EditorsAbout the SiteComes vs. MicrosoftUsing This Web SiteSite ArchivesCredibility IndexOOXMLOpenDocumentPatentsNovellNews DigestSite NewsRSS

12.21.09

IRC: #boycottnovell @ FreeNode: December 21st, 2009

Posted in IRC Logs at 7:38 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME Gedit

Read the log

Enter the IRC channel now

To use your own IRC client, join channel #boycottnovell in FreeNode.

IDC Speculation That Vista 7 is Last PC Operating System from Microsoft, Windows Mobile 7 Already Slips

Posted in Apple, GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Vista, Vista 7, Vista 8, Windows at 7:29 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Cemetery in snow

Summary: Cold reception for future releases of Windows and its variants

THE reality behind Vista 7 is not so pleasant, but either way, Microsoft Nick admits that Microsoft tried to bury Vista this year.

Microsoft’s old friends from IDC opine that Vista 7 might be the “last PC OS from Microsoft”, but this does not mean that Vista 8 will be called off. Under codenames like “Midori”, Microsoft has spoken about this for a long time, since 2008 in fact. Mozilla talks about this too and Google already implements this with Chrome OS (which Microsoft daemonises because it’s based on GNU/Linux).

Mozilla Claims Browser Will Run All Future Apps

Mozilla is claiming that its new mobile web browser, currently dubbed Fennec, will spell the end of application stores for mobile phones because once developers start writing for it, apps will run on any platform and can bypass platform specific app stores. Yes, that’s right, the old “write once, run anywhere” promise. It didn’t work when Java gained popularity in the 90′s, and I don’t think it will work any better as the new decade dawns.

PC Pro interviewed Jay Sullivan, the vice president of mobile at Mozilla. Mr. Sullivan claims that as developers get more frustrated with mobile app stores and the approval process, they will move their apps to the web. They won’t have to fool with app approval nor with rewriting apps for the major mobile platforms, now numbered six.

“As developers get more frustrated with quality assurance, the amount of handsets they have to buy, whether their security updates will get past the iPhone approval process… I think they’ll move to the web.”

In other news, the reality behind Windows Mobile gets uglier as nothing seems to go right. The next version of the operating system slips as usual (Microsoft cannot ever stick to deadlines, not even last week).

Microsoft has revealed that Windows Mobile 7 – the next version of its smartphone OS – is unlikely to be released until “late 2010″.

Here is where the date came from, obviously leading to disappointment:

The news comes from Microsoft’s UK head of mobility Phil Moore who is quoted as saying: “It has been put back until late next year but it is definitely coming”.

It gets even worse because Xperia X2 too is delayed.

Xperia X2 Delayed Again

[...]

It has been quite a while since Sony Ericsson officially announced the Windows Mobile powered Xperia X2.

Sony Ericsson moved closer to Linux in recent months. Might they just abandon their Windows Mobile plans now that Microsoft reveals further delays and a poor strategy overall?

CNN has written about Linux-powered phones from Google and we include links on the subject of Android on an almost daily basis

Google (GOOG) announced on its mobile blog Saturday what dozens of staffers had already leaked: the company has given employees around the world free handsets running its Android mobile operating system. The idea, according to the official report, is to have Google’s own people test various advanced features and offer feedback to the company’s designers — a process known in the business as “dogfooding” (as in “eating your own dogfood”).

Microsoft bloggers are trying to steal the thunder by mentioning Google’s products, in this case the Google phone. Oh, how things have changed (gotten reversed). The Microsoft-sponsored TechFlash blog did the same thing a few days ago when Yelp moved towards Google. There is a lot of Google envy at Microsoft, as the previous post hopefully showed. Microsoft is also very jealous of the iPhone and news coverage from the past week includes:

Windows Mobile on Life Support, Drops Behind iPhone

Apple Tops Windows in Smart Phone Share

Microsoft admits it was “caught napping” by the iPhone

Microsoft mobile chief ‘We’re still playing catch-up’ – with Apple

Apple scored a home run with the iPhone, and rivals are still struggling to catch-up, even while Google’s Android OS poses an additional threat to former smartphone industry leaders.

