05.03.09
Posted in GNOME, GNU/Linux, GPL, Microsoft, Mono, Novell, Red Hat at 2:05 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Gnote will be included in Fedora 10 and Fedora 11, which is out shortly
THE developer of Gnote moved to Fedora a few days ago. Fedora is known for its realisation and insistence on Freedom (although it does not go far enough for some). A lot of this is caused by legal precaution and Fedora already blocks Moonlight for this reason alone.
Gnote is a perfectly acceptable application which performs gracefully. According to this conversation, “The Fedora project further confirms this [that Gnote is fine] by including Gnote in Fedora 10 and 11.” Moreover: “Gnote is GPLv3-or-later, so it can always be distributed under the terms of the latest version of the GPL.”
“Gnote is a perfectly acceptable application which performs gracefully.”The pro-Mono crowd (some Novell and Microsoft employees included) would not be terribly happy about this because Tomboy is admittedly not as libre as Gnote. Jo Shields says that “[f]eatures CANNOT be ported back from Gnote – Gnote is GPLv3, and is only compatible with LGPL2 in one direction. I suspect this was 101% intentional.”
Irrespective of whether it’s intentional or not — and apparently it’s not even true — Gnote grew tremendously fast (even its resistors are stunned by how much was achieved in less than a month) and it's pending addition to Debian and Ubuntu. For those who want GNOME to stay independent from Mono, Gnote [1-6] is a project to support by spreading the word and asking distribution packagers to include it (either installed by default or added to the repositories). █
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[1] Project of the Day: GNote
[2] Tomboy is Afraid of Gnote, Its Mono-free Sibling
[3] Gnote Supports 6 More Languages, Does Not Support C#
[4] The Role of Mono and Moonlight Revisited
[5] Did Tomboy Learn from TomTom? Project Forked, Moves Away from Microsoft ‘Standards’
[6] Novell Partners Promote Silverlight, Zeitgeist at Risk of Mono(polists)
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Posted in Finance, GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft at 5:37 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Microsoft wants you to take its browser
cookie (and give Microsoft a lot more control)
Summary: Microsoft drops “Search & Give” (for now), cuts down other spurious spendings, and prays it can use Yahoo! to injure Google
MICROSOFT’S ATTEMPTS TO offer incentives to people who use its search engine [1, 2] were never successful, unless it was Microsoft who commissioned contradictory 'studies'.
With its online business declining at a two-digit rate despite huge investments, Microsoft is getting even more cash-strapped, so it sheds off “Search & Give”.
Microsoft is temporarily ending its Search And Give program, a site that sought to boost usage of its Live Search engine by donating a penny per search to an organization of the user’s choice.
Well, according to the same source, Microsoft also cuts spendings on its own employees, not just customers.
The moves reflect the difficult economy and decreased demand for the company’s products. The company last week reported its first year-over-year decline in quarterly revenue – a 6 percent drop compared to the same period a year ago.
The following trollish ZDNet post says that “Microsoft is bleeding.” It’s primarily about Microsoft’s online business.
Each month, new statistics about search engine traffic usage are published by companies like Comscore, and it never fails that Microsoft loses ground, and Google gains. It’s true that search is a small part of Microsoft’s strategy, but when you look at the amount of money they are throwing away to try and compete ($1 Billion per year), it’s not hard to see that there are several eggs in that basket.
Google might lose its partnership with AOL, but Microsoft may never establish an anti-Google partnership with Yahoo!, either. Here is a new list of four arguments against such a partnership:
[T]his week, a source we can only describe as someone very familiar with Yahoo’s advertising business gave us four reasons why Yahoo should actually run as far as can from Microsoft’s offer.
* The primary reason is that while most agencies and ad buyers may not care if they buy their search and display advertising from the same place, some do and the number is rapidly growing. Our source estimates that two years ago, probably 30% of Yahoo’s advertisers bought into this convergence, 50% buy it now and next year, 70% will prefer taking their business to a search engine that can also sell display advertising and vice-versa.
* Even outside of losing the business of advertisers who prefer to do one-stop shopping, giving up search could drastically damage Yahoo’s display business. Our source says about 25% of Yahoo’s display revenues come through behavioral targeting, which doesn’t work if Yahoo doesn’t know what search queries its users are using.
[...]
There are still some reports out there about Yahoo! and Microsoft, but it seems to be eternally hanging. We’ve heard all about it (in one form or another) for over a year.
Yahoo and Microsoft are in talks again, but this time it‘s a partnership deal on the table rather than a proposed acquisition, according to reports.
Yahoo! can’t save Microsoft. Sticking two inferior search engines together won’t make a better one. The same goes for two computer programs like ZFS and btrfs (advanced filesystem implementations, both of which are owned by Oracle). █
“Forty percent of servers run Windows, 60 percent run Linux…”
–Steve Ballmer (September 2008)
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Posted in Deception, Microsoft, Vista, Vista 7, Windows at 5:16 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“In the face of strong competition, Evangelism’s focus may shift immediately to the next version of the same technology, however. Indeed, Phase 1 (Evangelism Starts) for version x+1 may start as soon as this Final Release of version X.”
