Still, if that is the case, how are they meant to prove it? There is no computer to seize or hard drive to autopsy. Obviously the guy isn't making the files available for upload. I imagine it'd be a tougher fight than they're used to. But IANAL and I don't follow these thing too closely. Maybe they don't need evidence anymore other than the logs they collect.
Its taken me a minute to regain my ability to speak clearly after watching this video. I just can't imagine the time they wasted on this.
Maybe I'm out of touch but "the Boss" doesn't exactly speak to me, seeing as I was 4 when Bruce Springsteen was popular. I don't imagine Microsoft wants to be portrayed as being stuck 20 years in the past but that's the feeling I get from this video. For being made by sales and marketing people who are presumably trained in brand associations, it sure doesn't seem like they thought this one through.
I can't speak for their technology now but I know they had a partner company making their pre-wimax hardware for them a few years ago. The partner company seemed to only exist to provide them hardware (funded by the same owners as Clearwire). They could've changed this and be on new hardware by now, but I doubt it. As far as I know, they're still on CDMA pre-wimax technology. If they were wimax, I'm sure they'd have taken advantage of the marketing buzz and announced it by now.
Pushing cars off of gasoline and onto the grid is only solving a small part of the problem. This particular solution creates some interesting problems - increased power demands on the grid from the cars, increased demand for purified water, and problems storing the hydrogen in the car, which, from the sound of it, is one of the bigger problems in hydrogen vehicles ATM.
In regards to water, you could purify water yourself at home for a small cost (as compared to gas prices) but on the road you'd need a refueling station that could sell you hydrogen or you'd need to pay for water and electricity and wait for it to recharge. Despite the promises of not needing gas stations to change, it's obvious that they would need to accommodate one or both of these refueling methods.
That being said, a lot of gas stations make very little from gas sales and instead hope to entice you into the convenience store to purchase snacks for the road. I can't help but wonder how well a convenience store/diner would do with a simple water distillery and a metered electrical plug. While you refilled and recharged, you'd probably be inside eating lunch. It wouldn't be a big change from the business model they have already and they'd be in a position to make more money than they do now.
You are already hitting into liability by NOT helping your customers, and they could FORCE you to make things work, as technically it is you failing to provide a basic service that you contracted to provide without any exemption for users running Vista.
LOL. Wait, customers can sue their ISPs to force them to support their software's bugs? That'll be good news for all those Safari users.
Seriously, though, you need to calm down man. It isn't healthy to be this high-strung.
The problem is liability. If we tell a user to change a registry setting and it breaks the OS, we're liable to fix it. If you've ever worked in tech support you probably already know how something as simple as "change 0 to 1" can get messed up sometimes. We're busy enough tackling our usual support load - we don't need to start having people bring in misconfigured computers they claimed we told them to break. The point is, this is a Microsoft bug and even they aren't willing to help someone apply it because they think it's too risky. Why should we take on that responsibility?
Luckily, MS doesn't seem to care too much about it so we just ask customers if they have Vista when they sign up and sent out an e-mail to our existing customers warning them about the "feature." Not that big of a deal for customers, really. I just found it interesting that Microsoft isn't trying harder to push their new OS. I'm sure somebody somewhere has a reason for that... but still interesting.
Jem Tallon
My company ran into this as well. We have 4000 wireless customers spread out on 20+ antennas (each with its own Cisco switch). We're a Microsoft partner so we contacted them about the problem right away.
As I understood it, the bug was this: Vista will only accept broadcast replies to DHCP requests. Any multicast response is discarded for security reasons (!?). So their solution was to put a DHCP server on every level of our network (for us, one for every 200 users) or switch to a network that relayed the broadcasted replies (ie: hubs). They also told us it wasn't a bug so they wouldn't issue a patch to correct it. There was a KB article on the issue but when we had users call MS support and ask them to walk them through applying it, we got a bunch of angry calls back to us saying MS refused to help them with it. We also talked to Cisco a bit to see if they had any idea what we could do to relay the broadcast but they never got us a solution.
So in the end, we told MS that we'd either need a better way to fix this or we'd just tell our users not to use Vista. They seemed okay with us telling users not to use it so we have. A few of our users still use Vista with a home router and that seems to work alright. Luckily, there aren't too many Vista users yet and when faced with the option of buying and configuring a router or buying and configuring Windows XP, they've decided on XP. So all in all, it wasn't that big of a deal.
