Kerberos, both MIT and Heimdal, is already quite well established in higher education.
Kerberos already supports cross domain authentication and has the added advantage that there are packages for all the major linux and BSD distros (including OS X). PAM (pluggable authentication modules) make adding it even easier.
Even MS-Windows supports a passable if somewhat broken variant, but it is still possible to work around that.
Add one more category, one time pad, at the top and move your bank account and other must-preserve passwords there.
If your bank is not having you use at least a one-off PIN, then sniffing, phishing or other forms of interception can cause great harm. There are disadvantages to a one time pad, but having an individual password intercepted and re-used is not one of them.
You'd think that with remote exploits in MSIE announced publicly every week for 5 years would sharpen banks up. It's not like the problems don't circulate for weeks, months or years before MS finally admits them either.
In other words, MS has to have something to keep admins busy enough to keep them from having time to experiment with platforms BSD, Linux, OS X or applications like OpenOffice.org, Thunderbird, Firefox, Opera, etc.
Most businesses are finding that MS-Windows 2000 meets their needs better than XP. MS-Windows XP never really caught on except in OEM sales.
This is a good warning, though. A five year product life cycle kind of defeats any theoretical advantages that should come from having the backing of a large company. If this had happended to RedHat, Suse, Mandrake or any other GPL'ed tool any one company could pick up the ball and run with it. Or a consortia could be formed to continue support.
The first glaring problem with this is the use of a radio controled device in close proximity to ordinance.
Yes. But there are many work arounds such as adding shielding and making the device wireguided (or fiber). The umbilical would be a disadvantage and necessitate a stronger motor, but the weight and other limitations of a battery can be eliminated. That's more expense, but still probably less than their competitors.
An umbilical could also be used to winch the unit back out of trouble.
Another shortcoming from the protoype show in the article is that it rides high and is SOL if it rolls over. Probably better to design the vehicle so that it works with either side up.
It's one thing to laugh at the price of the competitors, but it's a good idea to find out what that price does and doesn't cover.
Believe it or not, there are unfortunatley many people that do not hear about secure or functional programs. MS has not only a lock on the desktop market (for the time being), but also the advertising market.
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, if you want to bring up anecdotal cures, I'll suggest stocking up on comedies from the black and white era, especially the old silent ones. You may have to visit a film archive and rent an 8mm or 16mm, but you won't get a better laugh out of the lame stuff circulating these days in place of comedies.
Enjoyment has been tied to improved immune function and when it comes down to it with or without anti-biotics his immune system is what has to kick the bacteria.
From time to time you read anecdotes about people kicking illnesses through humor or just deciding to kick back and have fun on the way out. (I guess, though, those are self selecting, You don't usually hear, "well, I tried that, but it killed me anyway...) Myself, as a kid I once got sicker and sicker for months, despite lots of medical treatment, the turning point for me was the b&w and silent comedies. Can't say for sure that's what did it, but at least it was entertaining. YMMV
The iPod brought attention to iBook or G5. They probably bought it, liked it and then thought, "hey, if iPod is this good, I ought to at least check out an iBook or G5." The rest is history.
iBooks are the single best device out there for college students and many others. Excellent form factor, easy to use, even easier to maintain, good bang for the buck. The main drawback is the Microsoft effect, which has convinced users that all computers are slow to start up, slow to wake up, hard to configure, hard to use, virus prone, etc. and all alike and therefore won't look at anything new.
If one gets over that, for whatever reason, then rational though has a chance to. The push can come from an iPod or elsewhere. e.g. I loaned one out for 2 hours to an "MS is good enough for me and I'm not changing" small business owner. At the end of the two hours, he stated that his next hardware purchase will be a Mac. But for most, iPod will be the wake up.
It's very good that these three have spoken. I do think that their voices carry weight even among stuffed suits, MBAs and other detritus.
There are also a lot of other things going on right now, hence the other distracting activities.
One crucial event is that the EU judge will hold a meeting on Thursday to
discuss the possiblity of suspending sactions against MS. This would be a mistake on par with allowing software, literature, or algorithms to be patented in the EU. While technical work continues on codecs like dirac and theora, more political and legal work needs to be done. Failing to impose sanctions until illegal behavior is stopped would be very harmful to Europe in general and to the European software industry in general.
Software has not advanced faster since patents were introduced in the US, actually quite the opposite.
The average cost of patent litigation, even to get a lame patent tossed out, is around $4 000 000 USD.
