Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Microsoft and the Bush Administration

By Ron Beasley



I explained below how my AMD based computer crashed when I attempted to install Windows XP Service Pack 3.  I found out I was far from alone.  All HP and Compaq desktop computers suffered the same fate.  The problem is that during installation an Intel power management driver is installed which is not compatible with the AMD chip set.  There is an easy fix although many users  may find the white on black DOS screen and DOS commands intimidating.  XP SP3 is now installed and running. 



This is not a new problem, it was also seen when Microsoft introduced XP SP2.  I read the "what you should know" from Microsoft before beginning the installation and it was not mentioned and as of this morning is still not mentioned.  Microsoft either knew this was going to be a problem and simply didn't care if 15% of the world's computers were going to crash or they didn't know meaning they had done a half ass-ed job of testing.  Neither one of those is acceptable.  The Microsoft corporation blends hubris and incompetence in a way that rivals the last six and a half years of the Bush administration.



Update - Finger Pointing



Microsoft is blaming HP:

According to Johansson and others, Hewlett-Packard used the same Windows XP disk image to factory install the OS on AMD-based systems as they used for PCs running Intel processors. That's a mistake, Microsoft contends.



"Under this configuration, after the computer is upgraded to Windows XP SP2 or SP3, the Intel processor driver (intelppm.sys) may try to load because an orphaned registry key remains," Microsoft said in a support document first released in 2004, after the company issued XP SP2.



The presence of the unnecessary driver, said Microsoft, may crash the machine, causing it to reboot. If the PC is set to automatically reboot on a start failure -- as most are by default -- it reboots endlessly, often so quickly that the user can't interrupt the process and enter what's called "Safe Mode" in Windows, a last-ditch way to sidestep the normal boot process for troubleshooting purposes.

But HP strikes back:

"After installing the initial release of Service Pack 3 for Windows XP an error condition can occur," the HP document reads. "The Service Pack 3 update copies an Intel power management driver to the computer that was not on the computer before the update. During Windows startup, computers with AMD processors may experience a blue screen error."



Computerworld has not been able to confirm that the errant driver is, as HP claims, added by XP SP3 to AMD-based PCs. If that is, in fact, the case, the endless rebooting is Microsoft's fault, not HP's.

Now I really don't care who's fault it is but if Microsoft knew about it, which apparently they did, they should have given some notification on the upload screen.



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