Here is new analysis from the Gerson Lehrman Group, a self-admitted “big fan of Windows Mobile”:

Microsoft – Losing Ground in Mobile

[...]

This year, I’ve been closely watching the horse race between iPhone, Android, and Windows Mobile. As it’s turning out, it’s not much of a race for Microsoft. As a big fan of Windows Mobile, I’ve been concerned that Microsoft would blow it as we headed into this crucial fourth quarter.

Some people argue that Microsoft will try to buy RIM. Older rumours said that Microsoft had already attempted to do this, maybe because it royally messed up Danger/SideKick (more information below).

Posts about the Microsoft-imposed SideKick disaster:


Direct link (Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer laughs at Apple’s iPhone in 2007)

Google and Microsoft Fight Over Data and Contracts

Posted in Australia, GNU/Linux, Google, Mail, Microsoft, Novell at 6:40 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Sun rays

Summary: The race to refine people’s digital profiles (for personalised/targeted advertising) reaches E-mail and Free/libre substitutes do exist

MICROSOFT is hoping to destroy Google, which is a big user of GNU/Linux. Microsoft has managed to wrap its tentacles around Yahoo! in hopes of harming Google’s main source of revenue (search and advertisements), but as the Wall Street Journal puts it, the value of Yahoo! to Microsoft keeps declining.

Drop In Yahoo Search Share May Trim Microsoft Deal’s Benefits

Yahoo Inc. (YHOO) expects to close its search deal with Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) early next year, but the benefits of that partnership might already be eroding as Yahoo’s search share slips with each passing month.

An interesting battle where neither Google nor Microsoft deserve a place is E-mail. Sadly enough, institutions and businesses are gradually selling their staff and students to a monopolist, passing all their mail to an untrusted third party which will be scanning people’s communication and profiling based on it. The Chicago Tribune has this new article about it, titled “Microsoft vs. Google”

With university endowments and public school budgets still feeling the pinch, the competition between Google and Microsoft to convert the nation’s colleges, universities and schools to the companies’ free e-mail and other information technology services that run on the Internet “cloud” has grown fiercer.

The common choice these days has become somewhat of a duopoly, with quite a few Australian universities surrendering their personal data to Microsoft. We wrote about a few of them before and we have already explained why universities should use neither if they care about the autonomy and privacy of those who pay tuition [1, 2]. For the time being, it seems safer to cautiously accept Google, rather than give Microsoft a penny.

“For personal reasons, I do not browse the web from my computer. (I also have not net connection much of the time.) To look at page I send mail to a demon which runs wget and mails the page back to me. It is very efficient use of my time, but it is slow in real time.”

Richard Stallman

When it comes to online office suites, there is a third player that does not receive much attention because it’s not a big brand.

Zoho Reports, the web-based productivity suite’s business and data intelligence tool, is ripping off the beta tag and officially launching today with a new pricing model and set of features. Zoho Reports, which was formerly known as Zoho DB, provides developers and database administrators with better ways to manage, digest and understand their data. It’s similar in theory to Microsoft Access but that the application is online.

Those who want a hosted service of this kind should preferably use Feng (formerly OpenGoo). It is Free software, so the server side can be deployed locally, modified, and redistributed too. Here is another article about Los Angeles moving to Google Apps (and away from Novell). We wrote about that before, but for other reasons with emphasis on Groupwise.

Lastly, we have been trying to determine whether this video of a Bing firing was real or just staged. According to this Seattle-based site:

Apparently, this guy was just a little too laidback in his response for Ballmer, who screamed “You’re Fired!” and without skipping a beat pointed at another guy.

Unfortunately, the video is unverified. The chap who uploaded hasn’t responded yet for comment, and this piece will be updated when I know more. What do you think: real or fake?

There is a really embarrassing (and authentic) video of Steve Ballmer taken in September, but it was pulled and we never found it. Microsoft tried to limit footage of Steve Ballmer on stage, maybe because he is very tactless (and candidate for exit).

