There were days when Microsoft would innovate. Yes many will scoff, but Microsoft Office is an example.
Two of the three major Microsoft Office components were bought from other places.
Word came from Xerox as "Bravo", a GUI based word processor written for the Xerox Alto. Microsoft hired one of Bravo's writers, Charles Simonyi, to oversee development of Word, Multiplan and Excel. Word even used the same method of saving data as Bravo which became a privacy problem for several subsequent versions. Word (and Bravo) simply grabbed and recorded a snapshot of the RAM containing the document along with any other data in the RAM from other documents that passed through.
Power Point was bought from the developer Forethought, Inc. of Sunnyvale, California.
Excel grew out of Microsoft's Multiplan and was made possible by some of the first Macintoshes for which it was written.
PC Clones touched off the battle for desktop control between IBM and Microsoft. Clones were the undoing of IBM's hardware monopoly which allowed Microsoft, the cloner's choice of OS, to steam roller and dominate every technology... uh... oh... wait a minute... [calling broker]
How sad for those who didn't know NASA as the epicenter of so much technology we take for granted today. The NASA that could have actually done good like that has long been disassembled. Unfortunately, everyone thinks they just shoot rockets and nothing else. It was tragic to disband them.
Jeez... most of you think NASA is a monolithic outfit that just lights off rockets? They're not directly in the medical business but they've developed quite a few medical technologies. If you know how to use Google, you'll find a few in a couple of minutes. Some NASA veterans have gone on to specifically advance medical research. Trivialize them if you like but NASA's transfer of medical contributions are in daily use:
NASA CCDs and software used on the Hubble is used to image and biopsy cancer tissue.
NASA/JPL developed "cool" lasers are used for heart surgery
NASA/JPL developed image processing is used in CAT scan and MRI machines
NASA developed robotics and materials are used in prosthetics
NASA's infrared thermometers measure stars, planets and now kid's foreheads
NASA developed LEDs are used to activate targeted anti-cancer drugs
NASA developed pill sized implantable body monitors
NASA/JPL space probe photo software is used to analyze human chromosomes to predict diseases
NASA technology is used to reestablish neural pathways for brain and spinal cord injuries
NASA space laboratory instruments are now used on the ground for diabetics
After Apollo was over, one of the greatest collection of scientists and researchers got their walking papers when NASA was disassembled. Why not take an agency like that and say "now, go cure cancer" or "figure out how to power the Nation for the next 1000 years"?
With the press talking about people who want to harm the U.S. using Facebook, Twitter, various IM systems etc, it almost makes sense to turn off one such avenue of abuse. It may be a "lead by example" thing... or a software bug.
...assuming the particular OS doesn't matter - it often doesn't between these two
Discarding the OS difference is quite an assumption and not easily done. As someone who had to maintain mixed Mac/PC/SGI/Linux environments, including every random thing clients walked in with, it's pretty clear which machines work and which don't. A Windows laptop walks in and you're standing there trying to get them connected to Wi-Fi, figure out why their email doesn't work, why they can't print etc. You never hear about a Mac laptop walking in because they just set up and start working. All of these people are essentially non-technical consumers.
The operating system makes all the difference, aside from the fact that most PC laptops I've encountered fell apart way sooner than the Macs.
Generally, the Windows machines are cranky, invasive, needy, rigid, arbitrary, vague and complex compared to OS X. That's why I have a Mac at home and why over 100 people who had their first exposure to Macs at my shop also have them at home now. Sure, some people work Windows machines better than others but it becomes a badge of pride and a platform to snipe at things that are different. "Pretty" might help get them in the door but working better and longer makes them more useful and practical.
The difference is real which is why Microsoft is so freaked out right now. The price difference isn't as real as many people try to maintain. RAM doesn't cost $500 a gig. Your $700 HP laptop has last year's processor, shared graphics, slow buss speed, poor battery performance and feels more like a scanner full of sand than a laptop. Apple doesn't sell into the junk computer market which is viewed as a major failing by people who would buy it. I wouldn't mind cheaper Macs but the price difference is well within the bounds of extra value.
Microsoft Marketing called - they want the 1990's back.
Seriously, if you compare the computers in question, the Mac is like a giant Swiss watch and the PC is the concrete patio tile of laptops. It's relative junk right out of the box.
