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The InfoWorld favicon that Firefox puts in my tab bar looks like a little red lobster, with one claw bigger than the other.

http://www.infoworld.com/favicon.ico

No matter how many times I see it, I don't think "stylin' letter 'I' dude!", I think... "lobster"

Hmm, I'm hungry.

You don't get upgrades. You get security patches that sometimes don't hose your apps. With Linux, you get free upgrades AND updates supported to exactly the same degree that your Windows updates are supported (ie, not at all), and the base cost of the system is free. And the per-incident cost is the same through his company. I'd think that Linux looks like a much better deal.

This article:
http://www.infoworld.com/archives/emailPrint.jsp?R=printThis&A=/article/08/06/16/25FE-stupid-users-part-3-admins_1.html

The other two:
http://www.infoworld.com/archives/emailPrint.jsp?R=printThis&A=/article/07/05/07/19FEuserintro_1.html
http://www.infoworld.com/archives/emailPrint.jsp?R=printThis&A=/article/06/04/13/77021_16FEusergoofs_1.html

This article:
http://www.infoworld.com/archives/emailPrint.jsp?R=printThis&A=/article/08/06/16/25FE-stupid-users-part-3-admins_1.html

The other two:
http://www.infoworld.com/archives/emailPrint.jsp?R=printThis&A=/article/07/05/07/19FEuserintro_1.html
http://www.infoworld.com/archives/emailPrint.jsp?R=printThis&A=/article/06/04/13/77021_16FEusergoofs_1.html

This article:
http://www.infoworld.com/archives/emailPrint.jsp?R=printThis&A=/article/08/06/16/25FE-stupid-users-part-3-admins_1.html

The other two:
http://www.infoworld.com/archives/emailPrint.jsp?R=printThis&A=/article/07/05/07/19FEuserintro_1.html
http://www.infoworld.com/archives/emailPrint.jsp?R=printThis&A=/article/06/04/13/77021_16FEusergoofs_1.html

http://www.infoworld.com/archives/emailPrint.jsp?R=printThis&A=/article/08/06/16/25FE-stupid-users-part-3-admins_1.html Printer friendly version, rather then 7 pages.

for info on the rise of Slammer, dated January 27, 2003.

Er, like their ruling that drastically reduced cases where an injunction was appropriate, this taking away the big injunction stick from patent trolls?

http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/05/15/78316_HNebaypatent_1.html?source=rss&url=http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/05/15/78316_HNebaypatent_1.html

Oh, that one again? It's 2008 — time to re-tire that M$ talking point. I suppose that Ken Thompson's presentation from 24 years ago is also not an endorsement of Open Source? Re-read A5-0264/2001 and European Commission technology strategy They're quite clear and the 2001 resolution even pre-dates the main start of MS EU-level lobbying efforts.

If M$ wanted to play, it's executives could decide to release product code as open source, but the company hasn't. Further, it can't. M$ products just aren't engineered for security. In fact, M$ code is so bad that it threatens US national security. So, although ditching M$ products won't in and of itself make your site secure, it's a necessary first step.

It's about security and for that you need open source.

InfoWorld are running an online petition to extend the life of XP, with (at the time of writing) several hundred thousand signatures. Sign the petition here

17100 lawsuits as of December 2005.

If nearly 20000 people had been wrongly accused and bullied into settleing, every lawyer in the country would be trying to cash in with a giant class action lawsuit.

So if these guys are guilty, I'm wondering where is the proof and was it validated? Or do we simply take the **IA's word on this?

Settling means no proof is necessary and and we don't take anybody's word for it. It means the defendant would rather agree to the terms set by the person filing the lawsuit rather than go to trial.

Also, here's "proof" that at least some of the defendants are found guilty if they don't settle.

"...Microsoft has never warned anyone to start using Firefox when a remote execution exploit in IE was discovered!"

I wouldn't be so sure about that if I was you. Think back about four years ago, right here on /. it was covered:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/07/05/1440228

http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/07/09/28enterwin_1.html "The U.S. Department of Homeland Security, otherwise known as Dancing with Big Brother, tells the world to stop using the Web browser you fought long and hard to tie into your operating system. That's what happened to beleaguered Microsoft when the department's Computer Emergency Readiness Team (CERT) recently recommended users switch to alternate browser platforms to avoid the security holes in IE caused largely by ActiveX.