So far the arguments in favor of software patents have not been backed up by evidence
Most of the small and medium business owners I've heard claiming to favor SWP have only one major customer, in Redmond
But don't listen to me. World experts covered the topic much better at the recent two day conference. You can listen to the proceedings in the form of MP3.
Yes, 90%+ market share despite poor products and competitors with excellent counter parts is a problem. If you count the US courts as a reliable source, then the cause has been from illegally leveraging the monopoly in the desktop markets to gain entrance into new markets. In that example it was to enter the web browser market and crush Netscape.
The same is being attempted in the EU by leveraging the desktop monopoly to force WMP's file format into the audio/video streaming market, probably with a goal to go after HDTV in general.
Firefox is good in that it brings up a little public awareness about good products. Also, it's not too far a lead for the rare curious individual to then find out how MSIE got so much market share and what it takes to get rid of MSIE and make the computer secure. With a little digging, they can easily find out about more good products to replace the shoddy MS ones.
1. Who WANTS to exercise underwater options? That means that you LOSE money because you suddenly have options that cost WAY more than the market value is and selling those would instantly lose a ton of money.
That's only on the assumption that the stock will turn around and the value will increase again. Otherwise, it is smarter to take a small loss than to ride the stock down to the bottom and take a big loss.
2. Blocked? Well there is this thing called Vesting....
Functionally the same thing. The sales were blocked for the year 2004, to prevent a mass exodus, or to put it in business speak "for retention".
Read the article again, or try a different one.
3. In 2003 Microsoft made an offer to buy back ANY underwater options that were above a certain price
Yes, in 2003 around 51% of the employees offered the chance to take a small loss did so, meaning 51% of that set of insiders think that the price stock will not go back up and back up that opinion with their own cash.
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!
I agree that's clever, but may not be the best way to improve the current situation. Especially since MS seems to want to generate lawsuits.
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.
OOo is doing quite well as it is. It would be foolish to emulate all the problems in MS-Office. Perhaps a training wheel mode is required to re-arrange the menus and short cuts for recovering MS-Office users. Some software in the 1980's used to offer different configurations like that.
However, as geg81 and others have pointed out, many OOo users are new users. They don't need the baggage of legacy software. Even if the users aren't so new, this is a chance to get things right, or at least better.
Another option for spreadsheets on *BSD, besides Gnumeric, would be OpenOffice.org Calc.
But Gnumeric is a very good choice.
Here is a detailed write up of Gnumeric. The Computational Statistics & Data Analysis Statistical Software Newsletter has a report reviewing Gnumeric vs MS-Excel titled Fixing Statistical Errors in Spreadsheet Software: The Cases of Gnumeric and Excel (Warning for PDF) Regardless, of which spreadsheet you use, it's worth a read. Some excerpts:
When apprised of the errors in v1.0.4, the developers of Gnumeric indicated that they would try to fix the errors. Indeed, Gnumeric v1.1.2 has largely fixed the flaws, while Microsoft has not fixed its errors through many successive versions.
...
Persons who desire to use a spreadsheet package to perfome statistical analyses are advised to use Gnumeric rather than Excel
So, actually, Gnumeric *is* currently much better than MS-Excel. At least if the metrics are that it's statistical functions are more accurate and that bugs get fixed faster. I'd speculate that once Quattro was killed off, MS coasted on development of MS-Excel like it has done with MSIE after killing Netscape. Anyway...
Google's fine when blindly fumbling for clues or for starting another branch of search. However, get to learn to use the (US) National Library of Medicine's database, Medline. You can access it via your university or via Pubmed (The Gratefulmed interface is gone).
It's free. Or rather, the research has already been paid for by private and federal grants and your taxes. Medline contains many tens of thousands of medical research articles and citations to tens of millions if you have access to paper journals. These articles can be found using keywords for greater precision searches, something Google, Altavista, and Co cannot offer.
That's the beauty of secret sources of information. They can't speak up. Intell could have been 100% accurate, or 100% wrong. If records are kept and not destroyed or lost over time long enough for them to be declassified yet short enough for an investigator to still care, then maybe we'll find out.
So, the public will never know, at least not in a meaningful time scale.
you KNOW that something is wrong when something so mediocre has total market dominance.
Well, one option to get off the treadmill is OpenOffice.org.
Easy to download and evaluate. Binary packages are available for multiple platforms. Cost was mentioned as an obstacle, but that is not an problem with OOo. Which, if you find it useful, can be installed on any of your machines. Your university ought to at least offer it as an option. In the worst case, it can be used to leverage a discount on MS-Office.
