01.28.09
Posted in Hardware, Microsoft, Vista, Windows at 2:25 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Zune Death Watch
A reader has just told us that “Windows Vista [is] among the finalists for Fiasco Awards.” This is the Internet page which, according to our source, “was [also] featured in a local newspaper (in printed form, one of the most read in Catalonia).”
The title (in Catalan) reads: “Windows Vista and Second Life compete for the prize to biggest technological fiasco of the year.”
Here is the website, which is open to voting.
Windows for laptops and desktops (Vista) is not the only version that’s under siege. Microsoft’s distribution of XP for sub-notebooks is costing it dearly, Windows CE is unattractive to developers and Windows Mobile is still lagging.
Microsoft-sympathetic writers have already advised Microsoft to drop Windows Mobile [1, 2, 3], which is performing badly. Well, it’s happening again, even though it comes from a Microsoft-bent source (CNET), which adds intensity to the argument:
Is it time to ditch Windows Mobile?
[...]
The biggest problem for Windows Mobile has always been that it’s bloated and runs too slowly.
The Register advocates axing the Zune as well. This sounds familiar and it comes from Mary Jo Foley’s buddy.
In a season – the Christmas shopping period – when consumer gadgets are supposed to fly off retailers’ shelves, Microsoft’s Zune experienced a stunning $100 drop in revenue, a 54 per cent plunge. Even Microsoft was surprised.
The Register was not alone. A huge number of similar articles were published to express similar opinions. Among them (from this week only):
Microsoft denies that we’re seeing the end of the Zune brand, but then again, it also vigorously denied layoffs just a couple of months ago. It lied [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. It routinely lies without reluctance or shame. █
Tom Davis took this photo of a Zune which was smashed in anger
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Posted in America, Asia, Bill Gates, Deception, Microsoft at 1:59 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“Did you know that there are more than 34,750 registered lobbyists in Washington, D.C., for just 435 representatives and 100 senators? That’s 64 lobbyists for each congressperson.”
–CIO.com
AS Microsoft grows smaller and more feeble [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7], more of its products get dropped (more on that in the next post). But the other day we wrote about the fashion in which it is shrinking, namely by starting the layoffs from its home country.
Americans are unhappy. Why should they not be? After all, political corruption and string-pulling from Microsoft were used to betray the American population in order to make an extra buck (or save a few). Today we present a little update with many references to trade journals. It ought to be agreed that Microsoft operates for its own portion of the corporocracy and by little or no means to the benefit of the local population.
Americans Out, Foreigners Still In
According to this report, Americans from Boise will be losing their jobs at Microsoft.
The company would not disclose an exact number of layoffs in Boise, but sources said the local impact would be less than a dozen jobs.
What is happening elsewhere? Let’s explore.
The Seattle Times suggests that China and India are unaffected by the layoffs.
Roughly 40 percent of Microsoft’s 96,000 employees work outside the United States. The company has subsidiaries in countries from Albania to Zimbabwe. How are the layoffs announced last week impacting Microsoft’s employees around the globe?
[...]
The Economic Times, part of Indiatimes, quoted a Microsoft spokesperson in New Delhi last week saying of the layoff, “It’s not going to impact us. No job cuts in India.”
Singapore is not affected, either. Might this be related to wages and work conditions (welfare etc.)?
‘I can confirm that the number of employees affected by the immediate job eliminations is a single-digit number across Asia-Pacific, excluding China, India and Japan,’ a company spokeswoman told BizIT.
Patriotism Forfeited
Greed comes before nationality, which is perhaps natural to expect from ruthless corporations with investors, but here are some new figures of interest:
Majority of the 60,000 professionals given H-1B visa every year are from India.
“Microsoft has a moral obligation to protect these American workers by putting them first during these difficult economic times,” the Senator said.
Ineed, another confrontation has begun following Gates’ lobbying, which was once backed by political corruption that his father, Gates Senior, had going with his friend and colleague Abramoff (according to Wikipedia, “[Gates Senior] also serves as a director for Costco wholesale, a bulk retail corporation”).
It was only last March that Bill Gates himself argued to Congress that the H-1B visa limits needed to be lifted, because Microsoft just couldn’t get enough skilled workers. But Microsoft was going through a crazy manic phase back then, as evidenced by its Yahoo infatuation. Now that Microsoft needs fewer skilled workers, should the H-1Bs get the ax first?
