BACK in September it was argued that Microsoft would buy Citrix, which had already been assisting Microsoft in its battle against GNU/Linux [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. According to Mary-Jo Foley, old speculations are back but she opines that a Yahoo! deal is more likely:
Microsoft quietly registered a limited liability company (LLC) last week, which points to the company being poised to make an acquisition or joint venture.
While some are speculating the new company could have something to do with Microsoft buying Citrix, I think all the signs, not to mention the timing, are pointing to a Microsoft-Yahoo hook-up. After all, this week is the “All Things D” D7 confab, where Microsoft is slated to show off to attendees its newest search release. And both Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz are on the guest list….
Assuming that Microsoft is still paying people to do its dirty laundry (see related links at the bottom of this post), the FTC wants to know about it and maybe have them criminalised (which quite frankly is doubtful given the FTC's track record). A reader has just shared with us the following article from the business press:
Blogola: The FTC Takes On Paid Posts
The Federal Trade Commission wants bloggers to disclose when they’ve been wooed with cash or freebies from companies they cover
It is rarely being discussed that Microsoft is literally buying journalists, adding them to its staff. We gave an example last year and back in 2007 Microsoft was looking for an “open source” journalist to join its ranks. Jon Udell was named as an option and it turns out now that indeed he is working for Microsoft right now.
In January 2007, Udell joined Microsoft as a writer, speaker, and producer of another series of interviews: Perspectives. This show features projects in which Microsoft works with partners — universities, governments, NGOs — to develop new and socially impactful uses of its technology portfolio.
Desperation by the MS faithful? I think so, I’d love to hear your opinions.
Those who are uninitiated when it comes to AstroTurf tactics at Microsoft are advised to read the posts below. This is not a myth but a reality. It has got to be stopped. █
HE INHERENT insecurity of Microsoft Windows is some serious business. It is not only used for spamming at a biblical scale, but with an army of hundreds of millions of Windows zombies one truly becomes a master of the World Wide Web, deciding which Web sites go offline and which ones stay offline. That’s a lot of power to have and it requires no Australia-style secret filters. At worst, entire nations get be paralysed and there are real-world examples of this.
The problem is confirmed to be a hugely severe one because some security experts believe that only luck or mercy has permitted the Web to persist living. According to a new report from Heise, “ITU calls for global cybersecurity measures.”
The International Telecommunication Union ITU has published its proposals for harmonising global cybersecurity legislation on the periphery of a conference on the information society in Geneva.
A conspiracy by “Marxist cyber criminals” campaigning against the BNP is alleged to be behind the assault, which remains ongoing, according to an appeal email, which was sent out on Monday.
The size of the renewed assault is unparalleled and there is no doubt that whoever has organised this has had to pay out a serious amount of money to the criminal underworld.
On Friday the servers of Clear Channel, part of a huge conglomerate that provides billboard advertising to the BNP, suffered a similar attack. Their IT professionals tracked the criminal activity back to a notorious “anti-fascist” organisation openly aligned to the Labour Party and supported by the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. This organisation was protesting at the decision by Clear Channel to allow the BNP to display advertising in support of our European Election Campaign.
As a consequence of the criminal actions against Clear Channel we understand that their legal team is currently in the process of issuing writs against the perpetrators which as well as civil actions will involve the possibility of potential criminal charges including racketeering.
Whether one believes them or not is a separate matter. Tracking the source of a DDos attack is next to impossible unless a comprehensive investigation is launched.
As for ourselves, we made no accusations against anyone, but we were privately sent information that may show the motive for an attack. There were about half a dozen such attacks. It was mostly likely targeted, it was not some random selection of a victim. █
“Our products just aren’t engineered for security.”
–Brian Valentine, Microsoft executive and Windows manager
Not that Figuiere is a Mono advocate. But his opposition over the years has been more practical than philosophical. For instance, in several discussion threads about Including Mono in GNOME on the desktop-devel-list in July 2006, Figuiere objected to shipping Mono-based apps on the grounds that the language required a lot of disk space, but was supporting only minor applications — and he made the same objection to Python, a far less contentious programming language.
This objection, incidentally, is one that he continues to hold today. Gnote, he tells me, “has all to do with the burden of carrying runtime systems designed to make the programmer’s life easier (but not the users’). Had Tomboy been written in Python, it would have gotten the same treatment.”
Of course, Figuiere might have soured on Mono after being laid off at Novell in February. But, if he did, it would be strange if he continued to use what he describes as an “openSUSE 11.1 custom build with SUSE Studio with some custom packages” — free software versions of Novell’s own products.
“We do NOT want to ship the ’standard’ with Windows because we want to make the native APIs more attractive. We want to evolve the standard APIs rapidly, and not have ISVs [independent software vendors] spending time on something that is cross-platform. Java standard server APIs are bad news for us. I veto any cooperation with this group unless someone comes and convinces me otherwise.”
