Slashdot Mirror

Unfortunately, a malicious person can still e-mail a macro virus by merely changing a .DOC file's extension to .RTF. (Microsoft should prevent Word from running macros in files with .RTF extensions, but it doesn't.)

http://www.infoworld.com/articles/op/xml/00/10/30/ 001030oplivingston.html

Maybe the success of Firefox will force web programmers to develop for more than one browser, and then we can all more easily switch to Linux.

I did wonder how long the "Microsoft Inc Bad, Google Inc Good" pastiche could last.

Just because its founders are young and "wacky" doesn't mean they can't make very corporate decisions in polo shirts instead of pinstripe shirts. The platitude about "thinking outside the box" already sounds trite coming from Google. The decision to fire a blogger for speaking up is proof that Google has a PR department just like any other corporate minded drone army.

Bill Gates was once young and just as idealistic as Sergey and Brin. Bill Gates once said that he was planning to give away most if not all of his fortune to charity - I bet he wasn't labelled "evil" back then ...

True. If it goes beyond the borders of a single company it becomes a competitive and political issue. Microsoft tried to offer their Passport as a single sign-on and identity solution, but obviously it doesn't work for several reasons including Microsoft's reputation for security and the fact that all that identity information resides with one company.

Sun and several other companies came up with the Liberty Alliance to provide a federation of companies that could collectively provide a single sign-on network, but it is taking a while to get it going. Although, it seems to be gaining new ground slowly but surely with IBM as one of the lastest additions to the alliance.

It would be nice, to one day, be able to use a widely recognized single sign-on source that is not controlled by a single company.

Even in 2000 it was already very bad, with Oracle not so brilliantly (i.e. disastrously) introducing per-MHz pricing.
Take a look at these urls:
http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/00/10/23/ 001023hndb.html (see the insert towards the bottom of the page titled "Pricing becomes contentious")
and:
http://www.infoworld.com/article/02/04/04/020408ap oracle_1.html
and I quote:

"Meanwhile, Asseily added that the pricing issues surrounding Oracle's database leave lingering questions about its application to Oracle's application pricing.

"I have no faith they won't change the licensing strategy at a moment's notice because it has happened before," Asseily said."

Even in 2000 it was already very bad, with Oracle not so brilliantly (i.e. disastrously) introducing per-MHz pricing.
Take a look at these urls:
http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/00/10/23/ 001023hndb.html (see the insert towards the bottom of the page titled "Pricing becomes contentious")
and:
http://www.infoworld.com/article/02/04/04/020408ap oracle_1.html
and I quote:

"Meanwhile, Asseily added that the pricing issues surrounding Oracle's database leave lingering questions about its application to Oracle's application pricing.

"I have no faith they won't change the licensing strategy at a moment's notice because it has happened before," Asseily said."

Yes, you can. Read up.

Ok, so the whole article seemed to pivot around the notion that the biggest problem Microsoft has is that consumers are not upgrading their software fast enough to improve current market returns. Yes, "Many organisations are still using Office '97 - an 8 year old release - and see no compelling reason to upgrade."

Organizations are using Microsoft products, and are not switching (to other Microsoft products). Sounds like a net zero change in market share to me.

Yes, Linux is expected to close in on Windows in a couple of years. From a 90% dominance today, to a projected 58% dominence. Oh yeah, only if you count dominance on PDAs. You see, Microsoft has 48.1% of the PDA market in Q3 2004, with Palm at #2 at 29.8%, and is expected to decline.

In the browser usage stats, Microsoft is dropping, with a 64.9% share, compared to up and coming FireFox at 20%. The problem is, FireFox looks like it hasnt gained any share since it peaked in Nov 2004. That's the best I could find for FireFox, since other studies put Microsoft's Internet Explorer at around 92.9 % dominance worldwide. Its very hard to get any two companies to agree on stats, because they're both approaching the question with different agendas.

But desktops, well, the statistics for Microsoft and Linux are all over the place. Last spring, Microsoft had 93% of the worldwide desktop market in their corner, but was still fighting (in Jan 2004) the business side to upgrade to the latest and greatest MS products. Microsoft really starts to cry in the server market, where IBM via Linux are barrelling through to win. Except Microsoft still has 59% of the server market, 3:1 today and 2:1 on projected Linux share. This was one of the few business statistic sites that actually had hard numbers, and even there, desktop stats appear pretty stale.