No, Ballmer is from the Church of Microsoft and someone who I expect would dilute the positive values of Slashdot with juvenile rage when something they don't understand or can't control is mentioned. Ballmer has his own RDF and it's much larger than Jobs'.
You are NOT new here, are you #19540? Tnx for the comment.
It shouldn't take this long to figure out there's a pattern of abuse going on. Here's an alternate idea: let people dial something like #11 during a call which records the connection as an annoyance in a database. If a pattern of annoyance develops from a particular source, a red light lights on the FTC directors desk and he calls out the black helicopters.
Your story is a little different [on the positive side] from everyone's earned impression of telemarketers. It still smacks of trying to call armed robbery where nobody actually gets killed "ethical".
...and have to give negative reports because of their inability to do their job because of morons who couldn't simply ask to be removed.
Poor baby. How's this for a negative report: you'll just put my name on a list for the next shell company and call me back. You've earned everyone's ire.
Anything which makes unwanted bells go off in my house by remote control is an invasion of my peace and quiet. Get some laws passed that allow the victim to hit #5 on their phone to charge the caller $5.00, then I'll be happy. If someone WANTS these calls, that's fine. Don't push #5. Most people don't want these calls and the victims should be able to instantly make these groups feel the pressure back in a big way.
Groups like The American Teleservices Association (rebranded to remove "Telemarketing" from their name) and The Direct Marketing Association talk U.S. Congressmen into passing laws which enable annoying, invasive and often fraudulent activities from this lowlife "industry". It's an industry to the extent that people get paid to ring bells in my house but jeez - earn a living some other way. Annoying everyone over the phone [I believe] is not an "industry" as the lobbyist associations claim. If there was money in ringing your doorbell and hitting people with buckets of paint ten times a day, I'm sure there would be a lobbyist group for that, too. Oh wait... that's PETA.
You've heard of "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish"? Yes, Microsoft torpedoed Java. They were in court over it when Sun figured out Microsoft, their partner, was trying to hijack the language to be Windows only. For years, it was - and still is - confusing on whether to develop with Java or J++ or.NET or whatever flavor of Java-like implementation Microsoft trotted out. Many developers thought it puzzling that between Visual Studio 97 and Visual Studio 6.0 they were suddenly building incompatible Java. "Write Once, Run Anywhere" was torpedoed. Only because of developers who figured out what Microsoft was up to did Java survive this long. The upper hand is apparently going to.NET now. Compatibility with.NET is coming from reverse engineering the product (Mono), not through any help from Microsoft. They're only interested in you to install, deploy and maintain.NET, not know what's happening inside.
"You need Internet Explorer to use this web site". Why? Because someone from Microsoft took a CIO to lunch and dropped off their developer tools at no charge. Tada... instant entrapment. There are still some of those sites out there and browser compatibility is still an issue. IE and everything associated with it was sabotage.
SMTP is fine unless the payload is illegible. TNEF. Most all email clients can read it now that they've reverse engineered how to decode the glop inside.
Oh, don't get me wrong... from a corporate standpoint, it makes perfect sense to make sure all your competitors fail. It's hell on interoperability, though.
Old Buck, actually. Yes, we're replying to each other's posts. Thank the Maker we don't have to deal with properly decoding MS-ASCII... yet. I'll still bet my browser looks different than your browser.
Certainly you've seen Rob Weir's assessment that Microsoft's Office ODF Plugin was completely non-interoperable with ODF. Office writes its own flavor of ODF and fails the read and write tests in both directions where everything else appears to work, or is at least on the road to debugging. I doubt that was an accident. ODF has a "sow's ear" quality to it anyway, but this has to be deliberate from Microsoft. Bravo on their effort to turn ODF into MS-ODF.
If you're living solely inside the Microsoft castle walls, of course everything will work. Well, maybe most things. SNMP and SMTP are protocols, but if you stuff them with unexpected glop, there go your abilities to interoperate. Rewind the clock a few years and try using a platform other than Microsoft's to see web pages or read email. Sure, SMTP from Outlook and Exchange works but you'll be presented with this winmail.dat bullshit instead of an RFC compliant email message. Why do they do that? It's just an RTF attachment but that would be too standard.