–Bill Gates, Microsoft
“Don’t encourage new, cross-platform Java classes, especially don’t help get great Win 32 implementations written/deployed. [...] Do encourage fragmentation of the Java classlib space.”
–Ben Slivka, Microsoft
“The core of this trial is consumer choice and the premise is that consumers ought to make that decision, not Microsoft. Microsoft’s argument that says Java would have died anyway is a little bit like saying if somebody shoots you they can defend [themselves] by saying you have cancer.”
Summary: A look at some new articles about software patents in the United States
THERE ARE some new comparisons out there which show the difference between the European and United States-based patent systems. Great risk remains however because these two might be combined in a sense [1, 2]; that’s the plan of proponents of software patents anyway. From Science Business: [via Digital Majority]
One of the fears – particularly in the software community – is that globalization of patents will mean dumbing down to the system in the US, where the bar for what can be patented is set lower than in Europe.
In the EU the system not only sets tougher standards for applicants, it’s also much more expensive to litigate here than stateside, partly because you have to fight it out in several different national patent courts, rather than in just one in the US.
IAM Magazine, which is pro-patents and litigation, shows that the US system is more patent-happy and trigger-happy when it comes to litigation (that’s where lawyers like the IAM crowd make money). Here is why, based on the experience of SAS:
Even in Europe’s most expensive jurisdiction, the UK, it is very unlikely to cost more than £1 million ($1.5 million) to litigate a case. In Germany, France and Italy you are looking at perhaps $200,000 to $300,000 at the most. In the US, the latest I saw was that on average getting a first instance decision in a big case will give you little change from $5million. In other words, SAS could litigate a case in the UK, France, Germany and Italy, probably throw in the Nordic countries and the Netherlands, and still spend less than it would cost to litigate in the United States. But even were it to cost $10 million and you won, it would be money well spent if you ended up fighting off a competitor and protecting or establishing a revenue stream.
If legal action is discouraged, how it that a bad thing? Was the introduction of patents intended to spur lawyers rather than scientists?
“What do you get when you combine IBM contributors with the Dojo Foundation? A patent for Real-Time Validation of Text Input Fields Using Regular Expression Evaluation During Text Entry, assuming the newly-disclosed Big Blue patent application passes muster with the USPTO. IBM explains that the invention of four IBMers addresses a ‘persistent problem that plagues Web form fields’ — e.g., ‘a social security number can be entered with or without dashes.’ A non-legalese description of IBM’s patent-pending invention can be found in The Official Dojo Documentation. While IBM has formed a Strategic Partnership With the Dojo Foundation which may protect one from a patent infringement lawsuit over validating phone numbers, concerns have been voiced over an exception clause in IBM’s open source pledge.”
Wired Magazine has this short new article about the genesis of software patents (some time before I was born). Here is where we stand today:
In 2007 alone, nearly 39,000 software patents were issued in the United States.
Does this promote the creation of more software? That, after all, is the original purpose of such intellectual monopolies. This whole bubble market has truly gone out of control. █
note has already entered Ubuntu, Debian, and other GNU/Linux distributions [1, 2, 3, 4]. But it is even more interesting to see just how many people got involved. Here is a Debian graph of the number of submitters as time goes by.
It’s the product, silly, not brands and connotations
Summary: Microsoft tries to fix a poor search algorithm and limited server capacity with rebranding
Microsoft has an irksome old habit of changing the names of failed products, hoping that new names alone would resolve issues. This was tried last year with embedded Windows, it is tried this year with Vista 7 (formerly “Mojave”), it was tried many times before with the search engine, and another notable example is Origami, which is basically Microsoft’s old concept of tablet PCs. It all failed miserably.
Microsoft understands the importance of names and it also knows that unless something changes its identity, then people will refuse to give it another try. With perceived change, Microsoft hopes that people will try the new brand or new theme (user interface in a Web site, for example) that essentially wraps around the same deficient product. Such is the case with Microsoft’s supposedly ‘new’ search engine, whose reception is very lukewarm. Even Microsoft supporters do not like it.
Microsoft can attempt to be a sumo with Kumo, have a fling with Bing, but in search Google will remain king. Ouch – sorry about that, it’s late at night here.
You have to feel sorry for Microsoft – no, really. In the search arena, it is getting taken to the cleaners by Google so comprehensively that even I feel sorry for them. Recognising this totally inability to fight Google on its own terms, Microsoft has decided to take a bold approach: run lots of ads suggesting that search – *all* search – is broken, and that there must be a better way…
The search bribery attempt [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] has already reached its end as the company loses billions — that’s right, billions — in this crucial area. There is a lot at stake. █
“Every time you use Google, you’re using a machine running the Linux kernel.”
Summary: A look at some new articles about software patents in the United States
