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Google is nearly as ubiquitous and a tool of the state

...To a large degree Apple has turned a blind eye to the jailbreak community. I hardly think Apple is trying to keep people from learning programming or doing cool new things.

Really?
You must be referring to an Apple I'm not familiar with.

Nearly every OS release for the iPhone has gone out of its way to un-jailbreak (re-jail?) its phones. Didn't look too hard, but wikipedia sums it up best with its "cat and mouse" description.

And then of course there's the legal case where Apple argues that jailbreaking phones should be flat-out illegal under the DMCA.

Seems to me that Apple has both eyes open on this one.

[...] the thing is that Amazon already has a iPhone Kindle reader and it can take advantage of the greater space on the iPad.

And that's going to make things interesting.

I've not seen absolute proof, so I'm willing to cut Apple a little slack. But Apple supposedly nixes applications that compete with their offerings. So you can't, for example, write an App that will allow you to buy and listen to music from Amazon's MP3 music store. Again, I don't know if this is true or more "Apple is evil" bashing, but let's assume it's true.

A whole industry has come up around selling books on the iPhone/iPod touch. In fact, the "Books" category is second only to games. Because many books are their own App, this has inflated the number of Apps in the App Store. And, as many have pointed out, the iPad is going to be at least a decent eBook reader and Apple has started their own book store.

So what happens to the Kindle app, which allow you to buy eBooks from Amazon? For that matter, what happens to a whole genre of Apps? Does Apple yank them (causing a sharp decline in the number of Apps in the App Store)? Do they just allow them to wither (ie, no updates)? Will Apple decide that these Apps cannot run "natively" on the iPad (eg, cannot take advantage of the larger screen) but they're okay for the iPhone/iPod touch?

On the other hand, can you imagine how much bad press Apple would get if they did anything like what I've mentioned? It's one thing to say that the iPhone/iPod touch already comes with Apple's music store so you can't make an App that competes. It's another thing when you've already made the App, it's already shipping and making money, and has created a large marketplace when suddenly Apple decides to enter the market and they kick you off? Developers would drop iPhone development so fast it would make your head swim! "Yes, we want iPhone developers! But if you look like you're going to be successful, we'll take over the market and not even allow you to compete!"

Even Phil Schiller and the Apple Fanbois couldn't double-talk their way out of that one.

Yes, it will be interesting, indeed, to see what happens.

Also, I should point out that Android seems to have all of the disadvantages of a closed system, and all of the disadvantages of an open system at the same time. For example, app developers on Android can publish without approval, but so can malware developers. There has already been one app pulled because it was a phishing app.

Thank goodness there hasn't been any malware on iPhone, eh? Oh, wait, never mind.

Apple's control over iPhone apps isn't to protect the user or the network; it's to protect Apple's revenue stream. They're a phone and fart app company that also makes computers.

They're already doing that with cars - as if your ECU now acting like a mini flight data recorder wasn't enough, they want to put GPS tracking units in your car.

http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Insurance/InsureYourCar/WillYourCarRatYouOut.aspx

Oh and if you have bad credit the dealer may install one too:

http://blogs.computerworld.com/gps_tracking_privacy_violation

I don't think the accusation is that *all* foreigners are spies. I too am an American scientist in Europe; the collapsing economy took the academic job market with it.
The comment was probably in response to articles like this one. In this case the researcher was offered a chaired faculty position at a Chinese university in exchange for trade secrets from a US company.
I've had a shocking number of Chinese colleagues over the years tell me that they were made similar offers. I'm still waiting for MIT to offer me tenure in exchange for European secrets.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/print/9147558/Here_comes_the_new_cell_phone_etiquette?taxonomyName=Mobile+and+Wireless&taxonomyId=15

That's because they apparently were able to access a system used to help Google comply with search warrants by providing data on Google users, said a source familiar with the situation, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak with the press. "Right before Christmas, it was, 'Holy s***, this malware is accessing the internal intercept [systems],'" he said.

According to that article, what Google had was an internal system that could pull limited amounts of account information to comply with law enforcement requests, not a backdoor that gave access to the account in question. Also, it appears that the malware/attack in question didn't "subvert the system" so much as it piggybacked onto a computer with access and got in that way.

