Communigate Pro.

First Outlook, then Office and 3 months later Exchange - sure some of the Office users didn't like it.

But I swear - every new user told "Mozilla for mail, Writer for letters and Calc for spreadsheets" went 'Oh - OK'.

Now they can put a PC on a desk without giving £300 to M$.

Oh! And the MD who was saying 'My friends say you are mad but I trust you' (He doesn't know why but I'll tell you - 3 years without any unplanned Network or Server downtime) is now saying 'Would you like to go and meet my friend Nigel? - he wants to know more about this Open stuff'

A colleague made the comment a week ago "Nobody got fired for buying Microsoft" - Sorry Wrong!!

People choosing products to use are meant to be smart - if I was an IT Manager and I was shown a network where people had spent 10's of £000's buying software where there was a better OSS solution I would want HEADS!!!

Re:Makes me glad

[Anonymous Coward]

Depends on your definition of "survive". As long as somebody is sufficiently motivated by philosophy, politics, prestige, or just plain cheapness open projects will continue to evolve. Some people code for *fun*...at least it's a hobby you don't have to sink a lot of money into.

I can't believe your worrying about all these greedy OSS programmers. Driving around in their fancy cars, programming on their shiney new computers. Plus, lets not forget about all the prestige. Name recognition, glory, I bet they can't walk down the street without people calling out there name.

Pampered ass programmers. Next, they will start preaching their politics on tv too....

Re:Makes me glad

[ManoMarks]

.8 * 35 does indeed equal 28, however he said 80% of his "school" uses it, and then that 35 people were in his "class". Assuming only one more like sized class, that's at least 56 people.

Re:Makes me glad

[Quantum Skyline]

True, but it seems like you force feeded OpenOffice down on your organizaion, which is the wrong way to advocate or implement OSS.

There are analogies, but I can't think of any.

Re:Makes me glad

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but 5000 Canadians aren't going to die fighting a war with a country that's never attacked you.

Better to be dumb than dead, I say.

Re:Makes me glad

[jimstone]

Well my girlfriend works for Jaycar Electronics - a retail chain of stores through out Australia and New Zealand where the POS system runs under Linux, and all Office stuff is accomplished using Open Office. With over 30 branches in operation, I think that qualifies it as a company with more than 30 staff. Hope that helps! -Jim.

Re:80,000

[Carbon Unit 549]

Can somebody please tell me why the original comment was modded down to oblivian? It was an honest opinion.

It's bad enough....

[Anonymous Coward]

That you have to go around with the CD and reactivate the software every time you use Ghost to reinstall new software on all the machines.....

Re:It's bad enough....

[Anonymous Coward]

You obviously know jack about Corporate versions. Its not necessary to register the product with MS when using Corporate versions. Anyone who says otherwise is just as clueless.

Solution. Nice question.

[Erris]

You say If you even proposed that deal I would bet that MS would tell you to get lost. "What are you going to do? Not use Office?"

The answer is yep. Open Office today, Debian/Red Hat and KOffice next year with Star Office here and there to deal with those pesky hold outs still suffering under M$. Open Office can get you over the immediate pain and suffering while M$ get's it's act together. Once M$ does, tell your employees to move their work they could not get at under Open Office to forms they can use. Once your data is liberated you won't ever get stuck again or feel compelled to bend over for M$ licensing. Migrate now.

Because it's Select Licensing which few Corps use.

[ashitaka]

With Select you have to be purchasing site license quantities (i.e. thousands and throusands).

The ironic thing is that the corps. bought this license because it doesn't require CD-Keys or registration.

The average individual retail or small-medium business user with Open Licenses will never see this.

It's all about education

[nigel.selke]

Most companies who feel this way just aren't informed or have people working for them who are not informed enough to know what open source is all about. I hear a lot of arguments along the lines of: "Well, we are an [insert non-software speciality] company, we don't have any software skills, so we need to buy commercial products to get support. This is bunk.

Our company is about as far from a software company as a company could get, yet we use a lot of software to improve our productivity, and a lot of that software is open source, which improves the cost/performance ratio that we get from our software. For example, our firewall runs OpenBSD, most of our servers run FreeBSD, and we have Linux and FreeBSD workstations running OpenOffice, Mozilla and KDE. Now admittedly, we do still have Win32 machines, but if we took all of the machines that we are running Open Source software on and replaced the open source packages on them with commercial software, we would be looking at thousands of dollars in additional costs, and for what? Support? Which brings me to the point: Hire I.T staff. So your company does something other than software. So what? Nothing stops you from hiring one or two I.T guys to run the systems that you need and provide in-house support. Or - gasp - shock - horror - read up on the products in question and learn about them!

If these solutions still aren't acceptable to commercial-mindset companies using MS Office in particular, they could always buy StarOffice from Sun. It's basically the commercial version of OpenOffice (based on OpenOffice), that Sun distributes. With this distribution you're looking at spending money, but it's a drop in the bucket compared to buying MS licenses. Some companies won't realize this and will either use MS software out of habit (everyone else uses it so it must be the right thing to use type mentality) or because they honestly believe that MS is better value for money. I feel sorry for those companies, but at the end of the day, the choices that their management makes will stand. If a company's management hasn't the foresight to hire professionals to advise them on matters such as this, that is their problem entirely.

Re:It's all about education

[Cromac]

Which brings me to the point: Hire I.T staff.

I hope more none software companies come to realize this and take that bit of advice. I've been in the software industry for several years, mostly testing some admin work, and frankly I'm getting tired of it. I would love to work in another field/industry and yet be able to put this computer experience/knowledge to use.

Ask them if they've heard of Yahoo or Amazon.

[MightyTribble]

Both of which make extensive use of OSS, and both of which make money.

I believe Yahoo finance uses MySQL as their DBMS, and of course both sites run on Apache on either BSD or GNU/Linux. I read a case study from Yahoo once that estimated they saved millions (like, $20M plus) through the use of OSS for their OS and web server choices.

Then, of course, there's Google... Either way, the trick is to point out that big, successful companies use OSS where appropriate to improve their bottom line.

Four Licensing Schemes/ Three versions

[ashitaka]

Office 2000 came in Standard, Professional and Developer. No Access, with Access and Acces plus extra dev tools respectively.

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:Four Licensing Schemes/ Three versions

[Anonymous Coward]

my version of 2000 is "premium"
it came with access and frontpage,pp,xl,wrd,outlook

Re:Four Licensing Schemes/ Three versions

[StupidHelpDeskGuy]

Is this perhaps a profile issue? I ran across this the other day. Uninstalled, reinstalled under local admin, copied admin profile to default user. And bang, no more message.

Correct me if I am wrong here.

Re:Four Licensing Schemes/ Three versions

[yAm]

now that's a coherent road map if ever i've seen one...

