09.14.09
Posted in Deception, Free/Libre Software, Microsoft, Office Suites, Open XML, OpenDocument, OpenOffice at 7:17 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: IDG makes an attempt at criticism of its very own output (poor attempt, obviously); OpenOffice.org grows regardless
AS we pointed out last month, there is clear evidence to suggest that Microsoft front groups such as the BSA promote the false perception that free is illegal. They try to discourage adoption of Free software like OpenOffice.org.
Here in ComputerWorld there is rare type of new article where deception from the BSA is actually debated in the sense that the other side of the story (the truth rather) is being told, in addition to the usual fabrication of big numbers and sob stories. It’s the annual BSA/IDC propaganda, indirectly funded by the likes of Microsoft [1, 2]. It’s analogous to propaganda which is manufactured by the MPAA/RIAA on behalf of the big studios.
The loopholes are always the same, but the mainstream press refuses to pay attention, so it parrots and deceives the public time after time. This type of obedience/compliance is what keeps it in business, by business, for business. From IDG:
But critics of the study say it fails to account for the possibility that pirated software could be replaced with Linux or other open-source options. If it were, the BSA’s global loss figure of $53 billion would drop sharply, they maintain.
The imbalance in this article is stunning. Only a single sentence gets dedicated to this very important issue that may as well debunk the message as a whole. Then again, it is the job of IDG to propagate these words of big business; it’s rarely about challenging them effectively. IDG happens to be one of those gigantic businesses*, not just an advertising partner [1, 2, 3, 4]. The conflict of interests here is obvious. From the same source we also gather some numbers which may or may not mean something. As the following new post states (with caveats):
InfoWorld runs an article titled Windows Pulse: The Real-World State of Windows, in which they report the results from a network of machines that voluntarily downloaded a reporting application. How the machines were chosen was not specified, and the sample size of 20,000 may not provide an accurate picture of global trends, but the data shows OpenOffice installed on 12% of those machines, which looks like great progress!
As further advice for the likes of OpenOffice.org, here is one bit of opinion on the subject: [the scrupulous Microsoft employee wrote (via Glyn Moody): “Interesting read, but do you know why thinkovation.com blocks access from Microsoft?”]
I happen to think that Microsoft’s OOXML shouldn’t be called an “open standard”. It’s not about “open” it’s about “closed” it’s not about the “future” it’s about the past.
The development of OOXML must have been like driving a car using only the rear-view mirror to tell where you’re going. It’s a nasty kluge designed to serve the dual purposes of reinforcing Microsoft’s virtual monopoly and providing some backward (backward in every sense of the word) compatibility. I also object to the shenanigans associated with the OSI process – but I do feel obliged to note that the activity of filling committee rooms with your supporters wasn’t invented by Microsoft – many other vendors have “stuffed” meetings in the past in order to sway votes, and many more will in the future.
In interviews and analyses last year, no-one was able to find anything close to the corruption demonstrated by Microsoft. Yes, corruption. Not everyone is familiar with the pertinent stories, but the facts speak for themselves. Microsoft too is unable to defend itself. █
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* IDC works with the BSA on those numbers and it's more or less a subsidiary of IDG.
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Posted in Security, Windows at 6:18 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Interesting stories that don’t fit into the daily group of pro-Free software links
• MS insists bodged fix didn’t spawn Windows crash risk
Vulnerable systems can be crashed with only a single malformed packet, according to Laurent Gaffié, the security researcher who discovered the so-called Teardrop attack.
• FTC forces Sears, Kmart out of the spyware business
When Sears and Kmart offered visitors the chance to earn $10 by participating in some research, few realized that they would be sending even secure session browsing information to the big retailers. Now, the government has put the kibosh on this “blue light special.”
• Skype Kills Extras (and Its Developer Ecosystem)
Today the company announced that it’s killed Skype Extras, an API-based effort that was launched with much fanfare in June 2007
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Posted in America, Deception, Europe, Microsoft at 6:04 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Truths one should know about the European Commission’s Software Strategy document
André Rebentisch has just heralded the formal release of documents which we covered and scrutinised here before. To use his own words:
The Commission of the European Union has published the final report on the European Software Strategy. It is a document drafted by several industry stakeholders, ironically most of them do not represent European companies. The preparatory documents are also published. The leakage of draft documents by an American SME representative causes great confusion. The editing policy did follow the same practice as the ICT Taskforce paper.