So while he's right as to the general purpose of the system, he seems to be pretty wrong as far as the scope of the 'backdoor'.

When I blogged about this the week before last, I was relying on an article in Computer World which talked about the intruders gaining access to "a system used to help Google comply with search warrants by providing data on Google users."

Android gone nowhere? Are you just making stuff up? Google's Android's market share compares well with Apple's iPhone And that's from May, as in before the Droid hit the market.

From the article you cited:

What is interesting here is that we are only five months and a million devices into the life of the Android. At month five, the iPhone had sold around two times as many devices.

The May 2009 article is saying, emphatically, that the Android platform is getting whipped and that the Browser [Chrome Lite] is being used more often than Safari inside the iPhone. That makes sense because native application options are massive for the iPhone and the Android is focusing more on browser based apps.

Android gone nowhere? Are you just making stuff up?

Google's Android's market share compares well with Apple's iPhone

And that's from May, as in before the Droid hit the market.

According to Computer World, Microsoft was notified about this bug last August.

And you, dear nightspirit, didn't read TFA did you? Here, let me highlight a relevant passage for you..."While the public exploit only targets Internet Explorer 6 without DEP, Vupen Security has confirmed code execution with Internet Explorer 8 and DEP enabled," the company said in an e-mail. "Enabling DEP will only protect users from current exploits."

TL:DR? IE8 is totally pwned as well. They just haven't released the script into the wild yet. When they do any script kiddie can pwn ANY MSFT browser, from 6 on up, DEP or not. So I really wouldn't be recommending IE to...well anyone at this point.

It's quite apparent that Apple would not want to partner with MS. Mostly because they have 30 BIllion $ in the bank and they probably feel they can design a better user experience than any of their competitors. For example Apple already purchased a maps company called Placebase and now they're getting into advertising to make it easy for developers to make money off of free apps (also helps Apple make money off of free apps). Another reason is that Apple hates the way MS does business. They hate their products and they hate their design. Bing is terribly designed from a visual standpoint. Google is already the standard and Apple isn't going to get into the search engine territory any time soon (that I know of) so it would make sense for them to continue using Google.

As far as I can tell, the article is BS. It links to another article, which links... nowhere, really. I don't see anything about this on planet mozilla, nor on any of the Mozilla wiki planning pages.

I think the author of this article is misinterpreting a discussion I read a few days (a week?) back, where they discussed backporting some high value, relatively low-disruption features from trunk (3.7) to 3.6.x There was some back an forth on what was safe enough and valuable enough to merit backporting, but last I saw, they seemed to be leaning towards only doing "out of process plugins" (OOPP) aka "Flash crashes don't need to crash the browser". I certainly didn't see anything about dropping 3.7

Ah, finally found that discussion http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.planning/browse_thread/thread/f65f34aba408ca01/82b3086c93a18036

Note that there doesn't seem to be anything about dropping 3.7 anywhere on http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.planning/

Blind people can surf the web just fine. Ever heard of a screen reader?

Yes, I have.
It can't "read" the diagram the professor posted to his website for some computer graphics class in the form of a SVG or PNG file.

Screen readers can only make text accessible.
Almost all websites make heavy use of graphics that cannot be consumed by a screen reader in a meaningful way.

Apparently someone has been working on this... and seems to have found a solution.

A book does discriminate, hence large print editions to enable partially sighted users access to content. You see making things accessible isn't impossible or even difficult.

Actually in this case its an interesting angle of attack.
The kindle could be far more accessible to blind or partially sighted users. We already know that text to speech was taken out of the kindle due to Publishers wanting to restrict any possible reduction in sales of audio books.

Since the function is there but disabled then yes the kindle is discriminating against the blind. now if there is any legislation that could force the re-enabling of this feature then the law might be able to trump the publishers.

I'm sure amazon won't protest too much if they are forced to re-enable a feature they were forced to disable.

Theres probably enough sales now for publishers to accept the re-enabling rather than lose future ebook sales or worse take ebooks away from the kindle that have already been sold. Presumably they would have to refund the cost of any ebooks they force to be deleted.