–Microsoft, internal document [PDF]
THIS MORNING we repeat last week’s experiment, wherein we accumulate news headlines from an entire week and then filter them — bar duplicates — by headline. This week, looking at headlines matching “Windows 7″, we have 34 results returned. Doing the same for “Vista”, we have just 4 (mostly SP2 headlines, 3 out of 4 to be precise). This is a classic!
Microsoft is already pretending that Windows Vista does not exist because it wants people to only talk about the “Next Best Thing”, which is still unknown vapourware [1, 2] that Microsoft hyped up with bribes. The quote at the top shows an explanation coming from Microsoft’s own mouth (its "theoretician").
“There’s a lot of money going into it because the Windows franchise is the most vital one for Microsoft’s dominant position.”Readers may wonder who it is that spreads the buzz about Vista 7 in the first place. Well, for the most part it’s the usual suspects, whose job in the press seems to be to consistently promote Microsoft and vilify its competitors in sophisticated, subtle ways. To give an example, here is Microsoft Jack (context in [1, 2]) promoting Vista 7 some days ago.
Unlike the press which relies on advertising, communities just say what they really think about Vista 7:
Of course, the “upgraded” Windows 7 still can’t compete with a Linux installation on features (can you say “OpenOffice”? Sure, I knew you could…), so MS is apparently hoping that consumers will give them even MORE money for MS Office.
Tired of Microsoft cleaning out your wallet for you? Then just say NO to Windows and MS Office!
Don’t be deceived by Microsoft’s slog for Vista 7, which Waggener Edstrom has been (still is) a part of. Waggener Edstrom gave free laptops to seed positive reviews of Vista 7. There’s a lot of money going into it because the Windows franchise is the most vital one for Microsoft’s dominant position. It acts as a prerequisite ramp for most of the other profitable applications. █
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Posted in Finance, Hardware, Microsoft at 4:22 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
XBox is still hanging in there
Summary: More depressing news for XBox 360 as it swings back to losses and the strategy chief jumps ship
A LOT of people are being misled by Microsoft’s PR, which makes it seem like XBox 360 is actually succeeding. In reality — truth be told — several years after the launch Microsoft is still losing money.
The loss comes after two consecutive quarters of profit for the division, which had long been notorious as an overall money-loser for Microsoft.
This is scarcely covered by the press, but more disturbingly, the usual fan sites were yapping about XBox results being great when the last report came out (with overall earnings down 32%). It was a lie. Here is more information:
The news was similarly scattered for Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices division, which includes the Xbox 360 business. Total revenues for the gaming segment were down less than 2 percent to $1.57 billion, and where the division posted an operating profit of $106 million during last year’s second quarter, this year it ran a $31 million loss.
A year or so ago, Information Week revealed that Microsoft had lost about $7 billion in its XBox business alone. It seems to be one of the best-guarded secrets of Microsoft.
How can so much money be lost other than by selling units at a loss? Well, with an enormous failure rate (claimed to be around 67%), this whole business has become painful and almost suicidal. Even the editor of EDN has just published an article about those Red Rings of Death he has been getting on his XBox 360. It’s not a resolved issue; it’s a design flaw.
Back on Wednesday the 15th, I told you that my first-generation Xbox 360 game console had experienced the Red Ring of Death the prior Friday evening. I also shipped it off on the 15th, and the UPS tracking website reported that it was delivered to Microsoft’s Mesquite, TX service facility at 10:15AM on the 21st.
Microsoft fired its more responsible employee for saying he truth about the failure rates. He was called a “whistleblower” rather than a knowledgeable person who wanted to mitigate the risk of death (XBox 360s are reportedly catching on fire sometimes).
The situation in XBox is so miserable that even its strategy chief has just quit Microsoft.
MICROSOFT’s Xbox strategy boss Richard Teversham has quit the firm to join arch rival Apple, MCV can reveal.
This is also covered in:
Speaking of an XBox director who departs, here is another XBox director who recently departed in anger. He’s a film director though, not an executive director. We wrote about it some days ago and here’s more information:
Other XBox employees had similarly bad experiences. Over the past 2 years, many key employees of the XBox group simply ditched the company. We have some examples here. █
“If you can’t make it good, at least make it look good.”
–Bill Gates, Microsoft
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Posted in Microsoft, Security, Windows at 4:01 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: More victims of Conficker (“dozens of hospitals”) and no real solutions to this from Microsoft
IN recent months we’ve come across many cases where hospitals went awry due to their use and/or dependence on Microsoft Windows. To give as examples some recent posts, we have:
- New Casualties of Microsoft Windows?
