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6 of our 10 BSA member products (id est: the non-free ones) were Windows (XP Pro and 2000). I cannot find any terms in the EULA (Note: this is the terms for Genuine Advantage, but most MS EULAs are essentially the same) where I agree to perform inventorying on the system at my own cost and expense to be made available at their request. I cannot locate a Mac OS X EULA, but I don't remember that in there either. The other two were an ancient (1996) VB compiler (Which is still MS and is probably an even more primitive version of linked one), and Delphi EULA (pdf) which states they have the right to terminate the license if we breach any of the conditions, but does not say that we at our own expense must perform the work necessary to prove we aren't in violation of these terms.

I frequently do read license agreements (exclusions are GPL, LGPL, BSD, Apache, or others that I am quite sure what the terms are as I have already read them). I have never agreed to pay to be somebody's lackey.

No Linux code violates other's IP. Period!

There's no violation until a court of law states there is.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=5746&tag=nl.e622

Well they're wrong... Apple released the sales figures, and they sold 270,000 units during the first two days, not 700,000.

While the FUD machine has done an admiral job at making Vista seem like a steaming pile, that's all it has been: FUD.

I've been using Vista since November of 2006, essentially days after it was released to MSDN, and it is without a doubt better than XP. The improvements are both obvious and subtle. I'm not going to list them all here, because others have done a good job already.

So if Vista is superior to XP technically, which was deemed by most as a great success, then Vista being a failure must be attributed to sales data. Many early reports showed Vista having poor sales, but those reports were flawed due to the fact that they compared the launch of Vista to the launch of XP. Vista launched Jan. 29th, long after the holiday season was over, where as XP enjoyed the entire holiday season to boosts its sales.

Once this was corrected, reports showed that Vista was selling on pace with XP. Indeed, as of March 2007, Vista's sales were double that of XPs.

In addition, despite being released to consumers and businesses separately, Vista's sales were only 4% behind XP, which was released to both simultaneously. In other words, Vista beat expectations by a long shot.

So it must be that sales of Vista have stagnated since March... opps, that's not true either. Apparently, Vista sold so well that it offset the massive hit Microsoft took as part of extending the Xbox 360 warranty to 3 years.

And then there is the wonderful story that Vista has somehow boosted XP sales, which is completely silly. It didn't boost XP sales. There was a larger proportion of XP sales than were expected, but the breakdown is about 80% Vista, 20% XP. Part of this is thanks to the FUD machine (good job guys) prompting some large OEMs, like Dell, to offer XP on lower end machines. Microsoft underestimated the FUD machine's ability to influence the market. (By the way, there were 7% more XP sales than were expected. Hardly a tidal wave of XP purchases.)

Sorry guys. I know you desperately want to believe that Vista is a failure, both technically and in terms of sales. But you're wrong on both accounts. 2 years from now, when 90% of PCs are running Vista, you'll probably still claim it's a failure, although you'll fall back to the technical side of things.

I'll be sure to bookmark my post and repeatedly link to it in all those flame wars.

As a matter of fact it's not necessary to wait for a public comment from ESR to know his views. If anything, these events can only reinforce his views that he wants "to see Microsoft broken on the wheel not by government fiat but by enlightened consumer choice". (Source: Halloween Documents FAQ

Isn't he on the linspire board or something?

According to this post apparantly by Linspire's CEO Eric is (or at least still was on Feb 23, 2007) "one of many un-paid volunteers of the Freespire Leadership Board". I wouldn't be surprised if Eric reconsiders his involvement in that project in reaction to Linspire's agreement with Microsoft, but it's his choice of course.

Sounds to me like what is happening now in Germany. In a recent article in a renomated german magazine, they describe how some policemen in one state already turn mobiles into a wiretap, even when the mobile appears to be off. The case of the arrest of New-York mafiaguy John Ardito is probably in the same direction: http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1035_22-6140191.html. If you can turn a mobile into a wiretap, and even fake that the mobile is turned off, you most probably can do much more like reading SMS, calendar, etc. That's were our rights are going :(

and risk the collective privacy (oxymoron?) of all pedophiles? NEVAR!

However if it is true it's not the first time people poking fun at the Mac have had death threats; Overclockers had them when they pretended to put an Intel/Windows motherboard/system inside a G5 case and Maynor reported death threats after his Wifi debacle.

Off the top of my head:

Zillow.com only works with IE or FireFox.

My employer's online time card system: IE only

My bank's on line bill paying system: IE only

Federal Emergency Management Agency's (FEMA) online registration site: "In order to use this site, you must have JavaScript Enabled and Internet Explorer version 6. Download it from Microsoft or call 1-800-621-FEMA (3362) to register."