I don't know if there any suitable ports on the kindle for addition of a braille display.
such as
http://www.afb.org/afbpress/pub.asp?DocID=aw070311
or
http://www.visioncue.com/ALVABC640.html

Prices for braille displays are insanely expensive the last link costs $4,750 but there is Linux support for braille displays (isn't the kindle linux based?) although perhaps they would be forced to use the SD card slot for I/O (its been used to add TV to PDA's among other devices ) unfortunately the Kindle2 drops the SD card Slot and removable battery
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9127739/Kindle_fans_upset_that_Kindle_2_drops_SD_slot_replaceable_battery

on the other hand a netbook with a good battery and a copy of unswindle http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/12/23/amazon_kindle_hacked/
and the content available on the kindle is available to everybody, proving yet again DRM exists to slap the paying customer in the face. Is there anything DRm'd that can't be got for free with the protection removed?

really the kindles just a portable computer and its limitations are capable of being changed.

Apparently the two compromised accounts were because of "access a system used to help Google comply with search warrants by providing data on Google users." I've blogged about this. And my source for all of that is from an article in Computer World.

Hey Symbolset :)

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you. Were all back form the Hollidays at work and Ive been a bit busy.

Got it - thats what I thought you meant by Telepresence. Yes, thats going to be a killer feature in phones and other highly portable devices. I actualy use it often for personal stuff via Windows Live Messanger quite a bit. On a scale of 1 to 10, its about a 6.5. Sometims its a bit glitchy and the audio-video sync slips a bit. The WLM team is working on this and they understand the major issues.

Microsoft Office Communicator R2 also supports telepresence. It works very well, about a 7 or 8 on a 10 point scale. It uses a different stack than WLM. This is used day to day inside MSFT. Almost everyone has a decent web cam on the main desktop and/or in the laptop. For example, we have a team in Beijing - we use this as our primary way to work with them.

Ya - the only reason I need to use iTunes is to backup my phone. I use Napster for most of my music purchass, also in MP3.

Yes, office for he MAC is still around. Its pretty much the only viable office suite for the MAC. Apple doesnt sell one any more. Its quite compatble. The MAC-BU (Macintosh Business Unit) removed VB from Office 2008 for the MAC. This all had to do with the Macintoshs move from PowerPC to the Intel Architecture. You can find all the gorey details here. Here is another related article. It seems like they are putting back in for the next revision.

Agreed on the Tablet front. Things are getting interesting. Apple may be able to do what we havent - spark the tablet market. Well see.

Ill stick with my prediction - if the new iSlate (or whatever it is they are calling it) is Intel based and is essentilay a MAC, then it will be sucesfull. If its ARM based, and thus really a big iPhone, then it will be a very cool, but niche product. this has nothing to do with ARM, and everyitng with what people can do with it.

Best Regards
-Foredecker

Basically, many programmers feel that everybody else around him(or her) is a stupid asshole

That's one of the reasons working in IT is not all that satisfying. Many problems have multiple solutions which for the most part are equivalent in function but vary on what they're attempting to optimize for (* see below) yet developers seem to latch onto the solution they thought of and become down right rude and nasty when evaluating a teammate's solution. When every developer assumes he is the smartest of the bunch and all others are morons it fosters an environment where everyone is unwilling to compromise and a 3rd person usually has to step in to break the tie. That leads to a hostile work place where thought battles frequently occur. Losing a battle causes a teammate to become afraid of undue criticism in the future, so the next time around they over engineer the code trying to cover all bases. This leads to large systems that solve fairly simple problems with overly complex implementations. After a few cycles of this, the software is unmanageable, which becomes evidence proving to the developer that his teammates and ones who came before are idiots with no clue, and now it is up to that lone hot shot to bitch about fixing the mess, which of course is accompanied with many nasty critiques and insinuations.

I am a developer with a fairly open mind and I strive to eliminate ego from the workplace by staying on the positive, helpful side, but honestly I'm getting sick of working with people who don't try to do the same.

* Example, solutions can be optimized to target maintainability, readability, CPU/IO performance, availability, reliability, correctness/precision, recovery, automation, reduction of complexity, extensibility, cross platform, resilience to change, parallelism, security, partitioning, modularization, popular design idioms. The list is nearly endless.

Well considering the fact that nearly all are writing for the x360 FIRST, and we poor PC gamers only get the leftovers (multiplatform...shudder) then I really don't think in the long run DX10 and DX11 are really gonna amount to squat, not unless the x720 comes out with support for them.

