Vista - Windows Vista RTM

I am a Technet Plus Subscriber and have been trying to download the Vista RTM
that was just released. However, once I sign on to technet and click the Get
It Now link, it just takes me back to the Technet home page and never takes
me to a download link. Can someone tell me what I'm doing wrong or how to
access the Windows Vista RTM version. Thanks.

I am not a Tecnet subscriber, but this sounds like the same thing the MSDN
site was doing when the servers were overloaded.

The best advice I can give you is to keep trying again every hour or so and
you might want to try in the early morning hours.

Norm
"Tritechits" <Tritechits@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:2A96755D-2619-4292-9177-5404CFF775E7@microsoft.com...
>I am a Technet Plus Subscriber and have been trying to download the Vista
>RTM
> that was just released. However, once I sign on to technet and click the
> Get
> It Now link, it just takes me back to the Technet home page and never
> takes
> me to a download link. Can someone tell me what I'm doing wrong or how to
> access the Windows Vista RTM version. Thanks.

Contact Technet via

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/contactus.mspx

or refer via emailing at this link Attention to:

Kathy Dixon, Sr. Product Manager
TechNet Plus subscriptions


https://blogs.technet.com/technetplu...s/contact.aspx

Good luck,

MSFT Trades Swag to MVPs for Support, Defense, and Blind Allegiance


No connection between SUVs, Iraq fiasco that exponentially brings filled
cofins to Dover, an apathetic America Public who reads next to NOTHING, and
a Congress that has mastered the art of jerking itself off. House and Senate
both excel at this.


>I am a Technet Plus Subscriber and have been trying to download the Vista
>RTM
> that was just released. However, once I sign on to technet and click the
> Get
> It Now link, it just takes me back to the Technet home page and never
> takes
> me to a download link. Can someone tell me what I'm doing wrong or how to
> access the Windows Vista RTM version. Thanks.

What's up with this MVP negativity stuff?

Most MVP's have been supporting Microsoft well before they became MVP's.


Bill F. (former MVP)

"MSFT Trades Swag to MVPs for Support, Defense, and Blind Allegiance"
<mvpshills@fanboys.net> wrote in message
news:egX5flzFHHA.1216@TK2MSFTNGP05.phx.gbl...
> Contact Technet via
>
> http://www.microsoft.com/technet/contactus.mspx
>
> or refer via emailing at this link Attention to:
>
> Kathy Dixon, Sr. Product Manager
> TechNet Plus subscriptions
>
>
> https://blogs.technet.com/technetplu...s/contact.aspx
>
> Good luck,
>
> MSFT Trades Swag to MVPs for Support, Defense, and Blind Allegiance
>
>
> No connection between SUVs, Iraq fiasco that exponentially brings filled
> cofins to Dover, an apathetic America Public who reads next to NOTHING,
> and a Congress that has mastered the art of jerking itself off. House and
> Senate both excel at this.
>
>
>>I am a Technet Plus Subscriber and have been trying to download the Vista
>>RTM
>> that was just released. However, once I sign on to technet and click the
>> Get
>> It Now link, it just takes me back to the Technet home page and never
>> takes
>> me to a download link. Can someone tell me what I'm doing wrong or how
>> to
>> access the Windows Vista RTM version. Thanks.
>

I fully appreciate the value of MVPs and their sites Bill. I've been a
beneficiary of them for years, but I've also passed them onto hundreds if
not thousands of people who aren't in the same kinds of lops as people who
huit the newsgroups or what I would call "windows enthusiasts" (the many
people who want to be efficient pc users but who have a lot of other
interests and may not spend as much time.

They have also been doing "bump and runs "on me when I am constructively
critical of MSFT. A bump and run is to use either the MVP access or get
someone who can to block posts in response. That's the height of cowardice
and it's exactly what Mike Hall MVP did early yesterday morning.

But ***lately here, I've seen a lot of self-righteous ellite, effete
condescending behavior from some MVPs (not all and never someone like Colin
who has done a remarkable job sharing as much information as he possibly
can)
and so I thought I would recognize it. It came as a response to any
criticism at all concernig MSFT, and I've had counteless ways to see that
while most of the MFST personnel I know in person would never be offended by
critiism that was constructive but there seems to be a special type of
genetics that seems to be in the makeup of the people at the Redmond campus
who consider themselves so elite and so special that they lash out at any
hint of criticism that comes their way in a variety of permutations and
combinations.
If you look at these "unofficial" guidelines from Robert McLaw's
http://weblogs.asp.net/rmclaws/archi...03/396941.aspx
many of which should apply to anyone posting, I see a lot of the don'ts
violated and a lot of smug posts by some MVPs as to

Fixes--that's new I didn't see that in the past where instead of just
telling them the obvious fix that most of us could come up with who have
been kicking Windoz around for a while giving them a smug snub.

This self-righteous obsession and hand ringing of MVPs and others (I can
understand the others getting a convoluted thought process going on this but
MVPs lol) with people getting Betas off Torrents or wherever. That's just
insane. Microsoft could not possibly care that someone has a beta vista on a
box. I don't care how exclusive someeone tried to make a TBT on a group
feel--basically besides Connect content the only thing they didn't want
public were newsgroup posts and most of the time I nave no idea why.

My philosophy is life is short and if someone could learn from something why
not share it. You're MSFT; don't you want to enable as many people to become
better Windows users as possible in the spirit of Gates giving computers to
school systems or money to school or helping cure a disease that hasn't been
cured by the medical establishment? So who the hell cares if Bozo and Suzy
download build whatever from a torrent--it's a frigging beta and although
MSFT did decide to get paid for shipping and downloads a bit there at the
end with Office Betas, basically betas aren't being sold in stores to my
knowledge--although I know some people were nuts enough to buy some on Ebay
or Craig's list or wherever (but fools and their money are soon parted and
often).

I didn't understand for the life of me as well why the many Beta chats
weren't immediately posted on a public site or sites to enlighten the
masses--I saw all of them and I didn't see any downside to MSFT but they
haven't done it. Jill Zoeller has a few on her site; Josh has some on his
Windows Connected site, and there are probably others but why would you
withold an educational resource like that. People spent time putting the
chats on; why not share the learning material. I suppose I could post links
to all of them here.

They like to be in control at Redmond. They turn over personal information
to DOJ and they lie about it. They hire people like Ralph Reed at $27,000
per month--that will cover Vista Ultimate and Office Enterprise, Small
Business Server and Longhorn Server and Visual Studio Premium and the 27
associated apps and servers with Office 2007 and valet parking in Seattle
for a year and more.

Reed directly partnered with Abramoff and Tom Delay to enslave women in the
Marianas islands like some of the more gruesome "Without A Trace" episodes.
And don't tell me that Ballmer with a few billion and Gates with a few
biillion and all those millionaires like Raikes, Kevin Johnson, Ozzie,
Sinofsky, Mehdi, Chrapty etc. can't make a fe and I mean very damn few phone
calls and find this out. They didn't care. And I've documented what I just
said several times on this group.

I find this disingenous and dishonest behavior a real constrast with the
arrogant elitist attitude that comes out of Redmond. I think it should be
represented.

If you think when MSN turns searches over to the Chinese governent they
don't do it so they can sell software and the consequences to the people in
China be damned, you're really naive. That's blood money just as diamonds
are in the new movie.