In conclusion, from browsing through Google, people have been making these same claims on market share dominance since 2001, "Linux is the up and comer, watch out!" and noone seems to ever back up their sides with hard numbers... nothing that actually shows a survey on how Windows:Linux ratios that actually shows Linux having a chance... every year, "we're coming to get you, this year is our year!" Maybe its because for all the talk, Linux really is a niche market after all...

Actually, all else being equal, higher clock speed *does* mean higher temperatures, not just for Intel, but for everyone. IIRC, it's a linear relationship, too.

Not really.

Yes, really. It's basic physics - higher frequencies require higher energy, which means more power, which means more heat. The fact that laptops with power management slow their CPUs to save battery life ought to give you a clue: by saving power, they're also saving heat, and they do that by slowing down their CPU. Another place you see this effect is in CPU over-temperature safeguards - when the CPU temperature gets too high, the clock is slowed down to reduce the power consumption and therefore temperature.

There's some confirmation of this here: "Heat above spec can come from two areas: 1, Heat due to increased frequencies and 2, Heat due to increased voltage. Increasing bus speeds (frequencies) increases heat linearly"; and here: "There is a direct relationship between a processor's clock speed and the amount of power it consumes, and a similar relationship between power consumption and the amount of heat given off by a PC."

The clock speed is simply how fast a crystal vibrates.

So in reality it is possible to build a CPU with high clockspeeds that runs really really slowly, for example one with a 6000 step pipeline.

You could probably make one of these run cool too because there would be few transistors to deal with in the chip. The real relationship is between transistors and heat. The more transistors there are producing heat the hotter the chip is going to run.

• Full details on FFII's wiki (with links to articles, JURI speeches, &c--good starting point)
• The story on the European Parliament's news site
• Infoworld article
• More stories on Google News
• FFII transcript of the JURI meeting (in progress--help out)
• FFII: more details of recent JURI happenings (before this decision)

And here is the EP's Rule 55 (for those wondering whether the €C will argue that it is not bound by the it):

The President shall, at the request of the committee responsible, ask the Commission to refer its proposal again to Parliament

• where the Commission withdraws its initial proposal after Parliament has adopted its position in order to replace it with another text, except where this is done in order to incorporate Parliament's amendments; or
• where the Commission substantially amends or intends to amend its initial proposal, except where this is done in order to incorporate Parliament's amendments; or
• where, through the passage of time or changes in circumstances, the nature of the problem with which the proposal is concerned substantially changes; or
• where new elections to Parliament have taken place since it adopted its position, and the Conference of Presidents considers it desirable.

Also, see FFII's (interesting but hopefully no longer needed) explanation about reversing council decsions

Agreed. Google doesn't stand much of a chance in the long run. Just look at google's Q4 revenue & net income VS. Microsoft's Q4 revenue & net income.

That's about 9.2 times the revenue and 13 times the net income. Microsoft will continue grow its army, penetrate deeply into search and other markets, and blow google out of the water in the long run. This is standard operating procedure folks.

This is great news!

December 1994
Apple Computer sues San Francisco Canyon Company for using Apple Computer's QuickTime code to speed up Microsoft's Video for Windows product.

I thought they only had a trademark on "Microsoft Windows" but that their trademark application for "Windows" had been rejected as too generic. It's possibly that I'm completely misremembering it thought.

Technically, you're correct but money for legal fees is more a more important factor than the trademark itself.

The lines blur...

Take desktop search, for example.

It's been there since last century, as Jon Udell highlights in this screencast.

five years and a whitewash of an antitrust settlement makes. after a bit of googling, i present the following (and link to source article) for the dark humor value:

Microsoft, meanwhile, called as its first witness an economist who described as irrelevant whether the vendor holds a monopoly in the desktop personal computer operating system market because, he said, potential competition will come from alternative computer platforms.

[rant omited]

If not, I highly recommend TeamTrack.

