Bruce has some interesting observations on the Ideal Programmer.
Archive | 2003
SCO stock tumbles, E-level cashing out?
Tide Turns Against SCO SCO shares fell nearly 10% Friday, after an IBM memo rejecting SCO’s Linux claims turned up. Meanwhile, Andy Butler of Gartner said “Users should not start waving their cheque books” in apparent contradiction of earlier comments by his colleague George Weiss. GROKLAW lists several other analysts taking anti-SCO positions on Linux licensing. Form-4 filings with the SEC reveal SCO Executives have been cashing out stock. They made $398,833.90 in June, and $781,964.70 in July. Full stories with links at link above. From OSNews
Journalism…
Surreal: NYT Fabricator Hired to Write About Plagiarist. You can’t make up stuff this bizarre. The New York Post reports, Esquire has “commissioned (Jayson) Blair to write about… [Dan Gillmor’s eJournal]
OSNews bits
OS News is a favorite site of mine, for a little more meat and a little less vitriol than Slashdot… here are some top stories from today:
Why Windows Isn’t Hell Or Why Linux Isn’t Bliss
Bill Gates : 5% Of Windows Machines Crash More Than Twice A Day
Richard Stallman: “Free software is neither to the right nor to the left”
[OSNews]
Wither goest Microsoft?
C|NET summarizes this week’s meeting between Microsoft and a series of financial analysts in a series of articles listed here. The impression I get is that Microsoft is starting to recognize that they are a large industry, and not a small, scrapy software developer, and trying to act grown up. This quote illustrates:
CEO Steve Ballmer will delegate much of the software giant’s day-to-day financial operations to seven executives who will serve as chief financial officers…
So, the beancounters are left in charge. What ever happened to the visionary leaders? I suspect they’ve all cashed out.
"I fear we have awoken the sleeping giant…"
My hope is that a swift resolution of this matter can elp restore balance to the industry… “Linux wars: Big Blue strikes back. IBM launches a counterstrike against SCO Group’s attack on Linux users. It argues that SCO’s demands for Unix license revenue are undermined by its earlier shipment of an open-source Linux product. On CNET News.com“
Antisocial Software?
I’ve seen this phenomenon at the last couple of FoxPro conferences: folks with laptops can be tuned in or way out of the presentation. At DevCon, I blogged the keynote live and made my one and only appearance on the Radio Top 100 blog list. OTOH, some folks tune out and miss the whole thing. Of course, they could do that with Solitaire, too. But now, with IM, they can join in a conversation… interesting. NY Times: In the Lecture Hall, a Geek Chorus. Mr. Aral discovered that he was not alone. The next day in the auditorium, which was outfitted with a wireless link to the Internet, a group of people booted up their laptops, opened their IM programs and spent the next three hours happily exchanging notes during the presentations. Link via Tomalak’s Realm
Business Intelligence market shake-out
BI, and closely related techno-buzzterms data mining and online analytical processing, are fields with lots of promise, documented paybacks for some big customers, and an exciting market with too many vendors, too many products, too many promises and too many buzzterms. A shakeout is occurring, with Business Objects purchaing Crystal Decisions, Cognos announcing new products, Hyperion buying Brio, and, as that second link points out, a lot of possible contestants – Microsoft, Oracle, SAS, PeopleSoft – still waiting in the wings. Going to be an interesting show to watch…
Blog Glossary
Bob Ruple points out the blog glossary on http://www.samizdata.net/blog/glossary.html
Microsoft issues security warnings…
MS03-29, MS03-30 and MS03-31 puts Microsoft one ahead of the rate of one per week for the year.
MS03-29 lists a “Moderate” problem with a normally un-exposed function that could lead to a denial of service attack on Windows NT 4.0 Server only. Read more at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms03-029.asp
MS03-30 deals with a buffer overrun which could allow a malicious user to run code of their choice on your machine, from a malformed MIDI file, web page or HTML e-mail. Rated as “Critical” for all to patch. Read details at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/MS03-030.asp.
Finally, MS03-31, described as an “Important” cumulative patch for SQL Server, also patches three new vulnerabilities for SQL Server 7.0, SQL Server 2000, as well as MSDE 1.0 and 2000. While the patches seem to indicate that an attacker must have local logon access to execute these exploits, it’s not clear if another executable the victim could be tricked into running might be able to exploit these. http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/MS03-031.asp has details.
As always, there is the danger with patching your system that the patch process could go wrong, crippling your machine, or that the patch might not work properly on your particular configuration, or that the patch fails to fix the problem. Use care in evaluating whether these patches are appropriate for you, and take precautions (backups, images or restore points) to minimize the effect of a patch gone bad.
Be careful out there.