They also refused to fix a ton of bugs, and they get absolutely livid when
the subject is mentioned that they know very well. Their business types like
Di Valerio go out of their way to screw their core home customers by making
damn sure that the OEMs that sell what is projected to be about 400 million
Vista OEM preloaded desktops (there was a 20% increase in MSFT profits last
quarter from OEM preinstalls and a 20% decrease from retail sales of
windows). They take this out on a very unsuspecting public who doesn't
unfortunately backup well (we all hope that One Care and Vista will
encourage them to do that although inexplicably they dumb down the backup).
It made me really smile when I saw Jill Zoeller write that they dumb down
backup in Vista because they didn't think users were savy enough to use a
browse button to backup files so they didn't allow backup at the file level
and I couldn't help thinking if Jill can find lipstick in her purse, then a
user is savvy enough to use a browse button). Give me a real break there.
I'm betting Jill could find the lipstick as well. And if she can, then
users could have benefited by a backup that backs up at the file level.

Regardless, the one care team had research and Redmond Vista/MSFT has
research that as high as 65-80% of users in homes don't backup. They don't
use all the convenient imaging methods as regulars do here. Or for whatever
reason they don't simply burn but the advent of wide spread DVD burning
should make this much easier hopefully.

Ah loves it when the MVPs defend mediocrity for Swag.

Wake up America. You have a sociopathic, psychotic moron playing with the
lives of thousands of your fellow Americans. Whatcha gonna do--put yo head
in the sand? If it was your Vista booting, or your One Care working, you'd
be expending a helluva lot more effort wouldn't you--come on--you know
that's right unless you're from predominantly small town ethnic miinority
America that has their sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, and grandmothers
and grandfathers actually being redeployed at stake:

This is how it is. Typical American sheep: Uh Uh Uh isn't civil war don't
it have to have Lincoln and Grant and cannons and a Confederate flag in it
and like uniforms? Ah gotta go shoppin' for some bling and a duo core.

Frank Rich Has He Started Talking to the Walls? Sunday December 3, 2006 New
York Times

IT turns out we've been reading the wrong Bob Woodward book to understand
what's going on with President Bush. The text we should be consulting
instead is "The Final Days," the Woodward-Bernstein account of Richard Nixon
talking to the portraits on the White House walls while Watergate demolished
his presidency. As Mr. Bush has ricocheted from Vietnam to Latvia to Jordan
in recent weeks, we've witnessed the troubling behavior of a president who
isn't merely in a state of denial but is completely untethered from reality.
It's not that he can't handle the truth about Iraq. He doesn't know what the
truth is.

The most startling example was his insistence that Al Qaeda is primarily
responsible for the country's spiraling violence. Only a week before Mr.
Bush said this, the American military spokesman on the scene, Maj. Gen.
William Caldwell, called Al Qaeda "extremely disorganized" in Iraq, adding
that "I would question at this point how effective they are at all at the
state level." Military intelligence estimates that Al Qaeda makes up only 2
percent to 3 percent of the enemy forces in Iraq, according to Jim
Miklaszewski of NBC News. The bottom line: America has a commander in chief
who can't even identify some 97 percent to 98 percent of the combatants in a
war that has gone on longer than our involvement in World War II.

But that's not the half of it. Mr. Bush relentlessly refers to Iraq's "unity
government" though it is not unified and can only nominally govern. (In
Henry Kissinger's accurate recent formulation, Iraq is not even a nation "in
the historic sense.") After that pseudo-government's prime minister, Nuri
al-Maliki, brushed him off in Amman, the president nonetheless declared him
"the right guy for Iraq" the morning after. This came only a day after The
Times's revelation of a secret memo by Mr. Bush's national security adviser,
Stephen Hadley, judging Mr. Maliki either "ignorant of what is going on" in
his own country or disingenuous or insufficiently capable of running a
government. Not that it matters what Mr. Hadley writes when his boss is
impervious to facts.

In truth the president is so out of it he wasn't even meeting with the right
guy. No one doubts that the most powerful political leader in Iraq is the
anti-American, pro-Hezbollah cleric Moktada al-Sadr, without whom Mr. Maliki
would be on the scrap heap next to his short-lived predecessors, Ayad Allawi
and Ibrahim al-Jaafari. Mr. Sadr's militia is far more powerful than the
official Iraqi army that we've been helping to "stand up" at hideous cost
all these years. If we're not going to take him out, as John McCain proposed
this month, we might as well deal with him directly rather than with Mr.
Maliki, his puppet. But our president shows few signs of recognizing Mr.
Sadr's existence.

In his classic study, "The Great War and Modern Memory," Paul Fussell wrote
of how World War I shattered and remade literature, for only a new language
of irony could convey the trauma and waste. Under the auspices of Mr. Bush,
the Iraq war is having a comparable, if different, linguistic impact: the
more he loses his hold on reality, the more language is severed from its
meaning altogether.

When the president persists in talking about staying until "the mission is
complete" even though there is no definable military mission, let alone one
that can be completed, he is indulging in pure absurdity. The same goes for
his talk of "victory," another concept robbed of any definition when the
prime minister we are trying to prop up is allied with Mr. Sadr, a man who
wants Americans dead and has many scalps to prove it. The newest
hollowed-out Bush word to mask the endgame in Iraq is "phase," as if the
increasing violence were as transitional as the growing pains of a surly
teenager. "Phase" is meant to drown out all the unsettling debate about two
words the president doesn't want to hear, "civil war."

When news organizations, politicians and bloggers had their own civil war
about the proper usage of that designation last week, it was highly
instructive - but about America, not Iraq. The intensity of the squabble
showed the corrosive effect the president's subversion of language has had
on our larger culture. Iraq arguably passed beyond civil war months ago into
what might more accurately be termed ethnic cleansing or chaos. That we were
fighting over "civil war" at this late date was a reminder that wittingly or
not, we have all taken to following Mr. Bush's lead in retreating from
English as we once knew it.

It's been a familiar pattern for the news media, politicians and the public
alike in the Bush era. It took us far too long to acknowledge that the
"abuses" at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere might be more accurately called
torture. And that the "manipulation" of prewar intelligence might be more
accurately called lying. Next up is "pullback," the Iraq Study Group's
reported euphemism to stave off the word "retreat" (if not retreat itself).

In the case of "civil war," it fell to a morning television anchor, Matt
Lauer, to officially bless the term before the "Today" show moved on to such
regular fare as an update on the Olsen twins. That juxtaposition of Iraq and
post-pubescent eroticism was only too accurate a gauge of how much the word
"war" itself has been drained of its meaning in America after years of
waging a war that required no shared sacrifice. Whatever you want to label
what's happening in Iraq, it has never impeded our freedom to dote on the
Olsen twins.

I have not been one to buy into the arguments that Mr. Bush is stupid or is
the sum of his "Bushisms" or is, as feverish Internet speculation
periodically has it, secretly drinking again. I still don't. But I have
believed he is a cynic - that he could always distinguish between truth and
fiction even as he and Karl Rove sold us their fictions. That's why, when
the president said that "absolutely, we're winning" in Iraq before the
midterms, I just figured it was more of the same: another expedient lie to
further his partisan political ends.

But that election has come and gone, and Mr. Bush is more isolated from the
real world than ever. That's scary. Neither he nor his party has anything to
gain politically by pretending that Iraq is not in crisis. Yet Mr. Bush
clings to his delusions with a near-rage - watch him seethe in his press
conference with Mr. Maliki - that can't be explained away by sheer
stubbornness or misguided principles or a pat psychological theory. Whatever
the reason, he is slipping into the same zone as Woodrow Wilson did when
refusing to face the rejection of the League of Nations, as a sleepless
L.B.J. did when micromanaging bombing missions in Vietnam, as Ronald Reagan
did when checking out during Iran-Contra. You can understand why Jim Webb,
the Virginia senator-elect with a son in Iraq, was tempted to slug the
president at a White House reception for newly elected members of Congress.
Mr. Bush asked "How's your boy?" But when Mr. Webb replied, "I'd like to get
them out of Iraq," the president refused to so much as acknowledge the
subject. Maybe a timely slug would have woken him up.