Or take good old IE which worked well only with Microsoft's server extensions creating a client-server relationship with the "browser" instead of stateless exchange standards as intended. It's HTTP, right? It's what's inside that counts and it isn't standard and IE is only partially a "browser". Front Page wrote broken HTML that only IE could decode properly, somehow. The goal was that everyone would see a blank or broken page on the internet unless they were using a complete chain of Microsoft technology. Interoperability is not in Microsoft's interests. Never has been. There was plenty of overlap between browser standards and what Microsoft was doing, enough to see something on the Internet, but even that was crafted to make everyone else's browsers look illiterate. Eventually, everyone reverse engineered what they were doing but we're still digging out from it.
Java? You don't think Microsoft torpedoed Java? They released Visual Studio 6 which was Java sans cross platform functionality. No, Microsoft has done a lot to kill compatibility with their products. It's so crazy that people say Microsoft is open and standard. Yikes. They'll supply the programming tools, the protocols, the servers and the clients - even the operating system but nobody really knows what's going on inside. It's certainly very accessible and the tools are very good but it isn't standard. One patch and everything turns proprietary.
If Microsoft actually used standards, they would be compatible with 100% of everything else using standards. Instead, they're compatible with only 80% of everything else. Perl is one of the few areas that Microsoft is behaving. Good call on that. At least ActivePerl for Windows is just an effort to make Perl work better on Windows but Microsoft's actions with Perl are more puzzling than "normal" considering their track record.
It's another trap. Proprietary digital glop from Microsoft gave us an Internet that doesn't interoperate like it should - and they're still trying to poison everything that's not tied to their profits. No thanks.
Fair enough, I suppose. The year reference was a jab at the actual release date of Windows 7 but I believe it's coming out on time for better or worse. Functionally, I don't care what people use for their OS but in practical terms, I do care. I have to fix their problems and Windows is just plain more work. It has become the most needy, intrusive, arbitrary, vague, rigid and annoying OS out there. I don't choose to put up with it until it changes.
Yes, I know what RC means but it still doesn't necessarily mean it's ready for prime time. I've witnessed the rude surprises of friends who got a computer with the original Vista. It really was "what were they thinking?" time and every one of them ditched Vista and went back to XP on their new computer. The rest who seriously needed a new computer didn't even look at PCs anymore and bought Macs. Some even surprised me as they were dyed in the wool PC users who actually hid the fact they had an iMac at home and gave their daughter a MacBook for school.
I think Microsoft seriously misses the point of sliding menus and stacked displays, thinking they just need to keep up with the eye candy war. OS X has its warts but Apple's implementation of what Microsoft perceives as gratuitous zoomy effects actually imparts information to the user far better than Vista.
Friends outside of work aside, I introduced several Macs to our most virus laden abusive departments and the issues stopped. The security scares for OS X are out there somewhere but the issues we've had with PCs say it loud and clear which platform has the actual problems. The Mac experiment was extended to several other departments until even management recognized that buying a PC where something else would work was irresponsible. The users noticed as well. I've seen about 100 staffers drop kick their home PCs in favor of Macs over the last couple of years and they couldn't be happier. They'd be on the Mac at work and in a short time couldn't stand their home PCs anymore.
I'm also familiar with dying hardware and software faults - nothing is immune to that. However, working in a place with a few hundred workstations of mixed Mac-PC-SGI flavors, we had to wipe the heavy use PCs at least once a year, sometimes twice, to make them functional again. They'd slow down over time to 10 seconds between mouse clicks or slow drawing windows which punch a hole in the screen, then show the frame edges, then the buttons and then the window contents while you drum your fingers on the desk. These are strong workstations with XP Pro, dual processors and gigs of RAM. If reinstalling the OS fixes those issues, there's something wrong with the OS. That's buggy crap. The Macs would universally keep working just as they did out of the box until they were too old and slow to be useful, the oldest ones still in service after 10 years. I've got a 9 year old Dual 500MHz G4 running Leopard server and it works way better than it should (and Leopard is easy to install on unsupported hardware).
Maybe we're doing something wrong with the PCs, as I'm sure some will argue, but most of the admins I know of take it as normal. Wipe the registry and reinstall. Or, get something that works more often than not.
Yeah, I'd say I'm biased now because Microsoft has earned my bias. I'm still waiting to be pleasantly surprised and I'll have Windows 7 as soon as it's out, but they'll need to change their track record before they get any more benefit of the doubt from me.
Slashdot Mirror
There were days when Microsoft would innovate. Yes many will scoff, but Microsoft Office is an example.
Two of the three major Microsoft Office components were bought from other places.
