Someone's after your job.

As far as I can tell the whole thing was just a farce to scare people into joining Skype to swell the userbase.
Kept on using Pidgin to connect to MSN, had friends who changed over to Skype.
Kept right on talking to them on Pidgin.

Last time I used it was a couple days ago even and it was working same as always.

The LAPD "working for the people" is an implied mission statement. It doesn't really reflect the individuals within the organization. A murderous stalker has to actually follow you to gather info, but the LAPD officer doesn't now, that's the only difference. The police can just as easily abuse a power given to them, kinda like those NSA agents using their expensive taxpayer-funded gear and government-granted spying powers to stalk love interests.

There was a scene in the 1997 movie Men In Black where Tommy Lee Jones's character is sitting at a console with high-resolution satellite imagery available in real time, and he zooms in on a suburban home, and the women he once knew years ago, and the thinks of the life he could have had if he hadn't become a MIB agent. That movie was so long before all this War on Terror and domestic spying BS no one recognized that scene for what it was.

That's a joke, right? We are talking about one of the two rovers that was sent to Mars on a mission planned to only last 90 days. They didn't see "flash memory wearing out from use" as a contingency they needed to plan for.

Was working on the computer late on the 27th and I saw there were new Windows updates available (8.1 Pro, x64). I'd heard about the update issues two weeks ago but figured that had all been taken care of and the updates were pulled so this was fine.

Big mistake.

Machine BSOD'ing after launch and none of Microsoft's fixes worked.
1) If I tried to boot into safe mode, which is still supposed to work -- BSOD
2) There is a font cache file that supposedly is causing the crash. You're supposed to boot into safe mode to remove it. Okay, I boot into a Mint from a thumb drive and delete the file from out of my C:\Windows\System32 folder, unmounted the drive manually to make sure changes were written back, and rebooted -- Still BSOD.
3) Tried using system restore points. Windows set one just before these updates. Windows was not able to restore to that point. Tried the previous one from an update to OpenOffice three days before this. That one was also no good. Tried the last one, one from the 20th -- when the previous set of Windows updates had been applied. Success. Now, straight from the horse's mouth, my Windows should now be rolled back to a time before the Windows Updates before the problematic updates were installed.

Rebooted... BSOD at the exact same place in the process. No change at all.

I can't uninstall the updates if I can't boot into the actual WIndows install it seems. There's no way to remove the updates from the recovery console (found a blog entry on how to do this in XP, but the updates aren't kept in the same folder structure and my ability to run things on the effected install seems much more limited in these later versions).

As I'm typing this I'm running on the Mint flash drive and have Grsync doing a verified copy of my user folder from my C drive to one of my other internal disks, so I can do a reformat and reinstall of all my programs. Just what I wanted to do on my weekend!

Is it too late to give you a "whoosh!"?

RV tolerance Winnebago

Jurassic Park banned from video stores for being terrorist propaganda!

I used to do tech support for Cox (by way of a outsourcer) and they started doing the same thing (this was about three years ago). The reason, straight from (Cox's) own mouths, was that customers were more trusting of the tech support agents than they were the sales department.

We (on the team) were quick to point out that we would be flushing that very credibility away if we started trying to sell people stuff, and it would make it more difficult to deal with the customers in our actual jobs as tech support then (folks would be less likely to follow directions, accept explanations for issues, etc).

They were looking for ancient Western secret to short life.

Don't these two sentences kinda contradict each other?

I wonder if Microsoft has considered changing their name to distance themselves from their reputation for the software they produce.

That's all we're basing this declaration on? That feels like it would fall within the margin of error for one of these reports.

Exactly. "Latest trend" my ass. I heard this all the time when Facebook was starting to get popular, and I bet it was being crowed in MySpace's time as well.

Using IM also creates a written record of the conversation, which I'm sure your employer kept logs of for that reason.

Part of the blame for this goes to users and service providers. When people get used to the idea of email moving immediately they start to use email as a form of IM, and then I get calls about how "I sent this email three minutes ago and they haven't gotten it yet". It's email. There is no guaranteed instant-delivery on it. Same with attachments. Email is not made to be a file-transfer method, but the proper alternative means teaching people to use FTP clients..