Bad Windows

For a little bit of background, see our previous posts about this ongoing mess at the ‘Open’ University (OU) [1, 2]. It was, on the face of it, sort of infiltrated by Microsoft. Here is the latest development, courtesy of Mark Ballard:

But the OU has refused to precipitate the wholesale switch of students from bought Microsoft software to (where appropriate) free open source alternatives because it would require too much effort and the costs would be too high at a time when the governments is squeezing student funding.

Read more at Boycott Novell

Microsoft’s – Document Interop Initiative, launched in March, has now published the Microsoft Office 2007 SP2 Open Document Format (ODF) implementer notes as a web site. The site is arranged as a tree structured view of the Oasis ODF 1.1 specification, with a button to pop up a window containing Microsoft’s notes on their implementation. This includes information on what Office 2007 SP2 does with elements when loading, or saving, documents and on the supported status of each ODF document element.

Read more at heise open source

An unpatched security hole in Internet Explorer that is being exploited affects all versions of the browser, making it more serious than originally believed when it was first publicized two days ago, Microsoft says.

Microsoft is investigating reports of attacks against a new vulnerability in IE but said in an update to a security advisory issued late on Thursday that all versions of IE are potentially vulnerable.

The company recommends setting the Internet zone security setting to “high” and using access control lists to disable Ole32db.dll to provide the most effective protection against an attack.

“Our latest information is that there are still limited attacks seeking to load malicious software on vulnerable systems,” Christopher Budd writes in the Microsoft Security Response Center blog.

Read more at CNet

He’s known as a jovial comedian with a vocabulary wider than the Grand Canyon. But an afternoon with Windows Vista has seemingly turned Stephen Fry into a intemperate, foul-mouthed illiterate.

Fry’s incandescent range against his Vista machine was captured on the star’s Twitter feed.

The QI star and Guardian technology columnist’s rant started on Sunday afternoon. “I hate Vista so much I want to cry,” he wrote. “Bought a Vaio. The most useless $4k ever spent. It just will not join a sec-enabled network.

Read more at PCPro

Microsoft has launched Oxite, an open source blogging platform.

However, the software maker was quick to underline that the product is aimed at developers and not intended to directly compete with popular blogging software such as WordPress or Movable Type.

Microsoft posted the Oxite code on its CodePlex Web site last week and made an official announcement this week. The software, described as an alpha release, is available under the Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL), one of Microsoft’s OSI-certified open source licenses.

Oxite is a standards-compliant, extensible content-management system designed to support either blogs or larger Web sites, Microsoft said. The platform includes support for features such as pingbacks, trackbacks, anonymous or authenticated commenting, gravatars and RSS feeds at any page level, the company said.

Read more at ZDNet

Earlier today, we reported that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has dropped below 70% for the first time nearly nine years. Even worse, market research firm Net Applications now estimates Microsoft’s Windows market share at less than 90%, which is still an impressive number, but a lower level than most PC users may remember. We had to go back to Windows 3.11 to find similar market share data.   

Any product that owns close to 90% of a market that is as gigantic as the global PC market would be considered a huge success. In the case of Microsoft, that is, of course, different. Windows has suffered from a continued market share decline since the 2003/2004 time frame and November 2008 was the first month in a very long time that Microsoft has dropped below 90%, 89.62% to be exact, according to Net Applications.

Read more at TG Daily

SOME weeks ago we wrote about how Microsoft fakes recommendations and deceives the public. Now we have solid proof.

Let’s take it one step at a time and see how this works.

In short, Microsoft informs computer shops that if they put some Vista advertising in their newspaper advertisements (or other forms of ads), there will be money in the bank for them, paid in the form of marketing money from Microsoft.

This is how Microsoft gets all those Vista advertisements all over the place, including big OEMs. They pay you for it. It’s an advert, not a sincere recommendation. This may also explain why Dell’s adverts for Ubuntu-powered PCs are accompanied by pro-Windows messages, as Ken Stark pointed out recently (Dell was subjected to bad and exclusionary deals before).

Read more at Boycott Novell