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Still, if that is the case, how are they meant to prove it? There is no computer to seize or hard drive to autopsy. Obviously the guy isn't making the files available for upload. I imagine it'd be a tougher fight than they're used to. But IANAL and I don't follow these thing too closely. Maybe they don't need evidence anymore other than the logs they collect.
Its taken me a minute to regain my ability to speak clearly after watching this video. I just can't imagine the time they wasted on this.
Maybe I'm out of touch but "the Boss" doesn't exactly speak to me, seeing as I was 4 when Bruce Springsteen was popular. I don't imagine Microsoft wants to be portrayed as being stuck 20 years in the past but that's the feeling I get from this video. For being made by sales and marketing people who are presumably trained in brand associations, it sure doesn't seem like they thought this one through.
See? I've been saying for years that eventually lynx will win the browser war. With this marketing boost, it shouldn't be long now! Lynx ftw!
I can't speak for their technology now but I know they had a partner company making their pre-wimax hardware for them a few years ago. The partner company seemed to only exist to provide them hardware (funded by the same owners as Clearwire). They could've changed this and be on new hardware by now, but I doubt it. As far as I know, they're still on CDMA pre-wimax technology. If they were wimax, I'm sure they'd have taken advantage of the marketing buzz and announced it by now.
Pushing cars off of gasoline and onto the grid is only solving a small part of the problem. This particular solution creates some interesting problems - increased power demands on the grid from the cars, increased demand for purified water, and problems storing the hydrogen in the car, which, from the sound of it, is one of the bigger problems in hydrogen vehicles ATM. In regards to water, you could purify water yourself at home for a small cost (as compared to gas prices) but on the road you'd need a refueling station that could sell you hydrogen or you'd need to pay for water and electricity and wait for it to recharge. Despite the promises of not needing gas stations to change, it's obvious that they would need to accommodate one or both of these refueling methods. That being said, a lot of gas stations make very little from gas sales and instead hope to entice you into the convenience store to purchase snacks for the road. I can't help but wonder how well a convenience store/diner would do with a simple water distillery and a metered electrical plug. While you refilled and recharged, you'd probably be inside eating lunch. It wouldn't be a big change from the business model they have already and they'd be in a position to make more money than they do now.
So you want a glider tied to a pony?
If you're in the midwest I could come type the command. What was the feature?
Seriously, though, you need to calm down man. It isn't healthy to be this high-strung.
Jem Tallon
The problem is liability. If we tell a user to change a registry setting and it breaks the OS, we're liable to fix it. If you've ever worked in tech support you probably already know how something as simple as "change 0 to 1" can get messed up sometimes. We're busy enough tackling our usual support load - we don't need to start having people bring in misconfigured computers they claimed we told them to break. The point is, this is a Microsoft bug and even they aren't willing to help someone apply it because they think it's too risky. Why should we take on that responsibility? Luckily, MS doesn't seem to care too much about it so we just ask customers if they have Vista when they sign up and sent out an e-mail to our existing customers warning them about the "feature." Not that big of a deal for customers, really. I just found it interesting that Microsoft isn't trying harder to push their new OS. I'm sure somebody somewhere has a reason for that... but still interesting. Jem Tallon
My company ran into this as well. We have 4000 wireless customers spread out on 20+ antennas (each with its own Cisco switch). We're a Microsoft partner so we contacted them about the problem right away.
As I understood it, the bug was this: Vista will only accept broadcast replies to DHCP requests. Any multicast response is discarded for security reasons (!?). So their solution was to put a DHCP server on every level of our network (for us, one for every 200 users) or switch to a network that relayed the broadcasted replies (ie: hubs). They also told us it wasn't a bug so they wouldn't issue a patch to correct it. There was a KB article on the issue but when we had users call MS support and ask them to walk them through applying it, we got a bunch of angry calls back to us saying MS refused to help them with it. We also talked to Cisco a bit to see if they had any idea what we could do to relay the broadcast but they never got us a solution.
So in the end, we told MS that we'd either need a better way to fix this or we'd just tell our users not to use Vista. They seemed okay with us telling users not to use it so we have. A few of our users still use Vista with a home router and that seems to work alright. Luckily, there aren't too many Vista users yet and when faced with the option of buying and configuring a router or buying and configuring Windows XP, they've decided on XP. So all in all, it wasn't that big of a deal.
Jem Tallon