Design flaws in MSIE are costing billions. Given the current state of the economy, those billions are not coming out of fat, nor even meat, but bone. Currently, MSIE is the only web browser that will execute abritrary code on your machine as the result of simply looking at a web page. Similar flaws have been found every few weeks for years. Sadly, MS has been slow about fixing many and cant take weeks or months to even acknowledge a problem, just like it does for its other products. Some cannot be stopped by firewalls or AV software. You'd be a fool to broadcast your bank codes to the world by using MSIE.
Nice to know MS has made security a high priority. Hopefully its next priority will be doing something about it.
Get over your blind adoration of Chairman Bill, right now there are products on the market that work they all happen to be non-MS.
Normally you're not allowed to do this when one of the products is a monopoly (because if there was real competition, you could evaluate different OS+browser packages), but Microsoft seems immue to anti-trust suits...
The recent flurry of articles about web browsers are leaving out mention of the fact that MS was found guilty of illegally leveraging its desktop monopoly to kill off Netscape. That was the core finding of one of the anti-trust trials of the mid-1990's. Let that go too long and the MS-apologists and astroturfers will try another round of revisionist history and try to make it look like MSIE beat Netscape without illegal methods.
That strategy has been successful for the company against more than just Netscape, though detrimental to the public and the economy and the free market.
As others have pointed out, Microsoft can not compete on merits, so they are trying to make it technically and legally imposible for others to do anything.
Anti-competitive behavior is also the core of one of the anti-trust trials in the EU regarding audio/video file formats.
This last part is very important because more and more news is being transmitted over the Internet, either via the WWW or via audio streams or video streams. Without information to make and informed decision, it is not possible to have a democracy. Thus, control of the media is the 21st century's hydrogen bomb.
El Mundo is distributing more than just Guadalinux. There are a dozen CDs. Interestingly enough OpenOffice.org (aka OOo) is on two of the CDs.
I wish some of the "security" campaigns being run by the occasional government or tv station would take notice. For your average home user (the one that prints letters, writes e-mail, surfs the web, listens to music, but doesn't necessarily have to
have the latest game) there's no excuse to still be running some slow, defective product from Redmond.
Thats the first thing i always do when freshly installing a windows system.... not that i want to...
For years I thought that the MS support mantra of wiping the hard disk and reinstalling MS Windows from scratch was just of sign of not only how bad its software was but also of how bad its tech support was.
Then I though about what is really happening, which is that all the defaults are restored to MS' wishes. Competing software is wiped, too, and if it gets reinstalled at all, must be installed last which leaves plenty of time for the clock to run out or other interruptions to occur. Since many (most?) MS shops IT departments run in crisis managment mode, most interruptions tend to be permanent.
Contrast that with OS X or any of the main Linux distros, where not only is a wipe of the hard disk exceedingly rare, but also it is simple to include third party apps in the install process.
Most banks offer WWW-based banking, in other words their services work with any browser. If your friend's bank is trying to lock him into MSIE, then go to a competitor and tell them what you are looking for. They'll usually sweeten the deal with reduced fees, extra services, and lower interest on loans. Then when you switch tell the old bank why.
Given all the MSIE security problems publicized every week, it's more than time to sharpen up.
For those that haven't read of him, Vannu was only recently released from an 18 year sentence as punishment for providing hard evidence to the west of an illegal middle east nuclear weapons progam. Though he has been a nominee for the Nobel Peace price every year from 1988 to 2004, he has not been allowed to speak with foreigners or reporters.
Mature companies like Microsoft have switched from options (who really thinks their stock will increase enough to make their
stock will increase enough to make the options valueable?)
Apparently not that many think its stock will increase and the options have been "underwater" for a long time. Last year at about this time around MS instituted a buy back plan for the underwater options.
About about half of eligible employees sold their underwater stock options, but only small holders were allowed to sell all and none were allowed to sell during 2004. Employee retention was cited as the main reason for blocking 2004.
Starting 2005, however, MS employees can resume selling which means they can bail and look for a job elsewhere without losing their options.
C'mon. Do you see anyone doing anything other than bailing?
Yes, Ballmer's making all kind of noise, but security and quality problems are starting to cut into MS' bottom line. OpenOffice.org is cutting into the applications profit. Linux is cutting into their server profit and just starting to edge into the desktop arena. Areas like embedded systems have MS listed as a no-show. If litigation and a patent war don't pull things up next year, MS is out of the way for good.
