MS is holding a contest in Europe & Pakistan, in which you have to guess what date MS will launch their long awaited next version of Windows. All legal residents of Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Pakistan, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Switzerland, and the UK who are 18 years of age or older have the chance to win from 1 of 3 prizes available in different prize bands; 1st Prize: Be live at the Launch Event in the USA: the full package with entry, flight and 3 nights in a 4-star Hotel, 2nd-4th Prize: New XBOX 360, 5th-10th Prize: XBOX Core System. NOTE: It seems to require IE to sign up, as it doesnt work in Safari, it may work in FF however.
9 september 2009
“All legal residents of Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Pakistan, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Switzerland, UK”
Racism against Swedes or what? 🙂
Not only Swedes.
No Austria, Bulgaria, everything that has been Yugoslavia, Ukraine, Luxembourg, the Baltic nations, Belarus, Russia, Turkey and probably a number of others I’ve forgotten but OTOH Pakistan is now part of Europe?!
Yeah I dropped the ball on that one, changed it now, Europe and Pakistan, just a question though, does MS have regional offices in the nations that arent included in this contest?
Not to mention other EU countries, while Croatia for example isn’t even in EU, yet they can compete. Really weird rules.
“All legal residents of Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Pakistan, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Switzerland, UK”
Racism against Swedes or what? 🙂
Maybe they thought Linus was Swedish instead of a Fin 🙂
It IS a strange list, what happened to the Netherlands and Luxemburg for example ? I think Belgium probably means BENELUX here and maybe Sweden is supplied by MS Norway ?
Nope, we Swedes have yet to throw out the Microsoft Office from our country…:-)
RTM: Late 2006 (December?) or early 2007.
Official: Q1 2007.
This worked in Firefox for me. Oh, and they let me sign up even though I’m in the USA. 😉
They probably already have the date and are working backward, anything not ready by March will move to SP1 and anything really sketchy will be moved to SE (second edition). Lots of corporate customers are trained by now to tell their Microsoft reps, “Call me when you ship SP1.”
BTW I’m not sure the grand prize is better than fourth prize… is this like a political convention, where you get to whoop and holler for the TV cameras on cue?
Paul G
Yeah, or they don’t have the date and they’re constructing the release date from the most expected date. Either way they are surely using this to manipulate the users in one way or another. What else would you expect from a monopoly?
Unless you are a die hard Microsoft fanboy I do not think the first prize is worth the trouble of getting time off work (i.e. use vacation/loss of pay), find someone to watch the kids/house/pets, etc. just to see the new BSOD. All kidding aside though, a new XBOX 360 would be nice in my entertainment center and the wireless controllers will make it easier (sit where you want) and safer (not wires to trip over, machine not on the floor) to play.
“die hard Microsoft fanboy”
Yeah, they’re called “shareholders”.
…for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it gives me – and probably many others – that Microsoft don’t actually know the release date yet (yes, it could equally mean they do know it, but with a “guess” in the contest, it does lend an air of uncertainty to the actual release date).
Secondly, you strongly suspect that if not enough people guess the right date to win all the prizes, they’ll just shift the release date back to whenever there is enough people 🙂 After all, it’s going to be way overdue and underwhelming when it’s released, so what does an extra few days wait matter?
…would be a copy of Mac OS X ‘Leopard’.
Stop trolling… November 1st 2006 !! (For Vista not Leopard).
Or how’s about spicing it up? Dapper Drake (codename for Ubuntu Linux 6.04) and Vista, for mid-april 2006.
Canonical are pushing Dapper Drake as a MS beater anyway, so why not?
Does anyone know whether this will include any composite extension turned on by default?
According to http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051215-5777.html Flight 2 of Dapper (recently released) includes GNOME 2.13.3 with Cairo goodness and a new Cairo-clearlooks theme. Also included is latest OpenOffice 2 and Beagle Desktop Search integration.
Kubuntu also rocks and no doubt will include it’s composite thingy in Kubuntu 6.10 (october 2006, hopefully with KDE 4). I forget the name of KDE’s similar renderer.
Hahahahahahah!
It’ll be like comparing cave paintings to a Da Vinci.
Maturity not your strong point, then?
Come back when you have pubes.
Yeah, real relevant to the topic of discussion. 🙂
Nice try — common tactic though. If you can’t beat ’em, just insult ’em!
6/6/6 – it has to be!
The work of the devil always leaves a telltale sign!
6/6/6 – it has to be!
The work of the devil always leaves a telltale sign!
I can just image Bill taking the stage to the music of Iron Maiden : “666 the Number of the Beast … Hell and fire was spawned to be released”
How many people do you think are going to sign up for this contest just to be able to show up to the launch event in a Tux-shirt ?
How many people do you think are going to sign up for this contest just to be able to show up to the launch event in a Tux-shirt ?
I certanly would.
Grow up. Microsoft people don’t care about Linux people in the same way Linux people care about Microsoft people.
If you show up to an MS event in a Tux shirt, you’ll just be ignored or laughed at by a few. If an MS shill did the same at a Linux event, the Linux geeks would go batshit insane over it.
“If you show up to an MS event in a Tux shirt, you’ll just be ignored or laughed at by a few.”
Yeah, but that would be such a cool photo-op if you got to shake hands with Bill or Steve! Woo hoo!
“If you show up to an MS event in a Tux shirt, you’ll just be ignored or laughed at by a few.”
Even better!!! When you go to the mic to thank Microsoft for your Xbox prize you can lean in and say “Thanks Microsoft! I’m going to find out a way to load Linux on this motherf–ker!!!”
Ready or not, Vista will be available to the OEM’s in August 2006. They will have Vista systems flooding the market for the Christmas rush in 2006.
I believe they will allow the OEM’s to sell systems with Vista pre-installed for a period of time before retail versions are sold. This will avoid some of the negative press they will receive when users attempt to install it on old junk systems.
The marketing hype for Vista will eclipse the hype of the Windows 95 release by a factor of ten.
It has to be 6/6/6 withouth doubt. I am waiting this release as it will mark the Linux and *BSD day of joy as Vista will not satisfy expectations.
“It has to be 6/6/6 withouth doubt. I am waiting this release as it will mark the Linux and *BSD day of joy as Vista will not satisfy expectations.”
I really am not trying to bate anyone but…BSD day of joy? The real BSD day of joy is when it can run Windows software and use Windows drivers and you won’t have to be a computer geek to do either. Then we could really compete!
I’m going to write a letter to my Queen about this insult.
October 25th 2006
Here’s a clue:
“Must be 18 or over”
Given the average life span of people in those countries, I’m guessing sometime in 2075.
MS keeps the prizes!
1. Go to about:config
2. Add new string item: general.useragent.override
3. Enter the value: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.2; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)
4. ???
5. Profit!
2042
(That was a joke btw)
>I certanly would.
<
me to… they would blur it out of news footage and any pictures that they could control.
I didn’t know that MS were such good comedians
Well the reason its taking so long is they want to include as much drm as possible.
Itll be Q4 of 2006 or Q1 of 2007