... of the fact that, despite Microsoft's worn-out cliches and downright lies, their software is simply...

WAKE UP AT THE BACK THERE, FOLKS!!!!

... *not fit for purpose*, and you will not, under any circumstances, get the 99.999% uptime that their slick marketting droids would have you believe is on offer to "enrich your corporate software experience".

The only "experience" you will (errmmm..) experience from trusting your business to their sloppily-written bloatware and "bent-over-with-its-arse-in-the-air" defences to malware is the "bankruptcy and ruin" experience.

Got it?

It's not Unix, it's not Oracle, it's not a platform for 24x7 critical operations, it's a toy single-user consumer operating system with many sparkly but dodgy bolt-ons that - for some reason - people think is the only choice in computing platforms. It ain't. Run something reliable instead.

God, I'm almost tired of sending screenshots of error messages from fallen-over .asp servers to corporate Webmasters to show why I didn't/couldn't buy anything from their crappy broken MS-driven sites... almost...

Trouble is, it's not that easy.

The moment you do that, the profile page tells you your address/postcode is no longer valid. And then there's the phone number.

My profile is linked to my 360/Live account, I can't just muck around with my settings/region and fake my address just to test some beta software!!

Now I hate MS as much as the next free-thinking bloke (or gal), I switched to Ubuntu because Vista was and is utter bloat, but this article was clearly just a flame at MS. I happen to think Mesh has a *lot* of potential. I know it's going to turn into a way to lock people in yet again, but it might just spur open source to make one. Actually, gnome does have something similar in the wings...

Anyway, shame on you el reg!

I'm in the UK, applied VIA Connect yestarday (Wednesday), got my invitation today, signed in and its been working all day as far as I can tell.

Yeah, that's what they said, but I'm running the Live Mesh tech preview here (UK) without changing any settings whatsoever. Got the invite, signed in, added device, client installed, instant 5Gb's extra storage, no complaints anywhere about not being in the US.

(and yes, I do use the UK keyboard and region settings b4 someone pipes up I must have US settings, I'm no fekin noob, ok)

btw, I'm no MS fanboi (Vista's a joke), but when the news is mentioned about the preview all over the web is it any wonder they suffered a bit of a /. moment with the site. After all, MS only released the info quietly in the live forums, not by official means, so I kind of agree with KenBW2 here.

My biggest gripe is the need to use IE because of an active-x control required for the desktop client, about time MS ditched that dated, buggy, hole infested proprietary active-x crap once and for all, aside from that I'm quite happy having another on-line storage facility to dump backups on.

Paris, cause I'd like to see her in mesh (stockings of course ;) )

I've been using for ages, since I got invited. It's nothing special. All it does at the moment is provide a web based alternative to a USB stick, as it won't sync to anything other than a PC. If it let you share calendars or was part of a web based office suite like google docs, I'd probably use it for something other than storing warez and porn.

If it is tied to Rotmail, why do you need to sign up for the service?

People criticised Apple's service for lacking features and having some shortcomings.

But at least Apple's works, more than can be said about Microsoft.

"If it is tied to Rotmail, why do you need to sign up for the service?"

Presumably because they don't want to give every 2-bit spammer that has 60 Hotmail accounts that much stuff for free when it won't even get used.

Go Google. Microsoft has tripped up.