So while I agree it is a hack and not the most stable of things I think ultimately MSFT shot themselves in the foot with DX 10 and 11 being Vista/7 only. When you consider that XP has 70% of users, to Windows Vista's 18% and Windows 7's 4%, it would be kinda nuts to write for an API that has less than 25% of the market.

Slightly OT, but you want to know the moment when I knew MSFT was going to shoot themselves in the foot again with windows 7? When they withdrew the Cheap upgrade option and family packs. I knew quite a lot of people that were willing to switch to Windows 7 HP for $50, and even more that would have plopped down the cash for the 3 pack like I did soon after trying it. But by raising the prices those people said "Why get screwed? XP is working just fine" and will probably keep XP until it runs out of support in 2014. Considering what an utter failure Vista was the LAST thing they needed was everyone avoiding Windows 7 like they did Vista, and there are a whole lot of folks out there with good PCs that could easily run Windows 7 HP and would have told their families it was okay to buy a PC with Win7.

To me it is just one more proof that without Bill at the helm MSFT is just flailing around in the dark. Ballmer is a classic "screw everything but the quarter" MBA type that lacks long term vision. By converting all those Windows XP users he could have wiped out the memory of Vista and have the numbers he needed to show Windows 7 as a runaway success and with it been able to push other tech like .NET, DX11, Silverlight, Live Messenger, etc. Instead all he thinks about is the quarterly report and pisses off many who would have adopted the latest OS and spread the word it was good. Stupid move Ballmer, stupid move.

In the case of today, I would guess:

the competitor is Microsoft

and

the partners are Verizon (more) and TV networks (for content)

Within the last few days, slashdot has published internet censorship stories from all these countries.

All of those countries may have differernt motovations, and use different tactics, but the results are similar.

January 01, 2010
China Reaffirms Plans to "Purify" the Internet

> Says crackdown on online pornography is part of overall effort to preserve "national long-term stability," build a "harmonious socialist society," and prevent the "poisoning of young people's physical and mental health," but most likely is all about strengthening its grip on the what could be a dangerous conduit for threatening images and ideas.

http://www.zeropaid.com/news/87485/china-reaffirms-plans-to-purify-the-internet/

January 03, 2010
Your Rights Online: Google Sets Censorship Precedent In India

> "Censorship varies from country to country but India, home to a sixth of the world's population, appears to be shaping up much like China. Not far behind everyone else, Google has increasingly censored websites with an incident where a very popular politician died and Google forcibly deleted and dissolved a group on Orkut where offensive comments about the Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh were posted. An official from India's Ministry of Communications and Information Technology said, 'If you are doing business here, you should follow the local law, the sentiments of the people, the culture of the country. If somebody starts abusing Lord Rama on a Web site, that could start riots.' The lengthy opinion piece calls attention to the beginnings of a definitive lack of free speech online for Indian citizens. A spokeswoman for the 'Do No Evil' company explained, 'India does value free speech and political speech. But they are weighing the harm of free speech against violence in their streets.'"

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/01/03/0123216/Google-Sets-Censorship-Precedent-In-India

In the USA, I think corporations are behind the censorship. Unethical corporations, and sometimes individuals (possibly backed by corporations), use various legal tricks, and harassment techniques, to remove websites that are not favorable to the interests of those corporations. Sometimes the same corporations have methods of flooding the media with propaganda that is favorable to their interests, or lanching smear campaigns against competiors.

For example, I seem to remember somebody with the initials JVM getting a certain blog removed, and possible arranging a major whitewash on wikipedia. And of course we all remember the harassment of PJ.

Then there was the case of the judge that had three websites removed. I may not care for him personally, but I think the APEX v. tunnelrat case raises some serious issues:

1) When is it right for a judge to expose an anonymous blogger?

2) When is it right for a judge to order a website to be taken down, and personal property (domain name) to be compensated?'

3) Is it illegal to publicly display legal contracts?

4) Does a judge in NJ have jurisdiction over of website that is not hosted in NJ, or owned by a NJ resident?

I don't care what APEX is telling us, or what the court is telling us. The APEX scam is clearly a case of a company bullying a blogger in order to hide information that company finds embarrassing, and maybe even illegal.

The case has been covered on several other sites.