Neon Challenges IBM’s GNU/Linux Mainframes, EU Challenges IE Bundling, and Microsoft Helps Push Mono and Moonlight Into GNU/Linux

Posted in Antitrust, Europe, GNU/Linux, IBM, Interoperability, Microsoft, Mono, Novell, Patents, Servers, Windows at 5:54 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Expansion of some news picks from Groklaw, ranging from Neon news to the European Commission, Microsoft, Mono, and Moonlight

IBM has been charged with “anticompetitive” allegations by a company that appears not to be connected with Microsoft. Coverage about this includes:

Now, look at the company’s homepage. We have captured screenshots because the homepage will change in the future.

NEON Web site

Let’s look more closely:

NEON vs IBM

The company’s news section is narrow in terms of scope:

NEON news

T3′s homepage was also all about IBM immediately after T3 had sued IBM. We captured screenshots of that too, writing about them in previous posts about T3, whose connection to Microsoft we wrote about in:

The above might become handy in the future. At Groklaw, Pamela Jones points to this article when she writes: “Well, without knowing anything about the facts of this case yet, I do recall Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith’s remark when the EU Commission announced the deal about the browser, “It is important we believe to create a level legal and regulatory playing field,” Smith said. “Everyone that has a high market share needs to respect the same set of rules. I think a number of these rules are likely to be applicable to other companies and other products.”

Groklaw’s response to the atrocious deal with the European Commission (the “interoperability” aspect of it [1, 2, 3, 4]) initially went into negative territories, after citing the ‘Microsoft press’ that says:

First, Microsoft has committed to implement a range of important industry standards in its software, including Web standards in Internet Explorer. Our agreement also recognizes that standards are often complex, and sometimes imprecise or even incomplete. To account for that, we will publicly document how we have implemented relevant standards so the information is readily available to all software developers. Our customers can reap the benefits of some of this work already in the beta version of Microsoft Office 2010, available today, which enables users to save and open documents in a variety of industry standard formats. These formats include Open XML (a standard originally sponsored by Microsoft) and the Open Document Format (a standard originally sponsored by competitors to Microsoft)….We also are posting our protocol documentation on the Internet, so any developer can access it easily without entering into a license with Microsoft.

Quoting Todd Bishop/Brad Smith from the Microsoft-funded Microsoft blog, Jones mocks the part which says: ‘“The most important question that we look at is whether a feature has APIs, or application programming interfaces, that are going to be important to the developers of Windows applications,” explained Brad Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel, in an interview with TechFlash this morning. “The browser is such a piece of software today. It has APIs that other applications call. That’s one reason we included the browser as part of Windows in the late 1990s. I think there was a recognition of the value that this creates for the industry as a whole by the courts in the United States and now the European Commission, in effect, today, because an important part of the announcement today is that Internet Explorer will remain a part of Windows, including in Europe.”‘

Jones writes: “Recognition of the value… hahahaha. Pass out laughing. But first I will point out that this seems to be an indication of what the settlement is about from Microsoft’s standpoint.”

Opera expected this to happen, but it is funny how Microsoft views its role. Last year it was Craig Mundie (Microsoft’s Chief Strategy Officer and lobbyist [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]) who said: “Google Owes Its Business To Us”

Does Microsoft really want people to believe that there would be no computers without Microsoft?

As a side note, Jones also remarked on the Moonlight news, highlighting the following important bit:

There is one catch, however.

The new patent covenant extension is only for Moonlight and does not extend to the full Mono project, which is Novell’s implementation of Microsoft’s .NET framework. Novell updated Mono to version 2.6 this week. As a result, the agreement covers only the subset of Mono that comes as a part of Moonlight. “This patent covenant only applies to Moonlight and the version of Mono that ships with Moonlight,” Goldfarb said.

So the problems with Mono basically remain and Moonlight is still Novell-only software for other reasons. One piece of software that only Novell customers can use safely (that would Banshee) is latching onto Docky now.

No need for a massive evolution from the Gnome-Do Banshee control plug-in, this is a nice addition for Banshee users.

