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Friggin' disgrace he is.

Bill Gates is the Osama bin Laden of the Internet and should be locked up for all the harm he's done, which by the way exceeds the economic damage caused by the real Osama bin Laden.

MS-viruses, worms, trojans alone cost billions in lost productivity every quarter. That's not counting other security problems caused by MS' shoddy products and lack of security. Other platforms and software are largely immune to worms and viruses, at worst they are merely resistent. Then there's the lost productivity due to MS' difficult, labor intensive mainenance and egregious interoperability with competing tools. The competing tools do, in contrast, work just fine together, only Bill's tools cause trouble. MS' interoperability is poor even between other MS products. All that costs money and burns people out, which in turn costs money.

What Gates and his company did between 1993-1998 was a crime, pure and simple. He and his flunkies took a healthy, wealthy, competitive market that was good for everybody and crushed it with OEM agreements, giveaways and secret API's. This is an established truth from the US trial statement of facts.

To really put the damage in context, it's not like the company brings in any tax dollars either. It pays no taxes, so aside from campaign contributions, nothing goes into the system. The mythical billions the company is rumored to be sitting on is either out of circulation, thus harming the economy, or are fictional Enron style accounting.

Ok. So what's left? His philantropic seem to be based on getting matching funds for purchases of expensive medications manufactured by the multi-national pharmaceuticals he has invested heavily in. The targeting of the so called gifts can also be questioned as they have the appearance of an agenda to persuade beneficiary governments to reverse policies promoting the use of open source software.

He should be locked up.

local Australian coverage can be found here by the way :-)

Besides, it's not like any of his public health donations address priority issues or even have a proactive lean to them. Nope, it's largely pushing corrective measures that rely on large purchases from his other investments.

C'mon you remember when his media circus when to India. Smoke from kitchen fires is a larger and more concrete problem than expensive AIDS treatments. However, AIDS is a high profile event in the US media plus he gets to push sales of expensive pharmaceuticals.

It's probably just funny money to him anyway. He gets MSFT stock for free and then "donates" enough to neutralize any taxes he might accidently still have.

The original argument Gosling had was how easy it was to produce something "unsafe" from legacy code. zdNet article My argument is Box's take on the original article's title, because it's just fuel for the m$ minions to go Java bashing.

So flag me as troll/flamebait minions! I fart in your general direction.

How many insecurities has Internet Explorer had since it was launched with XP? I lost count.

So, you don't actually know, then? How can you criticise them meaningfully if you don't know?

According to Secunia, MSIE 5.5 has had 55 so far with 10 remaining unpatched.
MSIE 6 has had 76 so far with 20 remaining unpatched, 98% are remote exploits.

SP2 was supposed to fix many things, but it was as as difficult as a major OS upgrade, just ended up breaking many things, not fixing much and not really fixing what it claimed to fix. Granted, it's slightly more than purely a PR move, but not by much. However, it burned up valuable staff time that could have otherwise been used to evaluate competing products. The delay doesn't help MS' claim of prioritizing security much either.

It's common knowledge that MS products just aren't designed with security in mind, but if you want details, then look it up.

If Bill weren't pumping his own portfolio and occasionally using such "charity" for coercion, I'd take a less cynical point of view towards his approaches to public health

One: It's another proprietary crap-pile from Apple.

Two: You're forced to pay for MacOS X, when you'd rather just put your own Linux distro in for Free.

Three: It's $499. Considering items one and two, that's highway fucking robbery for vendor lock-in.

= 9J =

In the absence of specific contractual provisions, the acts referred to in Article 4 (a) and (b) [Note: Using and altering the program] shall not require authorization by the rightholder where they are necessary for the use of the computer program by the lawful acquirer in accordance with its intended purpose, including for error correction.

Picture here.

many are finding ways to take advantage of it and make money off of it

"My sincere apology to redcross Australia and world vision Australia , and other well know charity's for disfame i might of bought to your relief efforts or your company"

Like HTML, which surprised people in the 1990's, the OASIS OpenOffice.org file format is indeed vendor independent, though, it is now called Open Document. Anyone can use it or develop tools for it without restriction. Even Microsoft is part of the team at OASIS, at least on paper. And, even if MS doesn't get out of the way, interesting things will happen with Open Doument.

