The Windows Shutdown crapfest
I worked at Microsoft for about 7 years total, from 1994 to 1998, and from 2002 to 2006. The most frustrating year of those seven was the year I spent working on Windows Vista, which was called Longhorn at the time. I spent a full year working on a feature which should've been designed, implemented and tested in a week.
Each team of 8 was separated by 6 layers of management from the leads, giving us 43 total people with a voice in this feature. Twenty-four of them were connected sorta closely to the code, and of those twenty four there were exactly zero with final say in how the feature worked.
By the way "feature" is much too strong a word; a better description would be "menu". Really. By the time I left the team the total code that I'd written for this "feature" was a couple hundred lines, tops.
From: Moblog
Kroes sets deadline for Microsoft to hand over software secrets
Brussels gave Microsoft a nine-day deadline yesterday to provide its rivals with outstanding details of its software systems or face fresh fines.
Neelie Kroes, the European Union's competition commissioner, gave the world's largest software group until next Thursday - Thanksgiving Day in America - to hand over all relevant information about the secret protocols behind its Windows operating system. Ms Kroes fined Microsoft €280.5m (£190m) in July for failing to comply with commission rulings and could now fine it up to €3m a day.
From: The Guardian.
Give the Gift of Pre-Installed Linux This Year
It has taken the editors over at LXer quite some time to convert cyber_rigger's “List of companies selling preinstalled Linux and no-OS” into a proper database, but they finally did it! The Pre-Installed Linux Vendor Database is a fact. Currently it holds 107 vendors world-wide but you can add more vendors yourselves, so help this database grow! All vendors in the list offer reasonably-priced desktops and/or notebooks for home and office users, and either offer Linux only, or as an installation option on the system configuration page of their sites.
Is Ubuntu set to become non-free?
by Sander MarechalLast week at the Ubuntu Developer Summit the release goals for Feisty Fawn-scheduled to appear April 2007-were discussed and drawn up. Ubuntu's next version is aiming for some pretty good features such as a bullet proof X.org and network roaming. There's one change that bothers me to no end though: composite by default.
The problem is that, in order to reach this goal, they want to install and configure binary video drivers by default. That is a firm slap in the face of long term Ubuntu users everywhere though.
I, Cringely: Divide and Conquer
Microsoft is still Microsoft and has its own peculiar way of changing with the times as we see in this very interesting agreement. […] This agreement will tie Novell to interoperability promises Microsoft doesn't care about nearly as much as Novell does, with the result that Novell will do most of the work.
We saw this happen before when 3Com tied its fortunes to Microsoft in the late 1980s with the lamented 3Com-Microsoft LAN Manager network operating system, which was ironically Microsoft's answer to Novell at that time. Then 3Com CEO Bill Krause felt the only way to compete with Novell was through an alliance with Microsoft. So 3Com bought its way into the relationship, ended up doing all the work (MORE THAN all the work if you count recoding Microsoft blunders), then had to BUY ITS WAY BACK OUT when the product failed. After that deal was over and the blood had dried, 3Com founder Bob Metcalfe claims that a Microsoft exec told him, “You made a fatal error, you trusted us.”
From: I, Cringely.
Tags: http%3A%2F%2Fwww.pbs.org%2Fcringely%2Fpulpit%2F2006%2Fpulpit_20061110_001188.html
One Small Business Gladly Gives Microsoft the Boot
You are reminded that Microsoft Windows, portable Microsoft devices or laptops running Microsoft Software within our network is forbidden as of 9/20/06. If you have not already received your Linux Live CD, email Ken or Tammy and they will get you one, along with any instructions you may need. These are yours to keep and at no cost. You are encouraged to use them at home as you see fit.
Everyone should be so lucky to recieve an e-mail like that from your CEO out of the blue on a monday morning. Read part two on how Ken Starks a.k.a Helios of lobby4linux fame is helping an anonymous company that ran afoul of the MS-BSA protection racket migrate a 9 city/455 desktop computer business network from Windows to Linux — Fedora Core in this case.
If you missed how this came to be, then you should read part one: No one ever got fired for using Microsoft — Yes they did.
Gnome Hearts 0.1.3 Release Announcement
by Sander MarechalWe are happy to announce the immediate release of gnome-hearts version 0.1.3. This release fixes some crashing behavior related to card styles on Debian and Debian-based systems [1][2][3][4] and fixes a similar potential crash regarding background images on any system. It also adds Polish documentation and updates all other in-game translations. You can download the latest version from our downloads page [5] or our APT repository [6].
[1]http://bugzilla.jejik.com/show_bug.cgi?id=11
[2]http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=395551
[3]http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=396043
[4]https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/gnome-hearts/+bug/65274
[5]http://www.gnome-hearts.org/download/
[6]http://www.jejik.com/pages/repositories/
About Gnome Hearts
Gnome Hearts is an implementation of the classic hearts card game for the GNOME desktop, featuring configurable rule sets and editable computer opponents to satisfy widely diverging playing styles. Gnome Hearts is Free Software, released under the GNU General Public License and should be able to run on any computer that can run the GNOME desktop.
Enjoy,
The Microsoft-Novell patent deal and the GPL
by Sander MarechalThe news of the Microsoft-Novell deal is hard to miss in the Linux community. The reactions range from very negative to vaguely neutral. The most interesting bit of the agreement for me are the patent clauses. Did Novell sign away it's future by mistake or did it cleverly safeguard the future of Mono, Samba and OpenOffice.org?