It’s a bit like Telepathy. Mono is grabbing all sort of other parts of GNOME, just like moss in a highly-fertilised garden. Novell is paying for this and Microsoft does too (it pays Novell).

8,500 Posts

Posted in Site News at 4:52 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Novel party

Summary: Another milestone for this Web site, which is only 3 years old

THE previous post was post #8500. 10,000 is not far away, but we might need help from you, our dear readers.

The Gates Foundation Extends Control Over Communication with Oxfam Relationship

Posted in Africa, Bill Gates, Finance, Microsoft at 4:30 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Oxfam logo

Summary: Many new PR tricks that ought to be tackled; The Gates Foundation uses Oxfam to further promote the Monsanto GMO agenda it’s investing heavily in

MICROSOFT is to a large degree a marketing company. It has great stakes in the media (see links at the bottom) and it is important for Microsoft to control what people think or how they feel about Microsoft and its products. Occasionally we find that Microsoft uses children and AIDS to promote its products [1, 2, 3]. It is a very shameless tactic that a parents group apparently complained about last month.

“Occasionally we find that Microsoft uses children and AIDS to promote its products.”There is a lot of coverage about a PR move from Microsoft right now — one where it claims to be fighting child porn. it is worth stressing that “child porn” is the favourite excuse — whether perceived or real — to justify censorship or removal (annexation affecting online communities) of entire protocols. The copyright cartel uses it to attack peer-to-peer software and politicians use it to kill USENET, which is decentralised. Politicians typically struggle to understand technology, but child porn is something they understand.

That aside, Microsoft is also doing the PR routines in Copenhagen. We wrote about this before because Microsoft is a top polluter. Watch how Associated (Content) is glorying the world's biggest patent troll, who came from Microsoft with financial support from Bill Gates, Microsoft, and Apple. Associated pretends that this patent troll fights Global Warming by amassing the very same patents that prevent action. It is worth adding that Gates denies Global Warming. It’s just not on his agenda, which seems more focused on controlling the world’s food. We wrote about this in:

  1. With Microsoft Monopoly in Check, Bill Gates Proceeds to Creating More Monopolies
  2. Gates-Backed Company Accused of Monopoly Abuse and Investigated
  3. How the Gates Foundation Privatises Africa
  4. Reader’s Article: The Gates Foundation and Genetically-Modified Foods
  5. Monsanto: The Microsoft of Food
  6. Seeds of Doubt in Bill Gates Investments
  7. Gates Foundation Accused of Faking/Fabricating Data to Advance Political Goals
  8. More Dubious Practices from the Gates Foundation
  9. Video Transcript of Vandana Shiva on Insane Patents
  10. Explanation of What Bill Gates’ Patent Investments Do to Developing World
  11. Black Friday Film: What the Bill Gates-Backed Monsanto Does to Animals, Farmers, Food, and Patent Systems
  12. Gates Foundation Looking to Destroy Kenya with Intellectual Monopolies
  13. Young Napoleon Comes to Africa and Told Off
  14. Bill Gates Takes His GMO Patent Investments/Experiments to India
  15. Gates/Microsoft Tax Dodge and Agriculture Monopoly Revisited
  16. Beyond the ‘Public Relations’
  17. UK Intellectual Monopoly Office (UK-IPO) May be Breaking the Law
  18. “Boycott Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in China”

As we showed earlier this month, Gates also pays people to write favourably about the Monsanto plan [1, 2]. As it turns out, based on this new job vacancy, the Gates Foundation uses Oxfam (money injection) to lobby for the Monsanto agenda from that vector too. They are looking for a “communications coordinator”.

The post would be split 50% between delivery on the Gates Foundation funded project: ‘Strengthening Women’s Livelihoods through Collective Action: Market Opportunities in Smallholder Agriculture’. The remaining 50% will support related learning and tools development processes and product delivery, of ongoing work on women and smallholder agriculture (e.g. linked to EDP, Accenture) working closely with Global Gendered Livelihoods and other advisers.

Accenture? As in Microsoft’s strong ally?

