Slashdot Mirror
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...."
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.
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?
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
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')
"Nimis exaltatus rex sedet in vertice - caveat ruinam!"
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.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
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.
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!
Engineering and the Ultimate
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.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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.
- Tempestdata
Isn't it fraudulent to sell someone a perpetual license for software that you've knowingly designed to stop working after two years?
--
BitTorrent in C -- LibBT
http://www.sf.net/projects/libbt
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
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.
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.
... far better to have used
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
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
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.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
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.
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
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-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
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.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.