Malaysian Police Not Roping Longhorn Rustlers

Artifex writes "CNN/Reuters reports that an early release of Microsoft's next operating system, 'Longhorn,' is already being sold openly in markets in Malaysia, with local police doing little to stop it. Microsoft's response, of course, is that consumers should steer clear. I'm sure this chaps their hides, as crashing copies of this as-yet-unreleased product are sure to cause dilution of branding."

Comments

Buggy Leaks

[skajake]

Most of these are simply the same Alpha leak build 4015 that has been available on irc for months.
They do NOT include WinFS, WinFX, and are extremely buggy.

Re:It has to be said

[aborchers]

So how does that make the pre-release "Longhorn" version any different from, say, Windows XP?

I generally hate to jump to Microsoft's defense, but have you actually used Windows XP? Just curious. I run XP Pro with a major mismash of hardware and have crashed it maybe twice in the two years since it shipped, fewer than the number of times I've crashed X on the RedHat 9 partition on the same machine. Admittedly, crashing the UI system shouldn't nuke the OS, which is what usually happens w/ Windows, but IMHO XP was an incredible improvement in stability over Windows 98 SE, which crashed a couple times a week and would never even shut down properly...