Or at least sounded an alarm. Some two years ago, I wrote that Iraq was
Vietnam on speed, a quagmire for the MTV generation. Those jump cuts are
accelerating now. The illusion that America can control events on the ground
is just that: an illusion. As the list of theoretical silver bullets for
Iraq grows longer (and more theoretical) by the day - special envoy,
embedded military advisers, partition, outreach to Iran and Syria,
Holbrooke, international conference, NATO - urgent decisions have to be made
by a chief executive who is in touch with reality (or such is the minimal
job description). Otherwise the events in Iraq will make the Decider's
decisions for him, as indeed they are doing already.

The joke, history may note, is that even as Mr. Bush deludes himself that he
is bringing "democracy" to Iraq, he is flouting democracy at home. American
voters could not have delivered a clearer mandate on the war than they did
on Nov. 7, but apparently elections don't register at the White House unless
the voters dip their fingers in purple ink. Mr. Bush seems to think that the
only decision he had to make was replacing Donald Rumsfeld and the mission
of changing course would be accomplished.

Tell that to the Americans in Anbar Province. Back in August the chief of
intelligence for the Marines filed a secret report - uncovered by Thomas
Ricks of The Washington Post - concluding that American troops "are no
longer capable of militarily defeating the insurgency in al-Anbar." That
finding was confirmed in an intelligence update last month. Yet American
troops are still being tossed into that maw, and at least 90 have been
killed there since Labor Day, including five marines, ages 19 to 24, around
Thanksgiving.

Civil war? Sectarian violence? A phase? This much is certain: The dead in
Iraq don't give a damn what we call it.









"Bill Frisbee" <wfrisbee@comcastx.net> wrote in message
news:exhz2Z0FHHA.3304@TK2MSFTNGP05.phx.gbl...
> What's up with this MVP negativity stuff?
>
> Most MVP's have been supporting Microsoft well before they became MVP's.
>
>
> Bill F. (former MVP)
>
> "MSFT Trades Swag to MVPs for Support, Defense, and Blind Allegiance"
> <mvpshills@fanboys.net> wrote in message
> news:egX5flzFHHA.1216@TK2MSFTNGP05.phx.gbl...
>> Contact Technet via
>>
>> http://www.microsoft.com/technet/contactus.mspx
>>
>> or refer via emailing at this link Attention to:
>>
>> Kathy Dixon, Sr. Product Manager
>> TechNet Plus subscriptions
>>
>>
>> https://blogs.technet.com/technetplu...s/contact.aspx
>>
>> Good luck,
>>
>> MSFT Trades Swag to MVPs for Support, Defense, and Blind Allegiance
>>
>>
>> No connection between SUVs, Iraq fiasco that exponentially brings filled
>> cofins to Dover, an apathetic America Public who reads next to NOTHING,
>> and a Congress that has mastered the art of jerking itself off. House and
>> Senate both excel at this.
>>
>>
>>>I am a Technet Plus Subscriber and have been trying to download the Vista
>>>RTM
>>> that was just released. However, once I sign on to technet and click
>>> the Get
>>> It Now link, it just takes me back to the Technet home page and never
>>> takes
>>> me to a download link. Can someone tell me what I'm doing wrong or how
>>> to
>>> access the Windows Vista RTM version. Thanks.
>>
>

You seem to forget MVP's are human too...


As for elitism... go check out the Apple newsgroups, or god help us all,
some of the Linux newsgroups.

MVP's are not perfect, some of them are not the perfect people.

Some of them, and quite a few in this newsgroup in particular have gone well
out of there way to support new users of a new operating system. Of course,
in that process we have a few public knuckleheads that seem to have nothing
better to do than post vile untruths about Vista and trying to force the
opinion that Vista is crap on everyone. With stuff like that, I think its
understandable that one or two people snap.


Heck I know I'm not the nicest person in the world to the trolls around
here, but I will ALWAYS go out of my way to help out people in whatever mode
I can.

I also see a lot of people here blaming Microsoft for things like lack of
drivers, older software not well supported under Vista (even stuff that has
been upgraded by the 3rd party dozens of times the past 4 years), so yeah,
some of us are going to defend Microsoft. Why shouldn't we?

No, Vista isn't perfect, no human writen software product is. Is Vista
better than XP? You bet it is. Is it the best OS out there? Depends on what
you need it for, but it could be for some things.


As for Microsoft getting "paid" for the Office Beta, actually, that was to
pay for the huge bandwidth Microsoft used to distribute the Beta, or to send
you a nice DVD.

Why were the Beta chats posted publicly? You have seen the trolls around
here right? Enough said on that.

I'm not even going to comment on some of your tin-foil stuff... in today's
world every time you touch the internet, you ain't private anymore. You want
privacy? Throw your computer away.

You want perfection? It simply doesn't exist.

So do us all a favor, lay off the MVP's they do a job a lot of people don't
and they typically do a damn good job at it.

Bill F.