Re:80,000...fat dumber??

[themanwhoknowsmostth]

...remember that your end users are fat dumber than you can ever estimate...

That Freudian slip is well worth keeping!

Death to Dongles Re:Piracy

[mitheral]

Dongles would be great if you only needed one. Imagine how many you need hanging off the back of your machines just for the programs you use on a weekly basis.

More and more network licenced software is coming with dongles. My poor licence server has 11 dongles hanging off the back. Each dongle seems to require a slightly different version of Flex or some weird custom licence software.

And just to add to the joy some dongles don't like each other. We had to install a second parrallel port to seperate them. I'll be so glad when the piracy counter measures cycle swings back the other way.

At least we don't have to deal with that brain dead protection where the company physically damaged the original floppy media. Back in the days when you ran the game off the floppy. Or Rogue's copy protection that prevented you from running the game on an AT because the machine was to fast and it thought you were coping it.

Re:Death to Dongles Re:Piracy

[ergo98]

Indeed I remember being in the professional audio business for a short while (as a computer consultant for the industry), and virtually all of the audio applications required dongles, so you had exactly the scenario that you mention of chained dongles, playing around with the ordering because of conflicts, etc. However in the era of USB and its intrinsic chaining capability, one would think that there would be some sort of "key" standard worked out, and USB keys could be chained together (perhaps using a standard physical structure...like you get a key box with 16 key ports). I say this as a legal software using sort of person that can see a nightmare scenario developing: All sorts of software nowadays is doing product activation/system tying, so what was a simple "Call Microsoft to reactivate XP", is now becoming "Call Microsoft about XP, Office XP, Plus DME!, Quickbooks, Quicken, that Encyclopedia Software, that FTP program, etc, etc, etc.". It's a tragedy of the commons so to speak, and it is untenable over the long run.

Re:Death to Dongles Re:Piracy

[mitheral]

The long run downsides are why I believe copy protection runs in cycles. In the extreme case you need a new partition for every software you want to use and the populous revolts.

Look at the out cry about quick tax. They lost a lot of customers. Users who had been loyal quick tax users for years were bringing me all sorts of weird tax software to install. All of these software titles had one obvious thing in common: No anti piracy measures.

Re:80,000...fat dumber??

[AssFace]

yeah, I just now reread that and felt pretty "fat dumb" myself :)

I think I should just go into the kitchen here at work and snort an entire bag off coffee grounds - maybe that would help.

Just chroot them to /home/$USERNAME err never mind

[BobBoring]

Windows Riiiiight [emote:shake head sadly]

http://www.sun.com/staroffice/ /.'d?

[MichaelPenne]

& not even directly mentioned in the article. The peripheral slashdot effect..

A good sign for OSS office, I guess.

Not so good for Solaris....

what happens if you re-install

[tabhitter]

has anyone tried re-installing office to see what happens? "he who make a beast of himself forgets the pain of being a man" Z

My thoughts on security.

[Jerk City Troll]

Security is only as strong as the weakest part, and I seriously doubt that's with the encryption algorithm here. Remember this system is not designed to protect your computer from outside threats (like SSH, etc), it is to protect the operating system from the user. The threat model and problem being solved are entirely different.

Why attack the encryption algorithm directly? Instead reverse engineer and bypass the parts of the OS that invoke the license checks. Or fool the probes which try to determine your hardware signatures. "Borrow" a key. Or for that matter just be sure to run IIS, as it lets perfect strangers run any applications they want on your computer, it should just as easily let you use your own computer too without any security checks :-)

I do have two important observations though:

1. I suspect this is one of the reasons MS is pushing so hard for TCPA/Palladium or other Distrustful Restrictions Management (DRM, sic) in hardware. That would finally allow Windows to completely distrust the user with a vengeance, as well as a side effect of preventing other choices in OS (look at the X-Box as their prototype of a hardware-enforced monopoly).
2. This is actually bad news for Open Source advocates as it widens the distribution and exposure of this product to people who otherwise may never intend or have the $$ to buy it anyway, futhering their illegal monopolistric grip on the modern world. I for one hate it when people pirate Windows or Office or even Windows Plus, that's one more person that doesn't "feel" the heavy price for using MS software and has no desire to look for other choices. Open Source people would love for more so-called piracy of their products! Perhaps GNU/Linux should require an activation key, maybe that would accelerate its adoption (I'm joking here).

Re:My thoughts on security.

[Anonymous Coward]

Off topic and a nick with TROLL in it?!@?!@!

Who the fuck mods these people up? FFS!

Re:My thoughts on security.

[Anonymous Coward]

Off topic and a nick with TROLL in it?!@?!@!
Who the fuck mods these people up? FFS!

Hahaha... You think this is bad? Read my bio! The best thing is I only reposted that from someone else. But the moderators are stupid and they'll give me points anyway.

Bet you're feeling *real* frustrated right now, aren't you?

Brilliant alternatives

[bigberk]

Do you know why a problem like this becomes such a worldwide crisis instead of just an annoying glitch? It's the same reason an IIS bug results in most of the world's networks grinding to a congested halt: everyone is using the same software.

But there are alternatives. WordPerfect Office 11 was released yesterday (interesting, eh?). And if you want something free, why not use OpenOffice.org 1.0.3 released earlier this month. It works great; I use it for everything. I haven't used Corel's product since office 9 but I used to really love it, especially the "reveal codes" feature.

The only area in which OpenOffice lacks is ease of installation for multiple users on a windows machine (use: setup /net)

Re:Brilliant alternatives

[d-e-w]

Does OpenOffice yet offer a way to save text files with hard line breaks? That lack was the major reason that we haven't switched (version 1.0 doesn't have the ability, as far as we could determine). Telling people that they have to hit return at the end of each line in a 100K file in order to achieve wrapping in a plain text file doesn't result in happy people.

Hard to feel sympathetic for these corporations.

[Jerk City Troll]

I typically try very hard to avoid the hard line stance that all software should be free, but I have to say I just don't feel very sympathetic to Microsoft or their customers. Just a quick glance at their financials make it abundantly clear how much they are gouging their customers. Last quarter they made just over 8 billion in revenue with just over 2 billion in costs. The three quarters prior to that they pulled in just over 7 billion (per quarter) in revenue with a little under 1.5 billion in costs each quarter.

If you compare that to other companies that are in the 20ish billion dollar per year range you will see a different story.

I honestly find the whole argument that piracy has hurt them incredibly dubious. I read somewhere that MS-DOS was the most pirated software of all time. Does anyone have a link to that article? If that's true, piracy is definately a problem...I mean look what it did to Microsoft.

Fix available

[PhipleTroenix]

I've been looking at the code in a debugger [reverse engineering?]. I have a fix that I'll post [DMCA viloation?] right after I answer the door for those 2 nice men in blue suits...