Court orders three H-1B sites disabled
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9142806/Court_orders_three_H_1B_sites_disabled

Legal action PR nightmare
http://www.techgoss.com/Story/2109S14-Legal-action-PR-nightmare.aspx

Your Rights Online: Court Orde

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9139250/Snow_Leopard_bug_deletes_all_user_data

http://www.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?story_id=031001SMSU6O

http://venturebeat.com/2009/08/27/apples-snow-leopard-may-stop-you-from-doing-your-job/

I can go on forever....

Printable ad free no-karma-whore link to the article.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/print/9142148/Review_3_top_Linux_distros_go_for_different_users

"Terry Childs nearly built the San Francisco computer network by himself, to the point of actually filing for copyright on his design of the network. Management in the San Francisco IT department apparently couldn't fathom half of what he was doing and Terry Childs himself called them incompetent on numerous occasions, which is pretty much what the sole standing charge is all about. Refusing to hand over the network to incompetent imbeciles."
http://blogs.computerworld.com/14592/good_news_for_jailed_sf_net_admin_terry_childs

I'm not defending Childs' decision to hand over the passwords when asked, but I can sure see his perspective on it. As a consulting network engineer, I've frequently been put in the position of having to decide whether giving someone the keys to the kingdom will put the kingdom at too great a risk.

The problem here is that there was not a documented policy on passwords. As a former government IT employee, we had a documented policy concerning passwords. They were all documented in a password-protected spreadsheet kept on a server that only admins had the access and technical skills to get to. They weren't withheld, per se, they were just in a place that was inconvenient to get to unless there was an emergency situation that required the inconvenience.

The impression I get is that San Francisco's IT department had old-timers waiting for their retirement date and their pensions to mature. They were stuck in the days of mainframes, modems, and 8088's. Here comes Terry Childs, who has not only a clue but a plan for getting them into the 90's, if not the 21st century. He intimidates his superiors because he knows what he's doing, and they don't. He builds a network for the city that his peers should be proud of. Instead they are intimidated. They ask for passwords, and he politely refuses to give over until they understand the enormity of what those passwords do. They get mad and accuse him of hacking.

The worst thing about this case is that Terry Childs did nothing wrong, other than withholding the passwords too long. He's intelligent. He intimidated people with his intelligence. They couldn't fire him without cause, so they created a cause by insisting that he was hacking, even though the evidence does not show this.

The insult to injury here is that by dragging this out, the San Francisco IT department is just putting more egg on their face. Anyone following the case can see that they were incompetent and Terry Childs was trying to protect them from their incompetence. His crime was not knowing when he'd lost the game at the key moment.

Were I living in San Francisco, I'd want an audit of the technical skills of the IT department. It sure sounds to me like there are some people that need some training. If they can't learn from the training, reassignment. If they can't be reassigned, early retirement. But for all that's good and holy, get the incompetence out of the IT departments!

Outrage prompts Amazon to Change Price-testing Policy: "Last week, Computerworld first reported that Amazon was conducting various price tests in its DVD store that could result in one consumer paying as much as $15 more for the same item as another consumer."

Most of the Mozilla Corporation's profit comes from Google. In 2006 they made 66.8 million dollars, 85% of which was from Google.[Citation given]

And now they're telling people to abandon Google and go with Bing -- which is owned by a competing that would gladly kill Firefox if given the chance.

I really think Dotzler is a bit off the mark here.

'Seriosly? That's just marketing FUD. They are not designed for Linux, they just have some features deactivated so that z/OS can't run on them, so that they "could sell them cheaper"'

Seriously, do you have any citations for the above busllshit ?

"The new system uses IBM's specialty Linux processor and runs either Novell SUSE or Red Hat systems"

I actually like the office that the Vice President of Engineering has. Wouldn't it be much fun to walk into an underground lair to work every day?

As I understand it, you had to specifically approve each post. And if you didn't explicitly approve it, it would be ignored.

You could be right -- I recall hearing it would auto-publish. Regardless, in Blockbuster's specific case there is the Video Privacy Protection Act which prevents companies from sharing a member's video rentals with other entities without explicit permission. The penalty carries a $2,500 fine per incident. Even if Facebook requires permission to publish the post, Blockbuster would have still violated this law by simply sharing the information with Facebook.