For those wondering what he was talking about, I think this is the home page of TeamTrack, which lets you download an evaluation version, and a InfoWorld review indicates pricing is about $9,000 USD for 10 named users and $17,000 USD for 10 concurrent users. Even with heavy discounting, it would put a moderately stiff price tag on a deployment that makes BPM infrastructure like this a linchpin of operations for a medium-sized (400-900) company.

At 50% discount with 400 named users, you are looking at $180,000 USD for infrastructure software that still expects you to wrap your own applications around it to achieve the business payoff; $360,000 USD for a no-discount price. By comparison, Lawson mid-tier ERP deployments bundle in the applications and each module is around $100,000 USD; I've seen $600,000-1M as a typical price tag for a healthily comprehensive Lawson deployment that includes services.

So I am not sure I would characterize TeamTrack as a no-brainer or even easy purchase decision. It is better than some pricing I've seen for this software, but many businesses might be tempted to go with a "good enough" lower-cost solution built around something like Lotus Notes or Microsoft Exchange. It sounds like if you already have an ecosystem of stovepiped applications that are integrated together with spit and glue, the payoff might be greater using TeamTrack to tie it all together with a more structured and robust framework than if you were building the integration from scratch (which the original poster sounds like they might be doing). For those whose company purchased BPM infrastructure systems like TeamTrack, what was your company's application integration situation before the purchase and what convinced you to make the purchase and expend additional development effort to tie into a new BPM system?

If you don't mind submitting some links that would be great. Read this article. It clearly states that Rambus was convicted by a jury of submarining patents into memory standards. It was overturned by a superior court because JEDEC doesn't explicitly require disclosing patents which is a technicality in my vocabulary. They definitely didn't come forth with those patents and tried to enslave the whole industry into paying them royalties. They are the bad guys in my book and I will not touch their crap with a ten foot pole.

Time will tell if Rambus has learned from the mistakes it made with RDRAM a few years ago.

Well, Rambus has expanded their latest lawsuit blitz to include DDR2 patent claims, so do you think they've learned?

You might want to subscribe to Bob Lewis' IT advice line newsletter. He covers this kind of topic regularly. You can also check out his weblog.

I'm sure that his first bit of advice would be to walk around and visit everyone who reports to you and listen to them. Lather-rinse-repeat for a bit before pushing your own ideas and initiatives.

You may also want to express your concerns to your boss and ask what resources are available to help you succeed. Many companies will pay for training and even if not, you are showing your desire to succeed in your new position and will hopefully get some good input.

You might want to subscribe to Bob Lewis' IT advice line newsletter. He covers this kind of topic regularly. You can also check out his weblog.

I'm sure that his first bit of advice would be to walk around and visit everyone who reports to you and listen to them. Lather-rinse-repeat for a bit before pushing your own ideas and initiatives.

You may also want to express your concerns to your boss and ask what resources are available to help you succeed. Many companies will pay for training and even if not, you are showing your desire to succeed in your new position and will hopefully get some good input.

The Outlook subscription service was covered back in September of last year. The only difference between then and now is the price they've settled on.

They are more welcome in Peru

InfoWorld had a nice story about the Power5 multi-core CPU (You'll have to download the report) coming out this year. It may outperform the coming dual core AMD chip, both in raw performance and in lower power consumption.

AMD has a write up on their upcoming dual core processor and what it means to performance. Somewhere I believe there are some published numbers for how an AMD dual core CPU running 5 steps below it's single core counterpart can still outperform dual single core processors. (i.e., a 1.4 GHz dual core CPU will outperform a 2.4GHz dual processor machine)

Meanwhile, Intel's dual core demo was doubted doubted when presented at the same time as the above referenced AMD demo. Also, Intel's dual core will not perform significantly better than a dual processor system, or so the analysis of the two processors stated. (I really need to bookmark these things when I read them! Hopefully someone else will provide that reference.)

As reported yesterday, Bill Gate's presentation of Windows Media Center didn't go so smoothly and included a Blue Screen of Death.

I bet Jobs is just scared the same will happen to him. Yeah Steve, you heard me. You are just CHICKEN! You know if Gate's and his 102% market share can't build a stable OS for his presentation, there is no way your piss-ant fruit company stands a chance. That's right Steve, better not stream your keynote.