Re:80,000

[Carbon Unit 549]

A karma whore? Ha. I could give a shit less about karma. If I did this would also be an anonymous post. I work for NASA and would dearly love them to switch to Opensource office products to end my Word hell. I personally use LaTeX all the way!

This did happen to me.....

[Monofilament]

No big deal.. like it or hate it.. I just hit the cancel button and since then have not been bothered. In fact I'm not sure if it was cancel or whatever else. Anyway.. hasn't come back up for me.. it was more of an auto-click.. the kind i give to popup adds or EULAs (ignorance is bliss). I think the problem is that people feel the need that they have to try and register again.. If they used a little common sense and said screw you to that pop-up.. they wouldn't have problems. That would mean that the herd of sheep has an ounce of common sense.. and we all no crowds are stupid as all hell.

Anyway thats all I had.

Proper Testing

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay, we deploy microsoft procudts all the time and without knowing the technical details I can honestly say who would really test for a software bug like this... think about it... why would your testing included launching applications on every date for 2 years or more. It is just impractical... personally I think this one falls squarely on Microsoft...

Re:Proper Testing

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhm, you don't have to click to open every application every day for 2 years -- you can achieve this by selecting a few apps & rolling the system clock forward.

Re:Solution. Nice question.

[Anonymous Coward]

What color is the sky in your world, fanboy?

bad attitude

[Erris]

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.

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 M$ are going to be reduced to very few and fired. They can then go home and practice with pirated XP junk till the BSA hauls them to jail.

Re:bad attitude

[Anonymous Coward]

Rex Ballard?

I didn't know you had an account here.

OT: Re:This hit us.

[CBravo]

People are often not busy with being right or wrong. First they need to feel secure before they can learn new things. Weird but true. If you say that they should use linux, you essentially say they've been wrong big time == insecure feeling.

It is their insecurity that hits you.

Big Blue to the rescue

[SysKoll]

So this company's management has a mental neon sign saying "No one ever got fired for buying Microsoft". Which is false anyway: The architect of National Westminster bank got fired after recommending an all-MS front office solution.

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 solutions for the company and will do support as well -- for a price of course.

Then some PHB will notice that since this open source thingy is free and you only pay for service, Joe Schmoe in IT can install and use open source tools if that saves money.... And you win.

Is CrossOver affected?

[SteelX]

Does anyone know whether CrossOver + MS Office 2000 SR1a is affected by this bug?

I run CrossOver + MS Office 2000 (without SR1a) and it looks okay. Just wondering if anyone with the SR1a is having the same problem.

Re:Is CrossOver affected?

[Anonymous Coward]

please don't have any offspring.

Re:Is CrossOver affected?

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay, I won't have any offspring... like you.

Not A Chance!

[Anonymous Coward]

All the suckers hate lawyers too much!

Re:CF Iraq, Palladium, the DMCA: Silence != Not Re

[Erik Piper]

That being the case, most people who have stayed away from XP (the majority of Windows users),

Do you mean for Office or for Windows? I see Windows XP as the user's system in a huge percentage of tech support emails I handle - mostly home users. Maybe the structure is different for business users, maybe you meant Office XP (I have less info on that, but I know it's often been panned in the tech press). But Windows XP does seem popular.

Erik

Any chance...

[etherlad]

Any chance that Microsoft's fix for this "feature" will make it easier for rampant piracy?

i.e. "Oh, look! MS Office will never ask me to register... ever again!"

Would serve 'em right, methinks.

Windows Update - You Moron!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

The discussion here is about corporate users with 80,000 PC's or more. These people DO NOT use Windows Update.

How would you like to run Windows Update 80,000 times for every Microsoft bug fix? Maybe you will volunteer?!

Re:Windows Update - You Moron!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you could easily automate it moron.

Dongles!

[lysium]

You left out the copy protection favored by boutique and high-end appmakers -- the dongle. One particularly amusing software package we run in the garment industry requires a seventy-five dollar upgrade for the dongle itself. Completely separate from the software upgrade -- the customer is paying for the priviledge of protecting other people's IP!

Re:Dongles!

[Obiwan Kenobi]

One particularly amusing software package we run in the garment industry requires a seventy-five dollar upgrade for the dongle itself.

Man, I used to work for a bank and we once asked for an upgrade of our main processing server, in which they stated the cost (over $10,000) was for a dongle that they would replace in 5 minutes.

They claimed over 3x performance just by the dongle. I swear to God, I couldn't believe it. Why hold back hardware? Greed knows no bounds.

We've had several hundred of

[Archfeld]

these problems in the last 2 days, ONLY on IBM T20 laptops installed by the OEM vendor. It appears as if they used an automated 'stealth' install process that totally by passed the "do you want to register" process, so 90 days later it is asking again. We've got a reg fix from M$ as a workaround, but tracking down and getting the farking laptops attached to a known network port vs VPN is turning into a nightmare.

Re:We've had several hundred of

[omega9]

The laptop were probably installed using an administrative install point. Using the Office (2K/XP) CDs it's possible to do an "administrative install" that essentially creates a new set of authorized install files, meaning that you can then install from that set without having to insert your installation key. Or not, who knows.

Institutionalized Stupidity

[t0ny]

Our company with approx 80,000 PCs has been hit...."

Maybe the people in your company should have had the brains to buy the enterprise version, which doesnt need to be activated.

I will now resume laughing at you.

Re:Institutionalized Stupidity

[tassii]

Except, of course, this WAS the enterprise addition.

Re:Institutionalized Stupidity

[Beatbyte]

quote: The problem appears to centre on the Select Customer - ie. non-academic volume licence purchasers

maybe you should read the article. chances are they bought a batch of custom computers from Dell or others and this is what it came with.

you can keep laughing though. nothing wrong with knowing you're smarter than someone else.

Re:Institutionalized Stupidity

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe the people in your company should have had the brains to buy the enterprise version, which doesnt need to be activated.

I will now resume laughing at you.

Read The Fucking Article. It WAS the Enterprise edition. These WERE PCs that were already registered en masse.

I will now resume calling you a moron.

Re:Institutionalized Stupidity

[Dibblah]

Nice idea. Shame the company DOES have an enterprise agreement (VLK + Select). It's a bug. It SHOULDN'T require activation - But it does on a specific date.

Cheers,

Allan.

Re:Four Licensing Schemes/ One version

[Kwil]

Sounds like licensing 3 and 4 have been reduced to one version only:

No Access

Not here....

[Archfeld]

if you leave 'production' documents on your desktop, they are not properly safeguarded or backed up and that is grounds for termination. "All work related documents will be placed in the designated repository on a regular basis as determined by internal audit requirments."