"Advanced developers who learned how to code on what would be considered bare bones IDEs" Anyone who learned to code on an IDE has no right to call themselves a developer let alone an advanced developer. If however, you learned to code using BRIEF or notepad.exe as your editor then you are entitled. I do agree though that bloat is finally being seen as a curse. http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9136280/Opinion_The_end_of_bloatware_The_return_of_programming_s_golden_age_

CDs, Lies, and Magnetic Tapes: "...but there are other considerations related to magnetic tape also. Tape is very sensitive to heat..." Yeah, that's the ticket!

According to the latest reliability charts, Apple hardware is the expensive and unreliable choice.

Citation needed!

Let's see what Google returns. Apple's laptops rate 'Better than Average' in reliability study. Macs not all that for reliability. That article puts Dells in the middle with laptop reliability with Macs above them. "For the first time, Apple Inc. dropped out of the top spot in the computer-reliability ranking of Rescuecom Corp., a Syracuse, N.Y.-based chain of service shops, and ended in third place behind a pair of Asian computer makers that specialize in laptops."

Falcon

If you think there are 0% Linux and Mac botnets and malware in the wild, you are seriously uninformed.

http://theappleblog.com/2009/04/24/mac-botnet-how-to-ensure-you-are-not-part-of-the-problem/
http://blog.trendmicro.com/more-mac-malware-in-the-wild/
http://lwn.net/Articles/222153/ - Linux botnets
http://blogs.computerworld.com/14723/no_more_linux_security_bragging_botnet_discovery_worry

This is just a small sample. Let's all take security seriously, and leave religion to the gods. (and to head of the claim that it doesn't count if the user has to install something, like a pirated malware-infected Photoshop for OSX, that is the most common Win vector these days as well. Malware is the problem, not viruses.)

If the child porn smuggler is smart and careful, 20 PS3's won't be anywhere near enough to break strong, modern, encryption.

If he's dumb, there will be an easier way to decrypt the suspect data. Maybe the perp left the encryption key in plaintext somewhere, or used an obvious passphrase, or a weak or buggy encryption software.

There's no happy medium. What can you break with 20 PS3's? Maybe 56-bit DES?

While the key of DES is easy to brute-force today, and 80-bit keys are becoming questionable, 128-bit keys of high-quality algorithms are thought to be unbreakable via conventional (non-quantum) computers for the foreseeable future. There's a reason that the NSA is the second-largest electric utility user in Maryland...

First of all I get quoted for my legacy software knowledge and I've been doing software maintenance and debugging and developing for 17 years now. I have a lot of references that can back me up.

I get offers from other firms to teach their developers Visual BASIC 6.0 for older Windows or Turbo C 2.0 for MS-DOS so they can better debug them and maintain them. I also get offers to migrate code to newer operating systems like Windows Vista or Windows 7 or both. But I have to turn them down because I am currently too sick to work since 2002. Once I get better I will start up my own small business for contracting, and teach my employees these skills.

Management is not stupid, they usually give a six month contract to see if the contractor is any good. If they don't get good results, the contract is not renewed and the contract goes to another developer. I've worked as a contractor before so I know how it works as my contracts lead to full-time employment before, and I have a good track record.

I usually will use a proxy like guru.com or elance.com to start doing small projects and then work my way up to full time projects, and then use them as a reference and in the contract state that I can use the source code to show to other bidders examples of my work, as long as they sign a NDA stating they won't use the code and that while I wrote it, it belongs to a different firm.

I not only hold degrees in Computer Science, Information Systems, but also Business Management. I know how to talk business speak and talk to managers. I can also do auditing of a business and quality control to help bring down costs, as well as job cost accounting to see where the company is bleeding money.

Over the years I have made enemies as I got picked for a job over others, or I got promoted and got a pay raise over others, who are jealous of my work. Some of them rate my comments on Slashdot as Offtopic, when they really aren't, as both my comments are about Software Maintenance and the relations to it. But note that I also get Interesting ratings because my comments are interesting. I am one of the most interesting people on Slashdot for that reason.

That's funny - Microsoft is doing something along the same lines. I guess you have to do what you can to make a buck, times being what they are.