"MSFT Trades Swag to MVPs for Support, Defense, and Blind Allegiance"
<mvpendorsementsforswag.net> wrote in message
news:O03GT71FHHA.1240@TK2MSFTNGP03.phx.gbl...
>I fully appreciate the value of MVPs and their sites Bill. I've been a
>beneficiary of them for years, but I've also passed them onto hundreds if
>not thousands of people who aren't in the same kinds of lops as people who
>huit the newsgroups or what I would call "windows enthusiasts" (the many
>people who want to be efficient pc users but who have a lot of other
>interests and may not spend as much time.
>
> They have also been doing "bump and runs "on me when I am constructively
> critical of MSFT. A bump and run is to use either the MVP access or get
> someone who can to block posts in response. That's the height of
> cowardice and it's exactly what Mike Hall MVP did early yesterday morning.
>
> But ***lately here, I've seen a lot of self-righteous ellite, effete
> condescending behavior from some MVPs (not all and never someone like
> Colin who has done a remarkable job sharing as much information as he
> possibly can)
> and so I thought I would recognize it. It came as a response to any
> criticism at all concernig MSFT, and I've had counteless ways to see that
> while most of the MFST personnel I know in person would never be offended
> by critiism that was constructive but there seems to be a special type
> of genetics that seems to be in the makeup of the people at the Redmond
> campus who consider themselves so elite and so special that they lash out
> at any hint of criticism that comes their way in a variety of permutations
> and combinations.
> If you look at these "unofficial" guidelines from Robert McLaw's
> http://weblogs.asp.net/rmclaws/archi...03/396941.aspx
> many of which should apply to anyone posting, I see a lot of the don'ts
> violated and a lot of smug posts by some MVPs as to
>
> Fixes--that's new I didn't see that in the past where instead of just
> telling them the obvious fix that most of us could come up with who have
> been kicking Windoz around for a while giving them a smug snub.
>
> This self-righteous obsession and hand ringing of MVPs and others (I can
> understand the others getting a convoluted thought process going on this
> but MVPs lol) with people getting Betas off Torrents or wherever. That's
> just insane. Microsoft could not possibly care that someone has a beta
> vista on a box. I don't care how exclusive someeone tried to make a TBT
> on a group feel--basically besides Connect content the only thing they
> didn't want public were newsgroup posts and most of the time I nave no
> idea why.
>
> My philosophy is life is short and if someone could learn from something
> why not share it. You're MSFT; don't you want to enable as many people to
> become better Windows users as possible in the spirit of Gates giving
> computers to school systems or money to school or helping cure a disease
> that hasn't been cured by the medical establishment? So who the hell
> cares if Bozo and Suzy download build whatever from a torrent--it's a
> frigging beta and although MSFT did decide to get paid for shipping and
> downloads a bit there at the end with Office Betas, basically betas aren't
> being sold in stores to my knowledge--although I know some people were
> nuts enough to buy some on Ebay or Craig's list or wherever (but fools
> and their money are soon parted and often).
>
> I didn't understand for the life of me as well why the many Beta chats
> weren't immediately posted on a public site or sites to enlighten the
> masses--I saw all of them and I didn't see any downside to MSFT but they
> haven't done it. Jill Zoeller has a few on her site; Josh has some on his
> Windows Connected site, and there are probably others but why would you
> withold an educational resource like that. People spent time putting the
> chats on; why not share the learning material. I suppose I could post
> links to all of them here.
>
> They like to be in control at Redmond. They turn over personal
> information to DOJ and they lie about it. They hire people like Ralph
> Reed at $27,000 per month--that will cover Vista Ultimate and Office
> Enterprise, Small Business Server and Longhorn Server and Visual Studio
> Premium and the 27 associated apps and servers with Office 2007 and valet
> parking in Seattle for a year and more.
>
> Reed directly partnered with Abramoff and Tom Delay to enslave women in
> the Marianas islands like some of the more gruesome "Without A Trace"
> episodes. And don't tell me that Ballmer with a few billion and Gates with
> a few biillion and all those millionaires like Raikes, Kevin Johnson,
> Ozzie, Sinofsky, Mehdi, Chrapty etc. can't make a fe and I mean very damn
> few phone calls and find this out. They didn't care. And I've documented
> what I just said several times on this group.
>
> I find this disingenous and dishonest behavior a real constrast with the
> arrogant elitist attitude that comes out of Redmond. I think it should be
> represented.
>
> If you think when MSN turns searches over to the Chinese governent they
> don't do it so they can sell software and the consequences to the people
> in China be damned, you're really naive. That's blood money just as
> diamonds are in the new movie.
>
> They also refused to fix a ton of bugs, and they get absolutely livid when
> the subject is mentioned that they know very well. Their business types
> like Di Valerio go out of their way to screw their core home customers by
> making damn sure that the OEMs that sell what is projected to be about 400
> million Vista OEM preloaded desktops (there was a 20% increase in MSFT
> profits last quarter from OEM preinstalls and a 20% decrease from retail
> sales of windows). They take this out on a very unsuspecting public who
> doesn't unfortunately backup well (we all hope that One Care and Vista
> will encourage them to do that although inexplicably they dumb down the
> backup). It made me really smile when I saw Jill Zoeller write that they
> dumb down backup in Vista because they didn't think users were savy enough
> to use a browse button to backup files so they didn't allow backup at the
> file level and I couldn't help thinking if Jill can find lipstick in her
> purse, then a user is savvy enough to use a browse button). Give me a real
> break there. I'm betting Jill could find the lipstick as well. And if she
> can, then users could have benefited by a backup that backs up at the file
> level.
>
> Regardless, the one care team had research and Redmond Vista/MSFT has
> research that as high as 65-80% of users in homes don't backup. They
> don't use all the convenient imaging methods as regulars do here. Or for
> whatever reason they don't simply burn but the advent of wide spread DVD
> burning should make this much easier hopefully.
>
> Ah loves it when the MVPs defend mediocrity for Swag.
>
> Wake up America. You have a sociopathic, psychotic moron playing with the
> lives of thousands of your fellow Americans. Whatcha gonna do--put yo head
> in the sand? If it was your Vista booting, or your One Care working,
> you'd
> be expending a helluva lot more effort wouldn't you--come on--you know
> that's right unless you're from predominantly small town ethnic miinority
> America that has their sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, and grandmothers
> and grandfathers actually being redeployed at stake:
>
> This is how it is. Typical American sheep: Uh Uh Uh isn't civil war
> don't
> it have to have Lincoln and Grant and cannons and a Confederate flag in it
> and like uniforms? Ah gotta go shoppin' for some bling and a duo core.
>
> Frank Rich Has He Started Talking to the Walls? Sunday December 3, 2006
> New
> York Times
>
> IT turns out we've been reading the wrong Bob Woodward book to understand
> what's going on with President Bush. The text we should be consulting
> instead is "The Final Days," the Woodward-Bernstein account of Richard
> Nixon
> talking to the portraits on the White House walls while Watergate
> demolished
> his presidency. As Mr. Bush has ricocheted from Vietnam to Latvia to
> Jordan
> in recent weeks, we've witnessed the troubling behavior of a president who
> isn't merely in a state of denial but is completely untethered from
> reality.
> It's not that he can't handle the truth about Iraq. He doesn't know what
> the
> truth is.
>
> The most startling example was his insistence that Al Qaeda is primarily
> responsible for the country's spiraling violence. Only a week before Mr.
> Bush said this, the American military spokesman on the scene, Maj. Gen.
> William Caldwell, called Al Qaeda "extremely disorganized" in Iraq, adding
> that "I would question at this point how effective they are at all at the
> state level." Military intelligence estimates that Al Qaeda makes up only
> 2
> percent to 3 percent of the enemy forces in Iraq, according to Jim
> Miklaszewski of NBC News. The bottom line: America has a commander in
> chief
> who can't even identify some 97 percent to 98 percent of the combatants in
> a
> war that has gone on longer than our involvement in World War II.
>
> But that's not the half of it. Mr. Bush relentlessly refers to Iraq's
> "unity
> government" though it is not unified and can only nominally govern. (In
> Henry Kissinger's accurate recent formulation, Iraq is not even a nation
> "in
> the historic sense.") After that pseudo-government's prime minister, Nuri
> al-Maliki, brushed him off in Amman, the president nonetheless declared
> him
> "the right guy for Iraq" the morning after. This came only a day after The
> Times's revelation of a secret memo by Mr. Bush's national security
> adviser,
> Stephen Hadley, judging Mr. Maliki either "ignorant of what is going on"
> in
> his own country or disingenuous or insufficiently capable of running a
> government. Not that it matters what Mr. Hadley writes when his boss is
> impervious to facts.
>
> In truth the president is so out of it he wasn't even meeting with the
> right
> guy. No one doubts that the most powerful political leader in Iraq is the
> anti-American, pro-Hezbollah cleric Moktada al-Sadr, without whom Mr.
> Maliki
> would be on the scrap heap next to his short-lived predecessors, Ayad
> Allawi
> and Ibrahim al-Jaafari. Mr. Sadr's militia is far more powerful than the
> official Iraqi army that we've been helping to "stand up" at hideous cost
> all these years. If we're not going to take him out, as John McCain
> proposed
> this month, we might as well deal with him directly rather than with Mr.
> Maliki, his puppet. But our president shows few signs of recognizing Mr.
> Sadr's existence.
>
> In his classic study, "The Great War and Modern Memory," Paul Fussell
> wrote
> of how World War I shattered and remade literature, for only a new
> language
> of irony could convey the trauma and waste. Under the auspices of Mr.
> Bush,
> the Iraq war is having a comparable, if different, linguistic impact: the
> more he loses his hold on reality, the more language is severed from its
> meaning altogether.
>
> When the president persists in talking about staying until "the mission is
> complete" even though there is no definable military mission, let alone
> one
> that can be completed, he is indulging in pure absurdity. The same goes
> for
> his talk of "victory," another concept robbed of any definition when the
> prime minister we are trying to prop up is allied with Mr. Sadr, a man who
> wants Americans dead and has many scalps to prove it. The newest
> hollowed-out Bush word to mask the endgame in Iraq is "phase," as if the
> increasing violence were as transitional as the growing pains of a surly
> teenager. "Phase" is meant to drown out all the unsettling debate about
> two
> words the president doesn't want to hear, "civil war."
>
> When news organizations, politicians and bloggers had their own civil war
> about the proper usage of that designation last week, it was highly
> instructive - but about America, not Iraq. The intensity of the squabble
> showed the corrosive effect the president's subversion of language has had
> on our larger culture. Iraq arguably passed beyond civil war months ago
> into
> what might more accurately be termed ethnic cleansing or chaos. That we
> were
> fighting over "civil war" at this late date was a reminder that wittingly
> or
> not, we have all taken to following Mr. Bush's lead in retreating from
> English as we once knew it.
>
> It's been a familiar pattern for the news media, politicians and the
> public
> alike in the Bush era. It took us far too long to acknowledge that the
> "abuses" at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere might be more accurately called
> torture. And that the "manipulation" of prewar intelligence might be more
> accurately called lying. Next up is "pullback," the Iraq Study Group's
> reported euphemism to stave off the word "retreat" (if not retreat
> itself).
>
> In the case of "civil war," it fell to a morning television anchor, Matt
> Lauer, to officially bless the term before the "Today" show moved on to
> such
> regular fare as an update on the Olsen twins. That juxtaposition of Iraq
> and
> post-pubescent eroticism was only too accurate a gauge of how much the
> word
> "war" itself has been drained of its meaning in America after years of
> waging a war that required no shared sacrifice. Whatever you want to label
> what's happening in Iraq, it has never impeded our freedom to dote on the
> Olsen twins.
>
> I have not been one to buy into the arguments that Mr. Bush is stupid or
> is
> the sum of his "Bushisms" or is, as feverish Internet speculation
> periodically has it, secretly drinking again. I still don't. But I have
> believed he is a cynic - that he could always distinguish between truth
> and
> fiction even as he and Karl Rove sold us their fictions. That's why, when
> the president said that "absolutely, we're winning" in Iraq before the
> midterms, I just figured it was more of the same: another expedient lie to
> further his partisan political ends.
>
> But that election has come and gone, and Mr. Bush is more isolated from
> the
> real world than ever. That's scary. Neither he nor his party has anything
> to
> gain politically by pretending that Iraq is not in crisis. Yet Mr. Bush
> clings to his delusions with a near-rage - watch him seethe in his press
> conference with Mr. Maliki - that can't be explained away by sheer
> stubbornness or misguided principles or a pat psychological theory.
> Whatever
> the reason, he is slipping into the same zone as Woodrow Wilson did when
> refusing to face the rejection of the League of Nations, as a sleepless
> L.B.J. did when micromanaging bombing missions in Vietnam, as Ronald
> Reagan
> did when checking out during Iran-Contra. You can understand why Jim Webb,
> the Virginia senator-elect with a son in Iraq, was tempted to slug the
> president at a White House reception for newly elected members of
> Congress.
> Mr. Bush asked "How's your boy?" But when Mr. Webb replied, "I'd like to
> get
> them out of Iraq," the president refused to so much as acknowledge the
> subject. Maybe a timely slug would have woken him up.
>
> Or at least sounded an alarm. Some two years ago, I wrote that Iraq was
> Vietnam on speed, a quagmire for the MTV generation. Those jump cuts are
> accelerating now. The illusion that America can control events on the
> ground
> is just that: an illusion. As the list of theoretical silver bullets for
> Iraq grows longer (and more theoretical) by the day - special envoy,
> embedded military advisers, partition, outreach to Iran and Syria,
> Holbrooke, international conference, NATO - urgent decisions have to be
> made
> by a chief executive who is in touch with reality (or such is the minimal
> job description). Otherwise the events in Iraq will make the Decider's
> decisions for him, as indeed they are doing already.
>
> The joke, history may note, is that even as Mr. Bush deludes himself that
> he
> is bringing "democracy" to Iraq, he is flouting democracy at home.
> American
> voters could not have delivered a clearer mandate on the war than they did
> on Nov. 7, but apparently elections don't register at the White House
> unless
> the voters dip their fingers in purple ink. Mr. Bush seems to think that
> the
> only decision he had to make was replacing Donald Rumsfeld and the mission
> of changing course would be accomplished.
>
> Tell that to the Americans in Anbar Province. Back in August the chief of
> intelligence for the Marines filed a secret report - uncovered by Thomas
> Ricks of The Washington Post - concluding that American troops "are no
> longer capable of militarily defeating the insurgency in al-Anbar." That
> finding was confirmed in an intelligence update last month. Yet American
> troops are still being tossed into that maw, and at least 90 have been
> killed there since Labor Day, including five marines, ages 19 to 24,
> around
> Thanksgiving.
>
> Civil war? Sectarian violence? A phase? This much is certain: The dead in
> Iraq don't give a damn what we call it.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> "Bill Frisbee" <wfrisbee@comcastx.net> wrote in message
> news:exhz2Z0FHHA.3304@TK2MSFTNGP05.phx.gbl...
>> What's up with this MVP negativity stuff?
>>
>> Most MVP's have been supporting Microsoft well before they became MVP's.
>>
>>
>> Bill F. (former MVP)
>>
>> "MSFT Trades Swag to MVPs for Support, Defense, and Blind Allegiance"
>> <mvpshills@fanboys.net> wrote in message
>> news:egX5flzFHHA.1216@TK2MSFTNGP05.phx.gbl...
>>> Contact Technet via
>>>
>>> http://www.microsoft.com/technet/contactus.mspx
>>>
>>> or refer via emailing at this link Attention to:
>>>
>>> Kathy Dixon, Sr. Product Manager
>>> TechNet Plus subscriptions
>>>
>>>
>>> https://blogs.technet.com/technetplu...s/contact.aspx
>>>
>>> Good luck,
>>>
>>> MSFT Trades Swag to MVPs for Support, Defense, and Blind Allegiance
>>>
>>>
>>> No connection between SUVs, Iraq fiasco that exponentially brings filled
>>> cofins to Dover, an apathetic America Public who reads next to NOTHING,
>>> and a Congress that has mastered the art of jerking itself off. House
>>> and Senate both excel at this.
>>>
>>>
>>>>I am a Technet Plus Subscriber and have been trying to download the
>>>>Vista RTM
>>>> that was just released. However, once I sign on to technet and click
>>>> the Get
>>>> It Now link, it just takes me back to the Technet home page and never
>>>> takes
>>>> me to a download link. Can someone tell me what I'm doing wrong or how
>>>> to
>>>> access the Windows Vista RTM version. Thanks.
>>>
>>
>