We ghost build workstations, restore connection to the file and print servers, and install apps, your data is either in the repository, or you look really STUPID explaining it to your boss :)
That aside I've set up several friendly developers with local raid cards and mirrored disks so they are keeping data locally but still protected, but those few I know about ensure tons of people are doing other less wise things...

aQfH

[JCholewa]

Yeah. Real men play "A Quest For Herring", not that nerdy racing crap.

Re:Solution. Nice question.

[Erris]

An insulting anonymous coward asks me, What color is the sky in your world, fanboy?

It's a beautiful cloudless blue with a little atmospheric moisture giving it a characteristic whiteness in Baton Rouge today. I can tell you this because I'm not bussy fixing M$ crap today. It's so nice outside, I think I'll go for a bike ride this afternoon. Where do you want to go today, shill?

If Tron had been made today...

[ferret70]

...can you imagine? Flynn gets sucked into a Wintel machine, announces that he's a "User", and all of the datatypes snicker and sneer. Then he's made to spend the rest of his cycles registering to the MCP/Gates thingy.

How complex are your documents?

[Mr. Underbridge]

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.

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.

Additionally, openoffice's implementation of the spreadsheet is a certified joke. It is missing many of the statistical functions from excel, making life difficult. Also, it's not smart enough to determine what app goes with a certain file. For example, if I have an ASCII datafile, I have to tell it every time to open it as CSV, or it opens it in the word processor (and that gets really OLD quickly, especially when you're editing a lot of files and forget to keep doing it).

I do support wholeheartedly the idea of an open source office suite, but OpenOffice isn't yet ready. If you've had good fortune with file conversion, you are truly lucky. And I've found OO to be kludgey even outside of conversion, even missing features. I never thought I'd see a worse designed UI than MSOffice, but Star/Open Office nailed it.

Re:How complex are your documents?

[OMEGA Power]

I have been using both MS Office and StarOffice/OO for about 2 years (MS on my work desktop (Win2k), OO on my personal laptop(Red Hat Linux) and have never had any significant problems. I find OO to be full featured and as easy to use as MS with the pluses of being free and running on Linux.

Re:How complex are your documents?

[Daniel Phillips]

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.

That's odd, it's quite different from my experience, particularly with regard to Powerpoint presentations, with which OpenOffice has been a real help.

I've had zero instances in the last two years or so where I've had to resort to decoding a document by booting a Microsoft operating system, and I have dealt with a lot of Microsoft documents.

Re:How complex are your documents?

[Anonymous Coward]

"I've never had a powerpoint presentation that opened correctly"

Not that you should ever use powerpoint, but yeah, everyone has the same problem. I used to think Powerpoint was just a tool to delay meeting for a couple minutes, and then break the ice with a joke about "damn computers."

OpenOffice does suck. Star Office 6 has nothing that Star Office 5.2 didn't have when Sun bought it from Start Division in 1998, and 5.1 was better than 5.2, stability and usability wise. Even simple things like outlines and tables are broken now. It's a dead project, without Mozilla's impetus, and the actual coders are the ones that sold it.

Re:How complex are your documents?

[mgv]

That's odd, it's quite different from my experience, particularly with regard to Powerpoint presentations, with which OpenOffice has been a real help.

Then you don't embed video into your powerpoint presentations.

Ok, I know its not really a function of either program, but I do many presentations to audiences a year using video loops which are integral to the talks.

This just fails under open office.

Michael

Re:How complex are your documents?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I installed OpenOffice on my new PC last Xmas, and have used it exclusively ever since. I pretty much totally agree with your assessment.

It's a product with a lot of potential, and it's fine as a "good enough" alternative for typical daily use, but it does have some major flaws compared to MS' offering. The spreadsheet is underpowered and graphing is hard to get right. (How do you update the source data range for a chart, anyway?) The word processor apparently offers no mechanism to assign keyboard shortcuts to styles or special characters, making both features absurdly unwieldy. And it is waaaay more buggy than any recent version of MS Office. In particular, it crashes and takes out any other OpenOffice applications that are running if you try to load the wrong MS Word document (and not necessarily a particularly complicated one, either).

All in all, I'm grateful for having the product -- it's saved me having to buy any more MS software, since I don't believe in ripping off commercial products -- but as an alternative to Microsoft for those who can afford it, it's definitely "7/10, must try harder" for now.

Re:How complex are your documents?

[Master of Transhuman]

Oh, wow, embedded video fails...

Do you run Windows 98, as I do? Does anything work properly? I reboot Windows 98 at LEAST five times a day when some app like the Epson printer drivers (or maybe it's Spool32.exe or maybe it's...) takes it down.

If Open Office works twice as reliably as Windows 98, it is a godsend...

Set the clock back? NO!

[Animats]

Don't ever set your clock back. Some other copy protection schemes, such as Globetrotter/Macrovision's FLEXLM, interpret that as an attempt to extend an expired license and lock out the license. (FLEXLM returns an error code of -88) Worse, FLEXLM records, in some secret place, that this has happened. Setting the clock forward again may not fix it. One Softimage|3D manual said that the computer had to be discarded if this had happened.

At least it's not another security flaw

[dcavanaugh]

I was getting tired of those.

hahahaha

[Warlock7]

Bwahahahahahahahaahahahahahahahahaahaha!!!!!!

Text from base OO install looks horrible

[Mr. Underbridge]

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.

Yeah, and I don't think you have to invoke the file-transfer argument. In our research group, a fellow linux guy was giving a presentation that he made in OO. He didn't transfer it, he hooked his laptop into a projector and displayed it that way.

Yet, his fonts had terrible spacing issues. Some of the text was scrunched, some spread out. His presentation looked like a damned ransom letter.

Oh, and he was using Suse 8.1, basic install. So no, the combination of a base linux/OO install is not ready for professional looking presentations.

Re:Text from base OO install looks horrible

[jedidiah]

Either that or the tool is far too flexible for the user. All you've really demonstrated is that the tool won't ensure that the user doesn't shoot themselves in the foot. This person may simply have made pisspoor font or layout choices. There's no gaurantee that he would have done any better with an alternate tool (unless that tool offers ZERO flexibility).

Re:Text from base OO install looks horrible

[Mr. Underbridge]

This person may simply have made pisspoor font or layout choices.

He just used default fonts (Helvetica or something) and spacings. I've had similar issues with OO as well. I don't think it was a matter of flexibility - I think the defaults should at least not look like garbage. And I've played around with OO a bit, and haven't found any way to make the fonts look even as good as in Word. Part of the problem is Linux's abysmal font handling, part is OO's issues with the same.

I will say that neither OO or linux will get significant desktop support until things look good "out of the box," and this is currently nowhere near the case.