Or maybe Steve was planning to get naked

Worlds largest blue screen of death here

Analog doesn't have ANY inherent bandwidth limitations. It all depends on the noise/power levels. Normal POTS has filters on the line which does limit the bandwidth. However, going digital in the switch doesn't change that.

Since the sampling rate is at 56Kbps (over a 64Kbps channel, but some is reserved for signaling), the max theoretical you can pump through it is 56Kbps - however, due to the filtering done on the line before the ADC (because it is designed for converting voice), you can't actually get that much on the uplink. For a 56Kbps downlink connection it has to stay digital until the DAC that heads towards you as an analog signal (and then, you only get the 56Kbps rate if the analog line is clean). At one point, the data rate in the US was limited to 53Kbps because of FCC limits on transmitted power over the phone line - there was a proposal to raise that limit, permitting the full 56Kbps, but I don't know if that ever happened.

First let me start by saying this: I am a Mexican.

Now, the problem here is corruption and I know MS knows it. Check out Miguel de Icaza's comments on this "MS & E-Mexico" agreement: HP, IBM and others were heading towards open source when all of a sudden MS enters and they are all told: sorry but MS is our champ!

Just give a couple of the people in the right places some nice ca$h deals and you've acquired yourself a nice country... same thing happened with local telephony and it will continue happening as long as we have all these power hungry clowns running this country. Not that Mexico is alone in this sector but still...

Sad but true.

• No decent scripting language? In Unix? What do you suggest? BASIC? JCL? Microsoft's batch language?

Unix needs something like MSH, I think.

Of course, there are plenty of good scripting of languages for Unix. The question is whether we need some higher-level glue between scriptable components, and I think we do.

• No decent scripting language? In Unix? What do you suggest? BASIC? JCL? Microsoft's batch language?

Unix needs something like MSH, I think.

Of course, there are plenty of good scripting of languages for Unix. The question is whether we need some higher-level glue between scriptable components, and I think we do.

Let us ignore for a moment that Slashdot is a community of thousands upon thousands of people, so you're being rather silly if you're expecting a consistent opinion to be held between the comments all these different people. The presence of multiple conflicting opinions on a discussion site is what's supposed to happen, not a flaw.

If we for some reason assume there to be some kind of "patents are bad" party line on slashdot, it's certainly not out of place here. After all:

Situation A: A company is not responsible for a concept, but obtains a patent on it anyway. It then waits for others, who discovered the concept independently-- possibly before the patent owner did-- to put the patented conept into widespread use, and then begins to bully them with the patent. Public benefit from the concept is lessened, and the company gains a great deal of money from the patent that they have done nothing to deserve.

Conclusion: The patent system is not serving the purpose it should be serving.

Situation B: A person comes up with a nontrivial and useful invention. Using this person's work, others make billions of dollars from the invention, and an incalculable number of people benefit directly or indirectly. The person responsible for the invention does not recieve monetary recompension through the patent system for any of this.

Conclusion: The patent system is not serving the purpose it should be serving.

homebrew_pvrs_on_linux

russell pavlicek experiment with a pvr

his article in infoworld about it

MS can't necessarily fix a lot of these things because it will break millions of existing websites.

I hear this a lot. It's utter bullshit. Please show me which websites would break if they started supporting the PNG alpha channel. Or fixed the guillotine bug. Or the peekaboo bug. Or the 3px jog. Or justified text in caption elements. Or display: table. Or generated content. Or any of the other things people have been complaining about for over three years.

It's funny how Microsoft didn't have a problem with breaking websites when they released all the previous versions of Internet Explorer. Practically all of them have broken things.

At my work there's an intranet site that I need to use constantly that relies on non-standard IE DOM features. Naturally it's completely broken in Firefox. That means that, yes, Firefox supports standards better, is easier to develop for etc. but also means that nobody where I work can use it.

If you are writing Internet Explorer-only applications, I don't see what that has to do with Firefox. They are proprietary applications, not websites. Firefox can't run Access databases, Excel macros, or any number of different proprietary application scripts. Developing "web applications" for Internet Explorer only is the 11th biggest IT mistake.

