Microsoft says WGA outage affected less than 12,000 systems
By Donald Melanson 
posted August 28th 2007 3:22PM
posted August 28th 2007 3:22PM
With Microsoft's WGA servers patched up after last week's outage, the company now appears to be willing to get a bit more specific about the situation and the damages done. In a post on the official Windows Genuine Advantage blog, Microsoft's Alex Kochis revealed that " fewer than 12,000 systems were affected worldwide" and that "many of those have already revalidated and are fixed." As for how the situation arose, it seems that Microsoft was in the dark initially, first learning of it "through a combination of posts to our forum and customer support." Curious about the matter, Ars Technica asked Microsoft for more information about the outage and why no backup had been put in place, but was apparently told by a spokesperson that "Microsoft is still determining the answer to these questions."
[Via Ars Technica]
[Via Ars Technica]
Don't they know that "fewer than" and "less than" mean both the same thing? Get rid of the "traditional fewer is used for things that can be counted". "Less than" is used in many cases that things can be counted (i.e. less than $50). Usage between the two varies from region to region and people may use "fewer" exclusively, or "less" exclusively.
To put it bluntly, language is not static, it is not well-defined, it is different from person to person and from city to city, state to state, and it changes rapidly.
http://www.paramegsoft.com/forum/
http://download.paramegsoft.com/
It's a pet peeve of mine, but I figure a professional website would want to be grammatically correct. In this case you should say 'fewer' not 'less'. Your headline should read "Microsoft says WGA outage affected fewer than 12,000 systems"
Thanks!
Less is MORE!
The grammar police again! They don't know when to stop!
Don't they know that "fewer than" and "less than" mean both the same thing? Get rid of the "traditional fewer is used for things that can be counted". "Less than" is used in many cases that things can be counted (i.e. less than $50). Usage between the two varies from region to region and people may use "fewer" exclusively, or "less" exclusively.
To put it bluntly, language is not static, it is not well-defined, it is different from person to person and from city to city, state to state, and it changes rapidly.
ur a european?
less is far better than more - it lets you go forward AND backwards!
I was one of the lucky 12,000. Other than losing the Aero interface in Vista, I was able to continue about my evening of Warcrafting without but a few "Yer A Pirate" popups.
So 11,999 people were affected?
haha, i saw about 5 or 6 at my school
And they know this because...their little Narco™ computers told them. Yes. I see. (evil sinister laugh).
What is the same guy counting? I mean the same guy who counted initially RROD'ed Xbox360s?
Ha Ha!
No problems doing a WinXP Pro setup last night.
12,000 - isn't that nearly 100% of the people who use vista?
I think you are getting it confused with linux
Yeah because if he was talking about Macs the number would be much lower.
Mac guys don't flame me!
They missed a few 0s
Wow, that almost makes it sounds like 12,000 isn't a lot of people...
Both my vista machines were hit because I was getting some updates from the MS site. But The next day they were fine...no bigs
4/4 of the PCS in my house running Vista were hit by this. The constant pop-ups during the weekend were a pain in the ass; though all of the PCs revalidated easy enough once WGA was back up.
My daughter's iMac worked fine ...
Yes, but 'fine' means something different to Mac users -- the equivalent in the PC user's lexicon, I think, is 'laughably.'
Didn't see any of this on my any of my Vista boxes.
Hmm... what is more disturbing?
The fact that they don't know what caused the outage? or the fact there is a WGA blog?
I think the blog...
Your frustration. Our fault. ™