At the end of the day, this is about having more influence over agriculture in Africa, which Monsanto strives to control absolutely under the pretext of “world hunger”. Gates and Rockefeller are big financial pusher for this, jointly lobbying for the goal under their euphemistic banner, “Green Revolution”.

Speaking of controlling press outlets, this news article is just several days old:

Roberts began attending Comcast company meetings with his dad Ralph when he was about 10 years old. When Comcast was preparing to go public in 1972, the 13-year-old Brian found a typo in the document that could have negatively affected the initial public offering. At 32, he was the youngest guy in the room when he leaned over and urged Bill Gates to buy 10% of the industry in 1997. A few weeks later, Gates’ Microsoft Corp. invested $1 billion in Comcast, setting off a string of investments and partnerships that revived and propelled cable to new heights.

Now 50, Roberts could become one of the country’s youngest — and surely most powerful — media moguls once the NBCU deal is completed. It is against this backdrop that Multichannel News has named Roberts as its Executive of the Year.

“That Microsoft story is so indicative of Brian,” said Julian Brodsky, one of the original founders of Comcast and someone who watched and mentored Roberts throughout his career.

More information about the Comcast-NBC situation can be found below. As long as they control the news channels, they also control the information people receive. It’s not a coincidence, it’s designed to be that way. If companies never do something malicious, then there is hardly any need to control the press at all (to deliver spin and revisionism).

Related and very recent posts:

Microsoft Announces More SPAM and Bribery Tactics

Posted in Deception, Finance, Mail, Marketing, Microsoft at 3:26 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

“Never wrestle with a pig—you get dirty and the pig likes it”

Sometimes attributed to Abraham Lincoln

Transfer

Summary: Microsoft’s marketing strategy turns very ugly and unethical based on reports and press releases that have received no proper attention

AS WE pointed out many times before, Microsoft loves contracting companies to do its unethical and/or illegal activities. We last mentioned this in reference to Plurk, but we have a lot of posts about Microsoft’s PR agencies, which are doing nasty things to promote Microsoft.

Well, Microsoft has just hired another sort of “proxy” to do its marketing. The name of the firm is Halesowen and in their site they say:

Microsoft picks Halesowen company to feature in new advertising campaign

[...]

Simon added: “Not only have we re-initiated old relationships, but by using e-mail Marketing, we now have a targeted way to promote specific business services.”

“E-mail Marketing” a euphemism for spam, or even “legalised” spam which is uninvited bulk mail that’s promotional. Well done, Microsoft. This company suits your character.

Another marketing contract has just been signed with eCoast. Here are the details:

eCoast to Provide Twitter Marketing for Microsoft

[...]

eCoast, a provider of outsourced demand generation and channel program management solutions in the technology industry, was selected by Microsoft to offer marketing services to its channel partners through the Ready-to-Go Microsoft portal.

Microsoft already uses Waggener Edstrom to ‘manage’ Twitter. Microsoft also ganged up against the Twitter community (real people) using Federated Media. In addition, see the following:

Microsoft marketing has neither shame nor boundaries. They probably convinced themselves that they are doing a favour to the world. As Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson once put it, “I think he [Bill Gates] has a Napoleonic concept of himself and his company, an arrogance that derives from power and unalloyed success…”

Well, look at this new development; Microsoft is hiring “independent experts” whom it pays and one cannot help thinking whether the PR agencies of Microsoft do the same thing. We know for sure about the lobbying groups and there are many confirmed cases of Microsoft AstroTurfing.

As it turns out, just like last year (when Microsoft first introduced Vista 7), there are big freebies at PDC:

Microsoft surprised attendees to November’s Professional Developers Conference with free touch-screen laptops. It wasn’t largesse, for the company had an ulterior motive: to get developers to write applications that utilize touch interfaces.

Who can forget the Vista 7 laptops bribes from the previous year (PDC 2008)?

According to TechCrunch, Microsoft is now bribing some more bloggers in exchange for coverage.

