Here’s the story of Major Tom (not his real name,) a ground controller for the United States Air Force.  His group is experiencing massive BSOD’s and his tech support is in another country.  You read that correctly.  The tech support for the United States Air Force is…not in the United States. Cool photo, though- never seen that many BSOD’s at once.  And I hope I never do.

Even Intel won’t run it. Shocking.

This time from the Borg itself. Buy Vista, and they’ll throw in XP so it will be easier for you to switch back once you start tearing your hair out over Vista. See here.

Right on cue–the Beastmaster must have read about the coinage of “Vistaster” as a term of art–the Borg makes scary Steve Sinofsky available to house stenographer Ina Fried for an “interview” on Windows 7.

Sinofsky’s so cute. He thinks he’s raised secrecy to an art form. Funny thing is, if we actually wanted to know anything about this hideous Son of Vista, we’d know it by now.

Moshe says if you ever want to freak this guy out, just walk by his office and let your coffee slosh around in the cup. He’ll be so fixated on possible spillage that he’ll be completely off his game. For hours. Imagine how guy like that must feel about cleaning up after the Vista elephant.

Meanwhile, the lower-ranking Vistatards, all evidence to the contrary, are busy declaring victory on their little blog.

“The business results speak for themselves,” types designated Vistatard Chris Flores. More than 140 million Windows Vista licenses sold etc etc etc. Unclear how many are actually in use.

Believe it or not this one is going around in the hallways at Redmond, where one of our spies picked it up. Here at Apple we’re running a “definition competition” and of course all of the Apple faithful are welcome to join as well. Send in the best fake dictionary definition and we’ll have a bake-off here in the comment strings. Winner gets a free fake vegan breakfast with El Jobso and a shout-out from the stage at the WWDC, week after next. Also, much love and a huge namaste to anyone who can get this word entered into the Urban Dictionary.

FWIW the definition that’s going around at the Borg campus is this:

VISTASTER. n. a giant cluster-fuck; a colossal mistake; a turning point, inflection point, or event that, in retrospect, turns out to have led to the doom and demise of a once-powerful company, person or organization, eg., “Have you seen Speed Racer? It’s a total vistaster.”

DERIVATIVES:
vistastrous. adj.
visastrously. adv.

Now comes Aaron Ricadela of BusinessWeek, one of the most talented hacks of his generation, with a fine piece explaining that corporate customers are shunning Vista and waiting for Windows 7 instead. I emailed a link to Beastmaster Bill with a note saying, “Bill — so happy for you.” He wrote back: “Steve, it saddens me that you are still so obsessed with our old adolescent rivalry when you could instead be finding ways to use your wealth and influence to work on serious issues in the developing world. There’s more to life than consumer electronics. As for Vista, let me just say this: Siooma, assclown.”

So if you were wondering when the successor to Vista will actually appear, and maybe you were a little skeptical when Beastmaster said the world would see Son of Vista by next year, well, you had reason to be skeptical. Dell apparently has told users it will keep shipping XP until 2012. Honestly I can’t believe how lucky we are. Thank you, thank you, thank you, Microsoft. Mwah.

I’m stunned. Talk about honesty. Check out this story where a Borgtard exec tells a conference that the User Account Control in Vista was designed to irritate usrs. Money quote: “The reason we put UAC into the platform was to annoy users. I’m serious.” Congratulations, dudes from Redmond. On this one you’ve succeeded in a big way.

Now Gates says they’ll have Windows 7 next year, where previously they’d said they wouldn’t have the next crappy iteration of Windows until 2010. “I’m superenthused about what it will do in lots of ways,” the Beastmaster sayeth. By which I think he means they’ve totally redesigned the blue screen of death to make it more visually appealing. And there’s a whole new set of driver issues and weird crashes and stalls. And performance will be down by an extra 10%. Can’t wait! Seriously.

Meanwhile if you’re really interested in software gorpspeak, this guy claims to have some inside dope on what Windows 7 is going to look like. Thanks to the folks who sent me this link but I must admit I didn’t read it, only because I really don’t care what Windows 7 will look like. And I’m super busy. Okay?

Says here we’re going to put out an SP1A service pack for Vista just because we’re all so sick of watching Microsoft flail. Yes, it’s a joke. But the weird thing is we’ve actually talked about this internally. I mean it’s getting really awful watching the Microtards gasp and struggle like so many dying fish hauled up onto the shore. That and all their lying about how well everything is going. Man oh man. It’s like the more they suck the more they have to brag. Just totally harshes my Zen. Mostly I try not to think about them, or to read anything about them. I recommend you do the same.