Edward Bernays, a man behind mind control, imposed ignorance, and consumerism
Summary: Novell’s and Microsoft’s use of PR, new AstroTurfing from Comcast/Radian6, and convenient delusions about the Gates Foundation
FOR THOSE who may not know this, the term “public relations” (or “PR”) was coined early in the last century after the term “propaganda” (also beginning with “Pr”) got a bad reputation. The methods used in the United States to manipulate people’s emotions about products and policies directly influenced the Nazi regime, which in turn destroyed the positive/benign connotation associated with a word like “propaganda”. Nowadays it is a dirty word (languages evolve/devolve), but the rules and methods remain the same, most commonly under the umbrella of “PR” (where the word “relations” is euphemistically used in the same sense as in the Council of Foreign Relations). For those who are interested, there is an excellent BBC documentary series about the subject and it is called “The Trap”. It comes in many parts. US citizens celebrate a shopping/spendings holiday today, called “Black Friday”. The documentary addresses the emergence of consumption culture as well, since it is closely related to the genesis and commercial purpose of PR techniques.
“They were all uploaded by an account called “TESTDRIVE9″, referring/belonging to a company Novell seems to have hired or partnered with.”Over the past couple of years we have spent some effort studying Microsoft PR agencies (Microsoft externalises PR activities). Once these are analysed and documented properly it becomes easier to tell apart truth from spin. The same goes for front groups of Microsoft, whose inherent function is similar but not identical.
Since this Web site is primarily about Novell, worth bringing up is a bunch of new “success stories” that ended up in YouTube this week. They were all uploaded by an account called “TESTDRIVE9″, referring/belonging to a company Novell seems to have hired or partnered with. From its channel description:
Interactive Ideas (www.interactiveideas.com) is one of the UK’s leading value-added software and peripheral distributors, providing channels to market for technology products.
This channel hosts short non-technical videos explaining the real world business benefits of implementing SolarWinds, Red Hat, Novell, Acronis, JBoss and Kerio solutions in your organisation.
This account has just uploaded no less than 4 European “success stories” (advertisements) for Novell, from Denmark, Holland, Austria, and the UK. Here is an example.
Novell’s (mis)use of YouTube is a subject we previously touched on in:
Novell recently preached about its attempt to “change the perception of Novell.” And yes, it seems like “perception management” [1, 2], as PR professionals call it.
To give another new example, Radian6, the non-Microsoft AstroTurf equivalent of Visible Technologies, is still spying on our reader Ryan on behalf of Comcast, trying to suppress his rants about bad service. He can see that Radian6 is doing this and has produced proof a few days ago. His blog was also being monitored by Visible Technologies, which was funded by Microsoft, contains (former) Microsoft employees, and has Microsoft as a client.
“Novell recently preached about its attempt to “change the perception of Novell.””Another entity that uses heavy PR and “perception management” (other than Microsoft, Novell, and Comcast) is the Gates Foundation, whose selfish deeds require huge amounts of spin. The Gates Foundation already controls a lot of the press (simply because it funds the press) and right now there is more spin about “family planning” (sometimes a euphemism for sterilisation, much like “public relations” for brainwash or “rendition” for torture).
It turns out that the Gates family is still very keen on shrinking the population in Africa. The Gates Foundation funds this goal, just as it funds colonisation of Africa with Monsanto [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8] and the pharmaceutical industry (patents) [1, 2, 3].
From reading Bill and Melinda’s thoughts on family planning you would think they only cared about WHY women would want smaller families (they say because their children don’t die) and that they didn’t care any longer about HOW women can reduce the number of children they have (family planning). But the Foundation just funded one of the largest family conferences on family planning in years
School boards in Memphis, Pittsburgh, and Hillsborough County, Fla., voted this week to take part in the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s national $500-million program to improve teacher effectiveness, according to press reports.
The Associated Press wrote a few weeks ago that “The real secretary of education, the joke goes, is Bill Gates.” There is nothing positive about it, based on history. █
“Excessive distrust is not less hurtful than its opposite. Most men become useless to him who is unwilling to risk being deceived.”
