Microsoft Watch from Mary Jo Foley reports Win2K Users Beware. “Of the 14 vulnerabilities for which Microsoft issued patches on the latest Patch Tuesday, one is especially important: a newly discovered Windows 2000 worm hole.”
The worm hole episode on STNG was one of my favorites!
Alex Feldstein reports Microsoft Visual FoxPro 9 Pulic Beta released. “Microsoft announced that the public Beta of SP1 for Visual FoxPro 9.0 is now available
for free download on msdn.com. The download page has a text file
download with the bug fix list contained in the SP1 beta. Refer to the
download page on msdn.com for more details… As always, being a Beta you should not install it in your production box but in a test unit, although having worked with it for a while I found it to be very stable… Note: If you have one of the community produced VFP9 IDE translations (German, Spanish, Czech, etc.), these translations do not yet work with SP1. We will have to make some minor changes for these when SP1 is released around December 2005.”
Two related Computerworld News postsL Allchin says farewell in e-mail to co-workers. “On the same day it unveiled a major reorganization, Microsoft Corp. also announced that Jim Allchin, group vice president of platforms at the software company, would retire at the end of 2006.”
Analysis: Microsoft reorganization needed to end internal ‘turf wars’. “Microsoft Corp.’s decision to consolidate six divisions into three — each of them run by presidents who report to CEO Steve Ballmer — makes sense for the company, industry analysts said today.”
Re-orgs at Microsoft are a regular item, as they play musical chairs above the glass ceiling. Whether or not this will actually trickle down to mean anything to the average Microsoft line worker is something only time will tell.
“The new Platform Products & Services group will comprise the current Windows Client, Server and Tools division and the MSN online services division. The business group will consist of the current Microsoft Information Worker group, including Microsoft Office, and the Business Solutions group, which includes CRM and ERP applications. And the new entertainment division will oversee the development of entertainment and digital devices, such as IP television, Xbox and other consumer-oriented digital lifestyle products.”
So now there are three: OS, Apps and Toys. Sounds like the split the Justice Department suggested a long time ago. I wonder if this might give the Apps group incentive to deploy on different OSes. There’s still the unnatural combination of the Operating Systems with the Servers that run on them – Exchange, SQL Server, BizTalk, etc., when those should be business applications rather than operating system extensions.
My call: little will change. A few less executives to perk. A few kicked upstairs, a few kicked around, a few kicked out. Same-o, same-o.
Alex Feldstein blogs New Bagle worm is making rounds?. SANS Internet Storm Center reports that a new Bagle worm variant is making rounds. Make sure that your antivirus is up-to-date and enabled.
Preliminary information is:
Be aware.
My Inbox (running on a Mac) is already filling up with these. One more time, let’s remember the rules: NEVER open an attachment from an untrusted source. There are no trusted sources. NEVER EVER open an unexpected attachment without verifying with the sender that they did intend to send you that attachment. If you have some confidence you know what you’re doing, save it to disk, scan it and test it. If you aren’t confident of your abilities to detect a problem, contact your IT support person. Don’t have any of those? Don’t open the attachment.
Very sad news: Drew Speedie (third from left) and his son, Brent Speedie (right) passed away while on vacation in Yellowstone.
Drew was a very talented man. He worked as the technical editor of “Hacker’s Guide to Visual FoxPro 3” and he helped Tamar and I make the book far better. Drew went on to develop the MaxFrame Professional framework. I used MaxFrame on a number of applications quite successfully. Drew was a contributing editor at FoxPro Advisor magazine where he wrote a number of insightful articles. Drew spoke at many FoxPro conferences around the world, always entertaining, always informative. He often attended the conferences in the company of son Brent and wife Irene.
He will be missed. My condolences to his family.
OSNews posts Firefox vs. IE security: Is Two Greater Than Five?. “A recent blog post on ZDNet contends that Firefox is not as secure as promised by counting exploits. Joseph Huang contends that severity and the number of unpatched vulnerabilites matters, not just the number of exploits discovered.”
Lies, damned lies and statistics, indeed! Here’s Joseph’s portrayal:
| IE | FireFox | |
| Extremely Critical | 10 | Zero |
| Highly Critical | 20 | 3 |
| Moderately Critical | 14 | 4 |
| Less / Not Critical | 25 | 15 |
of Windows Future!
Over at Scripting News. Dave Winer points out that “BusinessWeek profiles anonymous blogger Mini-Microsoft.” M-M is the most valuable employee Microsoft has, someone unfraid to point out that the system is broken. Microsoft ought to pay more attention to him/her if they aren’t already. It could just be a plot by Microsoft Research, of course.
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.
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.”