In chronological order, we covered this in:
The process has been somewhat of a farce; the outcome, likewise, would be hard to trust because it was impacted by American lobbyists and companies that injected misinformation. In that sense, it is not exactly a European software strategy, as the name might misleadingly suggest. And as Glyn Moody reminds us this week, governments do have a political agenda. In reply to this obvious fact he adds:
I see, so what they’re saying is that the EU has a political agenda, and is trying to protect companies in Europe. And this would be different from what the US does, or Japan, or China, exactly *how*….?
Bottom line: watch carefully who wrote this ‘European’ Software Strategy document. For instance, it included a Microsoft lobbyist from Association for Competitive Technology. █
“Television to brainwash us all and Internet to eliminate any last resistance.”
–Paul Carvel
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Posted in News Roundup at 5:11 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Don’t miss your last chance to register for Ohio Linux Fest! A mere two weeks away on September 25-27, it’s coming faster than a Free Software freight train! Registration has been lighter than past years please forward this release to friends in the Ohio and surrounding areas. Columbus, Ohio The seventh annual Ohio LinuxFest will be on September 25-26, 2009 at the Greater Columbus Convention Center, in downtown Columbus, Ohio.
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Ohio LinuxFest is definitely one of my favorite Linux and open-source conferences. If you’ve never been to a Linux conference, now is a great time to begin. If you have, it’s also a great time to experience this conference.
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We start this weekly with a beta testing of the Spri Linux Beta distribution. The following Linux distributions were announced last week: Easy Peasy 1.5, CRUX 2.6, GoblinX 3.0 GNOME Edition, moonOS 3, Bluewhite64 Linux 13.0, Absolute Linux 13.0 and Linux Mint 7 XFCE Edition.
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Head to www.ubuntu.com, download the ISO image for Ubuntu (currently at version 9.04) and burn the image to a CD. On your media server PC, change the BIOS settings to boot from CD, pop the disc in and let the Install wizard run its magic.
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Desktop
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KDE, GNOME and Mac OS X handle this much better. On KDE and GNOME the screen darkens around a password entry dialog, and the dialog is modal, so the user cannot escape and must make a conscious decision.
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Windows 7 is neither overly powerful, customizable or modern. It does avoid many of the problems of Windows Vista by introducing aggressive prefetching and changing the UI design so actions require less clicks, and this makes the system appear faster. This comes at the expense of chewing up a lot of RAM, so a gaming system should probably have 4 GB or more.
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I had a hard drive failure on my home Windows XP Pro DELL system last week. I decided this morning at about 4AM to rebuild the system as a dual boot with Ubuntu 9.04 on the second partition. The goal is to minimize my “Windows dependency” status as much as possible. Another goal was to come up with functional partitions that could be imaged and cloned. I couldn’t sleep anyway.
[...]
So for the price of:
1 hour and 27 minutes more of my time installing Windows XP Pro versus Ubuntu;
20GB of hard drive space used by Windows XP Pro versus 8GB of hard drive space in Ubuntu;
no differences in functionality;
potentially becoming XP-ground-zero for every malware-writing jackass in the world;
I get the “equivalent” in Windows XP Pro?
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Server
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The other hypervisors that are embedded inside of Linux distros or that are paired with Unix environments are also seen – and in proportions that make sense give the global installed base of iron.
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Based in Agoura Hills, Calif., Symark sells a line of software access-control products intended for Linux and Unix systems, while BeyondTrust, based in Portsmouth, N.H., focuses on Windows.
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Kernel Space
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While BFS lost with the Threaded I/O Tester disk benchmark, it won with the PostMark test profile. The BFS scheduler delivered just fewer than 5% more transactions per second than the Completely Fair Scheduler.
Nine tests carried out on a single low-end system (we may carry out more tests on multiple systems if there is sufficient interest) is not enough to call one scheduler better than the other.
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Applications
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Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a type of real-time Internet text messaging (chat) or synchronous conferencing. IRC was born during summer 1988 when Jarkko Oikarinen wrote the first IRC client and server when he was working in the Department of Information Processing Science at the University of Oulu, Finland. This system enables millions of people around the world to communicate in real time.
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Gloobus is an extension of Gnome designed to enable a full screen preview of any kind of file. Gloobus currently supports the following files: TXT , PDF, JPG, BMP, GIF, PNG, PSD, MP3, OGG, MPG, WMV, XCF. Finally I can preview PSD and XCF files 
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Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera and Safari. Those are the usual web browser names that make the news these days on the Internet. This are also the web browsers that the majority of web users use actively. Other web browsers face this tough competition. Last to feel the competition was the Google browser which – despite Google’s marketing power and efforts – remains at the lower end of web browser distribution.
