Tim O’Reilly notes in Update: Firefox vs. IE in OReilly Network Logs, “as of last month, Firefox passed IE, with 46% of all access to OReilly sites, vs IEs 45%.” Now, one percent is not significant, and the cause can likely be explained in a number of ways; perhaps there are more popular FOSS books than new Vista books in the past few months. But it is great to see that competition continues to prod Microsoft to compete, and inspires Mozilla to achieve.
Archive | Microsoft
Developers Increasingly Targeting non-Windows Platforms
“Windows dominance on the client is cracking, according to the latest release of Evans Data Corp’s North American Development Survey. Targeting of the Windows OS has declined by 12% from a year ago, continuing a two-year gradual decline. Currently 64.8% of North American developers are targeting some version of Windows, as opposed to 74% last year and this is expected to drop another 2% in the coming year. Although Windows remains the largest market segment, Linux targeting has increased by 34% from 8.8% a year ago to 11.8% today.”
Source: http://www.evansdata.com/n2/pr/releases/WindowsInDecline2007.shtml
Via: http://holdenweb.blogspot.com/2007/07/developers-migrating-away-from-windows.html
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ongoing · I’ve Seen This Movie
Tim Bray is ticked and he’s not going to take it any more: in I’ve Seen This Movie, Tim blogs,
One would assume that the world’s largest software company, when facing a technology choice, would take the trouble to actually, you know, understand the technologies involved, but the evidence doesn’t support that assumption.
Why? · The thing is, I’ve seen this movie before: The movie where there’s an emerging standard that’s got some buzz and looks promising and maybe it’ll raise the tide and float all our boats a little higher, and then Microsoft says they won’t play.
Geez. Nothing new on the internet but repeats. There’s a great conclusion. Worth reading the entire post.
Alex Feldstein: Dèjá Vu: Entity Framework will not be a part of original Orcas release
Alex Feldstein reports Alex Feldstein: Dèjá Vu: Entity Framework will not be a part of original Orcas release
“Mike Pizzo [MS] in the ADO.NET Team Blog, tells us that the Entity Framework will not be part of the initial release of Orcas. Note that the EF link is from June 06 when things were a looking a little more rosy… Sounds to me like WinFS all over again. And Im not the only one. Mike Pizzo gets the message and explains or apologizes depending on your point of view. And swears that this is not WinFS all over again.”
Here’s one problem with a single-vendor solution: if/when they blow it, you’re stuck waiting for them to fix it. With Open Source, you can pick up the code and finish it yourself, find someone else to finish it, or decide the version 0.4 is good enough for you to put into product (yikes!). It’s your choice. Or, in the Open Marketplace of software, you can decide to go with a different project, whether a fork of the original or a different project. It’s your choice.
It’s too tempting, as a leading vendor, to overpromise and then lead your customers along. IBM is credited with refining the process of “vaporware” by releasing far more press releases and promises than by releasing working code on time. That’s not to say every software project doesn’t start with overblown hopes. gold-plated requirements, delusions of grandeur and overly aggressive delivery schedules. You have to be a hopeless optimist to be in the software development business, thinking that you are going to outsmart these machines and defy Murphy. You don’t need to be crazy to work here, but it helps. We offer on-the-job training.
I’ve noticed in dealing with a number of Open Source shops that there is no rush to get the latest and greatest. That might be what the vendor wants for revenues, but it’s not necessarily in the best interests of the software. Sure, security exploit patches need to get out fast, but those are often back-ported to several well-used versions; if there are folks using the code, there’s a good chance there’s someone with the savvy to add the patch into the source tree and rebuild the older versions. But we all know new features bring new bugs and need a little settling time to stabilize, even after thorough betas. Early adopters can get a “first to market” advantage, but not if they are so mired in bugs, workarounds and patches that nothing works. So, there’s often interesting mixes of old and new: an older and stable OS, web server and database server, and a cutting edge language or framework. You use the latest of the tools that matter, but don’t have a public beta of every element of your application stack.
The dynamics of the software development market continue to churn. May we live in exciting times!
SANS ISC reports OpenOffice.org cross-platform virus
In the on-going battle for the hearts and minds and keyboards of users, OpenOffice.org made a major step forward by becoming more like MS Offices with its first Cross-Platform OpenOffice Virus Proof of Concept. And it’s cross-platform to boot! Let’s see MS one-up that! Can they get MS Office viruses to run on Office for Mac? Noooo!
