Microsoft Fires all Humans

After reading this article the only way Microsoft could afford not to cause any "Human Error" only by firing all humans, if there were any there in the first place!
"Microsoft Corp. said late yesterday that last weekend's failure of the antipiracy process it requires of Windows XP and Vista was due to "human error" and shouldn't be called an "outage" since the servers didn't go off-line. The company also promised that changes have been made to avoid a repeat."
May be this guy got into the server room!

Excerpt came from a computerworld's article.

WGA runs amok

A problem with Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) over the weekend caused some users to mistakenly have their copies of Windows XP and Vista labeled as fraudulent. We have spoken about this before and it is also the only reason that I would not go Vista way!

Earlier WGA blog reported that they 've been receiving reports on our forum and through customer service starting last night that Windows Vista validations have been failing on genuine systems. It looks now as though the issue has been resolved and validations are being processed successfully. But they did not explain why.

The same article also mentioned that people with validation problems, who received an incorrect validation response can fix their system by revalidating on their site (http://www.microsoft.com/genuine). They encourage anyone who received a validation failure to revalidate and after successfully revalidating any affected system should be rebooted to ensure the genuine-only features are restored.

A newer article explains "The issue with processing validations began Friday afternoon at about 3:30 PM Pacific time and through a combination of posts to our forum and customer support the issue was discovered by evening. By about 11:15 AM Pacific on Saturday morning the issue affecting the validation service had been analyzed and resolved such that validations were again being processed properly. Our data shows that fewer than 12,000 systems were affected worldwide and that many of those have already revalidated and are fixed. This is encouraging news but we want to emphasize that one bad customer experience is one too many and that we're committed to learning from this experience and working to prevent this type of event from occurring again."

Good luck to those whe were foolish enough to follow the path of WGA. May be it is time you tried out like ubuntu! and Open Office and certainly it will not cost $1000 and no worries about WGA konking off!

A company spokesperson told that the problems lasted for 20 hours, stretching from Friday afternoon into late Saturday morning. The company is still determining the exact cause, although marketing general manager Joe Williams attributed the problem to a server failure on a company blog.

During the 20-hour outage, users who attempted to re-validate their copies of Windows were told that their software could not be validated. For Windows Vista Users, failing the validation check puts the system in a reduced functionality mode, disabling the Windows Aero interface, the Ready Boost cache utility, and non-critical security procedures in Windows Defender.

Tags: WGA, M$, ubuntu, Open Office, WGA runs amok

If you thought WGA was a problem, Vista brings more stuff to harvest your Information!

I have written a countless times about XP and WGA. I was not happy with the way M$ dealing with a lot of issues. So were countless others. But now those worries seems to be simple compared to what Windows Vista brings in.
I read the article at SoftPedia and have not investigated any of the statements but you don't need to as I Softpedia article follows simple logic to explain the facts.
So my hotmail account size might drop as M$ has to store all these data from 60million people it sold Vista so far!
But why worry? Well, it's written in the Vista license agreement. "By using these features, you consent to the transmission of this information. Microsoft does not use the information to identify or contact you."

Tags: M$, WGA, WGA 2.0, Vista, harvest user data