Word came from Xerox as "Bravo", a GUI based word processor written for the Xerox Alto. Microsoft hired one of Bravo's writers, Charles Simonyi, to oversee development of Word, Multiplan and Excel. Word even used the same method of saving data as Bravo which became a privacy problem for several subsequent versions. Word (and Bravo) simply grabbed and recorded a snapshot of the RAM containing the document along with any other data in the RAM from other documents that passed through.
Power Point was bought from the developer Forethought, Inc. of Sunnyvale, California.
Excel grew out of Microsoft's Multiplan and was made possible by some of the first Macintoshes for which it was written.
PC Clones touched off the battle for desktop control between IBM and Microsoft. Clones were the undoing of IBM's hardware monopoly which allowed Microsoft, the cloner's choice of OS, to steam roller and dominate every technology... uh... oh... wait a minute... [calling broker]
How sad for those who didn't know NASA as the epicenter of so much technology we take for granted today. The NASA that could have actually done good like that has long been disassembled. Unfortunately, everyone thinks they just shoot rockets and nothing else. It was tragic to disband them.
Jeez... most of you think NASA is a monolithic outfit that just lights off rockets? They're not directly in the medical business but they've developed quite a few medical technologies. If you know how to use Google, you'll find a few in a couple of minutes. Some NASA veterans have gone on to specifically advance medical research. Trivialize them if you like but NASA's transfer of medical contributions are in daily use:
A lot of the science went into keeping humans alive where they shouldn't be. I'd say NASA knows a thing or two about the human body.
After Apollo was over, one of the greatest collection of scientists and researchers got their walking papers when NASA was disassembled. Why not take an agency like that and say "now, go cure cancer" or "figure out how to power the Nation for the next 1000 years"?
With the press talking about people who want to harm the U.S. using Facebook, Twitter, various IM systems etc, it almost makes sense to turn off one such avenue of abuse. It may be a "lead by example" thing... or a software bug.
...assuming the particular OS doesn't matter - it often doesn't between these two
Discarding the OS difference is quite an assumption and not easily done. As someone who had to maintain mixed Mac/PC/SGI/Linux environments, including every random thing clients walked in with, it's pretty clear which machines work and which don't. A Windows laptop walks in and you're standing there trying to get them connected to Wi-Fi, figure out why their email doesn't work, why they can't print etc. You never hear about a Mac laptop walking in because they just set up and start working. All of these people are essentially non-technical consumers.
The operating system makes all the difference, aside from the fact that most PC laptops I've encountered fell apart way sooner than the Macs.
Generally, the Windows machines are cranky, invasive, needy, rigid, arbitrary, vague and complex compared to OS X. That's why I have a Mac at home and why over 100 people who had their first exposure to Macs at my shop also have them at home now. Sure, some people work Windows machines better than others but it becomes a badge of pride and a platform to snipe at things that are different. "Pretty" might help get them in the door but working better and longer makes them more useful and practical.
The difference is real which is why Microsoft is so freaked out right now. The price difference isn't as real as many people try to maintain. RAM doesn't cost $500 a gig. Your $700 HP laptop has last year's processor, shared graphics, slow buss speed, poor battery performance and feels more like a scanner full of sand than a laptop. Apple doesn't sell into the junk computer market which is viewed as a major failing by people who would buy it. I wouldn't mind cheaper Macs but the price difference is well within the bounds of extra value.
And that Apples cost $$$ more.
Microsoft Marketing called - they want the 1990's back.
Seriously, if you compare the computers in question, the Mac is like a giant Swiss watch and the PC is the concrete patio tile of laptops. It's relative junk right out of the box.
No, Ballmer is from the Church of Microsoft and someone who I expect would dilute the positive values of Slashdot with juvenile rage when something they don't understand or can't control is mentioned. Ballmer has his own RDF and it's much larger than Jobs'.
iPhone!
iPhone!
iPhone!
iPhone!
iPhone!
There.
p.s. I don't have an iPhone either.
Ballmer? Is that you?
You don't get it, the phone company does.
Someone else in this thread said charge the perps $10 and split $5 with the phone company. Everyone gets paid. I like it.
you HOOKED THE DAMN BELL UP TO THE REMOTE CONTROL
Bells are a hazard of owning a phone but the operative word in the sentence is "unwanted" [bells].
Your solution requires warrants.