The problem here is that CBS is confusing WRITING with JOURNALISM... I think that the only time writing can ever be called journalism is when you are writing about a first-hand experience.
Most of what passes for journalism these days, at least in the mainstream press, is merely a edit job on a press release or public statement.
That said, I think blogs are becoming the "new journalism", people writing from their own experiences and sharing that knowledge with others.
That's probably what's scaring the networks. Both contain junk, but with blogs, people at least get to choose which junk and how often they're exposed to it. In some cases, they can even comment on it.
When was the last time anyone even heard of a reporter or news outlet investigating anything? Please prove me wrong, I'd like to be wrong in this regard, but I can only recall smaller outlets like the The Register doing it. Or people with a mission, like Black Box Voting.
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Kerberos already supports cross domain authentication and has the added advantage that there are packages for all the major linux and BSD distros (including OS X). PAM (pluggable authentication modules) make adding it even easier. Even MS-Windows supports a passable if somewhat broken variant, but it is still possible to work around that.
If your bank is not having you use at least a one-off PIN, then sniffing, phishing or other forms of interception can cause great harm. There are disadvantages to a one time pad, but having an individual password intercepted and re-used is not one of them.
You'd think that with remote exploits in MSIE announced publicly every week for 5 years would sharpen banks up. It's not like the problems don't circulate for weeks, months or years before MS finally admits them either.
Most businesses are finding that MS-Windows 2000 meets their needs better than XP. MS-Windows XP never really caught on except in OEM sales.
This is a good warning, though. A five year product life cycle kind of defeats any theoretical advantages that should come from having the backing of a large company. If this had happended to RedHat, Suse, Mandrake or any other GPL'ed tool any one company could pick up the ball and run with it. Or a consortia could be formed to continue support.
An umbilical could also be used to winch the unit back out of trouble.
Another shortcoming from the protoype show in the article is that it rides high and is SOL if it rolls over. Probably better to design the vehicle so that it works with either side up.
It's one thing to laugh at the price of the competitors, but it's a good idea to find out what that price does and doesn't cover.
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.
Enjoyment has been tied to improved immune function and when it comes down to it with or without anti-biotics his immune system is what has to kick the bacteria.
From time to time you read anecdotes about people kicking illnesses through humor or just deciding to kick back and have fun on the way out. (I guess, though, those are self selecting, You don't usually hear, "well, I tried that, but it killed me anyway...) Myself, as a kid I once got sicker and sicker for months, despite lots of medical treatment, the turning point for me was the b&w and silent comedies. Can't say for sure that's what did it, but at least it was entertaining. YMMV
iBooks are the single best device out there for college students and many others. Excellent form factor, easy to use, even easier to maintain, good bang for the buck. The main drawback is the Microsoft effect, which has convinced users that all computers are slow to start up, slow to wake up, hard to configure, hard to use, virus prone, etc. and all alike and therefore won't look at anything new.
If one gets over that, for whatever reason, then rational though has a chance to. The push can come from an iPod or elsewhere. e.g. I loaned one out for 2 hours to an "MS is good enough for me and I'm not changing" small business owner. At the end of the two hours, he stated that his next hardware purchase will be a Mac. But for most, iPod will be the wake up.
One crucial event is that the EU judge will hold a meeting on Thursday to discuss the possiblity of suspending sactions against MS. This would be a mistake on par with allowing software, literature, or algorithms to be patented in the EU. While technical work continues on codecs like dirac and theora, more political and legal work needs to be done. Failing to impose sanctions until illegal behavior is stopped would be very harmful to Europe in general and to the European software industry in general.
- Software has not advanced faster since patents were introduced in the US, actually quite the opposite.
- The average cost of patent litigation, even to get a lame patent tossed out, is around $4 000 000 USD.
- So far the arguments in favor of software patents have not been backed up by evidence
- Most of the small and medium business owners I've heard claiming to favor SWP have only one major customer, in Redmond
But don't listen to me. World experts covered the topic much better at the recent two day conference. You can listen to the proceedings in the form of MP3.The same is being attempted in the EU by leveraging the desktop monopoly to force WMP's file format into the audio/video streaming market, probably with a goal to go after HDTV in general.
Firefox is good in that it brings up a little public awareness about good products. Also, it's not too far a lead for the rare curious individual to then find out how MSIE got so much market share and what it takes to get rid of MSIE and make the computer secure. With a little digging, they can easily find out about more good products to replace the shoddy MS ones.
