Navigation

You are here: Home › MSCD › 2004 › November

Archive | November, 2004

FoxForum Wiki and FoxCentral RSS feeds redirected

By on November 21, 2004 in Home Page

As part of learning about RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and to encourage the Fox community to take up RSS news aggregation, I developed and hosted four feeds of interest to the Visual FoxPro community: both RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 feeds for the http://www.foxcentral.net and FoxForum Wiki (http://fox.wikis.com). These served as the basis for my presentations in 2003 and 2004 on RSS (see http://www.tedroche.com/papers.html).

As both of the sites have now created native feeds for RSS, I’ve turned off the applications that generate the feeds on this site, and redirected requests for those feeds that hit my web server to their updated sites. If you are having problems with your news aggregator picking up the new feed, please visit the sites directly and follow the links there to resubscribe. Thanks for your patronage. Glad I was able to give back a bit to the community that has been so supportive.

Florida votes statistically unlikely, no recount possible

By on November 19, 2004 in Home Page

Study finds e-voting irregularities in Florida. Voting irregularities in three Florida counties that used electronic voting machines may have awarded as many as 260,000 votes to President George Bush in this month’s election, according to researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. Posted atInfoWorld: Top News

Voter-Verifiable Paper Ballots are an essential way to ensure that electronic voting is not flawed. In this case, there are no recounts possible, because there is no audit trail. While these discrepancies probably would not have changed the election results, they undermine people’s confidence is the one person, one vote system. Non-auditable systems should never have been implemented and must be replaced.

Throwing down the gauntlet

By on November 18, 2004 in Home Page

Did Ballmer Drop the Linux Patent-Violation Bomb?. “Did Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer say that Microsoft believes Linux violates 200-plus software patents? Or was Ballmer simply citing a study claiming that same fact? In either case, Ballmer found himself on the Linux hot seat for remarks he made to a group of Asian government leaders in Singapore on Thursday.” From Microsoft Watch from Mary Jo Foley

The irony is that Microsoft is likely to violate just as many patents, if not orders of magnitude more, but that’s a lot tougher to determine with closed-source software.

Microsoft claims they will indemnify their customers, but the limitations of that indemnification make it look pretty flimsy to me. Big tip of the hat to http://www.groklaw.net for the insight into this one and many other legal issues.

First, Microsoft dissed Linux as amateurish. Then, Linux was “viral” and “un-American.” Next, Microsoft twists studies to “get the facts.” Now, they have resorted to threatening their customers. I find this trend disturbing. What’s next?

Is email retention a good thing or a bad thing?

By on November 18, 2004 in Home Page

“Burst.com says Microsoft destroyed evidence. In court documents made public this week, Burst.com accused Microsoft managers of telling employees in 2000 to destroy evidence contained in old e-mails.” From Computerworld News

Robert X. Cringely wrote about this case back in October:

One huge issue in Burst v. Microsoft is missing e-mails that should have appeared in the discovery portion of the case, but didn’t. Burst knows there are lost messages because many of them were to and from Burst, itself, so they have their copies. But not only are the known messages lost from Microsoft’s e-mail archive, so are any messages on the same subject that may have been sent between the Microsoft people, themselves, and not shared with Burst — messages that Burst only believes to exist, but it’s a pretty fair assumption that some such mail did happen. I have written about this before, and it plays back to a haphazard corporate e-mail retention policy at Microsoft that seems to conveniently lose any damning evidence.

Next: No Bathroom Breaks During Prime Time

By on November 17, 2004 in Home Page

Congress wants to outlaw fast-forwarding through commercials. From Engadget:

We thought we lucked out when Senator Orrin Hatch stopped pushing the INDUCE Act, but the RIAA and MPAA are at again, and are trying to push another copyright bill through Congress that does a lot of the same things, like criminalizing copyright infringing file-sharing and punishing anyone who brings a video camera into a movie theatre for recording purposes with up to three years in prison. But there’s another part of the Intellectual Property Protection Act that should perk up your ears (assuming they aren’t already suitably perky). They want to make it illegal to use software or hardware to skip all of those commercials and previews that the studios are placing before the beginnings of movies on DVDs, something which is freaking ridiculous since it’s your DVD playing on your DVD player in your home. How about making it illegal to not pay attention, too?

Link [Alex Feldstein]

Hit http://www.publicknowledge.org/ for more information on this and to write to your senator protesting this poorly thought out bill.

Poland: no software patents

By on November 17, 2004 in Home Page

Polish rejection may derail EU patent directive. The future of the controversial European Union (E.U.) software patent directive was thrown into doubt Wednesday after the Polish government indicated it could no longer support the legislation in its current form. [InfoWorld: Top News]

Software patents are an abomination: licensing an idea, instead of the implementation of an idea (the latter is what copyrights are). Patents will chill the software development marketplace and reserve software development for the big companies that can afford patent lawyers. Stealing another programmers copywritten code is theft; building on another programmers code is progress.

Veteran’s Day 2004

By on November 11, 2004 in Home Page

Let us never forget those who have gone before us and made the ultimate sacrifice so that we might be free. Bless you all.

New MyDoom variant exploits an unpatched Internet Explorer flaw

By on November 9, 2004 in Home Page

New MyDoom variant exploits IE flaw. “A new variant of the MyDoom worm that exploits an unpatched flaw in Microsoft Corp.’s Internet Explorer (IE) browser is in the wild and posing particular risk to home and small business users, security experts warned this week.” Posted at InfoWorld: Top News.

Yet another good reason to look at FireFox.

FireFox 1.0 Released

By on November 9, 2004 in Home Page

Mozilla launches Firefox 1.0 browser. “The Mozilla Foundation has released Version 1.0 of its Firefox browser, an open-source product that has generated lofty expectations that it will offer real competition to Microsoft Corp.’s ubiquitous Internet Explorer.” Posted at InfoWorld: Top News.

Use BitTorrent, if you can, and the download goes faster than greased lightening.

Older posts Newer posts

Powered by WordPress. Designed by Woo Themes

This work by Ted Roche is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.