Probably the same reason that this article appears on Norway's version of ComputerWorld, but I can't find it with a search of the U.S. version http://www.computerworld.com/action/googleSearch.do?cx=014839440456418836424%3A-khvkt1lc-e&q=china+igf&x=0&y=0&cof=FORID%3A9#223

That doesn't answer your question...or does it?

There are estimated to be over 12 million MySQL installations worldwide.

And many of these are powering toy applications.

I can't find hard numbers on Sybase or Oracle, but assuming that Oracle and Sybase are about as popular as DB2, then the number of MySQL installations is nearly as many as all three of those vendors combined.

But this is a baseless assumption. In terms of revenue, Oracle is by far the biggest. Unless Oracle is significantly more expensive than the competition, they almost certainly have more installations than you claim.

According to MySQL's site, Oracle and MySQL comprise around 52% of the of all deployed databases. If you don't understand that authorizing a deal which would enable a company which already controls 47% of the market share to form a company that controls such a dominant stake in the database market is bad for the market then you would most certainly benefit from investing a couple of minutes thinking about this subject.

US blackout was computer related

"The W32.Blaster worm may have contributed to the cascading effect of the Aug. 14 blackout, government and industry experts revealed this week"

Rare SCADA vulnerability discovered - May 2008

SCADA Systems Vulnerable to Hackers Feb 2004

Excuse me, but isn't simultaneously spending time and money recruiting new employees and laying off over 5000 people just a tad bit schizophrenic?

In contrast, Windows 2000 and XP have actually got better and better supported over the years - more and more drivers were released that wouldn't BSOD the system, more and more software released that didn't require Administator privileges to run (or even install - many games and apps nowadays install fine without requiring admin). Yes support for Win2K is dropping, but that's after way more than 3 measly years.

Really? Last time I checked, Microsoft has said that it won't be patching known serious bugs in TCP/IP in Windows XP, even though they claim XP will be supported until 2014.

That's okay, I can just hire a developer to backport those patches... oh, wait.

Because my experiences match that of the vast majority of Ubuntu users.

Just as the people who are caught up in the "endless reboot" problem with Windows 7 are a tiny minority, so are those having trouble with Karmic.

Even your example fails since you are having difficulties but are willing to brush them off.

My "difficulties" are that a single plugin for a single program hasn't been updated yet. The author of the plugin has been notified and has provided a beta updatebeta update. I have no doubt that I'll be seeing the release version in my update manager soon.

It's almost like M$ keeps moving the holes around and re-hiding them, but never fixing them. That would certainly permit the known holes and backdoors to be available for exploit but make it harder for 'unauthorized' (you did read the EULA, right?) entities to use them.

That is, however, only when M$ can be assed to patch in the first place. Not like they've dropped patches for versions they still claim to support.

A lesson for Windows Engineers. Aim for 256MB, not 2GB. The era of Netbooks is upon us, and it looks like Microsoft will miss the bus.

More netbooks come with Windows than with Linux. This is old but Study: Windows clobbers Linux on netbooks with over 90% share.

Falcon

From a link from TFS: "Vishing is much like phishing, but instead of urging e-mail recipients to click on a link (to a bogus website) this message instructs the reader to call a telephone number to rectify a problem with your account."

I agree - "vishing" is a stupid term.

That assumes that the value of the software is the same, value being usability, performance, etc. For netbooks, servers, and small dedicated devices I don't think Microsoft can compete at all.

More netbooks sell with Windows than Linux. When IT staffers were asked "the operating system of choice for IT netbooks is Windows 7". Some are hoping that because of Moblin Linux will regain market share in netbooks. MS IIS comes in second in webservers, behind Apache. While down from it's high IIS still has a market share of 18% in webservers, excluding Apache more than all the others combined. I don't think Microsoft is in any danger of losing it's market share anytime soon.

I'm all for Linux, but it can't completely replace Microsoft just yet.

For most people both Linux and Macs can replace Windows. People just have this "Microsoft software is needed" attitude. Like a lot of other switchers before switching from Windows to first Linux then OSX I evaluated what I wanted to do, the tasks not the software. I then looked to see if there was any software available for Linux and OSX that could do what I wanted. Other than there being no drop-in replacement for Photoshop for Linux the answer was I could get software that would do what I wanted. And with WINE or Crossover Photoshop CS 2 will run on Linux.

Falcon