Microsoft Recruits Student Bloggers With Free Software And Trips To Conferences

We’ve confirmed with Microsoft that the tech giant has launched a new program, called Student Insiders, to enlist college students to blog about Microsoft products. In return, the Microsoft “Student Insider” will be able to attend Microsoft conferences, such as Microsoft’s developer conference, PDC, and others and then write about their experiences and the products. The student will get all expenses paid to attend conferences as well as receive free training on Microsoft products. Student Insiders are expected to cover 15 events or topics a year, with at least “500 engagements per event/topic.”

It appears that Microsoft will try to recruit students with “established blogs” to write about a wide variety of Microsoft products. The advertisement we received focused on getting students to review Microsoft’s Expression Studio, a design and development software.

It is rather strange that TechCrunch complains about it because Microsoft paid Michael Arrington to recite Microsoft slogans in his blog, TechCrunch. He got exposed and turned very rude towards those who exposed him. Either way, Microsoft has an extensive history of distorting blog content by bribing bloggers. The above talks about the bribing of students, but Microsoft bribes professors too.

“Ideally, use of the competing technology becomes associated with mental deficiency, as in, “he believes in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and OS/2.” Just keep rubbing it in, via the press, analysts, newsgroups, whatever. Make the complete failure of the competition’s technology part of the mythology of the computer industry. We want to place selection pressure on those companies and individuals that show a genetic weakness for competitors’ technologies, to make the industry increasingly resistant to such unhealthy strains, over time.”

Microsoft, internal document [PDF]

Microsoft Crimes Emit Another $4,415,258 in Arizona, Amid Newer Crimes

Posted in Asia, Bill Gates, Deception, Free/Libre Software, Microsoft at 2:46 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Sedona rocks

Summary: Microsoft pays compensation to more victims of its illegal practices, but illegal practices continue to this date, leading to even more penalties

Microsoft is still a felonious company, but some of its offences it pays for many, many years after the crimes. In Arizona, for example, Microsoft was pressured to eventually pay back in June and this is finally finalised only in December:

Microsoft will pay more than $4.4 million to Arizona government agencies after settling an antitrust lawsuit in which the company was accused of overcharging for Office software and the MS/DOS operating system.

The Daisy Mountain Fire District sued Microsoft one year ago, alleging the software superpower abused its monopoly power. In the class action, the fire district represented all Arizona state and local agencies that bought Microsoft operating systems and applications between May 1994 and December 2008. Microsoft denied liability.

More fines are directed at Microsoft for present abuses that we wrote about last week. The short story is that Microsoft is harassing defendants whom it accuses of ‘piracy’ (it is definitely not piracy), despite the fact that Bill Gates said that “it’s easier for our software to compete with [GNU/]Linux when there’s piracy than when there’s not.”

The Delhi High Court has fined Microsoft for harassing alleged software pirates by taking them to court in the national capitol, instead of the cities where the crimes had supposedly occurred. According to the ruling, using money as a power tool is not condoned without repercussions.

We have written many posts about why Microsoft is lying about this so-called ‘piracy’. Among them:

This week too there is more of that Microsoft propaganda about ‘piracy’ in the Middle East and in India. Wait, what about Somalia? Microsoft adds fire to this tired propaganda by spinning it as “by popular demand”, so to speak. Microsoft pretends that by attacking its own customers and distributors it is just doing what customers ask for, which is probably a lie.

Redmond claims people are turning themselves in

Software giant Microsoft claims that it has launched an initiative to curb software piracy because its own customers have asked it to take action.

That’s hilarious. That’s just rich. But either way, GNU/Linux advocates hope that Microsoft cracks down on those so-called ‘pirates’ really, really hard. It advocates GNU/Linux.

« Previous Page« Previous entries « Previous Page · Next Page » Next entries »Next Page »

RSS 64x64RSS Feed: subscribe to the RSS feed for regular updates

Home iconSite Wiki: You can improve this site by helping the extension of the site's content

Chat iconIRC Channels: Come and chat with us in real time

New to This Site? Here Are Some Introductory Resources

No

Mono

ODF

Samba logo






We support

End software patents

GPLv3

GNU project

BLAG

EFF bloggers

Comcast is Blocktastic? SavetheInternet.com



Recent Posts