And Microsoft isn't objecting. Microsoft's own Slate even posted an article advocating Firefox, a Mozilla offshoot, in favor of IE until Microsoft gets its security act together. "

http://www.slate.com/id/2103152/

Those three (all related to the same incident to be fair-not three separate ones) are just off the top of my head, and the results of about 45 seconds on Google.

Oh, you mean the ones that have been fired over the contents of their blogs?

I'm sure they're all terribly honest after that...

http://weblog.infoworld.com/robertxcringely/archives/2007/07/dumb_dumber_and.html

So, I realize this article is getting a little long in the tooth, but I did just want to echo the sentiments of everyone who suggested the local library. This really is a great resource. When paired with John Udell's Library Bookmarklet http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/stories/2002/12/11/librarylookup.html and the Interlibrary Loan program I've saved a ton of money over the past couple of years and read a lot of great books.

In my opinion, partnering with Microsoft has been ugly. For example, Microsoft knew that Vista had problems before it was released: Suit says Microsoft knew it misled -- E-mails raised Vista doubts.

Windows Vista users suffer a ghastly performance loss (roughly two times, hardware for hardware).

http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2004/03/23.html

Granted, this vulnerability can be mitigated by other email clients...but Outlook is pretty popular, especially among non-technical users.

You mean there is an easy way to code around those annoying Windows Vista privilege escalation dialog boxes??? Thanks god!!!

"... very generous ..."

I've never heard anything Microsoft did called "very generous" before.

HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of people are protesting that Microsoft is killing the operating system they use, for the sole motive of making more profit. That's not generous, it's abusive.

The InfoWorld protest is only a tiny percentage of the people who will be enormously inconvenienced if they are forced eventually to change to another operating system.

Rather than "very generous", in my opinion the words "viciously destructive" apply.

Microsoft has scheduled the death of Windows XP at the same time that it has demonstrated an inability to deliver a new version. Even Steve Ballmer admits that Microsoft has been unable to deliver a finished operating system. He calls it "a work in progress".

Apparently good programmers don't want to work for Microsoft. If they are very skilled and creative, they want to work for Google.

Bill Gates leaves Microsoft soon. Steve Ballmer is trying to buy Yahoo, a company with 16,000 employees, many of whom don't want to work for him. Yahoo doesn't have skilled programmers, or they wouldn't be having financial problems during a time when Google is doing very well. Now does not seem a good time to consider buying anything new from Microsoft.

Windows XP won't sold after June 31, 2008, 68 days from now (2008-04-22).

This is how it works in practice: Once Microsoft has started a product on its death march, it is difficult for a corporation to continue to be involved with it.

I'm encouraged by the maturity of hardy hedon. However, there is still one MAJOR issue plaguing the distro. ACPI support. When a laptop user such as myself wishes to suspend their session, the OS never returns, instead yielding a black screen of death. Infoworld recently hammered on Ubuntu for not shaking out the ACPI bug in the available hardy hedon beta distro now available. While I realize there are some convoluted work-arounds, its these convoluted work-arounds that prevent simpletons from adopting linux / Ubuntu in the first place.

Some solutions, not tested and not reviewed, but simply googled. I have used other solutions for clients in the past. They have worked well on an IBM systems that was networked. The data wound up on a postgresql database that was then linked through a client application and a web server for different kinds of reporting and control.

These are just a few of the listings off of Google on a search:

• One solution reviewed
• More solutions ...
• More solutions from tech republic...
• An article on Infoworld

Remember though that POS is one of the most important aspects of any retail or store front type business. So, be wary of what you choose. Choosing a POS system is more about the relationship you are building with your system provider and maintainers than the actual system itself. Some systems require less of a relationship, but I have never run across a situation where that relationship was not present and integral to the long term use of the system. That relationship could be with the OSS developers and users or a company. I wish you luck on your choice. And, please post back to here as to what you chose, why and then your experiences. I prefer the OSS way in most cases as I can make modifications where I (my client) need them. But some applications I farm out to a company as the requirements are outside of my experience.