Fall season is one of the busiest times for Linux distributions, and this year is also a very busy time for me. Ever since two years now I gradually migrated family and friends to Linux. This year these new Linux users gave me quite some work, especially on week-ends, and my own upgrade gave me quite some work. You might think that the people I installed Linux systems on their laptops would be autonomous and relying on forums when help were needed. Think again: Usability of every day applications may have never been easy, but installing new applications is something that still has not gotten through them, at least on a regular basis, and this means they rely on their favourite system administrator (me) to fix whatever issues they have. But it’s somewhat of a vicious circle, because I guess I enjoy helping them myself, and to add to the pleasure I installed different distributions for each of them.
After retiring from 34 years of teaching high school computer science and mathematics, I finally thought I’d have some time to create some good instructional video lessons. My initial goal is to produce series of instructional videos for software that is cross-platform FLOSS–Inkscape, the GIMP, OpenOffice.org, computer programming in Ruby and Python, and so on. Along with my desktop computers, I wanted to use my new Acer laptop to produce these videos.
The biggest news was simply that Google was finally taking Microsoft head-on. The rest of the news, at least to me, was that Microsoft should be worried, very worried.
While we’re talking about operating systems here, Google’s real target is Microsoft Office. Redmond makes money from Windows but makes a lot more money from Office, its productivity app monopoly. Google already has its Google Apps pitted against Office, but Brin and Page know they won’t crack Office’s hold on corporate America without addressing the Windows flaws that effectively underlie both Office and Google Apps in their current incarnations. That’s where the Chrome OS comes in.
The Chrome OS strategy comes down to services, servers, security, and an iTunes-like app store (this latter part having been missed by nearly all the pundits).
A demo of a smartbook prototype from Qualcomm may have provided more details of Lenovo’s smartbook for AT&T, including its choice of OS. The design, which cosmetically resembles the publicly displayed Lenovo system, runs on a comparatively fast 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and has been shown running Android, suggesting Google’s OS is at least a candidate for the system. Previously, it had appeared that Lenovo would use a proprietary Linux release instead.
According to Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin, “each member of the TAB personifies collaboration and works hard to help us increase the technical dominance of the Linux operating system.” As for the Board itself, it “provides essential guidance to the Linux Foundation and its members.”
KRunner continues to grow into a really great tool to quickly get things done using words. It was intended to be something more flexible than the Run Command dialog in KDE3 that also looked nicer. I think we’ve achieved both of those things, and KRunner blends sexily into the rest of the Plasma Desktop. It runs as its own process to allow some separation between the desktop and panels and the command dialog, which is also a bit different from KDE3 where it was part of the desktop itself.
With the next version of KDE SC to be released early next year, KRunner, one of KDE SC’s most powerful feature since v4.0, is getting some major updates. The hard feature freeze for KDE SC 4.4 is already done. So, in this article, we shall look at some changes that is being introduced to KRunner for KDE SC 4.4 and then some new plugins coming with it.
So, I’m writing this partly because of vanity (let’s be honest here), partly because reflection helps managing past mistakes better in the future, and also because some of you (KDE community) have asked about our experiences with Git. With this out of the way, let’s go in medias res:
With Amarok 2.2.1 we have tried a new approach in release management, which meant a rather radical departure for us: The whole release cycle of 2.2.1 was pretty exactly 6 weeks long. While six weeks can be a lot of time, or very little time, in our case it was very little time, as we had set a goal of achieving three things with this release: 1) Features 2) Bug Fixes 3) Doing it all without causing regressions. To give you an impression of what we have done in these 6 weeks, check this out:
The example of Gwenview, Digikam and Krita is a great one, I think.
With Gwenview, you get basic photo downloading from cameras and image manipulation. These “high end” (for Gwenview) features mostly comes from work laid down by the people working on the higher end photo management tools like (though not exclusively) Digikam. Sometimes feature improvements flow from the general audience app into the advanced tool app as well, but in my experience such improvements tend to be of the general audience pleasing type (as one might expect).
Harald Sitter, one of the KDE developers, has announced that the KDE frontend for Ubuntu One is now available for a technical preview. The fact that it is a technical preview means that there is bound to be crashes, bugs etc. However, it is expected that it will be available for Kubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx with dolphin integration.