So far OASIS Open Document being used by at least the following:

• StarOffice
• OpenOffice.org
• AbiWord
• kWord

... the adoption of an OASIS Open Office Standard should be welcomed, and industry actors not currently involved with the OASIS Open Document Format should consider participating in the standardisation process in order to encourage a wider consensus around the format.

--EU Telematics between Administrations Committee, May 24, 2004

Currently, there are many governments moving up to StarOffice or OpenOffice.org for the sake of these formats. Singapore comes to mind first, but there are many, many others that don't necessarily make the mainstream press like Sarpsborg. Likewise, there are many small, medium and large businesses moving along. Some with an axe to grind (with good reason ) speak up. However, most are silent until the move is being implemented to keep the goon squad from Redmond from getting in the way.

The current choice:

• OASIS Open Document --
  1. be able to access your own data indefinitely as XML
  2. and change productivity tools, operating systems and hardware only if and when it suites you
• MS-WordML --
  1. pay that Redmond tithe indefinitely
  2. and buy new productivity tools, operating systems and hardware when Chairman Bill tells you to

Sun occasionally talks about releasing Java so you could use it; but so far it's been all talk, no action.

My vote... Ximian-Mono

You're comparing how products perform under a specific test that you have devised. (which ideally, is similar to your production environment).

Tuning can have a dramatic difference in performance, and unless you're familiar with all of the products involved, it's impossible to get the best performance out of each one.

The original poster is talking about where one of the systems has been modified so it is not a default install, and specifically customized before being sent to the testor, so that they will perform better. (like with ATI's Quake 'optimization').

As another example, there were some folks trying to get higher rankings in SETI@home, who would return bogus results -- as that was faster than actually performing the calculations. If someone knows that the results won't be checked for accuracy (or can't), and only for time, they can boost their rankings dramatically.

Hey everyone, don't like the article? Let them know through the Talkback feature.

In the ZDNet article on Google's inner workings that was posted earlier on /., Urs Hölzle mentions that in the larger Google clusters, 2 machines per day will fail. They compensate for this with triple redundancy, good software for failover control, and a staff of 800(!) computer scientists. Needless to say, not everyone could manage this... there's definitely an enterprise niche for system autonomy. This also brings IBM's eFuse technology for self-repairing chips to mind.

Guardian seems to be /.ed. (WTF?)

Here is a link

Who'd use IE?

The demand is out there. Whenever I show or tell about the options avaiable, the non-tech people ask afterwards why haven't they received this information earlier.

Perhaps one reason for the decision by the Finnish agencies to advise against MSIE and for Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, etc. is to compensate for harm done from the computer "security" campaign earlier this year, which amounted to nothing more than a state funded 8-page, 4-color MS ad delivered to every home, apartment or dorm in the country. Telling die hard Chairman Bill fans to update and patch is one thing, but neglecting to even name other options appears to fall somewhere between irresponsible/incompetent and graft.

Maybe this will lead to discussion of other useful tools and operating systems. Obviously, Mozilla, Firefox and Opera are drop in replacements. Likewise, MS-Outlook has a worse track record than MSIE and should be shunned in favor of Eudora, Mozilla, Thunderbird, etc. Home users that just want a computers that works should look at OS X, though I bet there would be a good cottage industry in upgrading old x86 machines to a Linux or BSD distro.

There are also issues like file incompatibility, technological obsolesence, and platform lock-in that those and options like OOo avoid.

Well...less whiners soon since Java is going to be open-sourced.

Don't hold your breath.

Well...less whiners soon since Java is going to be open-sourced.

It's also interesting to see the lawsuits that Microsoft has filed:

Microsoft sues controversial system assembler

Microsoft Sues Lindows.com Over Name

Microsoft takes on teen's site MikeRoweSoft.com

Microsoft sues Lucent in old dispute

Microsoft sues Brazilian magazine, IT official for defamation

Microsoft files lawsuit against five Md. firms

Of course, since they usually either buy out the company, develop and market a competing product, they don't need to resort to lawsuits for those type of situations.