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Most people go for the big apps when switching to Linux, and for good reason: they are easy to find, usually very polished, often updated, and there’s a lot of online documentation for them. What if you’re not looking for the most popular, but instead the best app for you? Below are 25 excellent, high-quality Linux apps that go neglected far more often than they should be. Some are popular amongst those who have been at the Linux game for awhile, and others have become a staple of certain distros while remaining relatively unknown by users of different distros. No matter the reason they’ve sat in the midline of popularity, you can be assured that these apps do what they claim to do, and they do it well.
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If you like your virtual-desktop managers to come with some flair and eye candy, Compiz is definitely worth a look. Linux users who just want simple workspace switching might be better served by Gnome Workspaces, but if you’re on a rig with a nice graphics card—and you want to live it up with fancy graphic-intensive transitions between virtual desktops—Compiz’s more advanced effects are pretty nifty. Compiz comes with a core of plug-ins that cover all sorts of 3D effects which can be further supplemented by using Compiz Fusion, a version of Compiz that sports additional plug-ins and enhanced graphics.
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This month’s issue includes:
* KDE 4.3 vs Windows 7 Comparison
* Behind The Scenes: An Interview with Neal Brooks
* IRC: The Forgotten Chat Frontier
* Through The Lens: Photo Management Software
* How To Set up Easy Samba File Sharing
* How To Make A Cheap Film Scanner
* How To Share A Printer With Windows Without Samba
* Video File Format Cllomparison
* PCLinuxOS on the Acer Aspire One
* Creating Movie Archives with dvd::rip
* Computer Languages A to Z: C and C++
* Scripts-R-Us: Repo Speed Test
* Double Take by Mark Szorady
* Forum Foibles
* And much, much more!
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Is the extra work and effort worth it? I think so, at least from what I’m experiencing so far. Arch is nimble and solid, and the rolling release means I don’t ever have to go through the installation process again on this machine if I don’t want to (barring a hardware catastrophe, of course). Arch has become my new home base from which I’ll continue the odyssey.
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Whilst the home user isn’t going to consider this as their main desktop solution (IMO). What it does, it does very very well. Boot time even from the LiveCD was very good and the system is virtually unbreakable, even for the most persistent of users!
I was very impressed with the speed in which BBCiplayer performed on the test machine, giving a very smooth results even in fullscreen. I also tested it on the Twitterfall site which often appears to bog browsers down after when there are numerous other tabs in use. This did not happen with Webconverger and scrolling remained smooth.
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Red Hat Family
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There is more, no doubt. The biggest contribution they have made is to step up and answer the FUD about GNU/Linux not being ready and able to supply mission-critical needs in business.
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Debian Family
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Ubuntu is in heavy testing for its next release, code named Karmic Koala, or version 9.10. It is currently in Alpha 5, and it looks very promising already. There is a huge focus on reducing the boot times of Ubuntu for Karmic. Jono Bacon, Ubuntu’s Community Manager has recently posted some interesting tidbits about other things coming to Ubuntu in this 9.10 release…
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Look for Ubuntu 9.10, otherwise known as the Karmic Koala, sometime in October. Alpha 6 is due sometime next week, and the the Beta should be in early October. If you are adventurous, you can download Alpha 5 now and begin testing yourself. But I must warn that as it is an unstable alpha, things can break and things may drastically change on a daily basis; I would not load this on a machine you depend on.
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The upcoming version 9.10 of the popular Linux distribution Ubuntu, code-named “Karmic Koala”, is is approaching its October release. As part of the community dialogue over what should be in the next version, “Lifehacker”, a website about getting things done, has come up with a wish list for the free operating system, and Ubuntu has responded.
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If I average out these scores (A, D, B, C, A, B, A) using a 4.0 scale, I end up with a solid B (3.0 exactly). I’d say that’s a very accurate assessment of my experience with Ubuntu – generally above-average, but lots of room left to improve.
To that end, the second half of this article (coming out next week) is an exciting one. It will consist of a group-generated list of features/fixes that need to happen over the next year if Ubuntu wants to remain a viable competitor in the consumer OS arena. This list is the result of conversations with all the Ubuntu users I know – including some great emails that have poured in over the last two days – and should represent a diverse range of input.
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Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue #159 for the week September 6th – September 12th, 2009. In this issue we cover: Karmic Alpha 6 freeze ahead, UI freeze in place for Karmic, Ubuntu One has moved, New Ubuntu Developers, New Ubuntu Members, Ubuntu Stats, US LoCo Wiki Doc Day 2009, Ubuntu Pennsylvania, Launchpad meet-up: Sept. 28th in London, Meet Deryck Hodge, Ubuntu Forums Unanswered Post Team Meeting, An interview with Nathan Handler, Screencasting using Ubuntu: Part 1, Jono turning ?? – Wishlist predictable, Jolicloud innovates Atop Ubuntu Netbook Remix, and much, much more!