Official workaround:

[Idou]

www.openoffice.org

At least until MS is able to resolve the issue.

Tie to grab

[MAXOMENOS]

It makes perfect business sense. A lot of companies balk at Open Source because people in management don't want to have to assume responsibility for their technology.

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.

Business logic in a nutshell:

[Thud457]

"OSS? We can't use that, who're gonna sue when it breaks?"

Microsoft? Can't sue them, the EULA forbids it.

Wouldn't it be more effective if the paperclip...

[CharonX]

Wouldn't it be more effective if the paperclip would only go away after you have registered?
That would give them product registrations AND extended exposure for their mascot.
And as an additional bonus, users could be driven insane by the clip - less work for the tech hotlines (ohhh... blue and white colours... shiny...) and increased sales on M$ products (sure, give me more, *giggle* Word, Powerpoint, gotta catch them all *drool*) ;)

Lack of acquisition is bad....

[Steveftoth]

at least if you're a salesman or a purchasing agent. If everyone used open source, then why would you need so many salesmen to push product? I mean yeah, there are apache salesmen, but the people selling apache are also the people writing the code and deploying the websites. I doubt there are as many people selling apache full time as MS has pushing IIS.

And if you don't have to buy licenses then why to you need a guy to handle that? In a small company you always need at least one requisition manager, but in a large company, not having to have as many people to do that job is a big plus. :)

OSS is scary to people because it changes so many parts of the business in ways that are non-obvious.

Yeah. New ad campaign for Microsoft?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Microsoft Program. It keeps reactivating and reactivating...

Read the story, moron

[Anonymous Coward]

They DID. That is the ONLY version that has this "feature".

How can an illiterate call himself a nerd? Gees...

Not a bug..

[lionchild]

Remember, it's not really a bug in the software, it's a liscensing feature!

Similar bug in original Office 2k

[aking137]

This error can occur in (AFAIK) the first version of Microsoft Office 2000, on at least Windows NT (SP6a) and Windows 2000 (original release).

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 /local administrator/ and then click 'No'. I suspect the reason is that when you submit your answer, Office tries to amend a file or registry key that is writable only by local administrator, and so it fails.

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.

Re:Similar bug in original Office 2k

[PhxBlue]

Hah. If only making a Slashdot post were any indication of legitimacy. . .

Further Implications

[pkinetics]

Has anyone else noticed that this is a little more far reaching impact.

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."

Confusion...

[Futurepower(R)]

Can someone explain this? Office 2000 is on Service Pack 3, since "21-Oct-2002". It doesn't have activation. Office XP is on SP2.

Is there a difference in Office 2000 SP3 if it was updated with SR1 instead of SR1a? If so, why not just re-install and use SR1?

Re:Confusion...

[omega9]

You're typing it yourself and you're still missing it. SP != SR. You're correct that O2K is currently at Service Pack 3 (SP3), but there was a Service Release 1 (SR1 [and SR1a]) of O2K some time ago.

For instance, MOUS testing software is *extremely* picky, and must be installed onto a machine with Office 2K SR1 SP2. STAB @ that.

wonder what the download rate from openoffice is..

[spasm]

I'd love to see some download stats for OpenOffice at the moment - has it spiked since this crap started hitting people?

Bug Gates

[Anonymous Coward]

View the article in 800x600... it looks like a huge bug is eating Bill's head.

Hey, a guy can dream, can't he?

Partial Answer

[Futurepower(R)]

Someone below answered part of my question: Four Licensing Schemes/Three versions, #5751897

But have companies really waited this long to install Office 2000's SP3? Microsoft says SP3 fixes some of the crashiness of Office 2000.

Now I hear hundreds of thousands of lawsuits...

[Blowit]

against M$ which will need to pay restitution for this bug. I wonder how many man hours are lost on this * minimum $100-200/hour. That will be one huge bill for M$.

News flash: Software has bugs

[bratmobile]

Sooooooo, someone found a bug in Office. Why is this news? Why is this reported, and not the bugs in any other software?

Software has bugs. It's like the definition of software. Big freakin' deal. Someone found the bug, Microsoft will fix it, people will download the patch, and life will go on.

When will Slashdot report on something UNRELATED to Microsoft? When will Slashdot get over its obvious, antagonistic bias? Probably never.

Re:News flash: Software has bugs

[AlgebraicSpore]

I think the main reason this is reported is not the bug but the way that microsoft has proposed to fix the bugs.

Re:News flash: Software has bugs

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with this bug is that, contrary to "usual" bugs, it's not related to an unexpected rare configuration / manipulation which would have eluded testing, and would only affect those users with the given configuration / attempting the given manipulation, but to the date, which is the same for every user, and so it affects all the computer running the software at once (and the workaround of setting back the date is not really viable).

Re:Solution. Nice question.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sky is red. I repeat, Sky is red.

Set the clock back two years- theY2K silver bullet

[Aging_Newbie]

"our sources claim Microsoft support is telling users to set PC clocks back two years. "

This sounds like an excellent idea - the fix is to set the system clock back two years. I hope people try it carefully -- it can be really entertaining when backups and other processes run.

Now, exactly how do you set your clock back two years if it syncronizes with a network clock? How do typical users version files when the date is really off? Gee, why didn't we think of this in Y2K?

I hope the Register's source is mistaken!

Microsoft creates awesome confusion.

[Futurepower(R)]

Thanks. Microsoft creates awesome confusion. What is the difference between an SR and an SP?

If I understand correctly, this only affects some licenses of Office 2000.

ALL YOUR OFFICE BELONG TO BILL!

[StupidKatz]

He set us up the time-bomb!

Don't forget the desire to NOT succeed

[Ixohoxi]

Status quo, etc.

Saving alot of money in the IT parts of business will make other parts look worse. Savings will be demanded in places they shouldn't be demanded.

Sometimes, doing a really good thing only gets you into being expected to do more really good things.

Success is something that people tend to either go for as much as possible, or make last as long as possible.

Stop selling Open Source, sell RedHat

[alexhmit01]

Inform them that Redhat, a public traded company, has a great solution. It should be competitive with their other solutions, with them normally coming in cheaper. Ask that they be included in the bid. Contact someone in Redhat sales, explain that you can't download open source, but you would like an inexpensive agreement.

They will likely be happy with an unsolicited sale, and give you a quote for a supported library. Management doesn't care that they are open source, they are caring about saving money...

BTW: put on a nice shirt, pressed pants, and a tie (if appropriate at your corp) before pitching it. Explain that they are a vendor that you have heard good things about, and feel that they might be competitive.

You don't understand how business works. Talk in dollars and cents...

My migration from Win2K -> OS X has been interesting. There were some panicked users, but they are slowly adapting and really digging the system. And managing the computers is really easy.

