Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Switchover, EULA, Perspectives
It's the little things. Time for another cumulative patch for IE, it seems. (Mozilla may have its share of security problems, but at least there's a new build broken in unique and exciting ways more frequently :)). Logica writes with a snippet from this ZDNet article, which reads: "Microsoft released a collection of software fixes Monday to plug six security problems in its Internet Explorer browser, including one that could be exploited to take over a victim's computer."
"Users are urged to download the latest patch."
What happened to the tar-and-feather clause? djmurdoch writes "Back in January, Borland promised to come up with new EULAs without some objectionable terms. They've just posted the new EULAs. Gone are the anti-competitive product clause, the right to audit, and the requirement to give up a jury trial. They still have required registration, and you can't use a 2nd hand copy. They've added a requirement that it be licensed to one named user; you need extra licenses to share a copy. Not perfect, but a big improvement."
Keep in the loop as consolidation continues. craig writes: "AT&T Broadband has now posted instructions for their cable modem users to change their e-mail addresses from @mediaone.net to @attbi.com. The instructions have been posted here. The instructions seem to work, and my upgrade has been smooth.
The instructions have been posted on the web, but it looks like they have not been e-mailed to current AT&T Broadband subscribers. It is probably a good idea to follow these instructions before they are mailed to the masses, because chances are, this is migration is going to keep AT&T Broadband customer support very busy. The old @mediaone.net addresses will stop working on March 15, as was mentioned in this previous posting on Slashdot."
And although it's been said many times, many ways ... LiquidPC writes: "Apple's Ernest Prabhakar is reporting that BSD is now 3 times as popular on the desktop as Linux, largely thanks to MacOSX, of course. He also commented that Microsoft now has Office running on a Berkeley UNIX."
This patch was mentioned in the recent MSN Messenger "virus" story. Just to recap, the "virus" was no virus at all, but just an exploitation of the old (as in, known since December) document.open bug in MSIE. This was fixed with Monday's patch. Everybody using IE should have installed this already, but those who haven't should do so now.
No, talking to Sorenson won't help. A few years back I asked about whether they'd be interested in making a BeOS version of their codec--since BeOS handles such things at the OS level, any media application would immediately have it available for their use. (This was back before Be's infamous focus shift and when they were getting a lot of positive attention in the A/V marketplace.) A Sorenson rep wrote back and said that they couldn't do that, because the codec is exclusively licensed to Apple for use in QuickTime--I was explicitly told the only way to get it on BeOS was to get Apple to port QuickTime to BeOS. Not the QuickTime file format, which a lot of other programs support, but actual QuickTime the program.
I like Apple (sometimes), but I don't really expect them to do much in the way of directly supporting Linux. The only commercial, closed-source app I could imagine them porting to a free Unix would be WebObjects, and I wouldn't be surprised if they ported it to FreeBSD before Linux.
Linux will get benefits from Apple, as you observed, if the Free Software Foundation deigns to accept the work Apple is doing on GCC. Having "one of the biggest GCC compiler design teams in the world and giving all that code back" doesn't mean the FSF is actually going to use it. I hope political considerations won't be an issue, but even without those they tend to be notoriously picky.