Here are a few links, thou varlet! ;o)

Safety. LCDs are safer to use because they have no electromagnetic radiation.

The only potential emission from any of them that we know may be hazardous is x radiation from CRT-type monitors. It is fair to say that flat-panel LCD monitors will not emit x radiation under any operating condition whereas CRT monitors have the potential for emitting x radiation if the high voltage is raised higher than the CRT is designed to operate at. One might be able to cause a CRT monitor to emit some x radiation by failing a circuit or component, such as the hold-down safety circuit, and misadjusting user and service controls to raise the high voltage.

What's more, LCD panels draw 40 percent less power than similarly sized CRT monitors, produce less heat, and do not emit electromagnetic interference or X-rays (which CRTs do), making them somewhat safer and cheaper to use in the long run.

That might not be true. Look what a week of gathering cash did for Firefox!! I bet that if Slashdot posted a "donate money to fight Microsoft in court" fund we'd raise millions of dollars to help fight the lies!

One way to look at it is that lawsuits are an expensive way to make noise. Ballmer has to make noise or else folks will resume paying attention to their work and finding that MS is an obstacle. Or worse, that folks will start checking out other options like OpenOffice.org or OS X or one of the Linux distros. Or, even worse, they'll start to realise that MS stock is a worse investment than Enron:

Mainstream press is starting to figure out that MS-Windows dominance will last only another 2- 4 years and that only because of the enormous marketing and lobbying engine that MS is. To add weight to that, MS blocked its employees from exercising their "underwater" stock options during 2004. That was intended to increase retention, as employees need to remain with Microsoft to receive the payout. Retention would not be an issue unless the company looked to have no future.

Many execs, however haven't been able to empty their portfolios yet and want more delay.

It looks like ZDnet.com.au Austrailia has also picked up the story, and has ran an article on the same Lexmark issue.

Remember when Telstra (Australias largest telecoms provider) went to Linux. Then it turned out they were doing it just to get a discount from MS?
Hilarious. Wonder if this is the same. I can't imagine an australian government agency would use any software that doesn't contribute to the American Corporate machine. I'm sure that's illegal under John Howard.

There are going to be more problems found, and they are going to be identified and patched. Just like PHP and everything else.

As always, Slashdot is three days late with this bit of "news" so the only purpose this "article" serves is to let the zealots come out of the woodwork to claim yet again that Microsoft is "teh evil" and .NET should be replaced with some bit of open source that of course has no bugs, exploits or vulnerabilities because it's perfect. And free.

If this is an "ominous warning" I don't know what this is, yet AFAIK it wasn't even reported on Slashbork.

You create something like .NET, put it out there for half the world to hit on and then see if you can go three years before finding a problem with it. I'm sure it's possible; after all free software is perfect.

If they had that many validated email addresses - they'd be the king of spam !!.

Nonsense!!!!

There's Only one King of spam in Australia.

WHY BOTHER? Come on Gnome, give it up already. You lost the desktop war to KDE (And deservedly so!) Now all you're doing is wasting your time and making grandious claims that do not reflect reality whilst you puff your chests like some GNU hackers in shining armour. You are the HURD developers of the desktop. Just go away and do something useful instead.

What will be interesting is how the software market adjusts to these multi-core processors becoming more widespread and popular (particularly with dual-core Opteron on the way). They're going to have to rethink things a bit with regards per-processor licensing. From what I recall, Oracle (and many others) consider a dual-core processor two separate processors, and charge accordingly. Anyone running one of these chips would then get stung for a 8 (or possibly 32) processor license.

Perhaps a better solution would be to adopt the approach taken by IDC (which Sun obviously seem quite happy to back) of counting processor sockets, instead of cores.

Anyone know what other software companies are planning on doing with their per-processor licensing ?

-Mark

We have learnt that Sun is seriously considering Open Sourcing Java. And the excellant Mono project will wrest control back from M$. Have faith, AC-of-bot, the collective will prevail.

But having said that, you are right. Word file format compatibility is the #1 problem.

Most of Dvorak's commentary is just grumbling about a bad product, but here is what might be the core of the problem:

"The ever-changing .doc format.
Even saving to older .doc formats or .rtf seldom gets perfect results. I'm always amused by the warning that things will change if I save in some format or other, yet after the save absolutely nothing has changed."