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Perhaps somebody has already posted this before and I missed it!
I just noticed that Ubuntu is mentioned in the l33t subtitles of The IT Crowd Season 1 Episode 1. It’s rather embarrassing since I bought the DVD when I was in London in July of 2007 and just now watched the whole episode with the subtitles on.
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Ubuntu Variants
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The developers note that the Deluge BitTorrent Client has been replaced by Transmission and that the VLC Media Player, Tomboy, Samba, Vim and all of the old artwork has been removed to save space.
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Clement Lefebvre has announced the release of the Linux Mint 7 “Gloria” XFCE edition, a community-maintained modification of the standard Linux Mint distribution that uses the XFCE desktop environment by default. There are a lot of changes in this new version, and, among the base packages, you will find the Linux 2.6.28 kernel, Xorg 7.4 and XFCE 4.6.
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Linux Mint 7 XFCE really does mix together the stability of the Ubuntu 9.04 base, Linux Mint 7 features and beauty, along with quickness of XFCE to create a powerful, full featured, desktop that’s fast and light enough to run on older hardware.
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Though you’re probably tired of all these Ubuntu-based distros, don’t hesitate to give moonOS 3 a try. The Enlightenment desktop environment has matured a lot and can provide a solid production platform if you’re willing to forgive its bugs here and there. Also, a big plus is the fact that you can tinker with it in so many ways to best suit your computing needs. Last but not least, it’s simply b e a u t i f u l, without asking for a monster machine.
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NEC develops and manufactures mobile terminals for NTT DOCOMO, INC. and SoftBank Mobile Corp. that capitalize on the company’s core competencies and incorporate wireless communications technologies such as W-CDMA (*1) and LTE
(*2), Linux (*3) platform development, low power consumption innovations and ultra-thin technologies.
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Phones
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Yesterday, everyone was prepared to see Motorola’s latest form factor that would bring it back from the brink. Instead, what we got was an announcement about an innovative new user interface, or skin, that runs on top of the Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Android operating system.
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Sub-notebooks
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We are taking a look at the Alpha 680 netbook from Skytone (no relation to Alfa Network Inc., makers wireless products). The Alpha 680 is the world’s first Android netbook, giving users all the features of Google’s mobile phone operating system right on a netbook. The unit is not yet available in the US, but we got our hands on one because we wanted to test some of our WiFi products with Android, and also had considered becoming a distributor. Because the device was so different from any other netbook we have used, we decided to do a full blown public review. Here is the video, then further down we have more to say about the item and some pictures as well.
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Rich Wolski, UCSB professor and CTO of recently-established Eucalyptus Systems, discusses the company’s first commercial product for the enterprise — an open source private cloud platform that supports Amazon AWS APIs and leverages VMware.
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If you’ve got friends and family who use Linux or you want them to know more about Linux, why don’t you join Software Freedom Day festivities in your area? There’s a bunch of Software Freedom Day (SFD) groups and you should check out the SFD Maps of Teams Registered for SFD 2009. Each SFD group will have different kinds of activities planned for their respective areas. Maybe your area will have a seminar or some kind of party just to get to know other people who use free and open source software. It could also be a time to let new Linux users to get to know those who are experts in the community. The goal is to celebrate software freedom in whatever possible way and in every possible place in the whole world.
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Mozilla
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Mozilla Labs has launched a new version of its Firefox web extensions package just a few days after Google opened up support for extensions in its Chrome browser.
The open source outfit has dubbed Mozilla’s Jetpack 0.5 “the bootstrap edition”.
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Mozilla has released a second beta of its internet app suite SeaMonkey 2.0.
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Government
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MAMPU currently collects and tracks OSS adoption statistics and trends for all agencies. The following links provide up to date data for the benefit of agencies and the public. They are updated every two weeks.
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Replacing proprietary solutions with Open Source solutions is not the same as leaving the flock and being eaten by the wolf, but to understand that you have to understand a little more about IT. Otherwise all you can do is choose to believe one side or another.
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Openness
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As well as being welcome, I think this is a shrewd move on Google’s part. It is essentially raising the bar for *all* cloud computing providers. It is obviously pretty confident that it can supply good enough services for people to want to keep their data in them, even if they can remove stuff quite easily. The bet is probably that users will shy away from cloud computing providers who *don’t* offer the same kind of pledges as Google. It will be interesting to see how the other major players respond.