This manipulation in Washington is something we will definitely revisit in the future. “Microsoft people seem already to have infiltrated every company and organization that could oppose them,” said one of our readers, further adding that “a while back [she] had collected some links about Bill Gates’ dad and how much power his law firm has. [...] it was from news releases about the Gates law firm buying up other law firms to the point where they now have offices nationwide.” She said she believes that’s where the real power behind Microsoft comes from.
“This manipulation in Washington is something we will definitely revisit in the future.”For the curious: “About the two Firms JAG worked for: – - The firm of William H. Gates Sr., father of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, merged with Preston in 1990. The later old line Seattle firm started when Harold Preston relocated to Seattle from Iowa in 1883 and began practicing law. Jim Ellis joined Preston in 1949. Members of JAG were registered lobbyists for Microsoft. During the 90′s PGE became a Top 10 lobbying Firm based on lobbying gross revenue. Much of their lobbying success and revenue was due to the success of JAG.”
The exploration here is seemingly endless and we had a go at it before. The latest complaint from the senator is also covered in:
He must be complaining because of reversal in plans that involved an Iowa datacentre. According to new figures, Microsoft keeps falling further behind Google (ignore bogus studies that Microsoft commissions).
With 2008 behind us, I wanted to look back and plot how search engine market share changed over the year in the United States. No surprises here. Pick your numbers, Google grew and grew. Yahoo and Microsoft dropped by lately have leveled off.
Worse Than Microsoft Tells
As pointed out some days ago, the scale of the layoffs is worse than initially reported and more are likely on their way. According to this article, Microsoft refuses to give accurate details.
Microsoft won’t disclose full extent of job cuts
So, in short, we’re not going to be getting much more info from Microsoft. We do have to say though, considering all the nice, helpful people that have recently lost their gigs, that last sentence is pretty icy.
There are additional bad signs in the following news items:
This begs the question, just how serious is it and how serious will this get? Microsoft’s refusal to boil down to specifics may be an indication that little or none of it has been finalised or thought through, yet. █
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Posted in Deception, Microsoft at 12:42 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“Analysts sell out – that’s their business model… But they are very concerned that they never look like they are selling out, so that makes them very prickly to work with.”
–Microsoft, internal document [PDF]
WE typically just ignore whatever the Gartner Group has to say because it is corrupt. More recently we also provided extensive evidence from antitrust exhibits [1, 2, 3, 4]. It’s very much like lobbying, wherein money runs the country rather than law and regulation, so it’s by no means surprising that Gartner hands a(nother) crown over to its paymasters from Redmond.
Gartner Research has named Microsoft a leader in four of its prestigious “Magic Quadrants,” including those for application infrastructure and database management.
There are other such groups that Microsoft pays to receive medals and praise from.
The industry of analysts is brutally corrupt, but a lot of people — particularly in the press — do not recognise this (or want to recognise this). The least Gartner could do in this case is add a disclaimer stating that Microsoft is one of its biggest customers (if not the biggest) and Bill Gates one of its funding sources. █
There is no money in objective opinions
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Posted in Deception, Free/Libre Software, Microsoft at 12:28 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Invade and divide?
Microsoft wants to use Eclipse in order to spread more Silver Lies and to break the Web with its proprietary, DRM-laden replacements [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. The price is very low (slush funds really), though the damage to this rival of Microsoft is high. There is not much trust there and we explained in more details what Microsoft had done and why. For more details, here is a new article which heralds the predictable and has elements in it that are reminiscent of what Microsoft did to OLPC in order to discourage participation.
The Eclipse Foundation is looking for opportunities to work more closely with Microsoft, says Mike Milinkovich, its executive director. Meanwhile, one observer is skeptical about whether a close Microsoft-Eclipse partnership would truly be a win-win scenario.
[...]
Tony Wasserman, a professor of software management practice and executive director at the Center for Open Source Investigation at Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley, said, “In thinking about possible relationships between Microsoft and the Eclipse Foundation, it would make sense for the two groups to collaborate in those areas where benefits would accrue to their respective users.”
A Microsoft-Eclipse partnership must work on a business, technical and personal level if it is likely to succeed, Wasserman said. He added that while the “win” for Microsoft is clear, he is less sure on what the “win” is for the Eclipse Foundation, other than having Microsoft join as a strategic member and contributing up to US$500,000 per year.
[...]