A more stable format is needed by businesses, agencies, organizations and individuals that value the information stored on their local drives, archives and file servers and/or is finds a benefit from the access or re-use of such information. This is especially true for documents that must be reusable or must be stored for longer than the half-life of the MS-Word formats (about 18 months). For these, there should be some concern about choosing a more stable file format at least.

A more stable file format is not an option when toeing the MS line, because MS uses changes in [default] file formats to drive the sales of new versions of MS Office. Especially since 68% of MS Office sales come from sales of new hardware, where in contrast for MS Windows this is 90%. That means that some portion of that 32% represents the sale to owners of earlier versions and is presumably driven by file format incompatibility. Given that MS-Office is one of the two *profitable* lines for MS, that's not likely to change for the better. In fact, Microsoft has recently quit the U.N. standards group:

" Microsoft quits U.N. standards group."

" OASIS calls for OpenOffice XML spec" Most people can connect the dots and see where MS is heading with this. The way out is to insist on products that use file formats well documented for interoperability and long term preservation. Legal issues aside, look at how well GIF and PDF have weathered the years. Try the same with a word-processing document of the same vintage!

Unisys stated that the response times, (which were instant at the demonstrations) were indicative of the performance that could be expected.

Unisys' configured a system that was fraught with functionality and technical problems. Information sought by a RACV claims officer could often be contained on several discs and frequently response times would be at least 20 seconds.

The system was, at one stage, no more than 30 percent functional and crashed on several occasions. Eventually the project was abandoned and RACV terminated the contract.

Notice there's not even a date mentioned in this article. It barely even suggests that ie7 will be released before longhorn (2008 last I heard).
Is it any wonder that people are switching away from a browser (and operating system) that can't even release system patches (XPSP2?) on time.

Perhaps I should elaborate..

Telstra (formerly Telecom) is THE tele-communications company in australia. It is a government owned monopoly, and doesn't hesitate to screw over the little guy to please the shareholders (like any big public company). On top of that it is bureacratic to the extreme(like anything governmental).

They provide shocking service for both wired telephone - dialup(particularly in regional areas), and for "broadband" - I'm not with Telstra and I still pay 70AU per month for 12gb on cable. Simply because Telstra can price fix the market. The mobile phone market is slightly better, with 3 established companies and a few smaller but growing ones.

Maybe they're talking about Linux, the OS?

I've been looking at Office 2003's "Information Rights Management", which uses Windows Server 2003 as a key-keeper, along with .net Passport to prevent various kinds of spoofing. It's an interesting setup - but there's next to no deep independant analysis of the process out in public anywhere, compared to previous MS encryption schemes I've looked at.

I really get the sense that people are scared of being the first to get hurt for publishing holes they've found in the system, rather than because the standards themselves are in flux.

It's a little creepy - on one side, you get people saying why DRM is wrong in so many ways, and should be avoided, but not allowing themselves to actually look at the system. On the other side, you've got people praising the idea with lavish strings of superlatives, saying that governments should use it amongst other things - it would be hard for a businessman to say anything other than Microsoft is fellow businessmen, and the other guys are crazy folks who don't know what they're talking about.

The FUD is working - the smart ones are staying quiet, and the dumb ones are making the rest look like they're all crazy.

Ryan Fenton

Zdnet

List of consoles sold at a loss:

Sega Saturn
Sega Dreamcast
Microsoft Xbox ... yes, the Gamecube _is_ that cheap to make. Maybe that's why Microsoft "copied" the design for Xbox Next.


Hey, fanboy... real people back up their statements with EVIDENCE.

Like this: Sony loses AU$100 per PS2 sold

"Merrill Lynch has reported that our competitor was losing AU$100 per machine prior to their price cut, about the same as we were losing per machine when we launched PlayStation 2."

After searching Google news and other sources I could not find a similar story anywhere besides this similar story posted on ZDnet Australia. The only problem is that it was dated back 10 February 2004. Not sure if it's the same story... or same worm but worth a read for those that cannot get out to Symantec.

If you're running content-based filtering, you're part of the problem. If you refuse SMTP traffic from confirmed spam sites, you are part of the solution.