My solution requires air strikes.
You are NOT new here, are you #19540? Tnx for the comment.
It shouldn't take this long to figure out there's a pattern of abuse going on. Here's an alternate idea: let people dial something like #11 during a call which records the connection as an annoyance in a database. If a pattern of annoyance develops from a particular source, a red light lights on the FTC directors desk and he calls out the black helicopters.
Nah... I'd rather have the $5.00.
Your story is a little different [on the positive side] from everyone's earned impression of telemarketers. It still smacks of trying to call armed robbery where nobody actually gets killed "ethical".
...and have to give negative reports because of their inability to do their job because of morons who couldn't simply ask to be removed.
Poor baby. How's this for a negative report: you'll just put my name on a list for the next shell company and call me back. You've earned everyone's ire.
Anything which makes unwanted bells go off in my house by remote control is an invasion of my peace and quiet. Get some laws passed that allow the victim to hit #5 on their phone to charge the caller $5.00, then I'll be happy. If someone WANTS these calls, that's fine. Don't push #5. Most people don't want these calls and the victims should be able to instantly make these groups feel the pressure back in a big way.
Groups like The American Teleservices Association (rebranded to remove "Telemarketing" from their name) and The Direct Marketing Association talk U.S. Congressmen into passing laws which enable annoying, invasive and often fraudulent activities from this lowlife "industry". It's an industry to the extent that people get paid to ring bells in my house but jeez - earn a living some other way. Annoying everyone over the phone [I believe] is not an "industry" as the lobbyist associations claim. If there was money in ringing your doorbell and hitting people with buckets of paint ten times a day, I'm sure there would be a lobbyist group for that, too. Oh wait... that's PETA.
They can reuse that chunk of Skylab and save a little money.
Hi hi!...
The YL already thinks you're a juvenile - wait 'til she watches you QSY around the living room like an idiot.
You've heard of "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish"? Yes, Microsoft torpedoed Java. They were in court over it when Sun figured out Microsoft, their partner, was trying to hijack the language to be Windows only. For years, it was - and still is - confusing on whether to develop with Java or J++ or .NET or whatever flavor of Java-like implementation Microsoft trotted out. Many developers thought it puzzling that between Visual Studio 97 and Visual Studio 6.0 they were suddenly building incompatible Java. "Write Once, Run Anywhere" was torpedoed. Only because of developers who figured out what Microsoft was up to did Java survive this long. The upper hand is apparently going to .NET now. Compatibility with .NET is coming from reverse engineering the product (Mono), not through any help from Microsoft. They're only interested in you to install, deploy and maintain .NET, not know what's happening inside.
"You need Internet Explorer to use this web site". Why? Because someone from Microsoft took a CIO to lunch and dropped off their developer tools at no charge. Tada... instant entrapment. There are still some of those sites out there and browser compatibility is still an issue. IE and everything associated with it was sabotage.
SMTP is fine unless the payload is illegible. TNEF. Most all email clients can read it now that they've reverse engineered how to decode the glop inside.
Oh, don't get me wrong... from a corporate standpoint, it makes perfect sense to make sure all your competitors fail. It's hell on interoperability, though.
Old Buck, actually. Yes, we're replying to each other's posts. Thank the Maker we don't have to deal with properly decoding MS-ASCII... yet. I'll still bet my browser looks different than your browser.
Certainly you've seen Rob Weir's assessment that Microsoft's Office ODF Plugin was completely non-interoperable with ODF. Office writes its own flavor of ODF and fails the read and write tests in both directions where everything else appears to work, or is at least on the road to debugging. I doubt that was an accident. ODF has a "sow's ear" quality to it anyway, but this has to be deliberate from Microsoft. Bravo on their effort to turn ODF into MS-ODF.
If you're living solely inside the Microsoft castle walls, of course everything will work. Well, maybe most things. SNMP and SMTP are protocols, but if you stuff them with unexpected glop, there go your abilities to interoperate. Rewind the clock a few years and try using a platform other than Microsoft's to see web pages or read email. Sure, SMTP from Outlook and Exchange works but you'll be presented with this winmail.dat bullshit instead of an RFC compliant email message. Why do they do that? It's just an RTF attachment but that would be too standard.