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.
However, as geg81 and others have pointed out, many OOo users are new users. They don't need the baggage of legacy software. Even if the users aren't so new, this is a chance to get things right, or at least better.
But Gnumeric is a very good choice. Here is a detailed write up of Gnumeric. The Computational Statistics & Data Analysis Statistical Software Newsletter has a report reviewing Gnumeric vs MS-Excel titled Fixing Statistical Errors in Spreadsheet Software: The Cases of Gnumeric and Excel (Warning for PDF) Regardless, of which spreadsheet you use, it's worth a read. Some excerpts:
So, actually, Gnumeric *is* currently much better than MS-Excel. At least if the metrics are that it's statistical functions are more accurate and that bugs get fixed faster. I'd speculate that once Quattro was killed off, MS coasted on development of MS-Excel like it has done with MSIE after killing Netscape. Anyway...It's free. Or rather, the research has already been paid for by private and federal grants and your taxes. Medline contains many tens of thousands of medical research articles and citations to tens of millions if you have access to paper journals. These articles can be found using keywords for greater precision searches, something Google, Altavista, and Co cannot offer.
That's the beauty of secret sources of information. They can't speak up. Intell could have been 100% accurate, or 100% wrong. If records are kept and not destroyed or lost over time long enough for them to be declassified yet short enough for an investigator to still care, then maybe we'll find out. So, the public will never know, at least not in a meaningful time scale.
Design flaws in MSIE are costing billions. Given the current state of the economy, those billions are not coming out of fat, nor even meat, but bone. Currently, MSIE is the only web browser that will execute abritrary code on your machine as the result of simply looking at a web page. Similar flaws have been found every few weeks for years. Sadly, MS has been slow about fixing many and cant take weeks or months to even acknowledge a problem, just like it does for its other products. Some cannot be stopped by firewalls or AV software. You'd be a fool to broadcast your bank codes to the world by using MSIE.
Nice to know MS has made security a high priority. Hopefully its next priority will be doing something about it. Get over your blind adoration of Chairman Bill, right now there are products on the market that work they all happen to be non-MS.
That strategy has been successful for the company against more than just Netscape, though detrimental to the public and the economy and the free market. As others have pointed out, Microsoft can not compete on merits, so they are trying to make it technically and legally imposible for others to do anything.
Anti-competitive behavior is also the core of one of the anti-trust trials in the EU regarding audio/video file formats. This last part is very important because more and more news is being transmitted over the Internet, either via the WWW or via audio streams or video streams. Without information to make and informed decision, it is not possible to have a democracy. Thus, control of the media is the 21st century's hydrogen bomb.
I wish some of the "security" campaigns being run by the occasional government or tv station would take notice. For your average home user (the one that prints letters, writes e-mail, surfs the web, listens to music, but doesn't necessarily have to have the latest game) there's no excuse to still be running some slow, defective product from Redmond.
Then I though about what is really happening, which is that all the defaults are restored to MS' wishes. Competing software is wiped, too, and if it gets reinstalled at all, must be installed last which leaves plenty of time for the clock to run out or other interruptions to occur. Since many (most?) MS shops IT departments run in crisis managment mode, most interruptions tend to be permanent.
Contrast that with OS X or any of the main Linux distros, where not only is a wipe of the hard disk exceedingly rare, but also it is simple to include third party apps in the install process.
Given all the MSIE security problems publicized every week, it's more than time to sharpen up.
For those that haven't read of him, Vannu was only recently released from an 18 year sentence as punishment for providing hard evidence to the west of an illegal middle east nuclear weapons progam. Though he has been a nominee for the Nobel Peace price every year from 1988 to 2004, he has not been allowed to speak with foreigners or reporters.
Starting 2005, however, MS employees can resume selling which means they can bail and look for a job elsewhere without losing their options. C'mon. Do you see anyone doing anything other than bailing?
Yes, Ballmer's making all kind of noise, but security and quality problems are starting to cut into MS' bottom line. OpenOffice.org is cutting into the applications profit. Linux is cutting into their server profit and just starting to edge into the desktop arena. Areas like embedded systems have MS listed as a no-show. If litigation and a patent war don't pull things up next year, MS is out of the way for good.
When was the last time anyone even heard of a reporter or news outlet investigating anything? Please prove me wrong, I'd like to be wrong in this regard, but I can only recall smaller outlets like the The Register doing it. Or people with a mission, like Black Box Voting.