InnerWeb

Finally, of course, there are not yet any ISO OOXML implementations in the wild. But there aren't any full implementations of ODF in the wild either. Here's a list of ODF apps, scored on their ODF functionality, and no app achieves a perfect score, not even OO.o.
http://opendocumentfellowship.com/applications [opendocume...owship.com]

In summary, many here talk of how horrible OOXML is by citing problems that have been resolved in the approved ISO revision. (I'm amazed that so many here are under the illusion that the problems cited with ECMA OOXML weren't addressed at all in the final ISO version. Under that misunerstanding, I can see where one might be tempted to believe that NO votes switching to YES votes could only be the result of bribery and corruption.)

The Swedish Standards Institute has declared its recent vote in favor of Microsoft's Office Open XML format invalid. It means that Sweden will probably abstain from an important upcoming international vote on whether to make the format a standard.

The reason given by SIS was not the controversial circumstances surrounding the vote, in which Microsoft was found to have offered companies "incentives" if they voted in favor of OOXML. Instead, SIS cited a technicality, saying proper procedures had not been followed.

Slammer and its derivatives (Sobig, etc.) targeted Microsoft SQL Server. It so happened that some MS desktop applications also had code derived from SQL Server and were thus also vulnerable.

That's not to say that there weren't also worm attacks against Apache. And many PHP applications have been exploited to carry out cross-site scripting attacks.

Still, framing the question as "Now show me an OS that hasn't been exploited at least once?" seems disingenuous at best. Shouldn't we also consider the frequency and success rate of these exploits? By those criteria Windows has a much poorer record than *nix-based OS's, and it's not just because there are lot more Windows machines in the world.

Except they're not.

MSFT was hoping to buy at the equivalent of $31/share, though they're offering less as their stock slips; YHOO is currently trading at (conservatively) $27.50, and if you think Microsoft can dump several billion dollars' worth of demand into the common market without spurring that trading price up at least $3.50 per share, you're overly optimistic.

Microsoft is simply going to have to pay more, despite their threats to the contrary. Admittedly the Yahoo! stock may be trending up because of irrational confidence brought on by the Board's response to MS's offer, but so far that appears to be a self-fulfilling market prophecy, whether or not it's justified by the company's fundamentals. It remains to be seen what the valuation will be twelve months down the line if Yahoo! resists the takeover attempt.

http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/11/12/New-broadband-data-shows-the-US-is-still-behind_1.html seems to refer to those statistics... the funny thing is, according to that article: "Japan and South Korea had much higher speeds than in the U.S. The average advertised download speed in Japan was 93.7Mbps, while France and South Korea both had averages of more than 43Mbps. The average download speed in the U.S. in October was 8.9Mbps, while it was 10.6Mbps in the U.K. and 12.1Mbps in Australia", and "The U.S. ranked 19th out of 30 in average broadband speeds. Turkey and Mexico were the lowest, both with an average of less than 2Mbps." But hey, the guy says he's "being honest" by apparently merging all the lower-scoring European nations into the "European Union" designation in order to hogtie all the other nations with faster average speeds than ours.

Other interesting quotes from the article: "The U.S. range for a monthly subscription was between $14.99 for lower speeds and $199.99 for the top level of service. Only four of the 30 OECD countries had a lower low-end price."

"In South Korea, the range was $30.56 to $50.93 for the highest speed of service, and in Japan, the range was $21.22 to $131.57."

I can't imagine that MS is completely unaware of this workaround. After all, they have a licensing department that is larger than many (most?) corporations.

That inclines one to suspect that this hack was left in intentionally.

Now why would Microsoft let people steal from them so easily? That seems diametrically opposed to most of their past behavior. However, if their brand is indeed on a "sharp decline," then this action would suddenly make sense.

But it is still amazing to see Microsoft to be (seemingly) actually encouraging theft of their product. What will they think of next? Voluntarily coding to standards?

Repetition becomes tedious.

But the Slashdot Geek seems to live within a bubble that no outside force can penetrate - without, of course, being modded down into oblivion.

"But, frankly, Scarlet, I don't give a damn."

