02.09.09

Why Did Dell Choose Ballnux (Microsoft-Taxed GNU/Linux) for Thin Clients?

Posted in Dell, GNU/Linux, HP, Microsoft, Novell, Patents, Servers, SLES/SLED, Ubuntu at 6:12 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

“I

don’t know if any of this is useful or interesting, but reading through all of those Comes v. Microsoft exhibits really makes a person view tech-news items differently,” said one reader. “After reading your latest post on Digg I clicked through to a SJVN blog-article where he mentions how well Canonical is doing with their Ubuntu Server,” she proceeded. From the article at hand:

In 2007, I talked with Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical’s CEO, and he told me “There is already a lot of work being done with hardware vendors. We’re confident we can do all the engineering required to just make Ubuntu work on servers.” It turns out he was being straight with me. In 2008, Ubuntu started shipping on Dell servers.

Let’s remember how Microsoft pressured Dell to toss GNU/Linux out of its servers.

“I was sorting through some Google news items in my email and this (below) was one of them,” told us the reader and “[s]ince it’s an O’Gara piece from Sys-con it’s definitely not a good source of accurate info, and I know that Dell supports a lot of different software on their enterprise offerings…but still… It just made me curious how much pressure might Microsoft (through Novell) be putting on Dell after hearing how well Ubuntu was doing.

“Microsoft uses Novell/Suse as a weapon against Red Hat and Canonical?”

As we noted on Saturday, Dell favoured SLE* for thin clients and Maureen O’Gara is an excellent source if one wants to know how Microsoft feels about these things [1, 2]. She has a very short report comprising only a couple of sentences that add nothing particularly new.

Novell says that Dell’s going to preload SUSE Linux Enterprise Thin Client onto its three-month-old OptiPlex FX160 thin client.

Dell’s relationship with Microsoft changed — or “evolved” rather — in 2007 when they “joined” the Novell/Microsoft deal. They didn't say exactly what it meant, so it was cryptic by design and shortly afterwards they sported SLE*. Another company that followed the SLES/D route was Lenovo. And then there’s H-P. Mysteriously enough, H-P chose SLED although they recently dumped it for Ubuntu on mini laptops because ‘vanilla’ SLED is not perfectly suited for this type of low-end hardware with small displays.

“Dell’s relationship with Microsoft changed — or “evolved” rather — in 2007 when they “joined” the Novell/Microsoft deal.”H-P, like many other companies of its kind, is cross-licensing with Microsoft, so someone does not tell the whole story which would potentially damage H-P’s business. The discussion is steered astray purposely.

Bruce Perens used to work for H-P. He found out just shortly before the attack from SCO that H-P probably knew about it in advance. H-P and Microsoft remain very close because H-P relies on low Windows margins. It’s keeping close to Microsoft, whose strategy is denial and intimidation. Groklaw went a long way to supply evidence for much of this and the Dell deal (probably patent deal) was eerily similar to the H-P story. Their advertisements tend to disappoint as well, but it's Microsoft's fault. Pricing too is a bit of a mystery.

Microsoft realises it needs to generate new revenue streams. Racketeering is not the way to go though, not as a sustainable long-term strategy anyway. Intellectual monopolies are mythical in this case and generally valid only in very few countries that allowed themselves to be litigiously corrupted by the interests of very few. █

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Links 09/02/2009: KDE 4.2 Review; X.org at FOSDEM

Posted in News Roundup at 5:23 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Digital Tipping Point: Clip of the Day

Bdale Garbee, Hewlett Packard computer wizard and Debian lead 05 (2004)

Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.

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IRC: #boycottnovell @ FreeNode: February 8th, 2009 – Part 2

Posted in IRC Logs at 4:54 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Enter the IRC channel now

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IRC: #boycottnovell @ FreeNode: February 8th, 2009 – Part 1

Posted in IRC Logs at 4:45 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Enter the IRC channel now

Read the rest of this entry »

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Microsoft: The Cronies, the Pressure, and Staff Reductions

Posted in Antitrust, Google, Microsoft at 4:20 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Microsoft Cronies

Microsoft has several cronies inside the US DOJ, one of whom is Thomas Barnett. We wrote about his relationship with Microsoft only a couple of weeks ago. Here he is commenting on Yahoo-Google and Reuters says nothing about the conflict of interests (nor does the government that appointed Barnett).