You seem to forget everyone is human.

I've gone well out of my way to support users of Vista, XP and a lot of
other MSFT software for years with posts that are well documented with
excellent links. If you can't find them, I could care less.

Your assumption selectively as to who goes out of their way to help is based
on fiction, delusion and fraud.

You really have a reading problem if you think the tone of my posts have
been as simplistic or stupid as "Vista is crap" or "MSFT is crap" and I
suggest you get your reading skills learning curve the attention it needs if
that's the case. You're painting with broad, fraudulent and delusional
brush strokes.

You've never seen me so simplistic as to blame MSFT for lack of drivers at
any instant, and I've had plenty of conversations with the people who work
on drivers on the TBT in chats and other venues. I will point out that when
I asked them on a live chat if they were going to get Device Manager able to
distinguish a driver that works when it says it does from one that doesn't
there is an archived chat where they blithly replied "not in Vista."

Frisbee wrote:

" I also see a lot of people here blaming Microsoft for things like lack of
drivers, older software not well supported under Vista (even stuff that has
been upgraded by the 3rd party dozens of times the past 4 years), so yeah,
some of us are going to defend Microsoft. Why shouldn't we?"

Not me. But there is no doubt that Microsoft could have done a better job
in getting the 3rd party companies to get drivers out faster and more
software to be Vista compatible faster. That's usually the same old song
every OS.

I know and appreciate that a lot of effort was made by MSFT to get that done
and I've heard from the individuals who did the pings and made those calls,
however, a lot more effort was made in a more sinister vein and that was to
make certain that OEM preinstalls don't included a CD for XP or a DVD for
Vista that will enable people to recover XP and Vista-- a big cause of mine.

