SlashNOT

Matthew writes: Microsoft has launched a new website to provide the facts regarding its competition. In this site, Microsoft takes on IBM, Sun, Linux, and the U.S. Government to show how its products deliver lower costs than all competitors.

A study of the total cost to deliver health and human services, basic governance, and environmental protection show that Windows Server 2003 outperforms the U.S. Government by an average of 11% to 22%, potentially saving U.S. Tax payers (licensees of managed government services) nearly 500 Billion dollars per year.

Windows is most cost effective when you compare the environmental impact of feeding and housing 20 million public servants versus the resource consolidation that allows them to be obviated. Add to that the elimination of the Justice Department and its associated costs, and you’ve got savings you can take to Microsoft’s new online banking service.

Matthew writes: Most IT practitioners have long held that heavy users of PowerPoint are almost always blithering idiots, capable of understanding just three to five bulleted points per page. NASA has joined those ranks, accusing PowerPoint of making even engineers stupid.

Edward Tufte, perhaps the most famous information theorist specializing in presentation and author of “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information“—easily the most exciting book on the visual display of quantitative information ever written—has written a scathing 28 page pamphlet on the dangers of PowerPoint. He concludes that PowerPoint weakens verbal and spacial reasoning and corrupts statistical analyses. Thus, it’s a powerful sales tool, but horrifyingly mind numbing for decision-making.

Matthew writes: IT Job Candidate Rupert Helmsley was recently hired by Melville & Underwood under the mistaken presumption that he could help improve their diversity in hiring statistics because he wan an MCSE.

“It was quite embarrassing, really. At the end of the interview, they asked if I had anything else I wanted to tell them about myself. I said ‘oh, yes, I have MCSE.’. I meant to say ‘an MCSE’, but I was nervous in the interview, and it just came out that way.

They got quite animated at that point, and asked if it was difficult. I said, yes, it was difficult, but that the hard work was over now. Then they asked how I thought it would affect my job performance, and I said I thought that it would be an asset. I thought it was weird that they told me I was brave at that point, but I brushed it off.”

“Later that first week, one of the secretaries asked me ‘how long I had left’. I thought she meant with the laptop repair I was doing, so I said “a few hours, maybe tomorrow at the latest.’ Then she burst into tears. At that point I got suspicious, and asked her why she was crying. She threw her arms around me and said that I was a shining example of courage, and that she was glad she got to meet me before I passed on.”

“So now I take Thursdays and Fridays off for treatment, and pass off anything that might be stressful to my co-workers. Getting MCSE was the best career move I could have made.”

Matthew writes: The last Tablet PC user living in the wild has died, making the viability of the form factor doubtful. Tablet PCs are now represented only by small populations spread amongst zoos, museums, and at Microsoft’s corporate headquarters.

“It’s certainly a sad day. Every time we loose a unique form factor, it’s less diversity. Who knows what medicine could have been developed on the platform? We may just have lost the cure for cancer.” says computer industry analyst Seymour Cleverly.

“But let’s face it: The tablet features were a metabolic cost that made the species less nimble in the sales race than lower cost competitors in the straight laptop market. Couple that with the not-quite-ready-for-prime-time voice and handwriting recognition, and you’ve got a niche species that just wasn’t going to do well against the native species in the market area.

Microsoft has announced captive breeding programs with the goal of eventually re-establishing Tablet PCs in the wild.

Matthew writes: Microsoft has had a difficult time explaining the subtle differences between Office 2002 and 2003, giving little reason for customers to upgrade. But the new collaboration tools built in to office are quite compelling, and offer far more ways for workers and their managers to communicate while producing documents.

New for this edition of Office is Microsoft Water Cooler 2003, which captures informal non-business related information from multiple employees and randomly distributes it to others based on a “cool or not” factor associated with each user account.

My favorite feature is “Digital Crumple”, which allows a manager to review a document and decide to crumple it up and throw it at the author with a simple click of a button. The next time the reader checks their e-mail in Outlook, the document appears, seems to crumple, and then explodes on screen while being deleted from the user’s hard disk or network share.

The tools aren’t all top down: The “Digital Urine” feature allows employees to secretly markup e-mail from their bosses in ways that other employees of their access level and below will clearly see, but which remain hidden from anyone with a higher security clearance.

