The Latest Updates from MySQL AB feed reports MySQL Announces Application and Partner of the Year Award Winners. “In his morning Keynote presentation at the MySQL Users Conference, company CEO Marten Mickos announced the winners of the 2005 Application of the Year and Partner of the Year awards.”
Impressive. This should continue to dispel the myth that MySQL is for “little” or “simple” applications. These are world-class high-performance sites.
From Ed Foster’s column today: “Microsoft’s Software Assurance licensing program has always stood out among software maintenance plans for the unique value proposition it offers customers. You pay nearly twice as much as other vendors charge for half of what other vendors give you, and that’s if you’re lucky.”
This is somewhere between “Would you like a service plan with that?” and your local mobster coming around to offer “insurance.” The quotes in the articles from irate IT customers, who paid 25% to 33% annually in licensing fees for essentially nothing, are priceless. Apparently, the “Vista Enterprise Version” will require an Assurance Plan, but that is something that only a few of the F500 should even be considering. If you’re that big, and really need 5-Nines reliability and want a 4-hour guaranteed response from their vendor, perhaps this is for you (note that is is a licensing payment plan, not a service contract). The rest of us would do better to hire a couple of qualified techs and keep them educated and up-to-date.
The Merrimack Valley Linux User Group, one of the five LUGs that makes up the Greater New Hampshire Linux User Group meets the third Thursday of each month at Martha’s Exchange in Nashua. Meetings commence at 7 PM, but members often gather for dinner before the meeting at 6 PM. The presenters tonight will be from WindRiver, manufacturers of VxWorks and a number of fascinating industrial products. Wind River will be presenting their build system, “which automates building the Linux kernel, and automatically generates the Linux filesystem from pristine source with needed patches applied automatically.” There ought to be good time for a Q&A as always on generally Linux topics, too. Hope to see you there.
Over at OSNews, Thom Holwerda posts Getting serious about the Linux Desktop. “In his latest column, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols argues that Microsoft Vista is going to be so expensive that it’s going to make users think hard about switching to Linux instead. [S.J.V-N says:] “Desktop Linux is never going to have a better chance than it will in the next eighteen months,” he says. [Thom says:] My take: He forgets two important factors: Vista can run with all the flashy graphics turned off, and seven editions of Vista? How many Linux distributions are there to choose from?”
Choice is Good, not bad, Thom. Many distributions serve many different audiences. We have choice in our appliances, in our automobiles, in our TV shows.
Vaughn-Nichols cites some interesting numbers about W2K being more popular than XP, despite not being officially “supported.” I have a lot of clients who have clerical staff who would be well-served with Linux as the OS, Thunderbird for mail, FireFox for browsing and OpenOffice.org for office documents. The Microsoft Vista launch could start the “Year of the Linux Desktop.”
David Wheeler has an in-depth essay on Why OpenDocument Won and presents a pretty persuasive argument for OpenDocument.
I still maintain that this is a fantastic opportunity for Microsoft to show that they can develop the best office package for reading and writing the new format. Microsoft went too far in encumbering their Office XML with patents and threats of future licensing, rather than taking the initiative to build the next generation standard.
Despite the fanfare that greeted Microsoft’s announcement that they had no patches ready to ship on their regular Tuesday, slipping due to a quality flaw again, Microsoft Watch from Mary Jo Foley reports Microsoft Reissues Windows 2000 Rollup. “Microsoft on Tuesday reissued the Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 Update Rollup that has been causing problems for myriad Windows 2000 customers for the past few months.”
UPDATE: More information. The “re-release,” named “Update Rollup 1 for Windows 2000 SP4 – v2” fixes four issues with the original Update Rollup One for Windows Two Thousand Service Pack Four:
Problems remain even with version 2 of the Update Rollup One for Windows Two Thousand Service Pack Four. Read this KnowledgeBase article before installing the patch/update/rollup/whatever if you have systems that:
If you have clients with any of these components and automatic updates turned on, you may need to act quickly. Good luck.
It’s the 38th week of 2005, and Microsoft has issued 43 security bulletins, not counting the multiple re-releases and “update rollup patches.” When should we be expecting Trustworthy Computing to kick in?
Tim Bray of Sun Microsystems was given a paper of “talking points” used by some lobbyists in campaigning against Massachusetts’ proposal to adopt the OASIS OpenDocument 1.0 as a standard document format. He reviews the document and points out many distortions, fallacies and, well, cow dung.
Once the world has converted to a common file format so everyone has to compete on features and quality, this will still be a good business to be in, but nobody will be reporting 72% operating profits, which in this particular case means less money going from Massachusetts to Redmond, year after year, forever.
Good reading and thoughtful points.
The Security Thread – September 11, 2005 over at Doc Searls’ IT Garage –points out that “Marcus Ranum brings a strong analytical frame of mind in his brilliant analysis The Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security. You need to read it!”
I saw pointers to the article from at least four of my RSS subscriptions and Ed Leafe pointed it out on the ProFox list this morning. With all those recommendations, it must be good… just finished reading it. Good stuff!
Slashdot post: Patch & Workaround for Firefox Flaw Available. mcc writes “Yesterday Slashdot reported on a Firefox vulnerability which could allow remote code execution. Today Firefox has a patch and a configuration workaround, both of which immunize against the bug. If you are using Firefox you should immediately go to the URL ‘about:config:’, type ‘network.enableIDN’ into the box, and verify that ‘network.enableIDN’ is set to ‘false’.”
Software Freedom Day is September 10th. Check the link for an activity going on near you. If you’re in New Hampshire, swing by the Milford village green and say hi to the volunteers who’ve set up a booth there for the day. Anywhere in the world, you can check out the OpenCD offered by the Software Freedom Day folks. Inserted into a Windows machine, it offers quite a bit of information about Open Source software, including the text of several books, including “Free as in Freedom,” “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” and “Open Sources”. Also on the disk is a catalog of Open Source saoftware that runs in Windows, with the ability to install it right off the disk. Software includes 7-Zip, AbiWord, Audacity, Battle for Wesnoth, FireFox, Gaim, GIMP, Notepad2, OpenOffice.org, PDFCreator, Really Slick Screensavers, NVU, Sokoban, Thunderbird, and TuxPaint. Reboot with the disk in your CD-ROM and you’ll get to test-drive the LiveCD version of Ubuntu. It’s a great disk to pass along to friends considering Open Source, or just looking for some quality software.
The press is picking up on the event, too. Here’s an Infoworld article.