Hacker's lounge: Making Money Program

Late last week, Microsoft put an end to its Office Genuine Advantage (OGA) program. The Office Notifier, the OGA ActiveX control for Internet Explorer, and the OGA plug-in for Firefox have also been retired. The change took place on December 16, was first confirmed in a KB article last updated on December 17, 2010, and found by ZDNet:

The Office Genuine Advantage ("OGA") program has been retired. For more information about the benefits of genuine Office, please visit the following website:

Benefits of genuine Office

When OGA still existed, it required users to validate their copy of Microsoft Office to download noncritical updates and other downloads such as addons, samples, templates, and so on. Now, users can grab said content without having to perform the extra step, whether they pirated Microsoft Office or not.

It's important to note that OGA is different from product activation. The former is Internet-based and permits users to download files and updates from the Microsoft website while the latter is enforced at the software level and is required to use the actual software. OGA rejects the product keys that have either been widely leaked or which have been generated to pass through the initial activation. OGA covers Office XP, Office 2003, and Office 2007.

OGA has an equivalent on the Windows side: Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA). WGA is required for much more useful downloads than OGA, such as Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE). Redmond has no plans to kill off WGA, at least not at this point in time.

"The Office Genuine Advantage program was designed to notify many customers around the world whether their copy of Microsoft Office was genuine," a Microsoft spokesperson told Ars. "The program has served its purpose and thus we have decided to retire the program. Given our strong commitment to anti-piracy, we are making several new investments that will allow us to engage with customers and help victims of fraud."

The change is a significant one because it implies that OGA was costing Microsoft more money than it was saving the company, suggesting that OGA was largely ineffective in its goal. This is hardly surprising given that the "Advantage" in Office Genuine Advantage was minor: the large majority of Office users can live without extra templates and samples.

Obama is only pro-choice on abortion and infanticide. On everything else, there is no choice, from the car you drive to the food on your plate to education. Failure is a feature, not a bug, of public schools. Keep the public dumb. Needy. Wanting more government that Democrats are only all too willing to provide. Voucher systems have been successful wherever they have been honestly tried. Which is why the Democrats have killed such programs. What the MSM has done its best to do is to lose this down the memory hole, and the above CNN clip is emblematic of that, as it is an utterly shameful act by Obama and Congressional Democrats in deep-sixing the successful voucher program in D.C., dooming 1,800 low-income mostly black students to one of the worst educational systems in the country (the worst is DPS -Detroit Public Schools, which I have bogged about ad infinitum here):

It's official: Democrats kill successful DC voucher program, resegregate DC Public Schools

After hiding the data and dumping the successful DC voucher program, the only thing Obama should tell students today is "I'm sorry"

Freep: Public Schools Are Crap - Let's Remold It!

Detroit News: DPS FAIL!!!

Vouchers vs. D.C. public schools

WaPo: Voucher Subterfuge

Education secretary Arne Duncan referred to DC public schools as a district with “more money than God.” More than $28,000 per student. Failing miserably. The only success in that district was a voucher program that Obama attacked, even though vouchers cost a quarter (that's right - 25%) of the $28,000 number and helped the students. Should Obama get his head screwed on straight (good luck with that one), he will announce today to all students that since vouchers have been a smashing success in D.C., proved by concrete educational data, they should be a smashing success elsewhere. I mean -wouldn't that be a move to "restore scientific integrity in governmental decision making?" Especially since vouchers are proven to help students and drive down costs?

But that is not what anyone will hear. That's because Obama and his administration hid data indicating the program's successful educational results as they pushed Congressional Democrats to scrap the program. After all, they have the teachers unions to protect. The WSJ published an article a while back about the shenanigans:

It's bad enough that Democrats are killing a program that parents love and is closing the achievement gap between poor minorities and whites. But as scandalous is that the Education Department almost certainly knew the results of this evaluation for months.

Voucher recipients were tested last spring. The scores were analyzed in the late summer and early fall, and in November preliminary results were presented to a team of advisers who work with the Education Department to produce the annual evaluation. Since Education officials are intimately involved in this process, they had to know what was in this evaluation even as Democrats passed (and Mr. Obama signed) language that ends the program after next year.

Opponents of school choice for poor children have long claimed they'd support vouchers if there was evidence that they work. While running for President last year, Mr. Obama told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel that if he saw more proof that they were successful, he would "not allow my predisposition to stand in the way of making sure that our kids can learn . . . You do what works for the kids." Except, apparently, when what works is opposed by unions.

Mr. Duncan's office spurned our repeated calls and emails asking what and when he and his aides knew about these results. We do know the Administration prohibited anyone involved with the evaluation from discussing it publicly. You'd think we were talking about nuclear secrets, not about a taxpayer-funded pilot program. A reasonable conclusion is that Mr. Duncan's department didn't want proof of voucher success to interfere with Senator Dick Durbin's campaign to kill vouchers at the behest of the teachers unions.

The decision to let 1,700 poor kids get tossed from private schools is a moral disgrace. It also exposes the ugly politics that lies beneath union and liberal efforts across the country to undermine mayoral control, charter schools, vouchers or any reform that threatens their monopoly over public education dollars and jobs. The Sheldon Silver-Dick Durbin Democrats aren't worried that school choice doesn't work. They're worried that it does, and if Messrs. Obama and Duncan want to succeed as reformers they need to say so consistently.

Ouch. Read the whole thing as it is a very worthy read. There's more and it is equally devastating. There is not enough shame to be heaped on the heads of Democrats for this obscenity of a decision. In Arizona, the school choice program there has been targeted for termination as well: Video: Arizona School Choice Fight Goes to U.S. Supreme Court

bench craft company scam

Hacker's lounge

Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Making Money Program

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Alfred Kahn, 'Godfather' of Airline Deregulation, Dies at 93

'You lie!' Clarence Page calls Fox <b>News</b> Channel's 'fair and <b>...</b>

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'You lie!' Clarence Page calls Fox <b>News</b> Channel's 'fair and <b>...</b>

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'You lie!' Clarence Page calls Fox <b>News</b> Channel's 'fair and <b>...</b>

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