Alex

don't know the Reg.

[apeman]

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...."

Oh, and slashdot is the home of cutting-edge, acurate journalism.

Re:80,000

[Graspee_Leemoor]

"Also putting something in bold does not make it true."

Oh, but if only it did!


Windows' market share down to 5%

Bill Gates sees ray of pink light and thereafter decides to open-source Windows.

Doom 2000, Deus Ex 2 and Duke Nukem Forever to be released next week.

High spec computers to be made free for anyone who can pass a programming test.



Oh well.

graspee

Re:prosper

[Anonymous Coward]

Or you can use PPower4 (don't have an url handy).
Combined with metapost (or xfig) you can even create
pictures that build incrementally as you go through the presentation.

Takes longer to learn than Powerpoint, but if you are fluent in LaTeX, and have a good text editor, it is IMHO actually easier to use.

Tribes 2

[Eraser_]

Tribes two will work on any computer it is installed on, etc. They encourage users to copy the installation folders because the CD Key's are tied into your account like everquest. You log in anywhere and BAM you are on your account, which you paid for. The only thing I wish tribes2, EQ, and AIM did were store the stupid UI preferences on the server.

hang in there

[Peaceful_Patriot]

I was the first in my office to push for evaluating Linux alternatives. I ran into a lot of resistance and developed the reputation for being the 'radical' and 'Microsoft hater' in the office. (And we are an IT shop!) This was about 2 years ago. Sloooowly thngs are changing. Now we can talk Linux openly and compare this quality and feature to that. Our personnel have soured on MS and now using Linux at home on their own machines. I cannot tell you what a relief it has been to see the 'light come on' with these guys. It's been tough to put up with the ribbing I took early on without saying 'nah nah, I told you so'. But hang in there. MS is making our point for us every time these new 'features' surface.

Re:hang in there

[Anonymous Cow herd]

Heh... I just had a meeting today with the local electrical company, which was trying to get a job application form online, with some backend database application and some other bells and whistles. Of course they were running IIS and some proprietary stuff. The techs seemed very open to using Open Source technologies, especially after what we showed them what we were doing with Apache/PHP/FDF. Unfortunately, upper level management at this company had been soured on open source after their poorly adminstrated RHL box got backdoored. Having said that, of course now they're throwing enough money at Microsoft and other software vendors to finance a fleet of veteran sysadmins (IIS, ASP, a bunch of proprietary modules & systems). It makes me very glad that I work at a place where we can use the right tool, instead of having some PHB tell me "it's not approved procedure".

Rehab too expensive for this addict.

[spinlocked]

you know, I wonder how many of these big F50 companies have to move to Linux on the desktop before we get a 'critical mass' of Linux desktops...

Not very many I suspect. But I seriously doubt this firm will be doing anything like that in the next decade. Believe it or not, they're probably getting a very good deal out of Microsoft, compared with smaller outfits. The software is pretty (if you like that sort of thing), does what it claims to (most of the time) and the end users are familiar with it.

An oil company is not exactly short of ready cash, but they're not stupid, they'll have done a TCO study. The trouble is, these can be made to say whatever you want them to say (believe me, I've made a Solaris only desktop strategy look good on paper :) and they're normally made to say 'we'll carry on doing what we're doing now, thanks'. They've already made a heavy investment in mitigating the effect of viruses, worms etc. and change to Linux would be a massive, painful, time consuming, expensive and arguably avoidable undertaking.

Luckily, I know most of the backoffice heavy lifting is done on Solaris or MVS, so at least the mission-critical data is safe.

PowerPoint is not ready for OpenOffice

[kavau]

"I created it in OpenOffice and brought it into PowerPoint," he explained, as the class laughed at at him.

Hmm... this seems to suggest that PowerPoint is just not ready yet for OpenOffice.

More seriously, though, document portability between different office suites is, of course, one of the nastiest problems to tackle. Especially if one suite uses closed, proprietary file formats. But from what I've heard from other people (I haven't used MS Office since Office 97) those problems also occur frequently if you transfer your documents between different versions of Office. Now does this mean MS Office is not yet ready for MS Office?

dont forget the small biz edition

[prisoner]

that shipped as well. There might also have been a "Premium" flavor that I remember seeing.

Re:linux breaks every 2 months?

[tomhudson]

Even if this was true, it's still better than win$hit.

I'm in the process of removing wincrap from EVERY machine at work -started last week, so I guess we're just in time :-)

Wanna give the moron^H^H^H^H^Hguy who downloaded crap on his machine and infected everybody else here a BIG thank-you!

Not Just Corporations, and Not Just Office

[GoldMace]

I was asked today if I wanted to register my copy Word 2000 with Microsoft. I of course said no and went along with my business as it is not required for it to run. I do not have Office, just Word, actually have MS Works & Money too, it all came preinstalled, though I believe was sold as "Microsoft Works Suite 2000" or something like that. Yes, my computer is really old and slow for me to have this...I know that's what you're thinking.

Re:Sweet. Here's what microsoft has to say

[tomhudson]

search the knowledge base: office 2000 product activation bug

Result: Content that matches your query is not available at this time. However, Microsoft adds new documents regularly, and may provide information similar to what you are looking for in the future.

Just don't hold your breath...

You still pay...

[mdfst13]

just not in money. All these projects were bought with code. It's nice of the people who bought them to make them freely available to others, but they weren't free. Unfortunately, you'll never see the open source model extend to the desktop. One problem is that developers don't need the same kind of tools that users do. A developer skilled enough to write an interface that correctly configures the X server will probably find it *easier* to do so with vi, rather than accept the limitations of a GUI interface (remember, one advantage of a GUI is that it restricts your choices so that you don't have to avoid the unworkable alternatives--it just won't let you choose them). Why would someone develop a product that they will never use? Another problem is that properly written GUI tools eliminate the need for support. Since GPLed software is free (like we wish beer was), there is no profit in making GUI tools. Fortunately, some hobbyists are nice enough to contribute, so there are some tools. However, the GUI tool supply for the clueless is woefully inadequate at this point. I'm not familiar with Zope, so I won't try to discuss it. Knoppix is simply an example linux distro; it's an excellent product because linux is. The GIMP is software made by developers to accomplish tasks that they could not do otherwise. It is one of the great open source achievements, particularly since there is not a great support market for it, AFAIK. OpenOffice (my addition to your list) is great, but it primarily exists because Sun needs for people to be able to migrate from MS products (java exists for the same reason). Similarly, Python is a tool to make it easier for developers to create code. Unsurprisingly, it gets developer support. The remaining three (Linux, Apache, and MySQL) are all server software and they make their money from configuration and support. Developers have to keep them supplied with code in order to be able to bill for configuration and support. The server side is great for open source because the main cost of a server is the support. The free version (without support) acts as a demo for the pay version with support. Sufficient users choose to pay and get the support (or pay simply to support the software), that they don't have to worry about freeloaders. Unfortunately, this is not working on the desktop side. Red Hat and other server distros do not make a great effort to get installed at the desktop level. A major reason for this is that it's not profitable. Xandros and Lindows.com are both losing money (insufficient volume to support their staffs). Lycoris is making enough money to support its four people but is struggling to stay current (now that KDE 3.2 is out, they are almost ready to release a new version with KDE 3.0).