Eclipse developers paid by their employers to work on an Eclipse-related project would not have much of a reaction one way or the other, said Wasserman. However, the reception from unpaid volunteers might be cooler, he noted. “A typical unpaid volunteer contributor to an Eclipse project might be less likely to work on the project if he (or she) felt that his or her work was going to benefit a large for-profit business such as Microsoft.”
Microsoft describes "Open Source Software" (OSS) as a rival. Why do some people fall for posturing? We gave answers before. █
“GPL is the licensing model. We think it’s very bad for — on an education, telling the world why we think it’s bad. We don’t think it’s the same as public domain. Somebody wants to put in a free DSB, we don’t have a problem with that, at least on licensing. But GPL, we think it’s very bad basically for the world, but especially for the United States.”
–Jim Allchin, Microsoft
Eclipse: Don’t let the dark side in (SilverDark)
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Posted in Africa, Free/Libre Software, GNU/Linux, Microsoft at 11:45 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
EDUCATION in Uganda seems to have just been hijacked by Microsoft, assisted by the United States government. This is an excellent example of imperialism, which also requires seeing the following antitrust exhibits about a programme that Microsoft calls EDGI and accompanying MOUs (codenamed “Project Marshall”).
How can this type of thing be ethical? Is Uganda delegating control for Microsoft to handle its children’s education? Is this an offshoring of minds?
The United States is working with Microsoft to improve education management with computer technology. The U.S. Agency for International Development, USAID, will provide two million dollars to purchase equipment for the project. Microsoft will design software that will help gather data in the education ministry. The alliance is expected to provide educators and students with online resources.
Ten years ago Uganda introduced free primary education for all children, opening doors for millions who would have been too poor to go to school. Under the Universal Primary Education program, the number of children between six and 15 years tripled over the past decade.
Why are the Ugandan authorities permitting digital colonialism by a company that committed so many crimes and continues to commit them? Microsoft has no place in Africa because it only exploits and insults the continent. It’s a fight against Free software and GNU/Linux, which would empower the local population rather than use it. █
“They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.”
–Bill Gates
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Posted in Antitrust, Europe, Microsoft at 11:24 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“Basically what everyone is saying is that we have done nothing Microsoft specific that makes IE and IIS work well together. This is a huge missed opportunity.”
–Bill Gates [PDF]
Microsoft is known to have essentially spammed all registered GNU/Linux users in Austria and its habit of AstroTurfing is speculation no more because there is hard evidence and admission. Now that Microsoft is pressured to unbundle the Web browser (again), the company seems to be flooding Internet users with unwanted mail.
Microsoft IE8 rolls out the astroturf
Microsoft is hawking the near-ready version of its Internet Explorer 8 browser at its staff in a desperate attempt to snatch back some of Mozilla’s growing market share.
Microsoft did the same thing for OOXML.
In other news about IE8, the company is pressing the press (in its typical fashion) to make some noise about a feature that, according to experts, is utterly useless.
IE8′s Clickjacking Fix Not Much Help, Experts Say
New Microsoft technology designed to protect Internet Explorer users from a powerful new Web-based attack will not fix the problem, security experts said Tuesday.
[...]
“It’s not a solution to clickjacking by any stretch of the imagination. It’s a vaguely mitigating factor for the very few people who use IE8,” said Robert Hansen, CEO of the SecTheory consultancy, and one of the people who first reported the issue to Microsoft. “But it’s interesting that they’re taking it seriously.”
Performance-wise, IE8 is well behind the rest, according to a new benchmark from a Microsoft-biased news network.
IE8 still trails the opposition by an awful amount; removing Opera from the comparison would leave IE8 at almost three times slower than its nearest competitor.
There is further commentary about these results right here.
Whatever the performance of IE8 is really like, it’s possible that it will not be bundled with future operating systems.
The European Commission has accused Microsoft of harming competition by bundling its Internet Explorer browser with its Windows operating system.
Richard Waters shows his typical pro-Microsoft bias by calling it “a fresh attack.” Microsoft is not facing “an attack”, no more than a criminal faces an “attack” from a policeman that’s chasing him. Microsoft broke many laws and it was never really punished for these. What we see here is more daemonisation of the EU Commission — daemonisation which is typically coordinated from the top (or from dead people [1, 2, 3]). █
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Posted in Antitrust, Fraud, Hardware, Microsoft, Vista 7 at 11:03 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
INTEL has committed many crimes (c.f. most recent example), but the European Commission limits itself — scope-wise — to looking at just one of them while Intel keeps trying to slink away. It’s very much how Microsoft handles the very same commission. Delaying tactics are so typical and characteristic of this, but the Commission is losing its cool.