The nations #1 news source: "The new AP Online Video Network is powered by Microsoft's MSN Video, meaning you must use the Microsoft browser, Internet Explorer (IE), to view it online."

Microsoft's Windows Update page only works in IE.

Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) does not show all content unless IE6 is used. It doesn't even work completely with IE7.

http://government.zdnet.com/?p=2683

http://www.fedworld.gov/

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9584_22-6183476.html

"Journals (Science [biggest journal, of the America Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)], and Nature) have prohibited taking OOXML documents, because they do not correspond to existing standards such as MathML and SVG and are not backwards compatible to Word 2003 and previous. Compatibility packs do not even help.[2][3] As Microsoft will stop selling Word 2003 by July 1, 2007[4], this is a very bad precedent for future-proofing documents.

1] http://www.sciencemag.org/about/authors/prep/docx. dtl "Because of changes Microsoft has made in its recent Word release that are incompatible with our internal workflow, which was built around previous versions of the software, Science cannot at present accept any files in the new .docx format produced through Microsoft Word 2007, either for initial submission or for revision. Users of this release of Word should convert these files to a format compatible with Word 2003 or Word for Macintosh 2004 (or, for initial submission, to a PDF file) before submitting to Science"

"Because of changes Microsoft has made in its recent Word release that are incompatible with our internal workflow, which was built around previous versions of the software, Science cannot at present accept any files in the new .docx format produced through Microsoft Word 2007, either for initial submission or for revision."

"Users of Word 2007 should also be aware that equations created with the default equation editor included in Microsoft Word 2007 will be unacceptable in revision, even if the file is converted to a format compatible with earlier versions of Word; this is because conversion will render equations as graphics and prevent electronic printing of equations, and because the default equation editor packaged with Word 2007 -- for reasons that, quite frankly, utterly baffle us -- was not designed to be compatible with MathML."

[3]http://www.robweir.com/blog/2007/04/math-markup -marked-down.html "Math markup marked down"
        http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/12608/1023/
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/technology/archives/20 07/06/04/scientists_hold_off_on_that_upgrade_to_of fice_2007.html

Nature's analysis of OOXML:
"We currently cannot accept files saved in Microsoft Office 2007 formats. Equations and special characters (for example, Greek letters) cannot be edited and are incompatible with Nature's own editing and typesetting programs"

[4] http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=519 "July 1: No more Office 2003 for OEMs" by Mary Jo Foley"

http://www.microsoft-watch.com/content/business_ap plications/the_pointless_office_converter_delay.ht ml "The Pointless Office Converter Delay"

"Two important Microsoft topics--interoperability and Office file formats--intersect on the Mac desktop, and they brutally cross like swords.

Two weeks ago, Microsoft broke a promise made in December: The spring beta release of OOXML (Office Open XML) converters for Mac Office. "

In reply to myself above, to satisfy my own curiosity, I just spent an hour researching this company. Seems they began as EJB Solutions in 1998 with one Rod Cope as co-founder. 2003 finds them headquartered in Highlands Ranch, Colorado. They were specialized in Java, J2EE, XML, and web service technologies, and without doubt the "EJB" in their name refers to Enterprise Java Beans which were all the rage back then. EJB Solutions changed their name to Open Logic sometime around June 21, 2004. They released the BlueGlue 3.2 Open Source Stack July 13, 2005. They launched Indemnification for their Certified Library of Open Source Products on October 17, 2006, but at least one blogger was not too impressed with that

Rod Cope of OpenLogic explains what this is all about in a nice video at JavaOne 2007 where he really seems to be a nice guy who perhaps deserves our support as they have been involved in Open Source and promoting it for a long time. Its just this thing about their Indemnification offer that has touched off a raw nerve here. I hereby invite Rod Cope to contact me and I will ask him about this, do a little interview with him, and report back.

Maybe because you can create performant, cross-platform applications like:

    http://www.banghowdy.com/
    http://tribaltrouble.com/
    http://sunflow.sourceforge.net/

...or that in five years it will be hard to find a widescreen, 3D capable cellphone that does not support being programmed in Java?

...or that the iPhone can run Java natively in hardware?
    http://blogs.zdnet.com/Burnette/?p=338

Once again, I would like to point to McNealy's Law, which states that you have zero privacy and to get over it. The FBI has done this in the past and will likely continue this type of activity.

Well they have to take the money to fund the XBox 360 3 year warranty from somwhere.

