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Posts tagged as “microsoft”

Watching the Penguin’s Back at All Things Open

You can be certain of one thing; if you’re a penguinista I’ll have your back at the All Things Open conference. I’ll be paying attention. Plenty of good companies and organizations will be represented at the the conference, to be held next week in Raleigh, but it is an enterprise conference so there will be a few snakes slithering about.

Mainly I’m talking about Oracle and Microsoft.

Windows Becomes Freeware, Adobe Cracked & More…

FOSS Week in Review

Adobe hacked

We’ve known for years that Adobe doesn’t seem to have a knack for keeping their products secure. New vulnerabilities are found almost daily in Reader and Flash, so much so that Windows users grow used to the constant updates required of them by the fine folks at Adobe. Now it appears as if the San Jose based company can’t keep their servers secure either.

Last Friday, The Australian reported that black hats had managed to steal source code and sensitive customer information:

From Smartphone to Desktop–One Screen For All?

Earlier this week at the Gartner Symposium ITXpo in Orlando, Microsoft’s lame duck President, Steve Ballmer, once again restated his vision for “One Microsoft/one world.”

Actually, we jest. As reported by Larry Dignan on CNET, the vision remains a single Windows GUI to be used across all devices, from smartphone to tablet to PC. That’s what he and the rest of the crowd in Redmond have been saying since long before the release of Windows 8, when Metro was still Metro, which was their first attempt at implementing this one-size-fits-all vision. Nevermind that it hasn’t worked for them so far. You know what they say about “try, try, try and try again?”

Google Disses Flash, DRM Comes to HTML & More…

FOSS Week in Review

Google wants to do away with Flash?

The day after our own Christine Hall expressed the opinion that Adobe’s Flash “isn’t going to go away anytime soon,” mainly because the Google ad business is hooked on it, we find that the Mountain View company might very well be trying to push Flash out the door. On Tuesday, CNET reported that Google has released a free beta of Google Web Designer, a tool for building animated HTML 5 ads.

Microsoft Five Years Down the Road

Microsoft is trying to get a grip.

They’re not in a tailspin, nothing like it, not yet anyway, but they haven’t had a vision since the release of Windows 95. They’ve had success that wasn’t visionary, the Xbox comes to mind, but that was a calculated move for market share, not a vision for the company’s future. They also helped pioneer the tablet, Bill Gates personal vision around the turn of the millennium, but they couldn’t figure out how to implement it.

Microsoft Windows logoWe’ve seen this crisis coming since the introduction of Vista, which should have been a shining moment for the company. After all, the operating system was nearly six years in the making. They botched it, releasing a much anticipated OS that was not only a resource hog but basically just didn’t work. Wow. This was just after the release of Zune, a “me too” iPod, and before the release of the Kin phones, which are so rare that they probably fetch a premium on eBay.

Torvald’s Diplomacy, Elop’s Riches & More…

FOSS Week in Review

Redmond Ups the Ante on Its Buyback Program

No sooner had we told you last Friday of Microsoft’s offer to buy certain “gently used” iPads for up to $200 in credit vouchers, good at your friendly neighborhood Microsoft store, than they went and upped the ante. What they’ve done is something of a reverse interpretation of a line from the old Proctor and Bergman comedy album from the early 70’s, TV or Not TV. To paraphrase, “What was once two hundred is now three hundred fifty.”

Yup. You heard us right. On Friday your old iPad was worth two hundred smackers to the Microsoft folk–which had to be taken in store credit. By Sunday morning, it was three fifty as cash loaded on a Visa card. Talk about inflation. Not only that, Redmond’s buyback offer now extends beyond a limited range of iPads to include many more devices. Now they’ll take Android devices, both phones and tablets, from Samsung, Lenovo and others, as well as iPhones and iPads. We understand they’re even offering to buyback BlackBerrys.

Votes Tallied on the GPL and the NSA’s Spying

Yikes! We got behind in looking at the results of the polls we run here on FOSS Force, which means we’ve got some catching up to do.

What was your opinion on the GPL?

Back on June 30th we asked you, “Which of the following best describes your thoughts about the GPL?” The poll’s been active since, though for most of that time it’s been buried in the article What’s Your Take on the GPL? back in our archives. We took it down just this morning.

In this poll we offered the following options as answers:

‘All Things Open’ Conference Offers Enterprise & More

When IT-oLogy opens the doors to the All Things Open conference in Raleigh on October 23, the focus will be on open source in the enterprise. That’s only fitting, given the fact that Raleigh is Red Hat’s playground–and Red Hat practically wrote the book on enterprise level open source.

Every hour during the two day conference there will be six lectures or workshops with at least four of them tailored especially for the business IT crowd. There’ll be tech-centric workshops on Python, databases, big data, Github, PHP and more. Not being a developer or admin type, I can only imagine what all of this might mean to the serious IT department types as they peruse the All Things Open schedule.

So where does that leave the rest of us who work with FOSS everyday without getting our knuckles dirty writing code, building and tweaking networks or figuring out new and better ways to make big bucks with computer technology? Is there anything at All Things Open for those of us who think the word “code” must always be preceded by “morse” or that “enterprise” refers to a Federation star ship laden with photon torpedoes?

Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

Redmond’s Used iPads, Spy Wars Escalate & More…

FOSS Week in Review

Court rules on Facebook privacy

If an employee makes a post on Facebook using a privacy setting that excludes the boss from seeing it, that post is off limits to the employer. Unless, that is, the poster has a turncoat friend who willingly supplies the post to the employer with no prodding to do so. That’s evidently the gist of a ruling handed down in August, as reported by PCWorld on Sunday.

The case involved Deborah Ehling, who was suspended by Monmouth-Ocean Hospital Service Corp. (MONOC) after she posted on Facebook in June of 2009 a response to news that a white supremacist had opened fire and killed a guard at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

Microsoft: Knock, Knock, Knocking on Nokia’s Door

FOSS Week in Review

The Microsoft saga continues…

Ten or twelve years ago somebody noticed that no one except IBM ever entered into a partnership with Microsoft and survived. Since then a few got lucky, but not many, and one of them wasn’t Nokia. For the life of us, we can’t figure what ever convinced the Finnish folk that hiring Stephen Elop, then head of Redmond’s business software division, as CEO was a good idea. We guess they never really grokked the whole understanding-history-or-being-doomed-to-repeat-it concept.

When Mr. Elop decided to scrap all plans for all mobile operating systems other than Windows Phone at Nokia, red flags should’ve gone up. We figure the only reason they didn’t is that the Finns spent most of the 20th century nurturing an aversion to red flags. In this case, the aversion cost them dearly. They bet the farm on an OS that no one else wanted and now the used-to-be-leader in the cell phone business is just another division of Microsoft.

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