Linux comes in a wide variety of flavors, better known as distributions. Such an array can make choosing between them very difficult for both the experienced administrator as well as the new user migrating from a different operating system. Making a decision isn’t easy, but we will do our best to simplify the process of selecting the ideal Linux distribution for your needs.
Gaël Duval, Mandrake Linux and Ulteo founder, has announced the availability of version 2.0 of the Ulteo Open Virtual Desktop (OVD). Ulteo is based on Debian and Ubuntu and allows users to run Linux and Microsoft windows applications from “any device” through a web browser. According to Ulteo, clients only need a Java enabled web browser to run the applications.
Linux developer Mandriva has updated its operating-system-on-a-stick with the release of Mandriva Flash 2010, which includes a bootable version of the software on a USB Flash drive.
Available from mid-December, Mandriva Flash 2010 puts the latest version of Mandriva Linux onto an 8GB Flash drive, which has 6GB free for a user’s own documents and files.
Upstream and Downstream is also important. Big problems come from Downstream thinking they are more important than upstream. Classic case of this is Ubuntu Wiki mind you Ubuntu is not they only one making this mistake. Most documentation in there really should not be there instead should be split up and stored at each of the projects they are talking about. One of the least commodity in the open source world is document writers. Clustering them at the upstream projects would get the most document writers in the one place to create documentation for everyone. This is for the good of the upstream projects.
iRiver doesn’t supply any e-book management software, so loading non-DRM content is a simple matter of drag’n'drop which worked out of the box with Mac and Linux machines, as well as Windows.
Nokia fans hoping to pick up one of its N900 Linux-based smartphone-cum-tablets on the high street may finally be able to do so on 4 December.
An unnamed Nokia spokesperson yesterday told website NokNok that the sheer volume of advance orders the Finnish phone giant has taken for the N900 means even though the first of these Maemo-based handsets are going out now, only folk who pre-ordered will get one in the short term.
I know that not many people ever believed it, but the old complaint about free software never innovating is being disproved magnificently in a whole new field: mobile phones. It’s becoming increasing clear that alongside the iPhone, which is still the leader in this sector – at the moment – the other driving force is mobile Linux.
[...]
That’s why free software will always *power* more innovation than closed source, even if it is not always itself the most innovative technology.
Graphics drivers (for X11 under whatever Free Software operating system you care to use) are one area where Free Software has plenty of room for improvement. My laptop has an nVidia GeForce 9600M in it, which means that there are two drivers I can use for it: the Free Software nv driver, or the proprietary nvidia one.
[...]
Non-idle the machine draws just as much: clearly regular end-user activities (writing email, writing letters, writing blog entres, but no compiling) don’t exactly stress the machine or draw extra power. Given the numbers, I don’t understand the perceived difference in temperature or comfort of working on the machine. But it does help me put a price on Freedom: two watts.
This release improves on the functionality of FreeBSD 7.2 and introduces often requested new features in jail, SMP-optimized scheduler, virtualization, virtual network stack, NFS4, and storage subsystem improvements. This the most impressive FreeBSD releases to date. Kudos to FreeBSD team for rolling out stable and feature rich enterprise ready FreeBSD 8 operating systems.
PREDICT is an open-source, multi-user satellite tracking and orbital prediction program written under the Linux operating system by John A. Magliacane, KD2BD. PREDICT is free software. Users may redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 2 of the License or any later version.
Direct2D is similar to Direct3D in that it allows the software to make calls directly to the graphics card. However, whereas Direct3D is concerned with three-dimensional geometry, Direct2D is designed explicitly for rendering two-dimensional objects. That difference aside, the performance characteristics between the APIs are similar in that scenes of greater complexity rely more heavily on the processor. When it comes to browsing, that means complex sites see relatively little acceleration, while simpler sites have more free CPU power to render faster.
W3C has published a new working draft of a proposed standard that will enable limited filesystem access from JavaScript. This will make it possible to do efficient client-side file processing in Web applications.
Salvation for children who feel threatened, harassed or bullied on the internet may be close at hand, in the shape of a user-friendly dolphin-shaped “panic button”.
