FoxProWiki notes FoxTeam. Editor comments: Randy Brown – retired September 2005.
Congratulations, Randy! For those new(er) to Foxpro, Randy led a successful and remarkable life as a consultant before joining Microsoft as a Fox/Mac expert and author (Pros Talk Fox 2.5: FoxPro OLE and DDE, FoxPro Machete with Lisa Slater (now Nicholls), Doc Livingston and Andy Griebel.)
Best of luck in your future ventures, Randy!
Years ago, I posted slides and white papers from many Visual FoxPro conferences, and I’ve been adding to this as time allows. Recently, I’ve noticed that a number of the older slides from the years 1997-2001 cannot by viewed from most browsers. Attempting to open the link here, [Edit:bad link fixed] for example results in an error message “This presentation contains content that your browser may not be able to show properly. This presentation was optimized for more recent versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer… If you would like to proceed anyway, click here. ”
This “error” occurs in Safari 2.01, FireFox 1.06, and Camino 0.8. Opera 8.02 attempts to open the files, but ends up with a set of black-background frames with slide titles and broken graphic links but no content. IE6/Win opens and displays the content, with handy little widgets.
Looking under the hood, these are former PowerPoint presentations converted using a version of Microsoft Office. As time allows, I’ll reload the original presentations in OpenOffice.org and repost the slides in a format that all can use.
InfoWorld: Top News notes Microsoft offers preview of next Windows Server release. “(InfoWorld) – Microsoftæon Tuesday made available yet another in a seemingly endless stream of interim product updates with the release of Windows Server 2003 Release Candidate Zero (RC0).”
Love the snarky “seemingly endless” – how is it the press can complain when Microsoft ships something and complain when they don’t? Even worse, this isn’t really *shipping* anything – it’s just a beta.
It’s a beta of an “R2” product – Windows 2003 Server Release 2, apparently not deserving of it’s own year moniker (hey, how about Server 2005?) because Microsoft doesn’t want to take heat from the folks who don’t want to upgrade their servers every two years, but they still have features to ship, especially with Longwait, er, Vista Server, scheduled for 2007. Maybe.
R2? What’s the client going to be named? C3P0?
OSNews points to Five Reasons NOT To Use Linux. “Linuxwatch.com is running a great story called “Five Reasons NOT To Use Linux.” It includes a nice list of reasons why one might want to steer clear of Linux, along with a nice comparison to how easily these reasons are addressed in Microsoft Windows.”
I always suspected that Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols was secretly a Linux-hater.
Slashdot reports Creative Zens Ship with Worms. An anonymous reader writes “Engadget reports about 3700 Creative Zen “Neeons” shipped with a virus. The virus in question was the W32.Wullik.B@mm worm. Creative released a statement today to help consumers pinpoint the possibly effected devices.” From the linked Babelfish-translated press release:
With the defectiveness of our company, we apologize the fact that very much annoyance was applied the customer and to the related everyone deeply.
I’m sure we all share those feelings.
At Shedding Some Light, Rick Schummer blogs “Then it hits me. They finally fixed this little useful tool after it was broken for a long time. Now I know how a couple of the ViewEditor alpha testers felt last week when I finally tracked down and fixed the sorting bug in the list of tables and views when picking columns to be copied to the clipboard. Finally!“
Microsoft Watch from Mary Jo Foley notes “Virtual Server 2005 R2 Due By Year-End. Microsoft is now going to release Virtual Server 2005 R2 (the product formerly known as Virtual Server 2005 Service Pack 1) before the end of this year.”
Interesting that since Microsoft has gone to naming their software after calendar years (Windows 95, SQL Server 2005, etc.) that they can’t release a DotFive version. So what do they do? Anything they want, as the joke goes. Windows 98 had a “Second Edition,” Windows XP had a major makeover disguised as “Service Pack 2” and now we have the “R2” version of “Virtual Server 2005.” Next, I hear VB.NET will be renamed “Visual Basic 9.0” dropping the pejorative DotNet and implying that you must have missed versions 7 and 8 as they built upon the success of 6.0, their most successful product ever discontinued, with which this language shares very little in common. What’s in a name?
Robert X. Cringely (the pseudonym not the registered trademark) writes in his weekly column, “Patently Absurd: Patent Reform Legislation in Congress Amounts to Little More Than a “Get Out of Jail Free” Card for Microsoft.”
Late last month, shortly before the U.S. Congress shut down for its summer recess, the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Intellectual Property subcommittee held an unusual hearing — unusual because the only committee member attending the hearing was the chairman, Orrin Hatch, a Republican from Utah. Why would such a prestigious committee hold a hearing in Washington attended by only one member? To slam through some controversial legislation, of course. Senator Hatch was trying to pass a new law “reforming” the U.S. patent system and apparently felt it would all go much more smoothly without the presence of the other committee members.
Legislation to remove the rights of citizens and small businesses to innovate need to stop. Congress needs to get back to doing what the Constitution empowered it to do: “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;”
InfoWorld: Top News reports Experts see new variants of Windows 2000 worm.
(InfoWorld) – Security vendors have reported several new variants of the worm infecting PCs running Microsoft’s Windows 2000 operating system. Groups of virus writers are competing to cause the most damage, according to one security company, although the worm appears less severe than some first feared.
So far. Many media outlets are reporting they were hit. It’s hard to tell if we’re at the crest of the wave just yet. In the meantime, ensure all machines are patched, scan all foreign machines coming into your network (laptops, VPN, etc.) and shut down any unnecessary services that require these ports open.
Over at Resigned to the Bittersweet Truth, Bill McGonigle posts InfoCon Yellow!. “The Internet Storm Center has declared InfoCon Yellow for the first time since May 2004. ”
“Due to a number of very well working Windows exploits for this weeks patch set, and the zero-day Veritas exploit, we decided to turn the infocon to yellow.
Advice: Use the weekend to patch ALL … read the rest at InfoCon Yellow!