Thomas Barnett, who led the investigation of Google’s scrapped deal with Yahoo when he headed the Justice Department’s antitrust division, said tying the lucrative search divisions of Yahoo with Microsoft could be a tough call for regulators.

“Any ‘three to two merger’ to my mind would require a significant investigation,” said Barnett, who stepped down in November after three years as head of the division.

Why is a person with Microsoft money in his pocket getting to decide on this? The story above makes a classic example of political corruption in action. Meanwhile, things are rather tough for Yahoo! if this report from the Wall Street Journal is anything to judge by.

Carol Bartz has been CEO of Yahoo for only few weeks. But she’s already working through a to-do list of changes to push. (Nothing yet about Microsoft deals or asset sales or cost-cutting, we’re afraid.)

In the most recent of what’s shaping up to be a weekly email to Yahoo employees, the blunt Ms. Bartz laid down some mandates in a memo last Friday.

First, cease the tardiness. “Let’s all work hard to start meetings on time,” she wrote, according to people familiar with the email.

She also implored the company to stop talking about “silos.” If she hears the word “one more time I am going to think I am back on the farm in Wisconsin,” she wrote.

Lastly, plug the leaks. Referring to the fact that someone forwarded her first company-wide email to some blogs, she wrote: “I hope whoever did it, feels bad enough to come forward and resign.”

Yahoo has its share of pains, which were largely inflicted by Microsoft. Here is a chronological list of some previous posts on this subject:

• Microsoft Fires Up Proxy War Against Yahoo as Debt Looms Over
• King of Hypocrisy(ahoo!)
• Microsoft Fight Against Yahoo Board Gets Uglier
• Microsoft’s Proxy Fight May Have Begun Weeks Ago, Quietly
• Microsoft’s Latest Ugly Tactics Against Google, Yahoo, and VMware
• As Yahoo Proxy War Looms, VMWare and Nokia Return to One’s Mind
• Microsoft Executives Penetrate Corel, Yahoo; Is Novell Next?
• What if Microsoft Owned Yahoo (and the US Government Establishments’ IT)?
• LawMedia Group May be Another Confirmed Microsoft AstroTurfing Agency
• Microsoft Executives Land Inside Microsoft Rivals
• Update on the Microsoft/Yahoo Situation: Google-Yahoo Alliance?
• Microsoft: 800 lb. Guerrilla
• Who’s Bugging Google and Apple? (Updatedx2)
• Video: Bloomberg on Yahoo/Google/Microsoft
• Eye on Microsoft: Windows Under Attack from Critics, Cyber Criminals; Yahoo! Besieged by Microsoft
• The Microsoft-Influenced US Regulators Wrong on Yahoo!
• Microsoft Hijacked Yahoo! from the Inside (Updated)
• Newly-Appointed Yahoo Puppet: Let Microsoft Have Us

It seems abundantly clear what Microsoft is doing as a matter of strategic pattern.

“I’d be glad to help tilt lotus into into the death spiral. I could do it Friday afternoon but not Saturday. I could do it pretty much any time the following week.”

–Brad Silverberg, Microsoft

Microsoft Hardballs

Some days ago we stumbled upon an old article which concerns Microsoft antitrust exhibits that were not allowed to be admitted as evidence. This is interesting because we possess a high number of Comes (Iowa) exhibits which, despite being very real, might be too confidential, sensitive and serious to be presented publicly (well, at least without getting sealed).

A memo by Microsoft’s Jim Durkin recalled a meeting by Gates and other executives in which Gates said of RealNetworks: “This is a strategic area, and we need to win it.”

The same memo dated June 5, 1997, quotes another senior Microsoft executive, Robert Muglia, as saying that RealNetworks is “like Netscape, the only difference is we have a chance to start this battle earlier in the game”.