Here are the links again, whether you like them or not:

MS Office

The Year of Office 2007
Microsoft SharePoint taking business by storm

"The "magnitude of Office sales relative to the rest of the PC software market" is phenomenal. It's the massively huge tail wagging the dog."

"The talk [around SharePoint] is getting strategic now, and people are talking about it as a middleware decision. MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server) 2007 is the fastest growing product in the company's history."

MS Financial

Microsoft Q2 2008 by the Numbers

"Just four years ago, the majority of revenue came from North America. Now, 60 percent of sales are outside the United States. For the quarter, Microsoft sales increased 30 percent in emerging markets, 20 percent in established markets like Europe and 15 percent in the United States."

OS Market Share [Net Applications]

March 2008
OS Share Trend May 2007 - March 2008
OS Share Trend By Versions May 2007-March 2008

MS Vista 14% Up 10% from May 07
Win XP 82% Down 9%
OSX 8% Up 1%
Linux 0.6% Up 0.2%

In the familiar W3Schools stats it took Vista six months to grow from a 2% to 4% market share.
Linux five years.

Printer friendly link

The surveys that Microsoft cares about tend to look more like these:

The Year of Office 2007
Microsoft SharePoint taking business by storm
Microsoft Q2 2008 by the Numbers
Top Operating System Versions Share Trend for May, 2007 to March, 2008, Top Operating System Share Trend for May, 2007 to March, 2008 , Operating System Market Share for March, 2008

In the Net Applications stats you'll find Vista winning a healthy 14% share of the market and Linux neatly sandwiched between Win NT and Win 98 with a 0.61% share.

He says ODF currently lacks formula definitions for spreadsheets and says that "many core financial functions in spreadsheets are undefined except for actual Excel output" which "varies by version and service pack of MS Office." He then asks, "What happens if OpenDocument and OpenXML reach different definitions of those functions?"

Durusau also notes that ODF doesn't yet support Microsoft format legacy features which "will be easier with a formal definition of those features," and points out something we already know: "OpenDocument does not have a robust mapping to the current Microsoft format." He says that task would be easier if OpenXML completes the ISO process and adds, "If OpenXML is unclear, it must be fixed in order to create a robust mapping between the two."

The comments attached to Infoworld's coverage of Durusau's announcement raise some interesting points, as well.

I would gladly migrate the entire enterprise over to Free (either speech or beer) software tomorrow for every single business need - it would eliminate that worry at a stroke - but this is the real world and half-decent Free accounting and payroll applications are pretty thin on the ground.

Ernie Ball Co. had no problems figuring that out after getting stung by a $90,000 BSA audit.

It's all a matter of business priorities. If a small-to-medium-sized guitar string manufacturer can do it, I suspect most shops could figure it.

I look at platform stats. I look at retail sales in the states.

I look at the - utterly fantastic - growth Microsoft is seeing world-wide...

I find nothing - nothing - to support the gleeful prophecies of doom posted daily on Slashdot.

Microsoft's SharePoint Server is on a billion-dollar quest to potentially become the next must-have technology, offering companies tools for building everything from collaborative applications to Internet sites and potentially handing Microsoft its next cash cow.

"I have not seen anything like this since the early days of [Lotus] Notes," says Mike Gotta, an analyst with the Burton Group. In those days, corporate users were enamored with a shiny new technology that seemed to have infinite uses. "The talk [around SharePoint] is getting strategic now, and people are talking about it as a middleware decision,"

MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server) 2007 is the fastest growing product in the company's history and seems to have as many uses as a Swiss Army knife. Its six focus areas are collaboration, portal, search, ECM (enterprise content management), business process management, and business intelligence.

Just last month, Microsoft added a hosted alternative to fuel adoption. There is a "perfect storm," observers say, around SharePoint in terms of the popularity of Web-based computing, demand for less-expensive ECM and portal tools, collaboration technology, and integration around Microsoft's Office suite.

The attention is a wake up call for competitors, especially IBM/Lotus, as SharePoint could pull customers to other Microsoft software because it is closely integrated with Microsoft's unified communications stack, its e-mail server, Office, and Office applications, including back-end file sharing repositories for Excel, Word, and PowerPoint. Microsoft SharePoint taking business by storm

How do you explain these numbers?