A string of police blunders led to the innocent electrician being held down by police and shot repeatedly in the head. They mistakenly believed he was a suicide bomber about to detonate a device.
Researchers from the School of Medicine at the University of California found that being too clean could impair the skin’s ability to heal. The San Diego-based team discovered that normal bacteria that live on the skin trigger a pathway that helps prevent inflammation when we get hurt.
NEXT week Henri Proglio will become the boss of EDF Group, the state-controlled French firm which is the world’s biggest listed utility and operator of nuclear reactors. With its proud corporate culture, its devotion to long-term planning and its powerful unions (the Confédération Générale du Travail jointly runs the firm, in effect), EDF is sometimes described as a miniature version of France itself.
While some politicians would have us believe the crisis is over and we’re recovering I think we can never be too sure, at the very least. Respectable people who are widely credited for predicting this crisis (George Celente, Peter Schiff, Ron Paul etc.) are saying there are even worse times to come. Suffice it to say it would probably be a bad idea to go get too comfy right now and think saving and being prepared is no longer so vital.
Many in Washington want to give more regulatory power to the Federal Reserve Board, the banking regulator that orchestrated the A.I.G. bailout. Through this prism, the actions taken in the deal by Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, who was president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York at the time, grow curiouser and curiouser.
This Thanksgiving season, I am thankful for so many things: my life, family, friends, freedoms, and new job at the Center for Media and Democracy. I feel lucky to be working with a team devoted to making a real difference in people’s lives as we out spin and press for change. And, with the broken health insurance system, I am thankful to work at CMD with a real-life hero, Wendell Potter, who is fighting tirelessly for families across the country so that parents and children and grandparents and grandchildren can have real access to needed health care to save their lives and thrive.
The bulk of MA’s $206K projected average monthly budget goes for airfare to Doha and other Middle Eastern destinations. Six trips are planned over the course of the one-year contract for four advisors. Average hotel room cost is pegged at $375 a night, while per diem meal fee in the Middle East is pegged at $150, and $100 in the U.S. MA pegs its monthly fee at $63,500.
The evasion could cost the government more than $30 million a month in revenues, according to the Associated Press. But the potential cost to the public is far greater, since studies show higher cigarette taxes have proved to be an effective way to discourage children from smoking.
The new fear is that the gimmickry of rolling your own and using flavored (“pipe”) tobacco — now banned in packaged cigarettes — could prove irresistible for youngsters experimenting with life. And with death.
Using a TOS, online service providers can dictate their legal relationship with users through private contracts, rather than rely on the law as written. In the unregulated and unpredictable world of the Internet, such arrangements often provide the necessary ground rules for how various online services should be used.
One cannot go online today without eventually being asked to accept a set of so-called Terms of Service (or TOS) agreements. These “terms” are actually purported legal contracts between the user and the online service provider (websites, MMORPGs, communication services, etc.), despite the fact that users never get a change to negotiate their contents and can often be entirely unaware of their existence.
The trial will cover about 40 per cent of Virgin Media’s network, a spokesman said, but those involved will not be informed. “It would be counter-productive because it doesn’t affect customers directly,” he said.
Preliminary injunctions against two file-sharing portals have been overturned, paving the way for a re-opening. The sites’ lawyers have proven that hard drive evidence collected during a controversial raid against the sites’ admin is worthless, and the anti-piracy group involved has been fined by the court for acting in bad faith.
Summary: Yet another piece of academic research shows the obvious — that intellectual monopolies serve in obstructing competition
TECHDIRT shares the following findings which suggest that copying (sometimes inspiration) is beneficial to society; impeding inspiration — contrariwise — would be detrimental.
And, now some researchers have started to look into it, and actually have built a model that shows society is likely better off when copying is the norm. Aaron deOliveira alerts us to the research on this, which tries to model societies with creators and innovators, and finds that society is served best when 30% of the population is involved in creating new goods, while 70% is focused on copying.