Blacklists only go so far in protecting you from spam. Content based filtering works and it IS part of the solution for my mail customers.

I would not open myself or my customers up to the increase in spam that removing content based filtering would cause just because it MIGHT cause more servers to be blacklisted and in turn that MIGHT cause people to bitch which in turn MIGHT cause a company to wake up.

There are too many ifs there. The reality is most spam comes from Russia and China and it doesn't matter how much you blacklist those blocks...they keep sending it.

Content based filtering IS a part of the solution. As well as blacklists and whitelisting.

And do you _really_ know why comcast took this step or are you just guessing?

guys, some analysts have taken MS to task for this. they say it's very "insincere" of MS to do this. this zdnet editorial -- Software Assurance not so assuring asks: "Does this mean that prior to June 1, 2004, these users contravened their agreements by having Microsoft software on their back-up machines?". it quotes meta group as saying Microsoft has had an interesting history of "finely-tuned licensing rules."

In this article in which they promise opening up Solaris, They say:

"Look, you only need to look at what we've done with Java to understand how Sun views the value of incorporating community feedback," he said. "Java could not exist if only Sun is supporting it. It exists because there are hundreds and thousands of partners. We need to now take the model with Java and bring it to Solaris."

The uninformed on-lookers will only see the statement "Sun warms to open-source for Solaris" which gives them more points.

Next concerning Java, a few months ago they said,

"Schwartz also noted that people who stick to Sun's licensing terms and maintain compatibility with Sun standards can have access to the Java source code. Changing the licensing to an open-source model would encourage different implementations, he said."

Now they are saying:

"We haven't worked out how to open-source Java -- but at some point it will happen," Srinivas said. However, he noted "it might be today, tomorrow or two years down the road".

Again, the uninformed on-lookers will only see the statement "Sun to open-source Java" which gives them more points.
Summary: They promised to make Solaris become like Java, meanwhile they don't know if at all Java will be open-sourced in this lifetime.

This is what is called hybrid-source: A vapor version of open-source meant only to gain favor with the open-source community and the business world without any active steps or concrete plans to put it in effect.

Unbelievable. Don't let Raven Alder hear you... You don't hear her crying, just the sound of flabby alpha-male geeks getting the crap beat outta them.

Biometrics are not all doom and gloom you know... Sure a biometric on it's own is not really very good for authentication, and does suffer from the problem of being hard to replace, but the strength of biometrics is not that they're secret (which no one should assume), but that they're hard to forge.

(ok not fingerprints!!!)

The real strength of biometrics is that people like to use them: they don't have to remember hard passwords, or need to change them regularly, and hence the likelihood of the security being properly used is far higher than that of people adhering to password policies. So even if the theoretical security of biometrics is weaker than that of passwords (which is not a given) we may still see an increase in actual security...

In addition, biometrics start to shine when used in conjunction with other technologies that can be reissued. Biometric smart cards with an integrated fingerprint reader, for example, require you to have a copy of both the smartcard and the fingerprint (making the difficulty of breaking the system much harder than just a fingerprint)... It's like a while back when you were both identified and authenticated with a password - people figured that it's a lot better to dissociate identity from authentication, hence username + passwords appeared (much better for auditing purposes, and means that a compromise of your authenticator does not require a reissuing of your identity)

In addition, the smartcard holds the copy of the fingerprint, so there's no privacy issues here either. Unlike many other biometric systems...

Sure, biometrics have issues, but which technology out there doesn't? Dismissing them out of hand is a touch knee-jerk for my taste...

and available here

I'm actually surprised there have not been more television biographies on hackers. It seems A&E Biographies, Discovery Channel, Learning Channel etc. would want to tell these stories.

www.reeddavid.com

An analysis of hacker attacks on online servers in January by security consultancy mi2g found that Linux servers were the most frequently violated, accounting for 13,654 successful attacks, or 80 per cent of the survey total. Windows ran a distant second with 2,005 attacks. A more specific analysis of government servers also found Linux more susceptible, accounting for 57 per cent of all breaches

The 5 year and 3 year sentences are maximums set by Congress. A while back, Congress created the U.S. Sentencing Commission and laws that bound what a judge may do in a given case, based on the Commission's Guidelines. So, although a crime may be a 5 year felony, a judge can only sentence someone to 5 years if he meets the criteria set in the guidelines.