Over two-thirds of the dollar volume growth in the U.S. retail PC software market in 2007 can be attributed to Microsoft Office. In other words, the ratio of Office dollar growth to total PC software growth is 67 percent. Office sales are so big, they make calculating broader PC software retail sales difficult. The "magnitude of Office sales relative to the rest of the PC software market" is phenomenal, "It's the massively huge tail wagging the dog. The Year of Office 2007

Vista is showing healthy growth in OS platform stats, while the *NIX platform has stagnated.

Top Operating System Share Trend for April, 2007 to February, 2008, Operating System Market Share for February, 2008
OS Platform Statistics February 2008

60% of Microsoft's revenues come from outside the U.S. It is seeing 30% growth - each quarter - in Asia and Africa, 20% in Europe, and 15% in the states. Microsoft Q2 2008 by the Numbers

Microsoft's client business, on sales of Windows Vista, was especially strong in the quarter, with $4.34 billion in revenue compared to $2.59 billion in revenue a year ago. According to Microsoft, its client business has grown 20 percent on average since Windows Vista was made available nearly a year ago... Microsoft beats forecasts for Q2

Despite Microsoft's claims about leveraging 3D accelerator technology to offload the GUI workload, Aero still chews-up more CPU cycles (an average of 22%) with desktop composition enabled (i.e. 3D accelerated mode) than with it disabled (i.e. non-accelerated "legacy" mode). In other words, turn on the "bling" and you toss nearly a quarter of your CPU bandwidth out the window.

Yeah, it might be a pointless exercise, but still... http://weblog.infoworld.com/save-xp/archives/2008/03/sign_the_save_x.html (Save Windows XP Petition)

http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/03/17/12TC-vista-versus-xp_1.html

http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=204203975

The fact that XP+bad drivers blue screens all the time doesn't mean that Vista is good; it simply means that both Vista and XP suck for different reasons.

Even more details on this: Sequoia Voting Systems site was defaced and subsequently taken down. Sweet :)

Note that this wasn't a "hacking war," and it wasn't a "Russian attack". It was a 20-year old Estonian kid with a botnet. More details here

The situation in the US is not the way you are portraying it. Foreign workers are well paid (by definition, given the kind of visa they need to enter the country) so they are not driving salaries down

Except that you're wrong.

It would have been an even better article had they chosen one definition of 'dirty' and stuck with it consistently.

As far as Dirty IT job No. 2: Datacenter migration specialistgoes... *yawn*. Move a bunch of boxes, cable 'em up and hit the on button. Big Deal. Come talk to me when you've moved an entire printing plant three blocks across three weeks - without interrupting production or missing a deadline.

One-page link.

Or come to downtown Chicago. I have six city/police cameras within two square blocks of my building with one on the lamp post directly outside of the front door to my building and one outside of the rear door. The camera grid extends all over the city with a camera every one to three blocks. At certain points a person standing on the street can be in sight of six cameras simultaneously. The city has thousands of hours of archived footage. As a matter of fact the City of Chicago has contracted with IBM to hoping to develop software to analyze the archives and scan real-time for "suspicious behavior."

IBM surveillance software to scan Chicago streets
http://www.infoworld.com/archives/emailPrint.jsp?R=printThis&A=/article/07/09/27/IBM-software-to-scan-Chicago-streets_1.html

Infoworld still has the original article, but I can understand wanting to pull a story like that.

The support for existing DRM-protected media is the same if not better; that does NOT force DRM on you,
They are forcing future DRM on you. Your being misleading.

Microsoft will provide technology in the core architecture of Windows Vista to secure "premium content flow," said John Paddleford, a lead program manager in the Windows Digital Media Division of Microsoft, in an interview Wednesday. This type of content is from sources such as cable and high-definition DVD (HDVD).

This secure technology will reside in the Protected Media Path (PMP), which will enable high-definition media to flow securely from its origination point through the operating system to whatever an end point, such as a high-definition TV screen or other media output device, Paddleford said.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/08/31/HNmsvideo_1.html

Given that the Wine project has already done 99% of the work, I can't imagine it would be very difficult to port Photoshop to Linux... The same is probably true for the rest of the suite. So, one wonders why they haven't bothered yet.