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Even the alpha version is incredibly impressive – real drag and drop 3D humanoid manipulation (*very* eerie), with a simple-to-use interface. If you think that free software is only about important but boring stuff, try out MakeHuman, and be amazed.
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Programming
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The key differentiator is the seamless integration with the Java platform underneath. It’s something no other languages provide, even alternative languages for the JVM (Java Virtual Machine), or at least not up to the level that Groovy does.
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Standards/Consortia
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Finalisation of the new wireless-networking standard — which is capable of delivering throughput speeds up to 300Mbps (and even higher) — took exactly seven years from the day it was conceived, or six years from the first draft version. The standard has been through a dozen or so draft versions.
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PEOPLE without criminal convictions could be subject to covert surveillance, under new police tactics revealed this week.
Durham Police has begun applying methods used to contain people found guilty of violent or sexual crimes to individuals not convicted of such offences.
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Here’s an unbelievably shameless attempt by Sir Roger Singleton to shout down the justified concern in the face of the insane UK government vetting scheme, which he heads. Let’s consider some of his comments.
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So, all-in-all, your statements are a total disgrace, because you simply dismiss all the deeply-felt concerns of parents up and down the country without addressing them in the slightest. You have simply re-stated your own indifference to what the public thinks – a public you are supposed to serve.
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This will help the Haiku development team identify and address bugs, and thus improve the quality of the system as development keeps advancing towards the subsequent development milestones. Bugs found in Alpha 1 should be reported to the Haiku bug tracking system at http://dev.haiku-os.org.
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AstroTurf
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Researchers at university hospitals who lead drug and device studies get as much as $110,869 a year from industry, and those who shared data and expertise with companies were “substantially” more likely to report positive results, a survey found.
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Censorship/Web Abuse
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In 2005 there was a huge scandal when it was revealed that Sony’s attempts to crack down on music piracy had got out of control. The company included a rootkit (XCP) on many of its music CDs which was installed on the user’s PC without permission. Now a court has ordered compensation to be paid to an XCP victim.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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I’m a freelance editorial photographer. Which broadly means that I charge a creative fee for my photographic services, the product of which the client is entitled to use, exclusively (called an embargo period), before I then syndicate it, and the rest of the pictures made at the shoot. As such my current business model revolves around my ownership of the copyright of my images and trading the licensing rights thereof. I represent myself and so pay no commission on my fees to an agent on the initial creative fee (though those fees seldom cover the cost of the shoot), however, when syndicated through Corbis Outline, I pay a minimum of 50% if they re-sell it, and 50% of my fee again if one of their agents sells it for them. I also produce self directed projects which I exhibit, and my work is collected by the National Portrait Gallery in London,UK. My total monthly income from archive sales are approx £150 GBP. I also sell my work directly and independently.
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Every mobile phone in Japan may be installed with software to block illegally copied music if the world’s first such system is approved by talks that start in Tokyo next week.
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But the idea that civil liberties should be curtailed simply to keep afloat a dying – and widely-hated, both by artists and consumers – industry, should be self-evidently absurd.
It’s worrying that the author of this latest simplistic attack on file-sharing, apparently “a former member of Runrig”, is unable to see this. He and other demagogues that attack sharing for whatever reason would do well to look at the facts, and not glibly regurgitate the propaganda of the industry and its lobbyists.
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But no. They’re going to identify and isolate these fans and try to ban them from the internet. Christ knows how that’s going to work. Perhaps they’ll employ a uniformed enforcer to run in and physically knock the mouse out of your hand every 10 minutes. Maybe an email arrives, curtly informing you you’ve been fired from Google. Now clear your cache and get out. I guess the powers that be could pressurise local service providers, but if they start cutting off broadband connections willy-nilly, neighbourhood Wi-Fi “theft” will skyrocket. And how do you stop people using iPhones and other mobile internet devices? Smash their fingers with rocks? Position snipers on rooftops?
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The example at issue (used by Crosbie to illustrate something he calls ‘Intellectual-property nihilism’) goes like this:
Crosbie is contracted to write a particular piece of software, and does so, setting specific conditions — how much he’ll be paid, etc — required before he’ll release it.
A burglar breaks into Crosbie’s house, and steals ‘the program’. (Note the equivocation, which we’ll get to later.)
At issue, is what punishment — if any — does the burglar get?