Congress was actually interested in pushing sentences up, because it wanted to appear tough on crime. Therefore, at the same time, it abolished parole for federal crimes. There is no parole for federal offenses, only a small amount of time off for good behavior, calculated through a formula.

The Guidelines end up working like Dungeon & Dragons. The crime has a base offense level, say 6. Then there are "enhancements" for various kinds of conduct. So, if you're caught (somehow) and used an innocent person's computer, you could get +4. If you use the word viagra, +1; if you misspell viagra, +2, etc. [Like, I'm wearing my leather armor, but my armor class is improved by 2 for my dexterity and 4 for my magic ring] See The Fraud Guidlines

A defendant also has a criminal history score, based on how many times he's been convicted before.

There's a table in the guidelines that cross-references offense level and criminal history to give a sentencing range in months. With a criminal history of I (they use roman numerals for the criminal history), you need an offense level of at least 11 to be certain of any actual jail time (because zone B sentences allow a convict to do "home detention"). See The Sentencing Table.

The thing is, I can't find what exactly the Commission has sent to Congress, i.e., the proposed offense levels and enhancements, so its hard to tell what the Commission has actually come up with. From what I can tell, they have decided to incorporate this offense into the the fraud guidelines. (according to this ZDnet story). The fraud guidelines are based on the amount lost and are notoriously squishy--because it is difficult to estimate exactly how much a given scheme cost.

Rational now will have to deal with Whitehorse and their sales will go south in the Windows market until corporations get a chance to compare it to Rational products. If Whitehorse becomes part of the MSDN subscription (and it will) then who is Rational going to sell to? Visio may have sucked enough to keep .NET developers buying Rational tools, but Whitehorse wont, and IBM will be stuck with another LOTUS. Great technology with too small a market for profitability.

Well, almost no impact. According to a new study, "downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero". Monday's NYTimes (free registration) describes the study, in which two economists analyzed file-sharing and sales data over a 17-week period in 2002, using "complex mathematical formulas" to determine that "spikes in downloading had almost no discernible effect on sales", and estimating that "it would take 5000 downloads to reduce the sales of an album by one copy". Naturally, some organizations disagree. Also, according to the RIAA's 2003 year end numbers [PDF], sales of CD singles were up 84% from 2002, while overall revenue shrunk from $11.55 to $11.05 billion... which makes perfect sense when you consider economic tendencies since 9/11.

Sun's statements have been a bit more subtle than SCO's (that's not too tough), but they have certainly made no bones about throwing FUD towards Linux.

Check out this article from immediately after SCO announced the lawsuit. McNealy was immediately commenting on their licensing position, FUD about an audit committee, and another wonderful FUD inspiring comment: "We think open source is wonderful and good, but we also believe in copyright and the rule of law,".

Contrast that to the comments from HP: "HP is unaware of any intellectual property infringement within Linux." And, Larry Ellison was already connecting Microsoft to the effort..

Sun is now getting close to the world's largest vendor of a Linux distribution

I have seen this claim before, but I have not seen any statistics that support this. This article from a year ago has Sun at a tiny fraction of the Linux sales of IBM, Dell, or HP. This article reporting on Q4'03 sales has similat stats, with HP, IBM, and Dell way out in front of everyone else. The only articles I found that gave Sun a decent percentage were those reporting UNIX sales, where Sun's SPARC/Solaris systems were counted. I'm not sure what the China agreement will amount to, but Linux systems have been available from Walmart for a long time, and they have not sold well at all.

And, I agree with your assessment of Sun's sales over the internet bubble, and how it changed. But, I see that as the reason for their spewing FUD about Linux, not the reason they are embracing it.

Basically, Sun sees the trends, which have been building for years, and they see that they can try to embrace it or be steamrolled by it. But, like Sun's previous Linux efforts over the years, it's half assed. They say "buy our Linux desktop" in one breath, then spread anti-Linux FUD in the next.. I don't see that as a recipe for success.