Ars Technica reports Firefox passes 10 percent market share. “The great IE purge continues and FIrefox now represents 11.51 percent of the global browser market.” By segphault@sbcglobal.net (Ryan Paul).
Archive | Microsoft
Look out for bootable media!
Last night, I booted my Windows XP notebook after it spent the day traveling in its padded bag – never touched, dropped, struck by lightening, etc. I had left a CD in the tray and it may have tried to boot from that — oops. Removing the disk and rebooting resulted in “NTFS.SYS is missing or corrupted.” Since the machine didn’t come with a rescue CD, I used Knoppix to boot the machine to examine the partition. Looking through the partition, the C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers directory is empty. That’s pretty unlikely a failure on Windows part – WinXP usually keeps several of these files open, and “Windows File Protection” prevents their deletion. Ran fine until I shut it down yesterday morning. Running S.M.A.R.T. utilities shows no errors on the drive. Running SpinRite right now to confirm there’s not a drive problem, then I’ll be restoring from a Ghost backup.
Reminder: don’t leave your computer configured to boot from devices you don’t want to boot from! UPDATE: Scanned the disk on a trustworthy computer with an up-to-date NAV, and it indicates no malware. Curiouser and curioser…
Microsoft: It’s Alive!!!!
It seems Microsoft was a day late with their Halloween horror story called Microsoft Live! and Microsoft Office Live! Whether these are truly “a Microsoft bet” (boy, is that line getting tired) or just a tired rebranding of next-gen Hotmail, MSN and bCentral services to respond to all the good press Google, Yahoo! and other rich AJAX apps are getting remains to be seen.
Dave Winer attended and called it “the worst demo ever.” Mini-Microsoft links to dozens of links. Mary Jo Foley has thorough coverage. Dan Farber questions what’s live – that it’s on the web? Niall Kennedy has some intriguing photographs.
Maybe Microsoft Live 3.0 will be better…
Scoble: twelve good reasons to avoid Microsoft
Scoble lists twelve reasons not to use Microsoft software. Not a comprehensive list, but a good start.
Rainer Becker to take the helm at FoxTalk
David Stevenson announces FoxTalk gets a new editor. “Foxtalk will have a new editor, beginning with the upcoming December issue, and I’m happy to announce that Rainer Becker is the man for the job.”
Congratulations to Rainer on getting an exciting new job, and to David for a job well done these past 18 months!
Reserve April 21-24, 2006 for a trip to Milwaukee?
On his Hentzenwerke Publishing website, Whil Hentzen says, “Reserve April 21-24, 2006 for a trip to Milwaukee. That’s all I can say right now. Trust me.”
Yeah, right. Wonder what he’s up to…
I’ll bet April in Milwaukee is almost as nice as the Novembers we’ve spent there at GLGDW…
Did MS flip-flop on supporting OpenDocument formats?
Slashdot post: MS Office 12 To Utilize ODF?. J. Random Luser writes “Groklaw is carrying a story about Microsoft quietly engaging a French company to develop Open Document filters for Office 12, due out mid-2006. The SourceForge project claims to be an import filter for MS Office, and that is how the developer describes it. But ZDNet quotes Ray Ozzie as talking about an export filter from MS Office, and this french blog takes Ozzie at his word. Ostensibly the tarball unpacks as OpenOfficePlugin, and SourceForge has the WindowsInstaller.msi listed as ‘platform independent’.” From the ZDNet article: “Ozzie told me that supporting ODF in Office isn’t a matter of principle. Microsoft isn’t opposed to supporting other formats. The company just announced support for PDF, and he added that the Open Office XML format has an ‘extremely liberal’ license.”
Follow-up: Check out the weasly words in Microsoft’s denial (citation lost): “We have no plans to directly support the OpenDocument format at this time,” I suppose that leaves open the back door of “indirectly supporting” by paying a third-party to write an import/export filter.
David Berlind follows up with long but insightful piece, “Hidden OpenDocument agenda uncovered in Massachusetts” concluding with the words, “If that’s not enough for Microsoft, then one can only assume that some other agenda is indeed in play. Just not the one that has so far been implicated.“
Taming Visual FoxPro SQL: Real World Data Solutions in VFP, the latest from Hentzenwerke
Well, Hentzenwerke Publishing has announced Tamar E. Granor and della Martin’s latest work, “Taming Visual FoxPro SQL: Real World Data Solutions in VFP,” available for purchase and download (in PDF format) from the Hentzewerke site. Follow the link above for more information, a table of contents, sample chapter (not yet posted) and ordering information. Looking forward to reading this one. Whil Hentzen writes,
“You know how once in a while you run into a book that grows on you – each time you read it, there seems to be more in there than the last time you picked it up?… 152 pages of sheer delight. For us programming types, at least. “
Stephen J. Vaughan-Nichols likes Microsoft, well, a little
Stephen J. Vaughan-Nichols is not well-known as a Microsoft fan; on the contrary, he tends to be one of their outspoken critics. So, I was pleased when I saw him praise Microsoft in his recent eWeek opinion column:
I haven’t been a big fan of personal database programs for a long time now. The only one out there these days that I care for at all is Microsoft’s Visual FoxPro. Yes, I can say good things about Microsoft products—when they really are good.
Shipping no WINE before it’s time, twelve years to beta
OSNews notes After 12 Years of Work, WINE is Going Beta. “After roughly 12 years of work, the Wine Project is about to take its widely used Windows translation layer to a place it has not been in all that time: beta. Wine Project leader Alexandre Julliard, who has worked on the software nearly since its beginning in 1993 and maintained it since 1994, said in an interview yesterday that the beta release is “a matter of days away.” He has since updated that forecast and said it would be released on Tuesday, October 25th.”
A remarkable platform, WINE Is Not an Emulator, but rather a thin layer that maps Win32 calls to matching Linux calls, running some applications even faster than on their native OS. Note that Visual FoxPro is a popular item in the Application Database, named to the Top 10 Silver List.