Bad Windows

Just days after users and bloggers raised Cain about Microsoft missing a deadline to deliver add-ons that it promised Windows Vista users, the company announced today that it is shipping one program but delaying 19 language packs for another month.

Microsoft also said that while Vista Service Pack 1's on-screen information about the add-ons has been dramatically scaled back from what appeared in the original operating system, it has no intention of dropping the extras.

Shipping today, said Barry Goffe, the director of Vista Ultimate, is DreamScene, the long-in-beta video screensaver that first appeared in February. The other downloads he had said would be shipped this summer — the remaining language packs used to turn Ultimate into a localized operating system — have been delayed until next month, however.

Read more at Computerworld 

Computers in the European Union should be sold without a bundled operating system, according to this submission to the European Commission. It says that the bundling of Microsoft Windows with computers is not in the public interest, and prevents meaningful competition in the operating system market.

Read more at Globalisation 

Critics who blasted Microsoft three months ago for failing to deliver Windows Vista add-ons have again called the company on the carpet, this time for missing its self-imposed deadline to provide promised extras. In late June, bloggers and users were already panning Vista Ultimate Extras as a bust. Extras, available only to customers running the top-end Vista edition, was one of the features cited by Microsoft to distinguish the USD 399 operating system from its USD 239 cousin, Home Premium. Microsoft's online marketing, for instance, touted Extras as 'cutting-edge programs, innovative services, and unique publications' that would be regularly offered to Ultimate users.

Read more at OSNews 

While Microsoft is still pushing Vista hard, the company is quietly allowing PC makers to offer a "downgrade" option to buyers that get machines with the new operating system but want to switch to Windows XP.

The program applies only to Windows Vista Business and Ultimate versions, and it is up to PC makers to decide how, if at all, they want to make XP available. Fujitsu has been among the most aggressive, starting last month to include an XP disc in the box with its laptops and tablets.

"That's going to help out small- and medium-size businesses," Fujitsu marketing manager Brandon Farris told CNET News.com.

Hewlett-Packard also started a program in August for many of its business models. "For business desktops, workstations and select business notebooks and tablet PCs, customers can configure their systems to include the XP Pro restore disc for little or no charge," HP spokeswoman Tiffany Smith said in an e-mail. She said it was too soon to gauge how high customer interest has been. "Since we've only been offering (it) for about a month, we don't really have anything to share on demand."

Read more at news.com 

The Microsoft Permissive License, one of two licenses the software maker submitted to the Open Source Initiative for approval as open-source licenses in August, is unlikely to be approved in its current form.

There have been two principle objections to the license from the open-source community, Michael Tiemann, the president of OSI, told eWEEK in an interview here at the annual Gartner Open Source Summit on Sept. 20.

The first objection is that the use of the word "permissive" in the license title implies an expectation that the license does not meet. The second complaint is that the MS-PL (Microsoft Permissive License) is incompatible with a large number of other open-source licenses, he said.

"Microsoft submitted their licenses to us and there was, of course, a certain amount of flak that went up about this. But we attempted to pre-empt some of that by saying this was not about militating for or against a given company, but rather looking objectively at the licenses and proactively at the Open Source Definition, and running the approval process in a fair way," he said.

Read more at eWeek

Less than 2% of UK-based firms have already upgraded all their desktops to Windows Vista, CBR has learned.

That was one of the findings of a new survey by CBR amongst 300 senior IT decision-makers in the UK, researched during September. Over the course of the next few weeks, we will be bringing you a series of articles that shine a light on the most interesting results from that survey of UK IT business decision-makers, and at the end of the series we will look at the big picture: what do the results say about UK IT at large?

Read more at CBR 

When Monday’s anti-trust verdict was announced, the FSFE and Samba team talked to the gathered journalists and then sat down for a group interview with Sean Daly.

That interview is on Groklaw now, and I think it came out very well. There’s Carlo Piana and Georg Greve for FSFE and Jeremy Allison and Volker Lendecke of Samba.

The story they tell is very different from what’s dominated the mainstream press. It’s not contradictory, but a different focus. For example, while the mainsteam press has produced a lot of headlines about the 430 million Euro fine, they haven’t mentioned the 3.6 billion (US dollars?) in payments that Microsoft has made to buy Novell, CCIA, Sun, and RealNetworks out of the case. With the fine being unimportant to Microsoft, the real issue is the client-server protocols.

Read more at FreeSoftwareMagazine

A 13-year-old virus not seen since the heyday of the floppy disk drive is believed to returned, infecting up to 100,000 laptops during manufacture by German vendor Medion.

The exact number of systems affected by the 'Stoned.Angelina' virus is not known, but the consignment of between 10,000 and 100,000 Medion laptops was destined for sale in Danish and German outlets of European retailing giant Aldi. The company also sells Medion laptops in the UK.

Luckily, the virus in question is a boot-sector master boot record (MBR) infector, and while it can exist on the hard disk boot sector of the laptops in question, it would need a floppy drive to spread itself to new systems. The laptops ship without floppy drives.

Read more at PC ADVISOR 

"Before I launch into my tirade, I need to make a confession. I like Vista. I use it daily, but I also use it with the full knowledge that it's a pre-service pack 1 OS from the boys in Redmond. That necessarily means it will have glitches, bugs, and annoyances. That's a given. I'm willing to put up with all those headaches. But there were several things I was really looking forward to in Vista that are simply missing in action or broken. These are features I'd really hope would improve my productivity and make life a little easier."

Read more at ExtremeTech 

We all know how far open source software has progressed, but has
it come so far to not only challenge Windows, but replace it? Can you
really install Linux and open source software in place of Windows, and
want for nothing?

In the first of this multi-part series we send in Ashton Mills to
take on the challenge of using nothing but Linux and open source
software… for absolutely everything. Will he find nirvana in the
process, or lose all his hair in frustration? Follow him in and find
out.

Read more at HowtoMatrix