A European court on Tuesday rejected a request from Intel to postpone a deadline in the European Commission’s antitrust proceedings against the company.
The Court of First Instance (CFI) in Luxembourg also rejected a request to allow Intel to access certain documents from Advanced Micro Devices that it said it needed in order to file a response in the antitrust case.
The Commission has charged Intel with anticompetitive behavior in the market for x86 microprocessors by allegedly offering rebates and selling chips below cost to PC makers and retail stores. The investigation began in 2000 when AMD filed a complaint against Intel with the Commission.
Microsoft and Intel’s affairs, especially when it comes to Linux, are not so easily forgotten. They must never be forgotten and we’ll be covering more such antitrust exhibits in the future.
Speaking of regulation, Vista 7′s anti-competitive parts [1, 2] have gotten it under more fire as well.
Technical advisers to the antitrust regulators who monitor Microsoft Corp.’s compliance with a 2002 antitrust settlement will test Windows 7 “more thoroughly” than earlier versions of the operating system were tested, according to a recently-released status report filed with the federal judge watching over the company.
The three-member panel of computer experts that works for state antitrust officials has had a copy of Windows 7 since at least last March, but in December 2008, Microsoft delivered additional documentation to the technical committee.
Regarding the Web browser, this issue will be more properly discussed in the next post. █
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Posted in Microsoft, Security, Windows at 10:47 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
THERE ARE SO MANY MICROSOFT failure stories to share today that it’s hard to decide where to start.
Sites Hijacked
Microsoft’s security nightmares as of late [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] are where we begin by presenting the following report about a government site in Australia getting cracked and doing enough harm that it needed to be shut down.
Like you, I get masses of spam. I knew it wasn’t from jobs.nsw.gov.au no matter how much it pretended to be. I deleted it figuring it was “just another” bit of junk mail, although I was surprised to find one purporting to be from the NSW Government job board; that was definitely a new one on me!
Had I thought about it deeper I might have considered this was no ordinary spam. This time there was a direct relationship between how the spammers got my e-mail address and the organisation they purported to represent.
It turns out the Department of Commerce has taken this whole incident very seriously indeed, and far more than common garden-variety spam would necessitate.
If you visit the site jobs.nsw.gov.au you will see it is inaccessible, and in fact, has been for a week. A message advises that the system is down for “system maintenance.”
The site is powered by Microsoft IIS.
Moving on a little, it turns out that Obama’s Web site too is causing harm. Some pages in it are distributing Windows malware.
Web security firm Websense reports that malicious hackers have registered multiple bogus user accounts on My.BarackObama.com. The site allows legitimate punters to join groups, raise funds, or creates blogs. The griefers have established blogs with fake YouTube clips, ostensibly offering grumble flicks.
According to some new statistics, there is a sharp increase in distribution of Windows malware, with more malicious sites than one can practically keep track of:
AVG is seeing between 200,000 to 300,000 new Web sites per day hosting code that can in some cases result in a PC being infected with malware just by visiting the site, said Roger Thompson, AVG’s chief research officer.
Zombies/Botnets Explode
Conficker is still running wild and it’s draining resources along its path (human resources and Web resources).
The world’s top virus hunters are watching every move made by the attacker in control of a nasty new Internet worm — referred to as “downadup” or “conficker.”
The number of infected Windows PCs keeps growing fast.
A virulent computer virus has infected as many as 15 million computers around the world so far, according to various estimates.
The virus — a self-replicating computer worm known as Downadup, Conficker or Kido — spreads across computer networks using Microsoft Windows software which have not been patched or updated properly. Microsoft issued a patch that fixes the vulnerability the virus exploits last October.
This is also covered here.
Computer experts are preparing to respond to further virus outbreaks and security threats posed by the Windows worm, known as Conficker, Kido and Downadup, which has infected more than 15 million PCs worldwide.
Had Microsoft cared about security rather than premature announcements (vapourware) and irresponsible releases, the Internet would have been a better and safer place to travel. █
“Our products just aren’t engineered for security.”
–Brian Valentine, Microsoft executive
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