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Microsoft’s Vertical Initiatives: Tactic or Strategy?

By on March 29, 2005 in Home Page

Microsoft Watch from Mary Jo Foley reports “Microsoft’s Grand Plan To Go Vertical. Can Microsoft transform itself from a product-focused company into a solutions-oriented one? Top brass are betting that it can.”

Microsoft is wise to diversify. From consumer products like MSN and Xbox to hardware like mice and keyboards, Microsoft is spreading its bets around. They make operating systems for home users and for big servers. They sell games. They sell development tools. We’ll see if the “plan to go vertical” realigns the OS, servers and desktop products divisions or just becomes yet another diversification.

Whose Lifetime?

By on March 29, 2005 in Home Page

Ed Foster’s Gripelog points out that ‘Lifetime’ promises by vendors are rarely the good deal that they sound like: Promise of Lifetime Service Isn’t Sirius. “We already know how some manufacturers think a lifetime warranty is one that’s only good…”

Subtlety and understated power

By on March 28, 2005 in Home Page

From the Bash Reference Manual, available online for Free, of course:

A Unix shell is both a command interpreter and a programming language…
While executing commands is essential, most of the power (and complexity) of shells is due to their embedded programming languages. Like any high-level language, the shell provides variables, flow control constructs, quoting, and functions.

These are not your forefather’s DOS batch files.

Apple issues March Security Update 2005-003

By on March 27, 2005 in Home Page

A security update 2005-003 for Mac OS X 10.3.8 is available for download from the Apple site, or from the automated software update. Details can be read at http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301061. Updated packages include: AFP Server, Bluetooth Setup Assistance, Core Foundation, Cyrus IMAP, Cyrus SASL, Folder permissions, Mailman, Safari (addresses the IDN exploits), Samba and SquirrelMail.

Dan Bricklin: Extreme Fear of the GPL

By on March 26, 2005 in Home Page

Dan Bricklin’s Log: A theory about extreme fear of the GPL. “I’m putting my material that is legalistic and narrowly related to Open Source and copyright that comes out of my work on my video on the Software Garden Training Video Blog. I’ll try to also mention here some of the more general interest stuff I put there. I just posted an observation I made after attending a conference on best practices in standards setting… Read “A theory about extreme fear of the GPL“.“

Do your part for FoxPro advocacy!

By on March 25, 2005 in Home Page

CompuServe is running a survey. You don’t need to be a member:

http://go.compuserve.com/MSDevApps?LOC=us

John Koziol of Microsoft responds, “Excuse me for saying so, but that’s a dumb-ass survey.”

I couldn’t say it better myself. Let’s put VFP over the top!

Microsoft funds a report that finds it’s server software is secure!

By on March 25, 2005 in Home Page

OSNews reports “Microsoft funding of security report decried. Two researchers surprised the audience at a computer-security convention last month with their finding that a version of Microsoft Windows was more secure than a competing Linux operating system. This week, the researchers released their finished report, and it included another surprise: Microsoft was funding the project all along.”

I heard about the report and I was really pleased that Microsoft may have finally started catching on with Windows Server 2003 in shipping a product that’s reasonably secure out of the box. To say it is about time is a vast understatement. To claim that redeems Microsoft, or has any effect on the 500 million insecure Windows installations out there is wrong. From my limited experience with W2K3, it’s a lot more difficult to work with, since lots of features are disabled by default, and turning them on is far from intuitive. It’s pretty much too late for me. I’ve taken my business elsewhere.

Doc Searls IT Garage: ‘Nonfriction’ and ‘Non-Profit Use of Open Source’

By on March 25, 2005 in Home Page

Two interesting articles from Doc Searls’ IT Garage: Doc has been banging the drum for a while on the theme of Do It Yourself Information Technology: DIY-IT. In Nonfriction, he ridicules the ‘Vendor Sports’ attitude of much of the information technology press: it’s not Novell vs. WordPerfect, MS vs. Sun, it’s ‘how do I get this stupid document to print’ out in the field. Andrew, you’ll like this piece, as he quotes Guy Kawasaki as well as others. His second piece, Non-Profit Use of Open Source is an interesting story of how FOSS can fit in the the non-profit segment. Some good references to look into here, too. If you’re not subscribed to Doc’s feed, I encourage it. There are some potent ideas brewing here.

Boston Windows UG announces a Malware UnloadFest

By on March 24, 2005 in Home Page

What a bizarre idea! The Boston Area Windows Server User Group has announced a Malware UnloadFest, an all-day lecture and lab, taking place on Saturday, April 9th at the Microsoft Offices in Waltham, Massachusetts. They are chargine $30.00 admission. I wonder if there’s a money-back guarantee. What’s Microsoft’s liability on this? I can’t believe the User Group members are going to try to “clean” (their word) compromised machines. How can you tell a compromised machine is cured? You can’t. Clean? Dust ’em out, fine. Then FDISK them. Boot them with Knoppix if you have to, to rescue files for which you haven’t a backup (tsk, tsk), but the OS is history and none of the files can be trusted. What a dangerous idea.

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