- Death by Microsoft Windows
- US Army Becomes Zombies Army; London Hospitals Still Ill (Windows Viruses)
- Utah Has Novell, SCO, and… Conficker in the Hospitals
- Windows in the Emergency Room
Here are some new ones for the list:
1. Feds’ red tape left medical devices infected with computer virus
The Conficker Internet virus has infected important computerized medical devices, but governmental red tape interfered with their repair, an organizer of an antivirus working group told Congress on Friday.
2. Conficker worm hits hospital devices
A computer worm that has alarmed security experts around the world has crawled into hundreds of medical devices at dozens of hospitals in the United States and other countries, according to technologists monitoring the threat.
So, according to that last article, “dozens of hospitals in the United States and other countries” are affected. This is serious. There a lot more about Conficker in the news this week, e.g.:
Where is Microsoft in all this?
Internet security experts say that the computer worm known as Conficker, which has the ability to silently penetrate vulnerabilities within the Microsoft operating system, is beginning to rear its ugly head.
They say that the software is installing new and malicious programs on some of the computers it has already invaded with the aim of using those PCs to send out criminal spam and scrounge around on unsecured computers for valuable personal data, Reuters reported Friday.
[...]
Experts say that the Conficker worm has already dug into millions of PCs but only been activated in a small percent of them. It was feared that the makers of the software program would trigger a massive attack on April 1. While that didn’t happen, the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) said earlier this month that it has detected a new variant of the worm that “updates earlier infections via its peer-to-peer network against unpatched systems.”
Microsoft is awkwardly quiet, having ignored lots of trouble that we also covered in:
- Microsoft’s Blame-Shifting Strategy Precedes More Trouble
- Leave Microsoft Alone
- Never Blame Microsoft, Blame Users and Exploits
- Botnets and Bounties Versus Real Security
- Is Windows to Blame for Cracking of Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)?
- Windows Problems Take Down Airplanes, JFK Airport, Houston Municipal Courts
- Turkey, France, United Stated Under Attack by Microsoft Windows Insecurities
- Microsoft Adopts Malware Techniques to Advance .NET
- Windows Botnets Go Out of Control, Obama Web Site Delivers Windows Malware
- One Windows Worm, One Week, and Possibly 250,000,000+ New Windows Zombies
- UNIX/Linux Offer More Security Than Windows: Evidence
- Eye on Microsoft: Another Messy Week for Security
Microsoft only works on improving its perception through work on ‘security’ (not the same as actually making its products secure), sparingly using the term “memorandum of understanding” to describe eventhis latest deal:
The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission [EFCC] and Microsoft yesterday signed a Memorandum of Understanding [MoU] to jointly combat internet crime in Nigeria. This was disclosed in a joint press briefing of the EFCC and representatives of Microsoft held at the headquarter of the anti-corruption agency.
There is also this report:
The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission and Microsoft on Thursday in Abuja signed a Memorandum of Understanding to curb internet crime and piracy in Nigeria.
Microsoft should quit lying about what it calls "piracy". Moreover, it should pay attention to Conficker because it harms not only its own customers; it also bothers users of other operating systems, more or less as a side effect on the Internet. █
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Posted in Asia, Deception, Microsoft at 3:13 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Thai schools — with government endorsement — may help Microsoft earn some young customers
SOME days ago we saw this in Spain and it turns out that activists will fight back. We also saw this in Russia and some other places. Microsoft is very, very desperate to get children (tomorrow’s generation) stuck with Microsoft. IDG, as expected, is completely missing the point about GNU/Linux in Russia, not to mention antitrust. In fact, it praises Microsoft for EDGI tactics, which should be made illegal.
No, really. Look at this. See how IDG describes a brutal tactic as though it’s exactly what Microsoft press releases call it:
According to the Moscow Times, he also heaped praise upon local officials for their efforts in fighting the global recession. Never mind the Russian government’s attempts to stabilize the Ruble by burning through its foreign currency reserves, or its leaders’ tirades against the United States for causing the global economic slowdown. The Microsoft CEO praised the “amazing work the Russian government is doing” to boost the economy.
If this does not lead to nausea just yet, then the following reading about EDGI is required.
As the title of this post suggests, Microsoft is now doing something of the same kind over in Thailand, where Free software like OpenOffice.org has gained strong government adoption. Lots of Thai children, however, will be pushed into Microsoft’s so-called ‘cloud’, to which they will probably be tied even when they finish school.
In an initial stage, the company will begin a pilot project in collaboration with Sripratum University in which students at 2,000 schools around the country will be able to sign-on to Live ID, allowing them to experience Microsoft’s Live service on a cloud platform.
We actually saw this coming back in March. It’s also worth reading this leak about Live@Edu. As Bill Gates put it, “they’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.” This is not the first time Microsoft does bad things in Thailand (including threats), usually under the guise of “helping the people.” █
“In order to form an immaculate member of a flock of sheep one must, above all, be a sheep.”
–Albert Einstein
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