All those memos sure bring back a flavour of Netscape, to which Microsoft applied similar forces and dirty tactics. It’s truly a shame that the European Union is slow to respond, but “better later than never” they say. Here is another belated report about pretty old news:

The European Commission has accused Microsoft of harming competition by bundling its Explorer web browser with its Windows operating system.

The commission said it had reached the preliminary view that the US software giant had undermined consumer choice and infringed EU rules.

Microsoft and the European Union have engaged in legal battles over competition issues for years.

Last year, the EU fined Microsoft 899m euros ($1.4bn; £680.9m).

There are other behavioural disturbances showing up in the news this week.

When Microsoft does not send its 'partners' to prison, the company sure puffs a lot of hot air. it’s posing as a victim.

Microsoft today announced settlements with 15 traders caught selling illegal software in regions throughout the UK. One reseller agreed a £75,000 settlement after customer complaints revealed he was illegally reselling Microsoft Windows recovery discs, many of which didn’t work. A further 14 traders faced court action in respect of hard disk loading1 and selling improperly licensed software to unsuspecting customers over the last six months.

These people are, according to Microsoft, actually helping the monopolist. Or at least they used to until Microsoft got miserable and hit a barrier.

The news about Bill Gates' weird mosquitoes incident continues to receive critical coverage from mainstream publications. Here is IT Pro (UK):

Bill ‘Super Villain’ Gates does a Steve ‘Monkey Dancing’ Ballmer

[...]

The media has grabbed this as evidence that Gates has gone insane. However, I have another theory: he is just fed up with Steve Ballmer getting all the headlines and so decided to take a leaf out of the Monkey Dancer Marketing Manual. Either that of his money really has made him mental and Gates will next be seen wearing a spandex bodysuit, cape, mask and insisting on being known from now on as Mosquito Man the least scary super villain in history.

This queer scene is likely to be well remembered and no apology was issued on the face of it, let alone regrets that ought to be expressed.

Microsoft Workforce

An issue that we covered before is Microsoft’s faceoff with an American senator [1, 2, 3]. Rightly enough he was dissatisfied with the company’s betrayal of American workers, so a sort of bar has just been put in place to impose on Microsoft a form of permanent restriction.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), introduced an amendment to the $900 billion stimulus package that would bar companies that received bailout funds from hiring foreign skilled workers with H1-B work visas, AFP is reporting. The amendment was co-sponsored by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont).

This move comes after Grassley last week asked Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) to lay off H1-B workers before Americans after the company announced it was going to cut 5,000 employees.

The outcome of Microsoft’s staff collapse begins to bear news, such as the firing of an employee who got a Microsoft tattoo. Is this the type of love he gets back?

It’s generally a good rule of thumb to avoid tattoos of your company’s logo.

For Microsoft solutions adviser Dan Woodman, that advice, unfortunately, came a little too late.

Analysts suppose that more layoffs will come to Microsoft pretty soon. The cuts were not sufficiently deep and they cannot stabilise the balance sheet, so the company is approaching debt [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] whilst trying to feed off of Linux' success. █

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02.08.09

Windows is Dying, Long Live Vapourware

Posted in IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Red Hat, Vista, Vista 7, Windows at 10:58 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Vista 7

Microsoft buried the “Vista” brand and started banging on some drum which refers to an imaginary O/S that they can always claim “is still in beta!”

As we noted several times before, the press says almost nothing about “Vista” and a lot about “Windows 7″. This is not a coincidence. It has been a recognisable pattern for a while and it gets more apparent every week.

As a small test, earlier today we obtained a set of Microsoft headlines from the past week. Assemblage of news matching “Microsoft” in Yahoo! News and Google News produced 450 items. Search/slice on the term “Vista” and 3 results will be returned; search/slice on “Windows 7″ and 34 results will be returned. Yes, vapourware tactics indeed:

“In the face of strong competition, Evangelism’s focus may shift immediately to the next version of the same technology, however. Indeed, Phase 1 (Evangelism Starts) for version x+1 may start as soon as this Final Release of version X.”