Go team!
Microsoft Patch Tuesday, May 2007
It’s the nineteeth week of the year, and Microsoft issues fixes #23 through #27, running a bit ahead of the pace from the last couple of years. And “Remote Code Execution” is obviously the goal of the bad guys. Here’s the list:
- MS07-023 – Vulnerabilities in Microsoft Excel Could Allow Remote Code Execution (934233)
- MS07-024 – Vulnerabilities in Microsoft Word Could Allow Remote Code Execution (934232)
- MS07-025 – Vulnerability in Microsoft Office Could Allow Remote Code Execution (934873)
- MS07-026 – Vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange Could Allow Remote Code Execution (931832)
- MS07-027 – Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer (931768)
- MS07-028 – Vulnerability in CAPICOM Could Allow Remote Code Execution (931906)
- MS07-029 – Vulnerability in RPC on Windows DNS Server Could Allow
Here’s the Microsoft summary, with links for more details. The Internet Storm Center at the SANS Institute is rating most of these as “Patch Now!” with few contraindications. As usual, make backups, and get patching!
PySIG Notes, 26 April 2007
By Ted Roche on April 27, 2007 in Apple Macintosh OS X, Home Page, Linux, Microsoft, OpenSource, Python, Technology
Thirteen attendees made it to the April meeting of the Python Special Interest Group, held as usual at the Amoskeag Business Incubator, Commercial Street, Manchester, NH on the fourth Thursday of the month at 7 PM.
Bill Sconce lead off the meeting with a printed agenda and a round of introductions. Several new people were welcomed to the group; a range of levels of experience with computers and specifically Python made for a good mixed crowd.
Martin LeDoux showed off homemade bookbinding of the Python tutorial. Using an HP laser and Adobe Acrobat, Martin printed duplex 2-up folded, cut, glued and bound a pretty handy homemade book. Very cool.
Shawn K. O’Shea showed off the tarfile module which allows creation, querying, extraction and manipulation of tar files (with gz or bz2 compression) from within Python. This can be a real handy way to create cross-platform installable packages that would run on OS X, Linux or Windows.
Shawn also mentioned that there was a Google API for the Google Calendar with examples in Python scripting. Someone asked what that might be used for, and I offered the LUG coordinator Nag-O-Matic as a great example of using automation with calendars.
Bill attempted an introduction to Python datatypes by creating a hierarchy from primitive to complex objects. Kent had an objection to the terminology, and countered with chapter 3 of the _library_ reference (not chapter 3 of the Python reference which Bill was using) and a vigorous discussion ensued. That’s the point of the meeting, after all. And it’s far less likely to erupt into a flamewar in person. All sides had some good points, examples and counterexamples, and most of us learned more about Python internals. Good stuff.
Kent started Kent’s Korner 4: Iterators and Generators at 9 PM, when the milk and cookies were starting to kick in, The crowd was a bit more subdued, having spent their energy harassing Bill (and heckling Ben, in abstentia). Iterators went quite quickly. Generators woke the crowd up. Bill Sconce came up with a great example of greenbar color code generator, where the boss decides there should be two reds, three greens, alternating and repeating, though he may change his mind once he sees it. Off-script, Kent took off with this example, and followed it with a discussion of parameter passing to a generator.
Kent really has a gift for shedding light on these sometimes obuse topics; his examples really helped make the functionality clear, and working through the real-world example proposed at the meeting gave us all some idea of what was involved.
Kent also mentioned that he’s using IPython (note the capitalization; guess it’s not an Apple product!) an improved interactive shell.
Meeting called at 9:44. Wow. Long meeting, but a very productive one. One of the attendees wrote to me this morning that he went home and altered some of his scripts based on what he learned at the meeting. No greater praise could we ask for.
Thanks to Bill Sconce for running the meeting, the Amoskeag Business Incubator for the facilities, Alex Hewitt for wrestling with the network, to Martin, Shawn and Kent for presenting, and to all for attending and participating.
Next meeting May 24th, topic TBA.
Postscript: Like the previous meetings, we saw examples running in Python on OS X, Windows (VMWare on the Mac, I think) and Linux. It Just Works.
Hugh MacLeod and the Open Source Billionaires
Hugh MacLeod writes a fascinating blog and illustrates it with killer drawings over at gapingvoid.com. I think he’s got a wicked wit and is a sharp observer of some of the hypocricy surrounding us. More than once I’ve been tempted to order sets of his business cards, even though they might be too edgy to share with all but a few. I note he’s recently taken on a gig working for Microsoft. Good luck with that.