1. According to Crosbie’s (hypothetical) ‘IP Nihilist’, the burglar is guilty only of breaking and entering, OR at absolute worst, the theft of physical property — the USB key or Hard Drive on which the program ‘resides’.
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It is increasingly apparent that modern copyright law is utterly and completely incompatible with the right to privacy…. What has changed? Before home computers, compact discs and Internet file sharing, it was conceivable for copyright laws to be enforced in a manner that did not bring the state to any-one’s doorstep. If there was an illegal copy of a book in a bookshop, one could report it to the authorities. If someone brought a video camera into a theatre or a concert, they could be readily seen.
Given today’s technological realities, this is no longer the case…. the problem lies in the fact that current copyright laws are completely unenforceable unless the government or industry groups start to read every e-mail and analyze every form of online communication done by citizens.
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ALIS, Israel’s answer to the MPAA, has moved aggressively against a site which provides translated subtitles for movies and TV shows. Three individuals who work to provide free subtitles on Qsubs, one of Israel’s most prominent subtitle providers, have been ordered by ALIS to pay $264,000 each in damages and issue a public apology.
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In a recent interview with IGN, Game Crazy’s Director of Used Games Marc Mondhaschen says that publishers are reaping benefits from game trade-ins, albeit indirectly…
Jim Hogg teaches GNU Linux to high school kids 02 (2008)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
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Posted in Antitrust, IBM, Microsoft at 9:00 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“Gates looks at everything as something that should be his. He acts in any way he can to make it his. It can be an idea, market share, or a contract. There is not an ounce of conscientiousness or compassion in him. The notion of fairness means nothing to him. The only thing he understands is leverage.”
–Philippe Kahn, Founder and former CEO of Borland
Summary: Antitrust memo that Microsoft paid to bury shows how Microsoft’s management decided to “drop the private neutron bombs” on Borland
LAST YEAR we looked back at several stories that relate to Borland and what Microsoft did to this company [1, 2]. Microsoft offered obscene amounts of money for key staff of Borland to abandon and subsequently pass control over development tools to Microsoft. It’s a vicious long-term investment whose key strategy is destruction of competition, which in turn enables price-fixing.
Borland suffered from some other Microsoft abuses, which we shall properly revisit and cover in the future.
“It’s a vicious long-term investment whose key strategy is destruction of competition, which in turn enables price-fixing.”Today’s Comes vs Microsoft exhibit, Exhibit PX00743 [PDF], provides black-on-white proof that Microsoft’s actions against Borland were very much deliberate. It also shows who was responsible. Not too surprisingly, we find correspondence with a familiar Microsoft bully, Brad Silverberg [1, 2]. There are other such bullies like Joachim Kempin, but Kempin is a lot more focused on just OEMs.
The key parts of today’s exhibit are shown below for those who may lack patience to view the entire document, whose text Wallclimber has kindly provided for us to include at the bottom. There may be inaccuracies in her transcription, so one ought to view the original PDF for a higher precision/fidelity.
The correspondence begins with Brad Silverberg addressing Lawrence J. Magid. It might be this journalist, based on his followup where he speaks to David Cole (Microsoft senior who left 2 years ago after over 20 years at the company).
Here is part of the long message/summary which may explain why Microsoft was worried about Borland. It was not just about development tools but also about operating systems (OS/2 versus Windows):
One ISV said (politely) “it is obvious that MS is no longer considered a key strategic partner by IBM”. This was reinforced by IBM announcing the Borland C++ deal on the 3rd day and flying Phillipe Kahn in on a red-eye to give an unscheduled talk.
While most ISVs did not walk away with a burning desire to write 32 bit apps, they all indicated that they expect to have to keep developing for Windows & OS/2 for a while, and that they found IBM’s strategy to be at least reasonable (some said compelling).
3 hours later, Brad Silverberg passed on to his colleagues this message which was sent to Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer an hour beforehand. It says:
In addition to the non-IBM stuff I recommended, I think we should stay super polite publically but drop the private neutron bombs. Let’s hire all their good guys (let me know if you want me to go after Brad Beitel — I bet we could get him esp. if we let him stay in northern cafifornia – e.g. work for GBU). Let’s go visit all of their key corporate customers and disclose the details of how well NT OS/2 will run 16bit windows apps natively. Let’s visit Jack Kuchler and John Akers and explain to them how much money their PC Group is throwing at a losing proposition and how easy it would be for them to work with Microsoft if they weren’t on a path to take us out of our core business of desktop operating systems. And finally — let’s give copies of the MS/IBM audit to each of the 25 most influencial ISVs. An maybe even corporate customers too if there are no legal issues.