Standards compliance isn't the be all and end all. Why not put a compatibility layer in there (that you can switch off) to emulate the non-standard and broken behavior of IE so all these real life scenarios, as unfortunate as they are, don't stop people from migrating to firefox?

You can emulate proprietary behaviour and still remain compliant with the specifications in many cases. And other browsers have put a tremenduous amount of energy into emulating all that crap. And most of it is done. But if browsers start ignoring the specifications and following Internet Explorer's behaviour, not only does that mean people writing to spec get punished for it - breaking interoperability in the process - but it effectively hands control of the web over to Microsoft.

That's true. I was a little surprised to see this article focusing on databases, because you see this sort of thing across the board in the industry right now. BEA launched an open source framework with the Apache Group; Novell is open sourcing bits and pieces and pushing a strong Linux message (while still banking on its proprietary products); even Microsoft is quick to tell you that its source code is available (for a price, and for whatever it's worth). I actually wrote an article about this for InfoWorld recently, if anyone's interested. In a sidebar, Bruce Perens also contributed some thoughts on when working with open source is beneficial to companies, and when it might make sense to go another way.

That's true. I was a little surprised to see this article focusing on databases, because you see this sort of thing across the board in the industry right now. BEA launched an open source framework with the Apache Group; Novell is open sourcing bits and pieces and pushing a strong Linux message (while still banking on its proprietary products); even Microsoft is quick to tell you that its source code is available (for a price, and for whatever it's worth). I actually wrote an article about this for InfoWorld recently, if anyone's interested. In a sidebar, Bruce Perens also contributed some thoughts on when working with open source is beneficial to companies, and when it might make sense to go another way.

Ed Foster of InfoWorld has written about EULAs for things besides software. Items such as vacuum tubes, digital cameras, and even books have had licenses applied. There was one case where an individual was sent a medical book, unsolicited, with a license agreement attached. The individual was not a member of the company that had produced the book. It appeared that keeping the book or disposing of the book would both violate the license either way. (Note: US postal regulations allow unsolicited mailed merchandise to be treated as a gift, with no obligation for return.)

Ed Foster of InfoWorld has written about EULAs for things besides software. Items such as vacuum tubes, digital cameras, and even books have had licenses applied. There was one case where an individual was sent a medical book, unsolicited, with a license agreement attached. The individual was not a member of the company that had produced the book. It appeared that keeping the book or disposing of the book would both violate the license either way. (Note: US postal regulations allow unsolicited mailed merchandise to be treated as a gift, with no obligation for return.)

Large vertical-market accounting system (Elite) with .NET-based web time-entry interface that absolutely, positively requires IE.

Ahh yes, developing Internet Explorer-only applications. Infoworld calls this the eleventh biggest IT mistake.

Anything else could probably run in Wine.

I was under the impression that Word and Internet Explorer already run in Wine?

Couple of things (as well as the very valid points already made about trying to order a non-standard ThinkPad as a one off):

1. IBM internally is challenging itself to move to Desktop Linux. I doubt it'll be on the basis of re-imaging all those ThinkPads, but will instead be in the standard refresh programme: when you get your new ThinkPad, it'll be Linux.
2. If you look at any recent (last year or two) Thinkpad, you'll note a lack of Windows key - there's no assumption there that the OS will be Windows.
3. Being able to buy (or not) a Thinkpad with Linux or no OS will very soon no longer be an indicator of any IBM thinking - like the rest of personal computing, the ThinkPad range will be owned by Lenovo as of 2Q05.

(Disclosure: I work for IBM, but in an entirely unrelated area of IGS)

http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2004/11/04.html

You get to watch/listen to him use it, which really gives you a sense of how far the software has come.

The reference isn't to say that Red Hat is the owner/maker of Linux, but more of a distinction in the plethora of linux options, as Red Hat stands out as the main company who is selling an O/S package, that uses the Linux kernel to Enterprises.