“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants” –Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727)
“Patents can also ruin our environment in a major way.”Our posting with video about Monsanto patents received a lot of good feedback (not in the comments), including a request for someone to transcribe for the benefit of all. One reader wrote: “I always translate your articles to Spanish and email them to teachers in my birth country Peru. We do have to protect freedom everywhere so that’s my grain of sand. [...] I wish I could have the transcript to translate it and send it to Peru. Please if do you have the transcript can you email it to me or publish it on the site so this group of Peruvian teachers can benefit from it.”
Can anyone help with this? Regardless, here is another recent video that explains how the patent system impedes innovation rather than promote any. Patents can also ruin our environment in a major way. █
Summary: How the Novell-backed Silverlight impacts GNU/Linux users and what NASA is doing with it
NOVELL’S sick obsession with Silverlight (may lead to “drooling” or foaming at the mouth) is a subject we explored in recent days [1, 2] because Silverlight turns out to be a Windows-only technology that can only be a compromise for other (non-Windows) platforms. Here is the implication as one writer puts it:
Silverlight gives the multi-platform market to flash
What I get from this decision is that the objectives Microsoft had with Silverlight have changed. It looks like competing with flash in the wider, multi-platform market is taking a back seat to the introduction of new functionality. What Microsoft is pushing is Silverlight as the default web based development platform for Windows, with some limited compatibility with non Windows platforms. This goes in the opposite direction to Adobe Flash which seems to favor a consistent set of functionality and compatibility across all platforms. Flash is not only available on Windows, Mac and Linux, but also on the Wii, and soon an ARM version should be released for smartbooks. And that does not even cover gnash, the open source version of flash that is more or less to Flash what Moonlight is to Silverlight. In short, Microsoft is giving up the multi-platform market to Adobe.
You might find it interesting to compare this memo with Bill Gates’ July 20, 1995 letter to Novell’s Robert Frankenberg, Microsoft’s Exhibit 15 [PDF] in its collection attached to its Cross Motion for Summary Judgment. It’s a hoot. Frankenberg had complained about undocumented calls, and Gates writes that both the FTC and the DOJ has “thoroughly investigated” the allegations and found them to be “not provable”. That was then. This is now. Here’s my favorite part of the letter:
In fact, Microsoft goes out of its way to make early copies of API and protocol specifications available, hold design reviews (that even our competitors attend), and run the largest beta test programs in the industry. Novell has been invited to participate in many of these “Open Process” events — and all without requiring a tit-for-tat arrangement.
Does Novell pay attention to this at all? It is currently fighting against Microsoft in court over discriminatory extensions and APIs, such as the ones it’s falling for when dealing with Silverlight. This is contradictory.
After a couple of minutes of talking to a very polite receptionist, who finally understood that I was having a problem with a website, I got transferred to Mark in Public Services. I explained the problem to Mark, pointing out that:
1) Most geeks are fans of the space effort.
2) Most geeks don’t run Windows.
3) Most geeks refuse to have Microsoft software on their systems.
4) Does CalTech/NASA/JPL really want to annoy their biggest fans?
5) Does Microsoft have the right to force us to run Windows?
Mark had never heard of the website, so I pointed him to it, and he spotted the bit about the Memorandum with Microsoft immediately, and pointed out that of course Microsoft would use Silverlight. And he’s correct. Of course Microsoft would use Silverlight. However NASA/JPL is a government institution, with responsibility to the American taxpayers, not Microsoft, and that it could be argued that any memorandum that blocked access to a significant part of NASA/JPL’s core constituency might not be legal.
This should be treated as an antitrust issue. It almost was, but Novell andcronies helped Microsoft escape this after an investigation had been launched in Europe (2007).
Carla Schroder is mystified by the decision to remove GIMP from Ubuntu [1, 2, 3] (Canonical could remove Mono or OpenOffice.org instead) and she offers this explanation:
I have a suspicion that this demonstrates how deeply Mono has become entrenched in Ubuntu. Gimp critics like to complain that it’s not Adobe Photoshop. True, it lacks CMYK support and other features essential to producing very high-quality professional color prints. For everything else it’s great, it makes excellent Web images and darned good color prints.