Or take good old IE which worked well only with Microsoft's server extensions creating a client-server relationship with the "browser" instead of stateless exchange standards as intended. It's HTTP, right? It's what's inside that counts and it isn't standard and IE is only partially a "browser". Front Page wrote broken HTML that only IE could decode properly, somehow. The goal was that everyone would see a blank or broken page on the internet unless they were using a complete chain of Microsoft technology. Interoperability is not in Microsoft's interests. Never has been. There was plenty of overlap between browser standards and what Microsoft was doing, enough to see something on the Internet, but even that was crafted to make everyone else's browsers look illiterate. Eventually, everyone reverse engineered what they were doing but we're still digging out from it.
Java? You don't think Microsoft torpedoed Java? They released Visual Studio 6 which was Java sans cross platform functionality. No, Microsoft has done a lot to kill compatibility with their products. It's so crazy that people say Microsoft is open and standard. Yikes. They'll supply the programming tools, the protocols, the servers and the clients - even the operating system but nobody really knows what's going on inside. It's certainly very accessible and the tools are very good but it isn't standard. One patch and everything turns proprietary.
If Microsoft actually used standards, they would be compatible with 100% of everything else using standards. Instead, they're compatible with only 80% of everything else. Perl is one of the few areas that Microsoft is behaving. Good call on that. At least ActivePerl for Windows is just an effort to make Perl work better on Windows but Microsoft's actions with Perl are more puzzling than "normal" considering their track record.
It's another trap. Proprietary digital glop from Microsoft gave us an Internet that doesn't interoperate like it should - and they're still trying to poison everything that's not tied to their profits. No thanks.
Exactly. More proprietary digital glop from Microsoft.
Fair enough, I suppose. The year reference was a jab at the actual release date of Windows 7 but I believe it's coming out on time for better or worse. Functionally, I don't care what people use for their OS but in practical terms, I do care. I have to fix their problems and Windows is just plain more work. It has become the most needy, intrusive, arbitrary, vague, rigid and annoying OS out there. I don't choose to put up with it until it changes.
Yes, I know what RC means but it still doesn't necessarily mean it's ready for prime time. I've witnessed the rude surprises of friends who got a computer with the original Vista. It really was "what were they thinking?" time and every one of them ditched Vista and went back to XP on their new computer. The rest who seriously needed a new computer didn't even look at PCs anymore and bought Macs. Some even surprised me as they were dyed in the wool PC users who actually hid the fact they had an iMac at home and gave their daughter a MacBook for school.
I think Microsoft seriously misses the point of sliding menus and stacked displays, thinking they just need to keep up with the eye candy war. OS X has its warts but Apple's implementation of what Microsoft perceives as gratuitous zoomy effects actually imparts information to the user far better than Vista.
Friends outside of work aside, I introduced several Macs to our most virus laden abusive departments and the issues stopped. The security scares for OS X are out there somewhere but the issues we've had with PCs say it loud and clear which platform has the actual problems. The Mac experiment was extended to several other departments until even management recognized that buying a PC where something else would work was irresponsible. The users noticed as well. I've seen about 100 staffers drop kick their home PCs in favor of Macs over the last couple of years and they couldn't be happier. They'd be on the Mac at work and in a short time couldn't stand their home PCs anymore.
I'm also familiar with dying hardware and software faults - nothing is immune to that. However, working in a place with a few hundred workstations of mixed Mac-PC-SGI flavors, we had to wipe the heavy use PCs at least once a year, sometimes twice, to make them functional again. They'd slow down over time to 10 seconds between mouse clicks or slow drawing windows which punch a hole in the screen, then show the frame edges, then the buttons and then the window contents while you drum your fingers on the desk. These are strong workstations with XP Pro, dual processors and gigs of RAM. If reinstalling the OS fixes those issues, there's something wrong with the OS. That's buggy crap. The Macs would universally keep working just as they did out of the box until they were too old and slow to be useful, the oldest ones still in service after 10 years. I've got a 9 year old Dual 500MHz G4 running Leopard server and it works way better than it should (and Leopard is easy to install on unsupported hardware).
Maybe we're doing something wrong with the PCs, as I'm sure some will argue, but most of the admins I know of take it as normal. Wipe the registry and reinstall. Or, get something that works more often than not.
Yeah, I'd say I'm biased now because Microsoft has earned my bias. I'm still waiting to be pleasantly surprised and I'll have Windows 7 as soon as it's out, but they'll need to change their track record before they get any more benefit of the doubt from me.