According to this post, the comparisons, in particular the WSJ ads, are from april and at least the Intel numbers were correct at this time.

Single-sided, POSIX comes out to less than 16 feet, .NET System to 40 feet.

Actually, I checked today. It's double-sided, but the binders themselves add thickness. An unbound set comes out to ~8 inches, and that works out to (8.5*11)/(3*5)*(2*8 inches/12 inches per foot) or ~8.3 feet of 3.5 cards, or about 1/5 of .NET. (And about three feet of POSIX would be devoted to the introduction, definitions, utilities (like tar, compress, vi, and such), and rationales.)

And .NET System contains System.Windows.Forms (i.e. pretty much everything you need for a GUI app in Windows), it includes an XML parser, it includes all kinds of web libraries.

As I've pointed out, the POSIX spec covers pretty much an entire operating system and environment with attendant utilities sufficient to run a business on. But you're right, I wasn't correct regarding what .NET "System" contained, so the comparison is not entirely fair.

So, let's even it up. Add another 6 feet to POSIX for the GUI stuff. Now POSIX+GTK (thoroughly documented) comes out to ~14.5 feet, or just over 1/3 of a sketchily-documented .NET.

Of course the metric here isn't totally scientific. But we know that Windows is just more complex than Linux or other POSIX-style systems. My overarching point was... let's see, what was it again... ah, yes, here it is:

"The Windows API is huge, complex, only occasionally and accidentally orthogonal, and in my experience mostly very poorly documented. I'm not the only one who thinks so... The APIs on Unix are small, well-thought-out, have few if any side effects, and tend to be thoroughly documented. I find very few interfaces on Windows have even a majority of these traits, let alone all of them."

You may be interested in the commentary I have written explaining Sun's position on GPLv3. Despite having been involved in the discussion process from the beginning, we still only saw the final text at the end of this week. Whereas some people (who ought to know better) think we can just change the licenses over-night, in fact we have to take into account:

• The meaning of the final text and what its implications are. The team has started the discussion but with July 4 week next week many of them will be taking vacation so I don't expect a firm statement for several weeks.
• The fact (which I explain at length in my blog) that Sun is only the steward of the copyrights and the decision to change licenses takes more agreement than just Sun's.
• The fact that we've 6+ million lines of code in each of OpenSolaris (which is under CDDL) and OpenJDK (which is under GPLv2) and it will be heavy lifting to make a change.

So please do let Jonathan know how you feel, but be aware he's not the only guy who has to decide.

"Microsoft doesn't view the popularity of user requests to downgrade from Vista to XP as a ding against Vista," Ball emphasized.

When his guests vomit, he probably doesn't view it a ding against the meal he's served them.

what's funny is that it was a microsoft recruiter who posted it.

Just search for Windows Profit Margins. There's a lot of news and discussion about their SEC filings.

This from the top-ranked page:

Did you check? I tried digging for a bit, and amusingly enough, I got the link for this page from Google:

This blog from a week ago shows that it's possible the project is active and mayhaps even advancing...

For those that only want the executive summary, here is a key chart that shows the publicly disclosed High severity vulnerabilities during the first 90 days of availability, broken down by vulns fixed and vulns unfixed. Note that this chart is showing the reduced Linux builds that exclude non-default and optional components without equivalents on WIndows. (clicking the chart also gets you to the full report.)

Somewhat off-topic, but there's another interesting iPhone rumor/tidbit floating in the ether today: A ZDNet Blog claims that Apple will be announcing sometime this week that they've licensed the MS Exchange ActiveSync API... which would signal that the iPhone is almost definitely compatible with Exchange Servers. For folks whose IT departments are in love with that particular software stack, I'll bet that will be big news.

• There is no Senator Debra Bowen (D-Redondo Beach).
• There is no SB2208.

Subject: Breast-feeding
Authored by: Migden

According to James M. Atkinson, a Massachusetts-based expert in counterintelligence who has advised the U.S. Congress on security issues, its not that hard to take remote control of a wireless phone. You do not have to have a strong technical background for someone to do this, he said Tuesday. They probably have a technically gifted kid who probably is in their neighborhood.

Flash was huge before 2005. v5 may have been when things started to take off, I don't really know...but Flash definitely had the majority of the market well before Youtube and Adobe came around.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/ITFacts/?p=6005

References a page on Macromedia.com which now only shows 2006 stats but I don't see why they'd post a blatant lie. In 2004 Flash had well over 90% penetration in US and Europe.