In the 1980s, IBM opened representative offices in Beijing and Shanghai, followed in 1992 by establishment of the IBM China Company Limited, a wholly-owned subsidiary of IBM World Trade Corporation. The IBM China Research Laboratory was established in Beijing in 1995. Today, IBM China has offices in 11 cities and operates eight joint venture companies in China.
--PrimeUR

IBM built and operates a chip packaging plant in China (registration site), a Research Laboratory in China, and is eyeing upward of a 50 percent share of China's market for business computers. Even IBM mainframes are big in China

IBM is creating a chip ecosystem in China and expects that Asian manufacturers will represent the bulk of the new Power licensees

So AMD (and Intel?) are planning on supporting virtualizing in their lower end CPU's in 2006?

AMD's Presidio project is suposed to be out next year, but how about intel's Vanderpool project?

I couldn't find any similar articles for Intel announcing any timeline for Vanderpool ... perhaps the Xen folks are waiting for imminent support there before committing dev resources to this?

I wrote: "It looks deliberate to me"

and the inimitable PJ removes all doubt. She turned up an earlier piece of tripe by the same shill, published by the same rag:

Here's a catchy title: "Maybe SCO has a point".

"Paul Krill, Infoworld" seems to specialize in breathless, high-anxiety stories about rather ordinary events.

InfoWorld
PC World

As quoted from Andrew Morton:
Update: Linux keeper, SpikeSource CEO talk up open source
quote: "Top contributors to the Linux kernel have been Red Hat Software and SuSE, he said. Also contributing have been IBM, SGI, Hewlett-Packard.and Intel" For a company that has done so much to promote and --- BUILD ---- Linux, Sun insulting them is no different then them going after Debian or Gentoo, yeah so what they charge a premium for support, have you considered they must offer something of value to their customers for them to be willing to pay a premium, such as their expertise in Linux kernel development... We are not communists at the end of the day, we want all the Linux players to compete and succeed... Even the article quotes Mortan's view on that: "Leading-edge projects are the exception in the open source world," he said. If anyone is developing leading-edge technology, "they should get their act together and form a company and take a shot at getting rich with it," said Morton. It used to be funny when Sun's McNeally insulted Microsoft, since they are much smaller than Microsoft, so MS just probably laughed it off, but when they pick on RedHat which is an order of magnitude smaller company, they just appear like an arrogant bully...

Poland just this week removed its support for the EU patent directive which means it no longer has enough support to pass. France and the UK have stated that FOSS is a viable alternative for government deployment and should be considered alongside commerical alternatives, Germany is already using it in Munich of course.

Sadly enough there are rumours that Belgium will vote in favour (see one but last paragraph) of software patents?!

• ZDnet: Patent opponents claim success
• Infoworld: Polish rejection may derail EU patent directive
• The Inquirer: Poland scuppers EU software patents directive
• EDRI: Poland blocks EU Software Patent directive
• NoSoftwarePatents.com: Polish Cabinet Against Software Patents

See also FFII's Breaking News wiki

The Council of Ministers' first reading text had been scheduled for fast-track approval before the end of the year, probably by Agriculture and Fisheries ministers.

"In May, Belgium voted to abstain, and though I cannot speak for the Belgium government, we have been extremely encouraged by meetings we have had with officials in Belgium and are cautiously optimistic that they may change their vote to yes," MacGann said.

Should Belgium decide to approve the Council's version of the directive, Poland's change of heart would not keep the "Patentability of Computer-implemented Inventions" from being formally approved and the legislation would then move to a second reading in the Parliament, where the contentious debate would continue, MacGann said.

According to NoSoftwarePatents.com, MacGann has got his sums wrong.

But this vote won't be over until it's over.

I apologize if this is consider trolling, but I submitted this story a couple minutes ago and since it's relevant to this story I'll post it in here (since it probably won't get approved if this one is already up. If it does make it up just mod it offtopic):

Technical director Dr. Avi Rubin of the John Hopkins University Information Security Institute (ISI) has made a presentation regarding Diebold's voting machine source code (pdf) to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST has been playing a key role in the improvement of voting systems since 2002.) Turns out, amongst other major security problems, Diebold was using NIST's Data Encryption Standard (DES) to encrypt votes and audit logs. DES was developed in 1976 was proven breakable by a "brute force" system in 1998. NIST proposed revoking DES's certification last July and recommends AES or at least 3DES.

Read from page 13. There are some hilarious comments ... or they would be if this weren't a freaking voting machine!