I'd be willing to bet not in the next OS/Blackcomb/Fiji/Vienna or whatever
it gets called either. It's been 12 years since Device Manager RTM'd in Win
95.

I don't know how well you read Frisbee, you of the lol FBI threats etc. but
if you search this group and setup and XP over the years not to mention WMP
and Office and Office setup I've gone well out of my way to help MSFT
customers use MSFT software. I love to see people who threaten
delusionally--they immediately telelgraph their chartacter. I love to see
people who are holier than thou. Your selective reading acts as if "MVP's"
are the only ones who have gone out of their way to help people get XP and
Vista setup, recovered and used well.

Complaining that Win RE is defective is not trolling nor is it abusive.
You're also reading selectively but I never cease to be amazed at how
opinionated and prejudiced children in adult bodies can become.

I've done a ton of defending MSFT and Evangalism for them over the years;
fixed an awful lot of computers hands on so that Windows could get used and
emailed hundreds of people to help them access what MSFT offers that is
useful. It's embarassingly disingenuous of you to think otherwise, but
whatever floats your boat--you go for it. The facts will trump anything
else.

"Why were the Beta chats posted publicly? You have seen the trolls around
here right? Enough said on that."--Bill Fisbee

I have no idea what this comment is supposed to mean.

The more circulation those beta chats get, the more people will be able to
use and understand the context of development of Vista and situations
surrounding the teams who worked and still work on it.

I know exactly the context of the charges on the Office downloads, and
although scores of people complained aobut it on this group and others, I
wasn't one. I hardly need you to explain it. Explain it on the threads
where people complained about it. I didn't need them--I can burn the isos
of anything they have. My only reason for wanting them was for collecting
memorbelia--betas, OS's and other software.

I have no idea what you mean about Beta chats posted publicly. There was no
prohibition on this from Paul Donnelly nor was there any agreement and in
fact, when asked directly on several of those chats Paul; Tenny Cho and many
others said they could be posted immediately after the chat was over. Some
people did that. One of them is named Jill Zoeller who is a PM on the File
Core Services team who has been posting a number of them on her excellent
blog.

Your "lay off the MVPs" is delusional thinking. I'm not picking on them.
I've also worked with many of them to get things done on and off newsgroups
but I understand you don't have the capacity to appreciate this. I was
objecting to blind allegiance. Too much of that exists, and too much of
that has been in some of these Vista groups.

Attacking those of us who aren't afraid to launch constructive criticsm
***butressed by facts while using the software is a real waste of your
energy.

I've spent a lot of time and have hundreds of posts if not a few thousand
helping people fix MSFT programs, Vista included, and spending a lot of time
helping people to use and fix it. I've done that and spent a lot of time
doing it. I don't need your recognition and your threats have as much
efficacy as a gnat on a freight train. My posts stand on their own.