So there we have it. Microsoft admits “drop[ping] the private neutron bombs” and poaching staff from Borland, obviously with chaos in mind. “Let’s hire all their good guys,” it says. Does this happen to remind anyone of what Microsoft did to Yahoo (latest prominent example)? This modus operandi characterises other stories of Microsoft ‘competing’. █
Appendix: Comes vs. Microsoft – exhibit PX00743, as text
Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in Antitrust, Asia, Google, Mail, Microsoft, Scalix, Servers, Xandros at 7:31 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Microsoft’s monopoly abuse with ActiveSync and Live@Edu is revisited; troubling sights in India encourage preventive action — urgently
ON THE FACE of it, Microsoft still (ab)uses its monopoly in order to charge competitors for mail and collaboration APIs, the latest example being Apple customers, not just Google, Scalix/Xandros, and others to whom software patents are seen as acceptable.
The Live@Edu scam is another case of Microsoft abuse in mail and collaboration. This one relies on bribes (or “incentives”) and ignorance (or selfishness). Recently we gave some examples in [1, 2, 3, 4]. Microsoft actually competes very viciously with Google in this area, but we lack evidence to suggest that Google offers bribes like Microsoft does. Watch the hypocrisy of Microsoft, which is now accusing Google of being monopolistic. We should really all just lean on Microsoft to save us from all those evil monopolists. Really. Microsoft to the rescue!
Here is a new account of what Microsoft achieves with Live@Edu:
It’s an interesting approach, and both companies are providing their products free for a reason. Perhaps now this will shed some light on the internal processes both Microsoft and Google take into account when offering free services or products.
What do you think? Ethical? Unethical? Good business practice or doomed to bite them in the arse?
Microsoft — unlike Google — has another methodology for spreading Live@Edu through a separate type of bribes. Microsoft is recruiting young people whom it calls MSPs (Microsoft Student Partners). They are hired ‘shills’ for Microsoft, whom Microsoft feeds with gifts, as we showed before. Microsoft is doing a lot of this in India these days. It is a modern, digital form of colonisation with the help of people who betray their country(‘s autonomy).
The Times of India had this coverage some days ago. It is very superficial and promotional, but it serves to show that Microsoft has not changed its ways.
To acquaint information and technology students with latest tools and software technology, Microsoft Student Partners (MSP) has launched a state-wide educative programme. The programme’s first phase kick-started with a workshop at Navrachana University (NU) here on Sunday.
“This is our first programme of the state-wide plan wherein we will cover 10 universities in Gujarat, including MS University. We are also looking to promote collaboration between universities and Microsoft through two major programmes – MSDN Academic Alliance and Live@Edu,” said Prakhar Agarwal, MSP programme head in Gujarat.
This is ridiculous. Universities can trivially host their own mail using Free software, not Fog Computing. Whether knowingly or not, those promoting such programmes are not just promoting multi-nationals but they also help turn their peers into slaves of a single foreign company that probably has the most appalling track record in its field. Witness who else is helping Microsoft in India at the moment. It’s Microsoft's old shill, TCS. Along with (potentially) tens of thousands of ‘charities’ that were seemingly offered gentle bribes from Microsoft, TCS lobbied for OOXML. And now:
IT outsourcing firm Tata Consultancy Services has entered into an alliance with Microsoft India to launch a virtualisation Center of Excellence (CoE) in Chennai.
That, together with EDGI, should be sufficient reason to kick Microsoft out of India, just as the British were once forced out. Microsoft exploits India, but it pays/bribes enough Indian people to carry on serving Microsoft’s agenda in the country. As the highly-regarded Professor Deepak Phatak put it last year, “This hypothetical counter complaint shows Microsoft as working at national and International forums to maintain and enhance its monopoly in global markets, and as attempting to ensure its monopoly strangle-hold on Indian desktop Market. It also paints INFOSYS, TCS, WIPRO and NASSCOM as willfully helping Microsoft in this evil design, and thus acting grossly against Indian National interests.” █
“The alliance uses Microsoft technologies instead of challenging Gates in his own game. Wipro is just a servant of Microsoft facilitating Indian cyber slavery under the American corporate banners.”
–India Daily
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Posted in Bill Gates, Finance, Microsoft, Patents at 6:34 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A clear connection is found between the world’s biggest patent bully and the world’s biggest patents hoarder, who is financially backed by Microsoft and Bill Gates
AS LONGTIME trackers of this patent trolls arena may know, Ray Niro is not only a vicious bully but he is also considered the father of patent trolling. He not only attacks companies that actually produce goods (unlike him) but he is also attacking his critics using lawsuits.
