Greenwich Mean Time, the company behind the increasingly popular Check 2000 range of Y2K remedial software for PCs, has slammed the recent release of Office 2000 from Microsoft...

Link (highlight the link, press Ctrl-C, move to browser Location window, press Ctrl-V)

http://www.currents.net/newstoday/99/06/29/news1.html

-- vbProg (vbProg@MicrosoftAndIntelSuck.com), July 05, 1999

Answers

vbProg,

Microsuck has done more that any other company to make Y2K severe, and they are making megabucks off of it. Bill Gates for Public Enemy # 1.

-- Harb (harb@pre.com), July 05, 1999.

heeheeheeheeheeheeheee, someday, just desserts
The Mac RULES !!

-- Ashton & Leska in Cascadia (allaha@earthlink.net), July 05, 1999.

I find it funny when Mac people start flaming MIcrosoft and then you tell them that that they put over 300 million into Apple some 4 years ago.

-- O.J. (OJSimpson@jailhouse.com), July 05, 1999.

It's not funny and it's not mere o/s wars. From "Computer Weekly", one of the UK's main IT industry papers, 1st. July.

MICROSOFT'S GIFT-WRAPPED MACHINE GUN Karl Fielder: "Ground Zero" column, Computer Weekly, 1st July 1999

[cut: intro] "What happened this week? Well, it just got worse. To put it simply, Microsoft released Office 2000, which now allows any user who has Windows 98 or NT to set their own date window. No, a date window isn't a wood framed thing that you just might consider jumping out of next year. It is technobabble for a technique that allows PC users like you or me to enter dates in YY format and have the computer automatically guess the century.

""Good game, good game" you might say. But it isn't a game. Over the past three years I have been trying to get the inhabitants of the Seattle Space Needle (aka the ivory tower) to understand the need to remove all YY possibilities from their software, while they fly in the opposite direction.

"So now my friend Ethel in accounts can set her PC so that any date less than 49 is assumed to be in the next century (and hence my father has not been born yet). She shares access to the firm's central personnel file with Mike in pensions, who uses the default pivot date of 29. THe end result is that any input or output data depends on whose PC is using it.

"Lets see if you can follow my logic. Ether enters a new employee's date of birth as 22/12/45 [note to USA readers: in UK we use dd/mm/yy]. THe person is 54 years old, but, unbeknown to Ethel, this valid date is stored as 2049 and hence the person is not included in Mike's company pension scheme. Easy to unravel? Sure - if you know what to look for.

"And who is to blame? well, of course, it's you and me. The Software Industry makes machine guns that come gift-wrapped with a lovely paper warning that says that they are not responsible if you shoot someone. With this most recent news, they have gone one further, putting 99 bullets into the box, but still insisting it's our fault if we shoot one another.

"Maybe I'm the mad one here. Maybe we don't need to share data with one another. MAybe the Internet never really happened. Maybe I can go back to sleep ...."

End quote, typed by myself so pardon any typos.

My view: windowing was always a dangerous solution. It can be made to work, provided that the window is absolutly permanently synchronized between all participating machines in a company (or other organisational unit), and provided all data-exchange between different units use YYYY so that window differences can't cause trouble. It must be something that only a trusted and technically competent person can change, i.e. at least as highly protected against alteration as the password/authorization file!

Enter Microsoft, who appear to have decided to allow any user to blow a hole in this plan. I'd call this criminal irresponsibilty, just as bad as would be the release of a new version with a "feature" that allows anyone to log in as VANDAL password HUN and immediately reformat every disk on the servers he's connected to! Somewhere down the line, it will cost, in lives not just money.

-- Nigel Arnot (nra@maxwell.ph.kcl.ac.uk), July 06, 1999.

And with "windowing", you have to make sure that you (your company) and all the outside entities are also in sync.

Microsoft sucks.

Part of my handle is Intel sucks. The reason is that new chips (Pentium III) each have a unique ident code burned in. Supposedly can be disabled, but already has been shown that it can be remotely re-enabled. What's the problem, you ask? Nothing, if Big Brother and other assorted snoops and extortionists (taxation is extortion) didn't exist.

-- vbProg (vbProg@MicrosoftAndIntelSuck.com), July 06, 1999.