FilePro Happy faces

[Bill Vermillion]

On Tue, Aug 10 03:03 , Fairlight moved his mouse, rebooted for the 
change to take effect, and then said:" 

> On Tue, Aug 10, 2004 at 02:29:00AM -0400, after drawing runes
> in goat's blood, Brian K. White cast forth these immortal,
> mystical words:

...

> > the vacuous and the rigging up an OS that is nothing more
> > than a show-floor demo that makes the user think they are
> > actually operating their computer, which of course took off
> > like wildfire in our something for nothing culture.

> Well -some- people are having second thoughts. You've seen
> the articles where IBM (amongst others) are recommending
> -avoiding- WinXP SP2 because while it increases security
> it breaks compatability in key areas, I trust? They're not
> garnering much support with this latest service pack.

The IBM memo was not as dire as your comment seems to imply.  
SP2 was released to manufacturing Friday and not even ready for
download yet so it's only been official for one business day.

Here are the pertinent excerpts.

=========================================

   But IBM last week told employees to hold off installing SP2 until Big
   Blue can fully test and customize it. The company's technology
   department said the delay is "due to known application problems and
   incompatibility with IBM workstation applications."

....

   In the memo to employees, seen by CNET News.com, IBM's internal
   technology department stated that Windows XP SP2 will "change the
   behavior of Internet Explorer and cause some application
   incompatibilities." The memo also noted that some "high-profile,
   business-critical applications are also known to conflict with SP2."

  .....

   IBM's Global Services consulting arm, which works with many companies
   to design and build information systems, has not yet issued any
   recommendations to its customers.

   One IBM employee in the company's internal technology department
   characterized the decision as routine. The person said that IBM will
   need to test and customize the new version of Windows before
   installing it throughout the company. Big Blue's internal technology
   department maintains about 380,000 desktop PCs.

========================================

Keywords in the 1st paragraph  "full test and customize it".
Changing the behaviour of IE could mean a lot of calls to their
internal support until they can let all the users know what to
expect with changes that SP2 will cause.

This is a prudent move for anyone - and the developers here need to
test before they deploy XP2 on theirc client machines.

One thing it would be prudent to do is to turn off automatic
updates so that SP2 doesn't get installed automagically and cause
unexpected changes.

Too many just let MS "do it's thing" and this time it could be
painful.

Bill
-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com