CH


"Bill Frisbee" <wfrisbee@comcastx.net> wrote in message
news:OsKsdt2FHHA.3468@TK2MSFTNGP04.phx.gbl...
> You seem to forget MVP's are human too...
>
>
> As for elitism... go check out the Apple newsgroups, or god help us all,
> some of the Linux newsgroups.
>
> MVP's are not perfect, some of them are not the perfect people.
>
> Some of them, and quite a few in this newsgroup in particular have gone
> well out of there way to support new users of a new operating system. Of
> course, in that process we have a few public knuckleheads that seem to
> have nothing better to do than post vile untruths about Vista and trying
> to force the opinion that Vista is crap on everyone. With stuff like that,
> I think its understandable that one or two people snap.
>
>
> Heck I know I'm not the nicest person in the world to the trolls around
> here, but I will ALWAYS go out of my way to help out people in whatever
> mode I can.
>
> I also see a lot of people here blaming Microsoft for things like lack of
> drivers, older software not well supported under Vista (even stuff that
> has been upgraded by the 3rd party dozens of times the past 4 years), so
> yeah, some of us are going to defend Microsoft. Why shouldn't we?
>
> No, Vista isn't perfect, no human writen software product is. Is Vista
> better than XP? You bet it is. Is it the best OS out there? Depends on
> what you need it for, but it could be for some things.
>
>
> As for Microsoft getting "paid" for the Office Beta, actually, that was to
> pay for the huge bandwidth Microsoft used to distribute the Beta, or to
> send you a nice DVD.
>
> Why were the Beta chats posted publicly? You have seen the trolls around
> here right? Enough said on that.
>
> I'm not even going to comment on some of your tin-foil stuff... in today's
> world every time you touch the internet, you ain't private anymore. You
> want privacy? Throw your computer away.
>
> You want perfection? It simply doesn't exist.
>
> So do us all a favor, lay off the MVP's they do a job a lot of people
> don't and they typically do a damn good job at it.
>
> Bill F.
>
>
> "MSFT Trades Swag to MVPs for Support, Defense, and Blind Allegiance"
> <mvpendorsementsforswag.net> wrote in message
> news:O03GT71FHHA.1240@TK2MSFTNGP03.phx.gbl...
>>I fully appreciate the value of MVPs and their sites Bill. I've been a
>>beneficiary of them for years, but I've also passed them onto hundreds if
>>not thousands of people who aren't in the same kinds of lops as people who
>>huit the newsgroups or what I would call "windows enthusiasts" (the many
>>people who want to be efficient pc users but who have a lot of other
>>interests and may not spend as much time.
>>
>> They have also been doing "bump and runs "on me when I am constructively
>> critical of MSFT. A bump and run is to use either the MVP access or get
>> someone who can to block posts in response. That's the height of
>> cowardice and it's exactly what Mike Hall MVP did early yesterday
>> morning.
>>
>> But ***lately here, I've seen a lot of self-righteous ellite, effete
>> condescending behavior from some MVPs (not all and never someone like
>> Colin who has done a remarkable job sharing as much information as he
>> possibly can)
>> and so I thought I would recognize it. It came as a response to any
>> criticism at all concernig MSFT, and I've had counteless ways to see that
>> while most of the MFST personnel I know in person would never be offended
>> by critiism that was constructive but there seems to be a special type
>> of genetics that seems to be in the makeup of the people at the Redmond
>> campus who consider themselves so elite and so special that they lash out
>> at any hint of criticism that comes their way in a variety of
>> permutations and combinations.
>> If you look at these "unofficial" guidelines from Robert McLaw's
>> http://weblogs.asp.net/rmclaws/archi...03/396941.aspx
>> many of which should apply to anyone posting, I see a lot of the don'ts
>> violated and a lot of smug posts by some MVPs as to
>>
>> Fixes--that's new I didn't see that in the past where instead of just
>> telling them the obvious fix that most of us could come up with who have
>> been kicking Windoz around for a while giving them a smug snub.
>>
>> This self-righteous obsession and hand ringing of MVPs and others (I can
>> understand the others getting a convoluted thought process going on this
>> but MVPs lol) with people getting Betas off Torrents or wherever. That's
>> just insane. Microsoft could not possibly care that someone has a beta
>> vista on a box. I don't care how exclusive someeone tried to make a TBT
>> on a group feel--basically besides Connect content the only thing they
>> didn't want public were newsgroup posts and most of the time I nave no
>> idea why.
>>
>> My philosophy is life is short and if someone could learn from something
>> why not share it. You're MSFT; don't you want to enable as many people to
>> become better Windows users as possible in the spirit of Gates giving
>> computers to school systems or money to school or helping cure a disease
>> that hasn't been cured by the medical establishment? So who the hell
>> cares if Bozo and Suzy download build whatever from a torrent--it's a
>> frigging beta and although MSFT did decide to get paid for shipping and
>> downloads a bit there at the end with Office Betas, basically betas
>> aren't being sold in stores to my knowledge--although I know some people
>> were nuts enough to buy some on Ebay or Craig's list or wherever (but
>> fools and their money are soon parted and often).
>>
>> I didn't understand for the life of me as well why the many Beta chats
>> weren't immediately posted on a public site or sites to enlighten the
>> masses--I saw all of them and I didn't see any downside to MSFT but they
>> haven't done it. Jill Zoeller has a few on her site; Josh has some on his
>> Windows Connected site, and there are probably others but why would you
>> withold an educational resource like that. People spent time putting the
>> chats on; why not share the learning material. I suppose I could post
>> links to all of them here.
>>
>> They like to be in control at Redmond. They turn over personal
>> information to DOJ and they lie about it. They hire people like Ralph
>> Reed at $27,000 per month--that will cover Vista Ultimate and Office
>> Enterprise, Small Business Server and Longhorn Server and Visual Studio
>> Premium and the 27 associated apps and servers with Office 2007 and valet
>> parking in Seattle for a year and more.
>>
>> Reed directly partnered with Abramoff and Tom Delay to enslave women in
>> the Marianas islands like some of the more gruesome "Without A Trace"
>> episodes. And don't tell me that Ballmer with a few billion and Gates
>> with a few biillion and all those millionaires like Raikes, Kevin
>> Johnson, Ozzie, Sinofsky, Mehdi, Chrapty etc. can't make a fe and I mean
>> very damn few phone calls and find this out. They didn't care. And I've
>> documented what I just said several times on this group.
>>
>> I find this disingenous and dishonest behavior a real constrast with the
>> arrogant elitist attitude that comes out of Redmond. I think it should
>> be represented.
>>
>> If you think when MSN turns searches over to the Chinese governent they
>> don't do it so they can sell software and the consequences to the people
>> in China be damned, you're really naive. That's blood money just as
>> diamonds are in the new movie.
>>
>> They also refused to fix a ton of bugs, and they get absolutely livid
>> when the subject is mentioned that they know very well. Their business
>> types like Di Valerio go out of their way to screw their core home
>> customers by making damn sure that the OEMs that sell what is projected
>> to be about 400 million Vista OEM preloaded desktops (there was a 20%
>> increase in MSFT profits last quarter from OEM preinstalls and a 20%
>> decrease from retail sales of windows). They take this out on a very
>> unsuspecting public who doesn't unfortunately backup well (we all hope
>> that One Care and Vista will encourage them to do that although
>> inexplicably they dumb down the backup). It made me really smile when I
>> saw Jill Zoeller write that they dumb down backup in Vista because they
>> didn't think users were savy enough to use a browse button to backup
>> files so they didn't allow backup at the file level and I couldn't help
>> thinking if Jill can find lipstick in her purse, then a user is savvy
>> enough to use a browse button). Give me a real break there. I'm betting
>> Jill could find the lipstick as well. And if she can, then users could
>> have benefited by a backup that backs up at the file level.
>>
>> Regardless, the one care team had research and Redmond Vista/MSFT has
>> research that as high as 65-80% of users in homes don't backup. They
>> don't use all the convenient imaging methods as regulars do here. Or for
>> whatever reason they don't simply burn but the advent of wide spread DVD
>> burning should make this much easier hopefully.
>>
>> Ah loves it when the MVPs defend mediocrity for Swag.
>>
>> Wake up America. You have a sociopathic, psychotic moron playing with
>> the
>> lives of thousands of your fellow Americans. Whatcha gonna do--put yo
>> head
>> in the sand? If it was your Vista booting, or your One Care working,
>> you'd
>> be expending a helluva lot more effort wouldn't you--come on--you know
>> that's right unless you're from predominantly small town ethnic miinority
>> America that has their sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, and
>> grandmothers
>> and grandfathers actually being redeployed at stake:
>>
>> This is how it is. Typical American sheep: Uh Uh Uh isn't civil war
>> don't
>> it have to have Lincoln and Grant and cannons and a Confederate flag in
>> it
>> and like uniforms? Ah gotta go shoppin' for some bling and a duo core.
>>
>> Frank Rich Has He Started Talking to the Walls? Sunday December 3, 2006
>> New
>> York Times
>>
>> IT turns out we've been reading the wrong Bob Woodward book to understand
>> what's going on with President Bush. The text we should be consulting
>> instead is "The Final Days," the Woodward-Bernstein account of Richard
>> Nixon
>> talking to the portraits on the White House walls while Watergate
>> demolished
>> his presidency. As Mr. Bush has ricocheted from Vietnam to Latvia to
>> Jordan
>> in recent weeks, we've witnessed the troubling behavior of a president
>> who
>> isn't merely in a state of denial but is completely untethered from
>> reality.
>> It's not that he can't handle the truth about Iraq. He doesn't know what
>> the
>> truth is.
>>
>> The most startling example was his insistence that Al Qaeda is primarily
>> responsible for the country's spiraling violence. Only a week before Mr.
>> Bush said this, the American military spokesman on the scene, Maj. Gen.
>> William Caldwell, called Al Qaeda "extremely disorganized" in Iraq,
>> adding