The zdnet blog article is here: http://government.zdnet.com/?p=3237

My mistake : http://government.zdnet.com/?p=3237

http://whitepapers.zdnet.com/whitepaper.aspx?docid =90938

Now you've got only one remaining excuse for not reading it : you're on Slashdot :)

While I've certainly heard of Microsoft not disclosing the vulnerabilities until their patches are released, I've never heard of them patching things completely in secret. Do you have any citations to back that up?

Skeletins in Microsoft's Patch-day Closet

It's interesting that you attack Microsoft for secrecy but say nothing about Apple, which is famous for its hostile attitude towards people who discover exploits as well as their secrecy about their patches are what they fix.

You seem to be under a misapprehension here. I'm not defending Apple. I'm simply pointing out that Microsoft has more ability to hide security flaws in their software than any company that uses a significant amount of open-source software, and thus they can artificially reduce their "score" in this game to a far greater extent than either of the other organizations mentioned by Jones. That is, regardless of Apple's motivations and actions, they are simply not capable of hiding patches as effectively as Microsoft.

So:

1. Microsoft has more ability to "game the system" than Red Hat, Apple, or any other organization using a significant amount of open-source software in their product.

2. Microsoft has acknowledged that they are engaged in gaming the system.

I would be happy to discuss Apple's past behavior in an appropriate context. In fact if you google around you'll find that I've been quite critical of Apple when I've felt it warranted. There's plenty of other skeletons in Microsoft's closet if you want to get into a fan war, but you'll have to find someone else for THAT debate... again, google around, you'll find I defend Microsoft when I believe it's warranted. Basically, I'm poorly equipped for the kind of debate that requires uncritical acceptance or dismissal of of one company's position on every subject.

Here and now, Microsoft's figures can not be accepted on face value. Unless Microsoft reveals ALL the details of the vulnerabilities they've corrected they can't be considered comparable to even Apple's figures with their heavy loading of open source software, let alone Red Hat's.

First sentence is correct. Author didn't distinguish bug/vulernability.

The second sentence, while double-plus-good Microsoft PR speak, is critically flawed reasoning.

If the parent said "Known Vista vulnerabilities..." I would agree, but that still glides over many fundamental liabilities that Microsoft products push onto the customer like:
1. The concept of security in Microsoft products means protect Microsoft's intellectual property.
2. No one can reasonably predict the scope or scale of Microsoft vulnerabilities.
3. Given Microsoft's history of producing "secure" operating systems, it is reasonable to assume there is no evidence end-user security features makes it through to the end product. Note carefully, Microsoft has *very* talented programmers who can code securely after all their monopoly status affords them this luxury. I'm saying that their work doesn't make it all the way through the management gauntlet. UAC is a perfect example. It is not a security boundary. http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=175

The Vista train will pull out of the station eventually because Microsoft's monopoly makes this a sure thing. As every other Microsoft OS has shown, there will be critical vulnerability surprises. It's a matter of when, not if.

Thank you Bruce. Someone needed to explain the situation a little better.

I've seen this problem for a while from my experience with SugarCRM. They use a modified Mozilla Public License Version 1.1 (SugarCRM Public License) that requires attribution with a logo on the bottom of every page. This was not the case initially but when SugarCRM was at version 1.5 a company used the Open Source license to create their own product (vTiger CRM) and it pissed off the people at Sugar so they changed the license. Now on the vTiger homepage they advertise with "Tired of kinda, sorta Open Source? Get the honest Open Source: vTiger CRM". SugarCRM isn't really Open Source. They are just profiting from using that term.

I am glad OSI is cracking down. These companies are misleading consumers into thinking they have certain freedoms because their software is "Open Source" but it really isn't. Oh, and don't give me that crap about you can define Open Source however you want. Open Source needs to have a concrete definition or it means nothing. Companies like SugarCRM are damaging that definition. If everyone got to define Open Source it would have no definition.

Wait, yuore telling me the Mozilla foundation does not get money (72 million) from google to make it the default search AND I'm paid by MS because I mentioned this fact? Are you just stupid or crazy and stupid?

I think you might be paid by M$ because you sound like they do. Anyone who could doubt the supremacy of Google as a search engine is insane. Also, your bad manners and basic misunderstanding of free software can only come from Redmond.

You happen to be right about Google giving money to Mozilla, though I can't vouch for the amount because the ZDNet (Wintel Rag) contradicts you.

Still, this does not matter because Firefox is free software as is Konqueror. Every distribution's choice of Google and ultimately every user's choice is indeed a mater of merit. If there's not an actual setting, anyone of those distributions could recompile the browser to include whatever search engine they want. The idea that teh Evil Google is buying influence in the free software world does not hold water like it would in the non free world where people don't really have software control or choices.