How different is Gimp? Not very, I think the critics have never touched it. Virtually all image editing programs have similar toolsets, the brush, pencil, airbrush, bucket fill, crop, eraser, fonts, and so on. Higher-end ones support layers and bales of plugins and add-ons. I think what the critics really want is Photoshop for free just because it is expensive, like the trendy folks who only wear brand-name apparel with high price tags. Like paying more makes those denim jeans that came out of the same factories as the cheap ones wear better. At any rate anyone who has touched a decent image editing/paint program before will do fine in Gimp, and someone who has never used one has some learning to do. Requiring a user of a product to learn anything seems to be a criminal offense anymore.
The latest episode of Tux Radar debates the issue and mentions “Mono haters” at one stage. Would that include “haters” like the FSF, for example? Resistance to Mono exists because of a real problem in Mono. To suggest that “irrational hatred” is behind all opposition to Mono is like casting people who get vaccinations “Swine flu haters”. █
Summary: An explanation of why Vista 7 is moving in the same trajectory as Vista
ONE of our readers has contributed the following thoughts that more or less agree with what we’ve been showing for over a year (since Vista 7 was first publicly introduced to bribed friends of Microsoft with access to the press).
I still look for Vista failure news and now see it as a test of journalistic integrity and market share. Vista dominated Windows tech news for a long time. You would think the authors that praised it for a year or two would still write about it if they meant what they said or actually used the software themselves. Reality shows otherwise and this is a failure of its own. Three years after launch Vista has vanished.
As Boycott Novell noticed, Vista has disappeared from the news. Google News searches are more likely to turn up news from towns named Vista as they are to turn up news about the failed OS. If journalists and market share numbers were honest, you would expect to see somewhere between two to fifteen times as much news about Vista as you do about Linux. Instead, a news search for “Linux” turns up 22,900 items and one for “microsoft vista” turns up only 8,400, only 500 if you include the quotes. In fact, you will find more news about XP than Vista.
What does this mean? Is there really no independent press that cares about Microsoft software? Are there really four times as many GNU/Linux users as there are Vista users? Is all news about Microsoft Windows advertising in disguise? “Windows 7″ pulls in 34,000 results and “Windows XP” finds 9,000. The disparity between use and reporting is interesting to say the least.
The results are not a fluke of search terms or Google bias. A search for “Windows Vista” finds 8,500 and the first page is nearly identical for a search on “Microsoft Vista”. Google knows what I’m looking for. Bing News presents exactly 100 results for any search term, so it can’t be used for comparison. The Microsoft damaged Yahoo News search finds about 2,000 results for “microsoft vista”, 2,600 for “windows xp”, 3,000 for “windows vista”, 4,100 for “linux” and “windows 7″ pulls a whopping 13,300. I expect ratios between Google and Yahoo elsewhere.
see
news.google.com
news.search.yahoo.com
and push the “news” tab on any Bing query to find 100 hand picked articles about anything you would like Microsoft guidance about.
In other news, I thought BN readers would enjoy this article by a stock analyst who thinks people don’t care about Windows and Microsoft is too stupid to learn how to sell it.
“The marketing effort for Windows 7 now underway clearly illustrates one thing: Microsoft has not learned from the past. For some reason, they seem to think that people actually care about the features of their operating system. The truth is, people don’t really care. … Windows 7 is likely to follow the same fate as Vista.”
“the upgrade cycle bonanza came to an end when… the PC became good enough! At that point, upgrades went from being no-brainer decisions to true nightmares. The major issues faced by users today are not speed or capacity — it is simplicity and inter-operability. The most common problems faced by PC users occur when what used to work just fine now no longer works. The most common problem faced by PC users today is making sure that a new piece of software recently installed does not disrupt everything else that already works.”
All very obvious. The broken software issue is old, Comes vs Microsoft email shows that Microsoft was aware of the issue almost 10 years ago. He’s also a little confused if he thinks that Windows 7 is much of an improvement over Vista but his arguments for Windows 7 failure do not depend on that because he knows that Microsoft’s market is still using XP and Vista is irrelevant. What’s interesting is seeing this kind of reasoning in print.