Damn!

[autopr0n]

Why the hell would you install something on 80k machines without testing it first!?

Re:Makes me glad^H^H^H^Hsad

[Guido69]

Though the AC is obviously trolling, I think he has a really valid point.

Major corps aren't switching. In fact, they keep buying deeper and deeper into the Beast through Software Assurance, Upgrade Advantage, etc. Every single one of your points is valid, but it doesn't matter. And the end result proves it. MS is still pushing around it's "customers" with ridiculous licensing schemes. The BSA is still in business and actively auditing and fining everyone they can get their hands on.

I'm sure you could find whole offices running OpenOffice or StarOffice or even still using WordPerfect and 123 just so they can stay away from MS products. But they aren't the IBM's or Fords or Bank of America's of the world.

Re:Sweet. Here's what microsoft has to say

[Saint Stephen]

You didn't use the correct lingo:

Search for: prb office 2000 activation
and you'll find several hits which discuss problems where Activation pops up again and again. Granted, this particular one doesn't come up!

MS KB lingo for bug is prb, that's the magic word!

But OpenOffice is actually NOT FREE?

[volkerdi]

That our company has switched over to OpenOffice exclusively.

Plus, OpenOffice is totally free.

Since you're using OpenOffice at your company, you might be interested to know that you could be in violation of the gpc (general polygon clipping library) license. gpc, which is often mistaken for a GNU item since it starts with a 'g', is required to build OpenOffice. However (and I've never seen this mentioned or reported anywhere), it comes with a very restrictive 'non-commercial-use' license. Presumably anything linked with it (like OpenOffice) should also be considered for 'non-commercial-use' only as well, right?

To me this is a major problem. I'm also not thrilled to see it require Java. We need a good free, open source office suite for free operating systems, but I don't think this is it.

Re:But OpenOffice is actually NOT FREE?

[volkerdi]

I can assure you that I am not trolling, spreading FUD, or any of those things. This is a valid point that I've not seen brought up, and is the reason I do not include OpenOffice in Slackware (believe me, there are a lot of requests). I'd love to be shown how I'm wrong about this.

Feel free to Google for OpenOffice's build requirements, and then follow the link to the gpc site.

Re:But OpenOffice is actually NOT FREE?

[sparcv9]

This is a valid point that I've not seen brought up, and is the reason I do not include OpenOffice in Slackware (believe me, there are a lot of requests). I'd love to be shown how I'm wrong about this.

Feel free to Google for OpenOffice's build requirements, and then follow the link to the gpc site.

Patrick is not making this up. (And why would he? The lack of an office suite in Slackware doesn't help him in any way.) While the dependency on gpc is not listed on the Build Requirements section of OpenOffice's website, a simple Google search for openoffice gpc reveals a slew of mailing list posts concerning the dependency.

Digging around will net you a patch from Debian to remove the gpc requirement..

Re:But OpenOffice is actually NOT FREE?

[Pharmboy]

I can assure you that I am not trolling, spreading FUD, or any of those things. This is a valid point that I've not seen brought up, and is the reason I do not include OpenOffice in Slackware (believe me, there are a lot of requests). I'd love to be shown how I'm wrong about this.

Feel free to Google for OpenOffice's build requirements, and then follow the link to the gpc site.

I assumed your were wrong because what you were saying defies all logic, but the fact is, I was totally wrong. I mean, to use that license in OO would be stupid right? ;) Starting reading at your suggestion, and Im even more confused.

Now that I have freely admitted that I had stuck my foot in my mouth, 95% of the people who NEED this/similar software us it in a commercial environment, so this is kinda dumb.

Is this being "fixed", as in removing GPC code and replacing it to make OO truly GPL? Im a bit shocked that the dev team has let the code mix this way, knowing that OO can't be used where it was designed to be used. Considering I was expecting to migrate everyone over to OO (linux and windows) the next cycle (summer) this puts a wrench in the works.

Re:But OpenOffice is actually NOT FREE?

[shepd]

Not to be sounding silly or trollish, but how is the gpc license all that much different from the license for xv, which slackware included for ages?

Re:Makes me glad^H^H^H^Hsad

[soloport]

I'm taking the "one client at a time" approach. I get calls on a regular basis from folks who can't open their own MS Office files. I'm serious! For some reason I've been hit like a plague, for the last year, by these kinds of MS Office bugs.

My solution is to install OpenOffice.org and use it as a "filter". That is, I have them open the un-openable MS Office file in OOo and save it by another name in MS Office format. It works!

Of course I leave OOo on their desktop and eventually some use the thing almost exclusively. ;-)

Go figure. MS bugs, driving people away from MS products...

Reply: To the wall

[OldHawk777]

Hello old friend. I knew you were here before me. Now we stand in the same place for the same reason. I feel, we will always be friends.

Oh, now look who has come here.

What time, what day, what year, what for, ...

I feel there is always a friend at the wall to answer.

Humor is sometimes best served dark by the bravest and weakest of US All.

May the devil let you visit an old friend for many shots of whisky, tequila, and maybe vodka till we sleep on our feet.

OldHawk777

Reality is a self-induced hallucination.

Re:Sweet. Here's what microsoft has to say

[tomhudson]

I guess that's because it's a feature, not a bug

On a related note, linux user lingo for windows bug is hahahaha_sucker_hahahahaha_opportunity_to_force_sw itch_to_linux

I'm laughing 'cause linux-only boxes now outnumber windows boxes here by a 2 to 1 ratio, and should be completely switched over in another couple of weeks :-)

Troll.

[jotaeleemeese]

WIth that signature it can't be otherwise.

The productivity and cost savings of many OS products out there is something that is not debatable anymore. is a demonstrable fact with myriads of examples worldwide.

While we're at it...

[achurch]

...online games which invalidate your CD key when you create an account, so that if you ever want to play again after quitting once you have to buy a new copy. (Yes, I'm talking about you, FFXI.)

Sorry, just had to get that off my chest...

Re:Makes me glad^H^H^H^Hsad

[shepd]

(I added the link for dramatics)

>I'm sure you could find whole offices running OpenOffice or StarOffice or even still using WordPerfect and 123 just so they can stay away from MS products. But they aren't the IBM's or Fords or Bank of America's of the world.