–Microsoft, internal document [PDF]

Among the headlines that we find about Vista 7[sic]:

i. Economy Could Slow Enterprise Adoption of Windows 7

The turbulent economy could hinder enterprise adoption of Windows 7, even though many companies opted to skip Windows Vista and are still running the outdated Windows XP OS, analysts said.

Although the beta of Windows 7 released in January is getting good reviews, that may not be enough to inspire businesses to upgrade, given their tight IT budgets and the fact that many are cutting costs in any way they can.

ii. Microsoft’s Plan to Upsell Windows 7

To many people, the Starter restriction will be, if you’ll pardon the expression, a non-starter. Between browsers, email programs, iTunes and other software, it won’t take long for the average user to bump into the three-application limit. What’s more, this is the first time Microsoft will be imposing such a restriction on an operating system sold in the U.S. and other developing markets (there’s a three-application limit on the starter edition of Windows Vista, Microsoft’s current installment of Windows, but that product is only sold in emerging markets).

iii. Intel employee warns on Windows 7 netbook pricing, SSDs

In the blog, Bancroft says that Microsoft’s margins on XP netbooks are not strong, and the company will feel pressure to increase revenue from Windows 7 netbooks — a move that he suggests could lead to netbooks that are too expensive. Bancroft also expressed doubt that netbooks with small solid state disks (also known as flash drives) would be able to handle Windows 7.

Sounds like a plan.

Windows Mobile

Windows Mobile has a sad story to tell and we have tracked this story for several months. Some of Microsoft’s most ardent supporters believe that Windows Mobile will not survive. The eulogies continue to rush in because several individuals keep suggesting that Windows Mobile is on its death throes. From Information Week:

i. Motorola, Microsoft In Suicide Pact

Instead, it’s cutting back even further. After announcing last year that it would support just two operating systems, Windows Mobile and Android, it is laying off Windows Mobile engineers, indicating that Motorola is going to focus exclusively on Android.

This is not only another sign that Microsoft’s decline is accelerating; Microsoft is behaving like an animal in its death throes, showing little interest in pursuing new prey.

ii. Is Window Mobile On Its Last Legs?

Fabrizio Capobianco, CEO of the mobile open source company Funambol, has all but declared Windows Mobile dead in a recent blog entry. Is he right, or is there still life left in the mobile platform from Microsoft?

Windows revenue has been declining for a while and not even 'massaged' reports are able to hide it. Very interesting times lie ahead.

Eric Lai provides some early evidence of the ‘IBM-isation’ of Microsoft. His article states in its summary: “Under program, [Microsoft] customers will get credits if no support response within 30 minutes.” This sounds very much like the successful business model adopted and championed by Red Hat and to an extent Oracle and IBM as well. Is Microsoft realising that giving Windows (almost) for free and offering support is one reasonable way forward? Some things inevitably become a commodity (like drugs going generic) but not human labour and skills. █

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Windows Problems Take Down Airplanes, JFK Airport, Houston Municipal Courts

Posted in Microsoft, Security, Windows at 10:45 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Serenity Security now!

IT wasn’t so long ago that NASA got plagued with Windows viruses that had infected its PCs in space. As embarrassing and dangerous as that was, it neither led to any crashes nor forced an emergency return to planet Earth. A few days ago we wrote about the French military becoming a victim of Windows viruses and French airplanes have just been downed by these severe issues. The news has just appeared in English [hat tip: Tony Manco].

Planes grounded by ‘Microsoft virus’

[...]

[T]his morning I happened upon peculiar information while accidentally scanning the French paper Liberation.

JFK too has just been sort of downed by a Windows failure and here is pictorial evidence.

So I was happy to see that they wanted everyone to truly experience life with Windows with one of the huge screens nicely displaying an exception. (grin)

Over in Houston, the court system has been downed by Windows viruses.

Houston shut down part of its municipal court operations Friday, cancelling hearings and suspending arrests for minor offenses after a computer virus infected hundreds of its machines. City officials said they expected the problems to extend at least through Monday.