Microsoft’s cycle will repeat itself in a couple of years. Alastair Otter disappointingly participates in Microsoft’s vapourware tactics, perhaps not realising that Vista 8 fantasies are reminiscent of lies about Vista 7. People no longer remember all the stuff that was not delivered other than a new deskbar for Vista (which acts similarly to KDE4/Plasma). Vista 7 too was a case of vapourware, due to many features that Microsoft promised and never eventually delivered. Why don’t people learn from history? █
Summary: The trading system in London suffered another major crash this morning and a permanent GNU/Linux replacement is on its way
THE WINDOWS-BASED London Stock Exchange (LSE) has been a total catastrophe not only to London but also to Microsoft’s case study against GNU/Linux. The very same “poster child” Microsoft was bragging about in its smears against GNU/Linux is going to move to GNU/Linux, having abandoned the entire Microsoft stack (following repeated failures [1, 2]).
A report that has arrived just now (several readers alerted us about it) says that LSE went down again. From the BBC:
Trading on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) has been brought to a halt by technical difficulties.
Technical problems led to the suspension of trading in some FTSE 100 stocks on the London Stock Exchange this morning.
[...]
Last month, the LSE announced it will acquire Sri Lankan trading firm Millennium IT for £18 million, replacing its Accenture built, Microsoft .Net-based TradElect platform. The new platform is understood to be based on Linux.
Interestingly enough, it was only one day ago that the very same publication released a report titled “London Stock Exchange takes £20m hit on almost redundant TradElect platform”
As this article clearly shows, the transition to GNU/Linux has not occurred yet.
The often troubled TradElect system remains five times slower than rivals’ reported speeds. It was upgraded in 2008 by Accenture at a cost of £40 million, is based around Microsoft .Net architecture and runs on HP ProLiant servers with Cisco networking technology.
It is due to be replaced at the end of next year by an open source based platform built by MillenniumIT, which the LSE acquired in September for £18 million.
[...]
The system is aimed at saving the LSE over £10 million a year from 2012. It will also bring in-house the LSE’s software development, provide “dedicated research and development support”, and offer new revenue streams by selling technology to other financial markets.
Profits at the stock exchange tumbled for the six months by 37 percent to £79 million. The exchange reiterated that it hopes an ongoing cost cutting exercise and management restructure will save it over £11 million a year.
The LSE must be relieved this time around because in spite of today’s downtime, it is aware that haven is in sight. That haven is GNU/Linux and Free software. A lot of the world uses exactly that for trading platforms and Microsoft’s experiment in London failed badly and relatively quickly. The natural conclusion is that Microsoft is not suitable for mission-critical systems. █
“Every time you use Google, you’re using a machine running the Linux kernel.”
Summary: Jobs is not good for jobs, suggests news story; iPhones all have the same root password
A FEW days ago we wrote about Apple's abuse of developers. That’s what happens in proprietary software, where only one company is ‘bossing’ around the platform and its participants. The following new report [via] suggests that Apple does not pay attention to the warnings.
Jobs may make Mat lose his job
A long-time Apple software developer from Sydney fears he may have to lay off most of his staff after draconian Apple legal threats and a rare personal email from Apple chief executive officer Steve Jobs.
Miguel de Icaza got his argument totally reversed when he tried to suggest (in a Microsoft conference) that doing Free software is a risk to one’s livelihood. It ought to be added that Mono targets Apple’s iPhone, specifically putting .NET in it, using MonoTouch which we wrote about in:
Regarding the iPhone, LWN.net has this new article about worms that entered the iPhones because Apple had chosen the same root password for all phones.
It is Apple’s decision to ship all models of its iPhone with the same root password — a tactic common to embedded device makers, if not particularly secure. The point of debate is whether the security hole left open by the combination of a default root password and a running SSH daemon is Apple’s fault, the jailbreaking tool authors’, or simply the users’.
This is hardly an argument against jailbreaking; it’s when those rails are removed from the phone that its inherent flaws get exposed. Apple was sloppy with passwords and journalists warned about exactly that one flaw even 2 years ago. It is surprising that Apple has not resolved this since. █
“FSF did some anti-Apple campaigns too. Personally I worry more about Apple because they have user loyalty; Microsoft doesn’t.”
