Articles to appear on the home page (nearly all)
MySQL Version 4.1 Certified as Production-Ready. “MySQL announced the general availability of MySQL 4.1. Certified by the company as production-ready for large-scale enterprise deployment, this significant upgrade to the MySQL database server features advanced querying capabilities through subqueries, faster and more secure client-server communication, new installation and configuration tools, and support for international character sets and geographic data.”
Posted from OSNews
Operating System Security, a Clear Winner.
Nicholas Petreley (The Register): Windows v Linux security: the real facts. “Reliance on a single metrics is a major feature of Microsoft’s Get the Facts campaign, and this is perhaps understandable if we consider what the campaign is. It is essentially a marketing-driven campaign intended to ‘get the message across’ with data used to back up the message (note that Microsoft would not necessarily disagree with us here). However, by their nature marketing campaigns push specific, favourable headline items and magnify their significance. They do not necessarily (even usually) accurately reflect the underlying data, and frequently outrun it by some distance. And this process is actually easily illustrated by the Forrester report we linked to earlier on. Get the Facts pulls out the 100 per cent fix and fewest vulnerabilities bullets, while the report itself talks of its use of three metrics and (if we’re doing headline items) also says: “ICAT classified 67% of Microsoft’s vulnerabilities as high severity, placing Microsoft dead last among the platform maintainers in this [high severity] metric.”
Joel Speaks. Microsoft Listens.. “Joel Spolsky, as in the Joel of “Joel on Software” fame, recently chatted with Microsoft Watch about his now-infamous essay “How Microsoft Lost the API War,” as well as on lots of other items of interest to those in the Microsoft ecosystem.” Link from Microsoft Watch from Mary Jo Foley
I’ve quoted Joel on this blog and in other forums more than a few times. It looks like an interesting interview…
Congratulations to Dan Bricklin, named as a Fellow of the Computer History Museum, joining a very elite group.
Want to bite your nails right until the last minute? This is the closest race I can recall, even more volatile than the disaster of 2000. Watch daily as the site updates with the most recent survey results, and converts them into the only units that matter: Electoral College votes. http://www.electoral-vote.com/
Yes, it’s that time of month again, the second Tuesday, when Microsoft releases their monthly list of patches. Quite a bunch this month, with several patches rated “Critical” with a threat of “Remote Code Execution” (“all your base belong to us.”) Get patching!. Microsoft releases fixes for seven ‘critical’ vulnerabilities. Windows users need to prepare for ‘patch Tuesday,’ analyst says. [Computerworld News]
A Month with a Mac: A Die-Hard PC User’s Perspective. A die-hard PC user’s perspective on Macs, by AndandTech. [OSNews]
You can’t find a more die-hard PC user than Anand Lal Shimpi, proprietor of the very popular hardware review website AnandTech. In the interests of fairness, Anand tried switching, and he was pretty impressed with what he saw on the Apple side of the fence. It’s a long article, but worth the read if you’re considered a walk on the wild side. His conclusions are difficult to sum up fairly, but he does think that more people should consider the platform. With Office (or OpenOffice.org) and Safari (or Camino), great mail clients and a lot of available software, the Mac should certainly be considered as a second home machine if you *really* require PC compatibility for something like FoxPro.
Microsoft Patches ASP.Net Problem in Record Time. Two days after it acknowledged a potential security problem with its ASP.Net Web-development platform, Microsoft quietly posted to its Web site for download a fix for the problem. [Microsoft Watch from Mary Jo Foley]
Bravo.
Millions of Dell power adapters recalled. The Taiwan-made AC adapters sold with Dell notebooks can overheat, posing risk of fire and electrical shock. [CNET News.com]
Hot stuff. Mine says “Made in Thailand” but by Delta Electronics and with the correct part number. When I went to visit http://www.delladapterprogram.com/ to check if my machine was affected, I got a “Server not available” and “Server Application Unavailable” Perhap Windows 2000 wasn’t a good choice of OS for the inevitable SlashDotting
Doc Searls asks “Did the air traffic control center really have a “Microsoft server crash”?. This looks like an incredible use of a 32-bit counter of milliseconds that overflows every 49.7 days, without a built-in feature to reset it. The “neglected maintenance” is likely a reboot of the system. Now ask yourself: Do you really want to be at 35,000 feet when they reboot the air traffic control system?
The list of Microsoft Knowledge base articles that refer to various (or the same) incarnation of this bug are scary:
SNMP SysUpTime Counter Resets After 49.7 Days
Computer Hangs After 49.7 Days
“PING -T” Stops Timing Out After 50 Days
Print Spooler Stops Scheduling Print Jobs
The Rpcss.exe process consumes 60 percent of CPU time and performance is affected
X-Duration Values Are Larger Than Expected in Windows Media Server Log
Windows 2000 Terminal Services Time-Out Setting Limits
Contents of the Microsoft Windows 98 System Update
List of Bugs Fixed in Windows NT 4.0 and Terminal Server Edition Service Pack 4 (Part 1)
You might be able to spot Microsoft the Windows 95 and 98 systems; who would have ever expected 50-day reliability out of those systems? NT 4.0 is a little more worrisome, as the bug had been documented for some time before the release of NT 4.0, I think. But for Windows 2000? The RPCSS and print spooler bugs are not documented as fixed in a later service pack, but only a hot fix, although this may be a documentation issue. That is truly disturbing if such a known issue is still sitting around to bite programmers.
I’d really like to know how and why Harris Corporation was allowed to replace UNIX machines that did not have these problems with Windows machines where this was a known issue, and roll them out into the FAA’s production systems, no less. That this was a documented issue is not an acceptable excuse, as the incident last month demonstrated, fortunately without the loss of life.