You can sit here and rain all day but it won't do you any good. You can call me stupid and crazy. You can say Google is evil and sucks. None of that will give M$ what it needs: product and sales. The end of the M$ gravy train is here.

Not quite,

Assuming a 70W difference (more than what Intel claims) in TDP at 100% utilization (unlikely) and a 10c kWh (residential prices are lower, not to mention corporate rates), that works out to 50*0.001*24*365*0.1 = $43 for a year.

Even if you double that to account for extra air-con costs, you're still far from it. The cheapest core-duo is around 200$. The above calculations are for high-end CPU, which cost hundreds more.

In reality, CPU utilization average is generally nowhere near 100% over a whole year, and AMD CPUs have a good power-saving mode (better than Intel's in my experience) when idle which ensures lower actual TDP differences.

Here's the pudding from zdnet's gallery. Looks great to me and I can't wait to get a camera with this technology. I just bought a new camera and I'm almost sorry I did now.

http://content.zdnet.com/2346-9595_22-88313.html

I know that it's hard to RTFA when the link is messed up, but http://government.zdnet.com/?p=3218 is pretty easy to find. It clearly states that the judge doesn't want the RAM turned over, but the data that is stored there.

Here's another one:

http://government.zdnet.com/?p=3218

Try this: ZDnet.com

Here is a working link to the article: http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-6190900.html

Single-threaded SPARC performance on modern processors is perfectly fine. In fact it's better than on Intel / AMD in that it's always the same. ie - it runs the same speed, regardless of load.

What? What the hell are you talking about?

"runs the same speed" regardless of "load"? Could you please use some technical terms here? x86 instructions complete in a given number of cycles (barring branch misprediction, to which SPARC is not immune) so intel/AMD chips also always run at the same speed (barring throttling.)

I've had horrible experiences with RedHat in particular

Well, that's fair - so has everyone else. (Some people are simply willing to overlook them)

They aren't making Solaris look like Linux, they are however, making Solaris cross platform (Sparc/AMD/Intel)

*cough*bullshit*cough* As a newborn Sun employee, Murdock is thinking about making Solaris more Linux-like. "When people say Linux what do they mean? Linux is a kernel. Cool apps are not written to the kernel. The OS powers higher levels of the stack. What we want is an open OS platform and to make sure that the existing skill sets and knowledge and training investments are leveraged. We don't want to make them learn a new product or rip and replace," Murdock said. "You can make a real argument that Solaris innovated more than Linux in the last few years--such as DTrace and ZFS--but usability stands in the way of appreciating that," Murdock said. "Part of what we are working on is closing the usability gap so that it doesn't stand in the way." (next para, emphasis mine:) "There is no reason we can't make Solaris look and feel more like Linux," he continued. "There are a couple of ways we could do it. We could stick a penguin on it or take a Linux distribution and put a Solaris kernel in it. There are a few Solaris-based distros that have done that. Personally, as the person charting the course and looking at the strategy question, it becomes how to keep the competitive differentiation of Solaris while closing the usability gap."

Perhaps you should try to be informed before you attempt to refute my statements? Especially since you're wrong.

Also, it's worth noting that there's Sun SPARC-based hardware that OpenSolaris doesn't run on, because Sun won't give out sufficient specifications. Theo's way of putting it was "Sun released CPU docs, but that's useless. It is kind of like trying to fix a car engine with the owner's manual. The rest of the hardware is not documented."

Now go away, or I shall taunt you a second time.

I don't exactly understand how this is a communism over capitalism issue. It's simply the current laws of the environment that you are trying to operate in. It's similar to eBay's struggle in France over Nazi memorabilia. Now one could argue that France is definitely sliding toward socialism/communism, but regardless eBay cannot display Nazi memorabilia auctions to French based IP addresses. See the attached link for more information. http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-525752.html This is simply a similar issue. Yahoo, Google, et al must comply with local jurisdiction to stay in business. Another example is Gambling sites being illegal in the US. The only issue here is that the US hasn't taken the effort to block access to those sites from the US, yet.

Not exactly true. Apple is one of the largest PC manufacturers (and was when they dropped ATI as well). Their OS share may be low, but they are a big hardware maker. (Fourth largest in the September quarter last year: http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-6127255.html?ta g=nl).

For an OS comparison, a Dell is the same as an Acer is the same a HP. But as for hardware, these are all different.

There's an article here. I believe the shipped Macs still went with ATI, but they removed all references to ATI from the keynote and exhibit hall and gave ATI the cold shoulder for a while.