We finally have this long update about a case regarding one critic whom Ray Niro decided to bully by putting a bounty on his head and then suing not only the critic but his employer also [1, 2, 3, 4, 5].
Legal bloggers writing about intellectual property matters are sure to take note of a trial set to start Monday in Tyler, Texas. It pits East Texas intellectual property litigator Eric Albritton against Silicon Valley tech company Cisco Systems Inc.
Albritton alleges in his June 16, 2008, federal court complaint that Richard Frenkel, a one-time in-house lawyer at Cisco, defamed him in anonymous postings on Frenkel’s Patent Troll Tracker blog in October 2007.
In March 2008, after Frenkel outed himself as the Patent Troll Tracker blogger, Albritton filed the defamation suit against Cisco, Frenkel, another Cisco in-house lawyer and a corporate spokesman.
Frenkel will hopefully win this case against a monster which terrifies the entire industry. Who would befriend such a monster? Well, Microsoft’s former CTO on the face of it. Watch this report from The Prior Art Blog, which indicates that Ray Niro is apparently also an attack dog of Nathan Myhrvold/Intellectual Ventures, currently the world’s largest patent troll that resorted to massive-scale racketeering.
Today’s Recorder has a story revealing that patent-holding giant Intellectual Ventures appears to be connected to a patent lawsuit recently filed in Chicago against Kodak and CDW Corp. Picture Frame Innovations, LLC v. Eastman Kodak Company et al., 09-cv-04888, N.D. Illinois. Intellectual Ventures was founded by former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold (pictured at right).
[...]
Ray Niro says “IV is not involved in any way, shape, or form” in the Picture Frame Innovations lawsuit, but neither he nor IV will answer the key question: whether the patent-holding company has any financial interest in the litigation.
Mysterious, eh?
Had the Secret Services actually done something useful, they would be going after the likes of Icahn, Myhrvold, and Niro. Instead they are kept occupied with ‘small potatoes’ whose damage to industry and human kind is negligible in comparison. Stephen Hawking must be turning in his wheelchair seeing what became of his former student. █
“Small enterprises generally adopt a rather negative position towards the current increasing granting of patents for software and algorithms because they fear that these will hamper or eventually even impede their work (more than 85%).” —German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), Study of the Innovation Performance of German Software Companies, 2006, p. 86
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Posted in Europe, Finance, Microsoft at 6:12 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.”
–Bill Gates
Summary: Under the guise of “job creation”, Microsoft creates Windows drones out of less fortunate people
THE EVER SO GENEROUS Microsoft has decided to come over to the UK where it will take advantage of an economic crisis to squeeze its dependency and lock-ins down people’s throats while passing it off in the press as “goodwill”. This strategy is known in much of the world as “EDGI”, which has an equivalent for Western nations, notably “Elevate America” [1, 2, 3, 4].
So, what will this whole “charitable” thing from Microsoft involve? Let us look closely at Microsoft advertising disguised as “news”:
Microsoft will provide about 450,000 training vouchers to low-skilled people giving them access to courses offering ‘digital literacy’, for example how to use Windows or a keyboard.
The use of Windows, eh? Why not GNU/Linux? Does “digital literacy” — as the item above puts it — imply memorising menus in Microsoft Windows? Here is another foolish article which casts Microsoft training/indoctrination as “job creation”. How heartwarming.
Microsoft said it would work with other organisations and local government to deliver its “ambitious” target through a combination of apprenticeships, training and a new job matching service.
The sad thing is that many people are actually buying it. The superficial coverage in the press consistently supports this spin doctoring, ushering the arrival of another generation of Microsoft servants and clients. Watch what “Community Education” has come to mean in the United States and weep at the sight of Microsoft getting chummy with the US Labor [sic] Department (also covered here).
Microsoft Corp. has asked the Labor Department for authorization to fund benefit risks through the Vermont branch of its Bermuda-based captive insurance company.
We needn’t even revisit the topic of Microsoft’s tax avoidance [1, 2], which is further facilitated by shells like the Gates Foundation whose latest public relations for some personal publicity is this:
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is partnering with Viacom Inc.’s television networks, education leaders and celebrities to launch an awareness campaign to reduce the number of dropouts.
That’s a meager investment for some air time and publicity in national television, benefiting a foundation that does a whole lot of other things, with investment scale an order of magnitude greater. █
“Gates’ gimmick of becoming a philantropist repeats the Rockefeller scam almost one to one a century later.”
–Dark cloud over good works of Gates Foundation
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