>> that "I would question at this point how effective they are at all at the
>> state level." Military intelligence estimates that Al Qaeda makes up only
>> 2
>> percent to 3 percent of the enemy forces in Iraq, according to Jim
>> Miklaszewski of NBC News. The bottom line: America has a commander in
>> chief
>> who can't even identify some 97 percent to 98 percent of the combatants
>> in a
>> war that has gone on longer than our involvement in World War II.
>>
>> But that's not the half of it. Mr. Bush relentlessly refers to Iraq's
>> "unity
>> government" though it is not unified and can only nominally govern. (In
>> Henry Kissinger's accurate recent formulation, Iraq is not even a nation
>> "in
>> the historic sense.") After that pseudo-government's prime minister, Nuri
>> al-Maliki, brushed him off in Amman, the president nonetheless declared
>> him
>> "the right guy for Iraq" the morning after. This came only a day after
>> The
>> Times's revelation of a secret memo by Mr. Bush's national security
>> adviser,
>> Stephen Hadley, judging Mr. Maliki either "ignorant of what is going on"
>> in
>> his own country or disingenuous or insufficiently capable of running a
>> government. Not that it matters what Mr. Hadley writes when his boss is
>> impervious to facts.
>>
>> In truth the president is so out of it he wasn't even meeting with the
>> right
>> guy. No one doubts that the most powerful political leader in Iraq is the
>> anti-American, pro-Hezbollah cleric Moktada al-Sadr, without whom Mr.
>> Maliki
>> would be on the scrap heap next to his short-lived predecessors, Ayad
>> Allawi
>> and Ibrahim al-Jaafari. Mr. Sadr's militia is far more powerful than the
>> official Iraqi army that we've been helping to "stand up" at hideous cost
>> all these years. If we're not going to take him out, as John McCain
>> proposed
>> this month, we might as well deal with him directly rather than with Mr.
>> Maliki, his puppet. But our president shows few signs of recognizing Mr.
>> Sadr's existence.
>>
>> In his classic study, "The Great War and Modern Memory," Paul Fussell
>> wrote
>> of how World War I shattered and remade literature, for only a new
>> language
>> of irony could convey the trauma and waste. Under the auspices of Mr.
>> Bush,
>> the Iraq war is having a comparable, if different, linguistic impact: the
>> more he loses his hold on reality, the more language is severed from its
>> meaning altogether.
>>
>> When the president persists in talking about staying until "the mission
>> is
>> complete" even though there is no definable military mission, let alone
>> one
>> that can be completed, he is indulging in pure absurdity. The same goes
>> for
>> his talk of "victory," another concept robbed of any definition when the
>> prime minister we are trying to prop up is allied with Mr. Sadr, a man
>> who
>> wants Americans dead and has many scalps to prove it. The newest
>> hollowed-out Bush word to mask the endgame in Iraq is "phase," as if the
>> increasing violence were as transitional as the growing pains of a surly
>> teenager. "Phase" is meant to drown out all the unsettling debate about
>> two
>> words the president doesn't want to hear, "civil war."
>>
>> When news organizations, politicians and bloggers had their own civil war
>> about the proper usage of that designation last week, it was highly
>> instructive - but about America, not Iraq. The intensity of the squabble
>> showed the corrosive effect the president's subversion of language has
>> had
>> on our larger culture. Iraq arguably passed beyond civil war months ago
>> into
>> what might more accurately be termed ethnic cleansing or chaos. That we
>> were
>> fighting over "civil war" at this late date was a reminder that wittingly
>> or
>> not, we have all taken to following Mr. Bush's lead in retreating from
>> English as we once knew it.
>>
>> It's been a familiar pattern for the news media, politicians and the
>> public
>> alike in the Bush era. It took us far too long to acknowledge that the
>> "abuses" at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere might be more accurately called
>> torture. And that the "manipulation" of prewar intelligence might be more
>> accurately called lying. Next up is "pullback," the Iraq Study Group's
>> reported euphemism to stave off the word "retreat" (if not retreat
>> itself).
>>
>> In the case of "civil war," it fell to a morning television anchor, Matt
>> Lauer, to officially bless the term before the "Today" show moved on to
>> such
>> regular fare as an update on the Olsen twins. That juxtaposition of Iraq
>> and
>> post-pubescent eroticism was only too accurate a gauge of how much the
>> word
>> "war" itself has been drained of its meaning in America after years of
>> waging a war that required no shared sacrifice. Whatever you want to
>> label
>> what's happening in Iraq, it has never impeded our freedom to dote on the
>> Olsen twins.
>>
>> I have not been one to buy into the arguments that Mr. Bush is stupid or
>> is
>> the sum of his "Bushisms" or is, as feverish Internet speculation
>> periodically has it, secretly drinking again. I still don't. But I have
>> believed he is a cynic - that he could always distinguish between truth
>> and
>> fiction even as he and Karl Rove sold us their fictions. That's why, when
>> the president said that "absolutely, we're winning" in Iraq before the
>> midterms, I just figured it was more of the same: another expedient lie
>> to
>> further his partisan political ends.
>>
>> But that election has come and gone, and Mr. Bush is more isolated from
>> the
>> real world than ever. That's scary. Neither he nor his party has anything
>> to
>> gain politically by pretending that Iraq is not in crisis. Yet Mr. Bush
>> clings to his delusions with a near-rage - watch him seethe in his press
>> conference with Mr. Maliki - that can't be explained away by sheer
>> stubbornness or misguided principles or a pat psychological theory.
>> Whatever
>> the reason, he is slipping into the same zone as Woodrow Wilson did when
>> refusing to face the rejection of the League of Nations, as a sleepless
>> L.B.J. did when micromanaging bombing missions in Vietnam, as Ronald
>> Reagan
>> did when checking out during Iran-Contra. You can understand why Jim
>> Webb,
>> the Virginia senator-elect with a son in Iraq, was tempted to slug the
>> president at a White House reception for newly elected members of
>> Congress.
>> Mr. Bush asked "How's your boy?" But when Mr. Webb replied, "I'd like to
>> get
>> them out of Iraq," the president refused to so much as acknowledge the
>> subject. Maybe a timely slug would have woken him up.
>>
>> Or at least sounded an alarm. Some two years ago, I wrote that Iraq was
>> Vietnam on speed, a quagmire for the MTV generation. Those jump cuts are
>> accelerating now. The illusion that America can control events on the
>> ground
>> is just that: an illusion. As the list of theoretical silver bullets for
>> Iraq grows longer (and more theoretical) by the day - special envoy,
>> embedded military advisers, partition, outreach to Iran and Syria,
>> Holbrooke, international conference, NATO - urgent decisions have to be
>> made
>> by a chief executive who is in touch with reality (or such is the minimal
>> job description). Otherwise the events in Iraq will make the Decider's
>> decisions for him, as indeed they are doing already.
>>
>> The joke, history may note, is that even as Mr. Bush deludes himself that
>> he
>> is bringing "democracy" to Iraq, he is flouting democracy at home.
>> American
>> voters could not have delivered a clearer mandate on the war than they
>> did
>> on Nov. 7, but apparently elections don't register at the White House
>> unless
>> the voters dip their fingers in purple ink. Mr. Bush seems to think that
>> the
>> only decision he had to make was replacing Donald Rumsfeld and the
>> mission
>> of changing course would be accomplished.
>>
>> Tell that to the Americans in Anbar Province. Back in August the chief of
>> intelligence for the Marines filed a secret report - uncovered by Thomas
>> Ricks of The Washington Post - concluding that American troops "are no
>> longer capable of militarily defeating the insurgency in al-Anbar." That
>> finding was confirmed in an intelligence update last month. Yet American
>> troops are still being tossed into that maw, and at least 90 have been
>> killed there since Labor Day, including five marines, ages 19 to 24,
>> around
>> Thanksgiving.
>>
>> Civil war? Sectarian violence? A phase? This much is certain: The dead in
>> Iraq don't give a damn what we call it.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> "Bill Frisbee" <wfrisbee@comcastx.net> wrote in message
>> news:exhz2Z0FHHA.3304@TK2MSFTNGP05.phx.gbl...
>>> What's up with this MVP negativity stuff?
>>>
>>> Most MVP's have been supporting Microsoft well before they became MVP's.
>>>
>>>
>>> Bill F. (former MVP)
>>>
>>> "MSFT Trades Swag to MVPs for Support, Defense, and Blind Allegiance"
>>> <mvpshills@fanboys.net> wrote in message
>>> news:egX5flzFHHA.1216@TK2MSFTNGP05.phx.gbl...
>>>> Contact Technet via
>>>>
>>>> http://www.microsoft.com/technet/contactus.mspx
>>>>
>>>> or refer via emailing at this link Attention to:
>>>>
>>>> Kathy Dixon, Sr. Product Manager
>>>> TechNet Plus subscriptions
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> https://blogs.technet.com/technetplu...s/contact.aspx
>>>>
>>>> Good luck,
>>>>
>>>> MSFT Trades Swag to MVPs for Support, Defense, and Blind Allegiance
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> No connection between SUVs, Iraq fiasco that exponentially brings
>>>> filled cofins to Dover, an apathetic America Public who reads next to
>>>> NOTHING, and a Congress that has mastered the art of jerking itself
>>>> off. House and Senate both excel at this.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>I am a Technet Plus Subscriber and have been trying to download the
>>>>>Vista RTM
>>>>> that was just released. However, once I sign on to technet and click
>>>>> the Get
>>>>> It Now link, it just takes me back to the Technet home page and never
>>>>> takes
>>>>> me to a download link. Can someone tell me what I'm doing wrong or
>>>>> how to
>>>>> access the Windows Vista RTM version. Thanks.
>>>>
>>>
>>
>

I had the same problem. Contacted TechNet and the rep suggested clearing all
caches and cookies from IE, closing and re-opening IE and trying again. It
worked that time and again yesterday when I tried to access the downloads and
keys page. Might want to give that a shot.

"Tritechits" wrote:

> I am a Technet Plus Subscriber and have been trying to download the Vista RTM
> that was just released. However, once I sign on to technet and click the Get
> It Now link, it just takes me back to the Technet home page and never takes
> me to a download link. Can someone tell me what I'm doing wrong or how to
> access the Windows Vista RTM version. Thanks.