Summary: The possible role of an Olympic race in Microsoft's decision to build in Chicago

MANY ADDITIONS were merged into the Wiki today and soon we shall have new material about Brazil, thanks to the help of readership from there.

As many people may know by now, Microsoft builds a US datacentre only in Chicago. Why Chicago? One reader from Europe put forth an interesting possibility, perhaps knowing that Microsoft makes such allocations of funds and favours with strategic insight at heart/mind; one should take for example the simple fact that they bring more workforce and a datacentre to Ireland where Microsoft can influence EU law and continue to escape taxation. Groklaw raised a similar type of concern when Microsoft 'rewarded' Norway with a datacentre after a batch of very apparent favours.

“They already had several Microsoft disasters in recent games, not the least visible was the BSOD on the opening ceremonies in China.”
      --Anonymous reader"BSOD" is the one-word reason for all this, according to our reader. He refers to this type of incident and argues: "I notice that despite a good position and major effort from the US, Chicago lost the bid for the 2016 Olympics. How much did the Microsoft threat turn off the Olympic committee. They already had several Microsoft disasters in recent games, not the least visible was the BSOD on the opening ceremonies in China.

"Microsoft is also threatening to put what it calls a data center in the Chicago area and might have tried to piggy back on the games, had the bid been won.

"Rio, on the other hand, is in Brazil, which is leaving closed source and closed standards and above all Microsoft behind.

"Could it be that Microsoft's interference in Chicago was a factor in losing the bid?"

The BBC published this article about Brazil early in the morning. The article says nothing about Brazil's unique advancement of Free software, but it is not particularly surprising given the biased source.

Speaking of failures, this new complaint about Microsoft software has made the front page of Slashdot over the weekend.

This not just a rant against microsoft but a pratical article for all developpers using Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 to build their product.

At the beginning of August 2009, Microsoft issued a security patch KB971090 on its Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 product: the result was that when we recompiled our plugin with this updated Studio, it would not run on other PCs. The symtoms were:

* Our ActiveX would not register on the system, complaining that the CRT or MFC assembly could not be found (to be detected by opening the Event Observer). * Our Fireforx plugin would not load. * If you have a standalone application and have upgraded to Internet Explore 8, you may have the complain that IESHims.dll is missing.

You can easily confirm the issue by configuring your project to generate an external manifest for your application and see if you have someting like:

[...]

We also noticed that some client PCs running Windows Vista had updated build 3053 (not 4053) and when we tried to ship build 4053 as private assembly, Windows complained that the two assemblies were in conflict (although we were shipping the MFC and CRT as private assemblies). This conflict message was so undocumented that nobody seems to have encountered the situation. So the simplest solution was to remove this security fix.

What sane person would wish to mimic such an architecture?

Well, Novell's engineers are trying, only to be met with skepticism even from Samba lawyer Carlo Piana, who wrote: "Is it my impression, or the new !Gnome builds more consistently on #Mono? Bad decision, legally-wise, if you ask."

Piana marked it as "!Gnome", which means that the Mono brigade noticed and is already silencing his "dissent". ⬆

"I'd like to see Gnome applications written in .NET in version 4.0 - no, version 3.0. But Gnome 4.0 should be based on .NET."

--"Gnome to be based on .NET – de Icaza"