Matthew writes: In an effort to simplify patch management and reduce the number of security hotfixes to just one per day, Microsoft President Steve Ballmer has announced a new and simplified security updates mechanism for computers running Windows and office call the “Patch-A-Day” program.

“A Patch A Day Keeps the Hackers Away” is the slogan for this new campaign, whereby security hotfixes will be downloaded to computers every night between midnight and 8:00 a.m.

“Imagine waking up to a newly secured computer every morning, where the previous night’s vulnerabilities have been patched so that you don’t have to think about the process. During the night we will also scan and remove viruses, Trojans, and other malicious software such as unlicensed copies of Office and any open source software that might have found its way onto your computer. Windows users who elect not to participate in the program will not be able to connect to the Internet after December 31st of this year.”

Microsoft has announced that it is acquiring bankruptcy and scandal-plagued communications carrier MCI in an attempt to handle the extra bandwidth that the program will require. The acquisition will be handled as a 1:1000000 stock swap.

Matthew writes: The Department of Homeland Security has announced that the recent Windows RPC vulnerability that affects 90% of the computers attached to the Internet is likely to spawn the largest hacking attack the Internet has ever seen, giving hackers complete control of potentially millions of computers from which they could perpetrated targeted attacks.

Bill Gates, Chairman of Microsoft Corporation, appeared before congress to explain the vulnerability: “Microsoft is actively committed to assisting our world-wide user all your computer are belong to us in patching this vulnerability.” Mr. Gates then absentmindedly snatched a fly from the air with his tongue.

christopher baus writes: To satisify Microsoft’s relentless pursuit of desktop performance, Word 2003 will now include a major kernel mode reimplementation.

“After realizing performance gains in our server division by moving our IIS web server core to kernel mode, we realized this advanced server architecture could represent a major benefit our desktop users,” Yousee Bluemore, product manager for Microsoft Office explains. “In fact there is movement a foot to move more applications to kernel mode using our exclusive Direct Speed Architecture.”

“User mode was invented by Microsoft to keep less savy developers from crashing the entire system in the case of an application failure. This often unnecessary protection feature comes at a huge cost to performance. We will still support “user mode” for other developers which might not have Microsoft’s high quality standards.”

In a side note, Bluemore, claims that his team has also fixed the mysterious random image placement bug that has dumbfounded Word users since 1995. According to Bluemore, “Word 2003 has advanced image layout features that actually place images where the user draws the image box.”

Word 2003 is expected to ship in the first quarter of 2004.

Matthew writes: A copy of Microsoft Bob signed by Melinda Gates has been stolen from the Microsoft Museum of Microsoft, located directly under the Microsoft Employees Store in building 27 North at Microsoft’s Redmond campus. The piece is considered irreplaceable because while tens of thousands of copies of Microsoft Bob were printed, nobody else seems to have a copy.

Museum Curator Alfred Hickock (formerly of the Hormel Museum of Spam ) had this to say: “Microsoft Bob is unique. While millions of copies of Windows 3.11 for Workgroups still exist in their original boxes, it seems that nobody has retained a packaged copy of Microsoft Bob. That’s what makes this theft so heartbreaking. Children just won’t be able to see what kind of impact Bob had on the industry.”

Late breaking news: A copy of Microsoft Bob suddenly appeared on Ebay, in new sealed condition. Acting on a tip, Police raided the home of a Quebecois dealer in software antiquities and found the copy stolen from the Microsoft Museum. Also recovered were two OEM copies of Windows 2.0, a copy of MS-DOS 2.11, and a Picasso featuring a cubist rendition of a woman whose eyes resembled juxtaposed floppy disks.

Matthew writes: Steve Ballmer announced the latest edition of the software giant’s Windows XP line of desktop operating systems: Windows XP Homeless Edition.

“With XP Homeless, we’re closing the gap for a segment of society that has been historically underrepresented in the software market.”

“This version of XP is basically a limited version of the XP Home edition. We’ve taken out Movie Maker, Media Player, and Internet Explorer, and we’ve added PocketChange Pro, Outlook Grim, Microsoft Streets & Trips, Cardboard Creator, and Microsoft Train Tracks Simulator.”

“We’ve taken out a lot of the fluff and pizzazz so that we could lower the price to 2.50, or whatever you’ve got on you.”