Computerworld News notes Microsoft could face trademark fight over Vista OS name. “John Wall, CEO of Vista Inc., said his company is “considering all of its options” for a potential lawsuit against Microsoft, which last week announced that the next version of its operating system would be called Windows Vista.”
Not surprising that the name was already taken. We’ll have to see if Microsoft can argue their trademark is sufficiently different.
Computerworld News notes Oracle releases security patch fixes; MySQL flaw surfaces. “Oracle has released two sets of database patches to correct flaws in previously released security patches, including on that was itself a fix to an earlier set of patches.”
Oracle is patching their patches, too.
MySQL is up to 4.1.13 to avoid a buffer overrun in the zlib library. Consider updating, especially if you’re exposing your db directly to the internet.
The ever-snarky Andrew Orlowski points out in the Register that Microsoft is shipping an anti-spyware tool (they bought, not developed) based on the abandoned, unsupported and generally disrespected Visual Basic 6.0. Perhaps they should consider rewriting it in Visual FoxPro…
Dave Winer at Scripting News points to MacWorld: “Yahoo on Monday will announce the acquisition of Konfabulator, a Macintosh and Windows application that allows users to run mini files known as Widgets on their desktop — the same model used by Apple for its Dashboard application.”
Platform-agnostic applets that run on every desktop could be yet another challenge to proprietary OS vendors like Apple, Microsoft and Sun, along with web-based applications.
Slashdot “Your Rights Online” section asks Canadian Telco Admits to Blocking Union’s Website. Nogami_Saeko writes “Canadian telephone company and ISP “Telus” has admitted that they are blocking all attempts to access a website set up by the employee’s union (who is currently “on-strike” or “locked-out”, depending on your point of view). Currently no customers of the Telco’s ADSL service (or any other ADSL service provider who leases lines) can access the union’s webpage. Is it reasonable for an ISP to censor webpages they don’t agree with during contract negotiations?”
At Scripting News, Dave Winer posts 
“If all goes well, the OPML Editor will be available publicly on Monday. I fixed a couple of important bugs today, one involved rewriting the startup process, which was horribly wrong. I had to take the time to understand the issues, and now I just can’t break it and so far neither have any of the testers been able to. I’m very excited about this release, it’s the first time I did roadshows before a release, and it’s looking like I’ll be able to do one in Toronto after the release, next week. So you could say it’s an international rollout, and you’d be right. I was careful to explain in the Terms of Service that it’s all for evaluation purposes, and I’ll note here that the back end will be GPL’d too, so people will have choice about where to serve their OPML. So we’re about to get an upgrade in the part of the web we use. That doesn’t happen every day, not even every year.” [Emphasis mine]
Eagerly looking forward to it.
Slashdot posts Why I Hate the Apache Web Server. schon writes “Today’s the last day of ApacheCon Europe; There was a hilarious presentation entitled ‘Why I Hate the Apache Web Server‘ [note: PDF] for anyone who has expressed frustration with the various inconsistencies and nuances of the Internet’s favourite config file. And yes, it includes a comparison to Sendmail.”
Authored by Apache contributor Rich Bowen, who collected the FAQs from the Apache IRC chat channel. Every language has these kinks, trying to remember the strange, arbitrary, mis-named and archaic commands. Anyone who has had to tweak Apache has probably run into one or more of these.
http://www.betanews.com/article/Longhorn_Gets_a_Name_Windows_Vista/1122002477
Imagine, a Windows product that has been in beta so long that they throw out its codename 17 months before it is even due to ship! Anyone taking bets that this test balloon falls over from high lead content and Microsoft Windows 2006+ (TPFKAL – The Product Formerly Known As Longhorn) gets yet another name? Besides “#$%&@!? Windows,” which is pretty much what every copy gets called, of course.
Interesting juxtaposition here. The Open Source Development Lab, a small group located in the Northwest US, posted a roadmap titled “OSDL’s Linux Initiatives.”
Nearly simultaneously, Information Week carries a 9 page story “Microsoft Lays Out Enterprise Roadmap,” where the lead paragraph reads:
Microsoft is making big promises about Longhorn and other product development, but will it deliver? We spoke with company execs about initiatives in security, server operating systems, storage, convergence and more.
OSDL is just one small group, advancing their own agenda of tools and utilities, with an obvious focus on making the platform more reliable, appealing and robust for a variety of vendors to deploy upon. Microsoft, in contrast, strikes me as withdrawing within a fortress of their own making tying together their tools ever more tightly. The Information Week interviews a number of high-placed Microsofties and each seems to have their own agenda, plans and acronyms (and titles, too!). Don’t miss the last two pages of the Information Week piece with some surprising survey results sure to delight partisans on both sides of the debate.
Rick Schummer notes Bill Gates is puzzled by computer science apathy: “This is a headline in this morning’s Great Lakes IT Report: “Bill Gates is puzzled by computer science apathy.” I also read a couple of news items with the same story yesterday. If he wants to understand it, all he has to do is sit down with some high school students and he will get his answer. I have and can tell you there are several reasons.”