Perhaps Bank of America will be changing its tune after 13,000 of its ATMs were put out of service by Microsoft bugs. Or perhaps they're just stupid and masochistic? Either way, if they're still paying for M$-ware, I'd take a second look at whether I want to invest my money in a bank that doesn't put its money where its mouth is.

Ford, well, beats the hell out of me what they run. :)

Re:Makes me glad^H^H^H^Hsad

[Guido69]

My including IBM wasn't by accident. Guess which office suite they run internally (at least on the hardware side of the house). Nope, not SmartSuite. Ever had occasion to work with an IBM corporate-account rep on enterprise desktops? SmartSuite isn't even offered as an option on a great majority of their standard configs. Go figure.

BOA changing it's tune? Perhaps, though I haven't heard anything about it yet. They're big enough that I'm sure a mass OSS rollout or even them asking questions would have hit the news. So now you pull your $$ out of BOA - where are you going to put it? Find me a big name bank that isn't running MS Office. Maybe under your mattress...

I don't know for sure what Ford is running either, but again I'm fairly sure we would know about it (and flaunt it mercilessly) if it was anything other than Redmond's finest (no offence, Lycoris).

:)

Re:Makes me glad^H^H^H^Hsad

[Guido69]

And I'm sure that works well in those small shops. Don't try it in a corporate environment, though. Standard Software Configurations and Authorized Software lists are held as dear as the writings of Christ himself. "Rogue" techs installing unauthorized software generally have a short lifespan.

So does anyone have an article that *is* accurate?

[Max Threshold]

Or an explanation of what's inaccurate in the cited article? This is the kind of thing I like to add to my Linux advocacy page.

Send me $300 for the best crappy office software

[Anonymous Coward]

People send me $300 and I will give office software wich has as many bugs as M$ office. And I for one will not tell you to buy upgrade to fix I will say it is not a bug but feature.

After I make my fortune for this office software I will start a platform called .Not.

Muhahaha

U all are my slaves.

Hey!

[Anonymous Coward]

Companies shouldn't be using crappy software if they are willing to complain about it's crappiness.

In a word: YARTNUM.

[Black Copter Control]

( Yet Another Reason To Not Use Microsoft)

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?

Testing, yes -- but few people expect a Y2K bug in software released after the year 2000. Even if it is a Microsoft product, most people wouldn't think to check to see if software wilfully violates the license under which it was sold to you. It might have been a bit easier for people to figure out something like this with access to the source code --- but MS isn't allowing that.

EULAs notwithstanding, this time bomb is essentially an example of malicious code. Expecting sysadmins to find and document all examples of malicious code in binary-only software where the EULA specifically enjoins you from reverse-engineering is rather like asking a gorilla to dance on the head of a pin.

Re:In a word: YARTNUM.

[racermd]

Expected or not, it should still be tested for. Yes, it's true that nobody has found the bug until it got into the wild as it's a pretty uncommon one. But it stands to reason that the people who will ultimately use the software will be able to find things that Microsoft missed in testing. It's analagous to a layered defense system. The coders looking at their own code are at level one and will find the vast majority of the major problems before it gets to testing. The Q/A team will be level 2 and will get the remainder of the major problems while helping to polish the software for release. The final level should be an internal testing lab with documented testing procedures that mirror everyday use specific to that company. If a bug makes it through all 3 levels of testing, one or more of the levels should make a change in policy so that such a bug cannot be slipped through again. Usually, a company (as an end-user) will implement this policy on it's own, regardless of what the software manufacturer/publisher does.

Obviously, the software industry isn't going to change for the better overnight. But as a corporate employee in IS/IT, it's my responsibility to mitigate the risks of doing business in the current computing environment. The best way to do that is to test-test-test and make the product fail (within reason). If I can't fail the product, it's generally safe for deployment on our internal systems. When bugs have been found that have also passed our own testing, it is either patched or disabled until a patch can be found. Of course, gray areas exist where we determine that the risk of doing nothing is lower than that of disabling the software (and the situation with Office 2000 seems to fit that category). But we always update our testing procedures to look for similar bugs so that we don't run into the same problem in the future. And while we don't have anyone currently using Office 2000, we'll definitely be on the lookout for this permanently from now on in other software packages.

Re:In a word: YARTNUM.

[Black Copter Control]

I've gpt absolutely nothing against the idea of testing -- but when people speak like missing this bug implied that the 'proper' testing had not occured...
Until this bug bit people in the ass, I don't think that it was very predictable problem. Now that it's been seen, I agree that people should be testing for this sort of stupidigy from MS. I just don't feel that it should be considered the customer's fault that people didn't pre-emptively catch this example of malicious programming.

It's not a bug

[hhknighter]

It's a feature

Now pay us for a new copy

Sincerely,

Your trustworthy Micro$oft tech support,
I.P Freely

*For more information, please send your company payroll to us, thank you.

Re:What is true, then?

[Alsee]

"The Register's story is not quite accurate, but the registration bug is real."

Okay, so.. what's the accurate story?

I'm just going to take a wild guess and say the accurate story is: the registration bug is real.

-

One word: competition....

[fferreres]

If other companies see that opportunity and it starts working for them, your company will start to see trouble ahead. This is how everything seems to work in most liberal countries.

You may say "why not us??"...well, you copmany probably thinks that if they start using open source libraries then your clients will take your products less seriously (if they are internal, then whoever decides how good and "propietary" to your company you IT department is), and also, they don't even want to think about the possibility of any legal trouble. They don't care spending more money for things that are "supposed" to be profesionally built and supported.

Of course, the problem is one of non-innovation and superficial analysis. But hey, not many people got fired by not using open source, and surelly a lof of people did got fired because of that. People have prejudices and a carreer to take care, not to mention kids to feed. That's part of the equation too...

But things gradually change. As long as OSS becomes more and more usefull, early adopters that are wise enough to have a bussines plan that focuses on a real need will reap the rewards. Ofter a while, it will be everyone, but I think we'll have to way a decade or more...

Even legal versions + updates can give problems...

[anonymous cupboard]

I was developing with an MSDN Universal subscription. The trouble was that the packaging was screwed. Everytime it wants to validate that you have the software, it decided that it isn't valid. The solution was to reinstall ... and then reinstall. Updates were almost impossible as the disk IDs were also screwed.

Re:Makes me glad^H^H^H^Hsad

[soloport]

Uh, but I'm the Manager of IT... I can act "rougue" but I can't very well *be* rogue, can I ;-)

(In a 120+ employee office, btw)

Re:Makes me glad^H^H^H^Hsad

[Guido69]

No, I suppose you can't. But you did just support my point.

Please understand, I mean no offence. A 120+ employee office. Not tiny, but certainly not a large corporate environment.