Microsoft Battles Vista Perception With Prizes 342
LambAndMint writes "In what can only be described as an act of utter desperation to overcome Vista's mostly negative public perception issues, Microsoft has put together an online "Fact or Fiction" quiz about Windows Vista. Every person who submits themselves to Microsoft indoctrination gets a free shirt and the chance to win a $15,000 prize. Some of the supposed 'facts' will make you feel like you're reading a document from an alternate reality. Get ready to get a job as a computer salesman for a mass-market retailer as you go through the quiz."
Propaganda (Score:3, Interesting)
Prizes (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Cheat Sheet! No Silverlight Required! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Cheat Sheet! No Silverlight Required! (Score:3, Interesting)
Idiots.
Re:Why do they care about perception? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Why do they care about perception? (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.vistaforums.com/Forum/Topic13358-8-1.aspx [vistaforums.com]
Vienna - coming out next year. I think Vista will be swept under the carpet as soon as Vienna is out. In the meantime, SP3 for XP will be out soon, which apparently will make XP even faster than Vista on the same hardware. I still can't get over how slow Vista is at copying files off of USB drives, DVDs and networks.
Re:Cheat Sheet! No Silverlight Required! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Cheat Sheet! No Silverlight Required! (Score:3, Interesting)
Very misleading (Score:4, Interesting)
The Fact or Fiction [microsoft.com] site was put together by Microsoft Australia for "technology professionals" and aims to help Windows tech experts sell Vista to their customers. This is not oriented toward the general public, and frankly it doesn't look "desperate" to me.
Sure Vista has been a disappointment, but not everything Microsoft does is evidence of this.
Re:No, 100% safe. (Score:5, Interesting)
Have you ever talked with Microsoft marketing people?
Sure did, and was sharp that day.
We were at an internal technology presentation, showing off what we do. Being security, we had our BSD, UNIX loggers and appliances on screens for everyone to see. We had a "tail -f syslog" and other logs just a moving every bad event across the screen in real time. Many called it similar to matrix.
Along comes the CFO and the Microsoft sales guy. And asked me, I haven't seen that before what is it. I said it was OpenBSD firewall logs on the vendor net. He said "OpenBSD what? That isn't an OS, is it? BSD what? Is that LSD?" with a smile (He knew).
I looked at our CFO and said, OpenBSD, the operating system we use to keep our Microsoft systems from getting wormed, infected and controlled by others. We also use it for firewalls, detection and system login because they cost less, run longer and don't requires the costly hand care to keep them going as does Microsoft Windows. We don't have the staff, software or capital budget for Microsoft.
Rubbed it right in. My manager heard from the CFO 2 days later, he was impressed and got a second tour with my manager. And a budget increase and authorization to use BSD and open source, in writing to the executive staff.
Re:Cheat Sheet! No Silverlight Required! (Score:4, Interesting)
Try telling that to my parents, whose HP printer and scanner won't work with the copy of Vista that was preinstalled on the Dell they bought a few months ago. There's nothing wrong with the hardware, but because the Win2K/XP drivers for those devices won't work with Vista and HP hasn't gotten around to writing Vista drivers for them (and, in the case of their ScanJet 4p, probably never will), they're stuck with some POS Dell all-in-one that should work with Vista, but usually doesn't because of the craptastic drivers that came with it.
(If there's a silver lining in here, it's that they won't ever buy a Dell again. I tried talking them into buying a Mac, but they wouldn't listen to me. Dad was worried about not being able to open Office files; that there are plenty of apps for the Mac that open Office files (including...um...Office [microsoft.com] itself) didn't appear to register.)
Re:Propaganda (Score:3, Interesting)
And a bad one.
Here:
Black screen. Only. Okay, NoScript pops up. I *allow* Microsoft.com (pun)
Now the black screen is still black, with a tiny icon on top: Get Silverlight. I *click*.
A full screen pops up inviting me to download. "Install Microsoft Silverlight now for a
better Web experience". I click. "Download Silverlight.exe" 'OK'.
Yes, that's only bad. My browser identifies as "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; SunOS i86pc; en-US; rv:1.8.1.10) Gecko/20071230 Firefox/2.0.0.10". Any well-done site would inform me that I am not yet a convert, and point me to http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/Search.aspx?displaylang=en [microsoft.com] for reference.
Re:No, 100% safe. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Cheat Sheet! No Silverlight Required! (Score:1, Interesting)
Other condition (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Good luck with your free shirt... (Score:3, Interesting)
You mean you're an Microsoft OEM builder in Australia, and you read Slashdot, and you were interested in the free shirt, but then after finding out you'd need to install yet another Microsoft product (after being an OEM builder mind you) you decided it wasn't worth it?
Re:All I read was... (Score:3, Interesting)
Do you have a reference for this? I did a quick Google for activex sandbox [google.com.au] without much luck.
The top hit is this rather dated page [princeton.edu] which says:
You have two choices: either accept the program and let it do whatever it wants on your machine, or reject it completely.
That was written in 1997 and maybe (most likely) they've changed things since then, but it definitely wasn't written with a sandbox in mind. Actually, most or all of the links in that search date from the late nineties.
Changing the search to "activex security" and we get a nice page on MSDN [microsoft.com] that says:
No idea when that was written or if it still applies. So, do you have any references on this subject?
Time for some anecdotal "evidence". A week or so ago I was asked to upload a large (2+ gig) debug trace file to Microsoft's tech support site, and doing that made use of an ActiveX control (I tried using Firefox with the "simple upload" option but I just got a generic and uninformative server error). Given the way in which it sat there saying "Connecting..." 99% of the time with the occasional momentary change to say it was transferring data, I'm sure this wasn't using a plain HTTP POST file upload. Which means this control was able to read the zip file on my desktop and upload it to the site.
Even more disturbing was the effect it had on my RDP session. I used 7-Zip to zip it with maximum compression and since that was gonna take a while I went home, and connected to my desktop later that night to do the upload. Set it going and started doing some other stuff and noticed my keyboard was being weird: almost every keystroke was being duplicated. I've got a Microsoft wireless keyboard and sometimes it does odd things like repeat a keystroke a bunch of times, but this was just twice and for everything. So I closed the IE window and disconnected the RDP session and re-connected -- back to normal.
Started the upload up again and sure enough, same problem. Disconnected the RDP session thinking maybe it was just a bit confused by the crappy uploader ActiveX page and logging in again would reset it. Went to reconnect, and found the keystrokes were being duplicated even on the login dialog! At that point I gave up and just left it for the weekend.
If an ActiveX control can somehow screw up key processing for the RDP login dialog, then I have a tough time believing it's actually sandboxed in any meaningful way. If you have references to the contrary, I'd love to see them.