A recent post really caught me by surprise: in “how well does open source currently meet the needs of shareholders and ceo’s?,” Hugh points out Open Source can’t be as good as proprietary software; otherwise “… there’d be a lot more famous Open Source billionaires out there, being written up in Forbes Magazine …” Wow! What a strange question. I think Hugh’s fallen into the common mistake of mistaking business models and software development models as related. I fumed over his proposition for some time, composing and discarding a couple responses on his site. I knew this was a “have you stopped beating your wife?” question, but I couldn’t get a handle on the right way to respond. Giles Bowkett nails it with this post. Read the whole thing, but here’s a pull quote: “Asking where the open source billionaries are is like pointing to the French Revolution and saying, “If democracy is such a good idea, how come France doesn’t have any more kings?” Because the kings were the problem.” Ouch. But read the rest of the post, too.
Garrett Fitzgerald: Mas FoxPro
Garrett Fitzgerald blogs Mas FoxPro: “In view of Microsoft’s decision to abandon future development of Visual FoxPro, there is a movement afoot to ask MS to open-source the product, so the community can take it forward. If you’d like to see this happen, one thing you can do is sign the petition that PortalFox is running.”
It’s an admirable notion, but just because Microsoft doesn’t want to continue development, doesn’t mean they are willing to turn their tools over to a potential competitor. That would be altruistic.
There’s no doubt the software contains all sorts of embarrassing comments, perhaps undocumented calls to APIs Microsoft doesn’t want others to know about or use and probably some ugly work-arounds. It would be very educational to read the source and understand some of the obscure behaviors of FoxPro: where the phantom record really hides, how “Workarea Zero” works and why Error 14 reports Error while reporting Error 14, but I’m afraid the final journey of Visual FoxPro code will resemble the final scene in Indiana Jones, with the crate of source code wheeled back into the misty distances…
UPDATE… ComputerWorld covers the petition with an article that covers the history of FoxPro better than any other I’ve ever read in the trade press. This is the best press FoxPro has gotten since PC Magazine gave it the Editor’s Choice award, and that was some time ago.
Life After VFP
By Ted Roche on April 2, 2007 in FoxPro, Home Page, LAMP, Linux, Microsoft, MySQL, OpenSource, Personal, PHP, Python, Technology
Robert Jennings posts Yet “Another Life After VFP Thread.” For those not following VFP closely, MS recently announced a confirmation of earlier news that there were no plans for a VFP version 10, and that the VFP scripts in the project known as Sedna would be released under some sort of public license. Poor communications lead to media and Slashdot reports that VFP was to be Open Sourced, sadly not the case.
Robert does a good job of outlining the huge cost in moving a vertical-niche application into another development environment, language and runtime. Most sophisticated specialty applications have person-years of investment built into them, knowledge not easily extracted, transferred or translated to any new environment. Regardless of whether that new environment is Dot Net, Dabo, LAMP, Python or Visual Fred, there will be a huge cost and risk with any enterprise making this switch.
Unlike the Open Source world, when a vendor choses to discontinue a product, developers have little choice but to move along. While many folks point out the upside that the product will likely run for years to come, and a lack of Microsoft official support doesn’t instantly obsolete a product (DOS apps can still be found, after all), there is an immediate slowdown in the custom software market, and a longer-term turning away from the product by customers. Large-scale vertical products have to be operating with 5- and 10-year plans for reinvestment and changes in direction, to ensure they can fund “The Next Big Thing” while continuing to deliver good value to their customers today and tomorrow.
This is not a death knell for the product. The writing has been on the wall for years. But developers with large applications have to be looking around for a new platform.
FoxPro developers always viewed themselves with a bit of “Battlestar Galactica” mythology: a rag-tag crew of self-taught developers from the PC Revolution, they survived the dBASE wars and the implosion of Ashton-Tate. Working under a cruel master who never promoted their product, they persevered. MS’ internal team developing VFP did amazing things on a shoestring budget, introducing a fairly smooth transition from procedural to object-oriented, from developer-guided to event-driven interfaces, from characters to pixels, from local ISAM to RDBMS. The VFP IDE was a remarkable environment in which to develop rich-client, component-based, web-driven or even server-based applications. I will miss it, and look forward to becoming as skilled at my next platform.