Court offices will remain open to allow people to pay tickets and fines, but the dockets will have to be reset, a move that will affect thousands of cases, city officials said.

It was unclear Friday how the virus got into the system, but officials promised a thorough investigation. They could not say when they hoped to have the virus removed from the city network.

Last but not least, the abusive relationship between DNS and Windows botnets sure seems to be ‘flourishing’.

With an estimated 10 million PCs infected by the stealthy worm known as Conficker, it’s a good bet that plenty of administrators are blissfully unaware that their networks are playing host to the pest. Now, a free service called OpenDNS is offering a new feature designed to alert administrators to the damage and help them contain it.

Why is this needed in the first place? Because people's lives are now being compromised by Windows' failures? █

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Slated Lists Microsoft Sins and Offences

Posted in Antitrust, Asia, Courtroom, Finance, Fraud, GNU/Linux, Google, Intellectual Monopoly, ISO, Microsoft, OLPC at 10:31 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

• Illegally shooting antelope.
• Throwing chairs and profanities at employees who leave for Google.
• Selling towels and soda machines to survive a financial crisis.
• Making false accusations.
• Bleeding their victims dry in litigation.
• Tax evasion.
• Harvesting other companies’ products, then transforming them into slop in an inept attempt to “integrate” them with all their other assimilated warez.
• Burning people’s houses down, and killing babies, with faulty electrical components, then blaming the victims for not knowing about the recall notice, and demanding they pay the legal fees, whilst challenging the validity of claiming a dead baby represents any kind of “loss”.
• Scratching Xbox games discs, then denying liability, whilst secretly acknowledging it.
• Sabotaging charities for fun and profit.
• Bricking Xboxes with poor ventilation, resulting in a Red Ring of Death, then denying warranty repairs to the victims.
• Shrugging their shoulders as Xbox Live accounts get stolen.
• Pretending to be the police by demanding to audit other companies’ books, if they dare to refuse to renew Windows/Office licenses.
• Infecting the world with a million+ viruses.
• Missing the boat on essential technologies, declaring them to be insignificant, then running around like headless chickens trying to catch up after everyone else has adopted those technologies, whilst claiming that was the plan all along, pretending to have invented that technology, applying for patents on it, assimilating it, perverting it into something proprietary and/or encumbered to Microsoft, then denying everyone else access to that technology.
• Dumping products at a loss in order to destroy competition.
• Getting letters of support from dead bodies.
• Inextricably integrating a Web browser into their OS, in order to try to win the browser standards war.
• Bribing ISO delegates to vote in their favour.
• Bribing Nigerian education suppliers to wipe Linux from schoolkids’ laptops.
• Bribing bloggers with laptops to provide favourable reviews for Vista.
• Talking and behaving like drug dealers.
• Blackmailing OEMs to exclude competing products.
• Running smear campaigns against ISO chairmen who don’t support them.
• Hiring proxies to attack critics.
• Hiring Munchkins to discredit competing products.
• Hiring astroturfers to do damage limitations for Microsoft by proxy.
• Hiring analysts to lie in Microsoft’s favour.
• Creating fake grass-roots organisations to support Microsoft’s agenda.
• Creating shell companies to litigate against their competition by proxy.
• Trying to compete with the world’s most beautifully designed digital media player, by producing something which looks and behaves like a rectangular turd, even to the point of actually being coloured brown (initially).
• Producing a spreadsheet application which can’t actually calculate anything accurately, but which subsequently forms the basis of nearly every business’ office in the world, thus dooming mankind to years of worthless and untrustworthy accounts.
• Hypocritically claiming “IP” infringement, whilst basing their entire business empire on stolen property.
• Breeding an entire generation of toner-monkeys, due to them being taught “Microsoft” instead of “computing” at school.
• Destroying American jobs with cheap, foreign labour, by bribing politicians to extend the H1-B visa program, then making their indigenous workforce redundant instead if immigrant workers, at the first sign of financial trouble.
• Using India as a software engineering sweat-shop.
• Poisoning Free Software with patent-encumbered garbage, with the eager help of FOSS traitors.

Credit: Slated

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