Microsoft is dumping Windows on all Russian schools in order to hinder the nationwide migration to GNU/Linux, which it has already attempted to derail several times before
Microsoft uses EDGI to derail another migration to GNU/Linux. The company has no shame and it also continues to show its anti-competitive nature.
WINDOWS is not doing terribly well. The margins are low and Microsoft relies on bundling alone (which requires a hardware buying spree). Looking at the past week’s news, there was one headline alone with “Vista” in it and just 5 clusters of headlines about “Windows 7″, 1 of which was a whitepaper.
Vista 7 is hardly mentioned these days, except for occasional complaints or PR fluff. Microsoft continues to improperly count “sales” and we have already explained how Microsoft fakes these to achieve an illusion of success. In many ways, Vista 7 is just Vista, but it looks a little different (notably the new deskbar). “Well the initial impression is how much it looks like Vista,” said Microsoft’s booster Jack Schofield about Vista 7, “Which I think is…uh…the thing I’m not supposed to say.”
Summary: The idea of live CDs running GNU/Linux is promoted by realisation of Windows’ fundamental flaws
• Can Ubuntu save online banking?
Not really, says McLaughlin, a Certified Information Security Professional and CIO of CNL Bank. Accessing online banking from your everyday PC is just asking for trouble, he says.
In fact, the CIO of the Orlando, Florida-based regional bank would like to see all of his customers – both consumers and businesses – access online banking either from a dedicated machine or from a self-booting CD-ROM running Ubuntu Linux and Firefox.
Microsoft is facing an ongoing legal challenge in Argentina from an open source company which alleges the software giant used its Windows Starter Edition to dominate the country’s operating system market.
Argentinian software company Pixart SRL launched the lawsuit in September 2008 but the possibility of the case being heard has become more likely in recent weeks, according to the company’s lawyer Dr Uriel Blustein of Estudio Blustein & Asociados.
“It is a suit filed in the ‘National commission for Fair Trading’, for an alleged abuse of dominant position,” Dr Blustein told eWEEK Europe in an email this week. “The Commission in is the process of deciding whether the trial will take place,” (i.e. whether there is enough evidence to justify an investigation).
I already explained in another article that open file formats are essential to save money in Public Administrations and make them more efficient and that the right choice for office document is the OpenDocument Format (ODF).
Since I regularly follow these themes, in September 2009 I received this request from outside Italy:
I have read in a report that: “According to Microsoft Italian regional authorities have examined ODF, but proposal for adopting ODF as the mandatory standard have been rejected” (translated by the sender of the message). This fact probably comes from this Microsoft paper. And we are trying to fact check it… can you help?
Back then I knew, just as I know today, that there is no law or regulation in Italy, not even at the city level, that mandates ODF as the only accepted format for office documents, regardless of the context.
It’s not the final nail in the coffin, but it’s yet another sign of Windows XP’s decline. Microsoft is officially dumping Windows XP support in the next iteration of Internet Explorer. Here’s the why and how and what’s next from Microsoft…
If you didn’t know, Microsoft is positioning IE 9 to have some advanced features, like supporting HTML5 and hardware accelerated image creation through Direct X’s ‘Direct 2D’ introduced in Windows 7 (Microsoft’s rendering platform.) That’s part of the reason IE 9 won’t run on XP. But there’s also a far more basic explanation.
Microsoft’s comments on happenings outside its immediate product portfolio are rare, and all the more valuable when they do appear. Here’s one from Horacio Gutierrez, “Corporate Vice President and Deputy General Counsel”, entitled “Apple v. HTC: A Step Along the Path of Addressing IP Rights in Smartphones.”
By now, all the alarm bells should be going off: this is from Microsoft’s top intellectual monopoly bloke, writing about one of the most surprising and potentially disruptive lawsuits in the world of technology – and one that doesn’t even involve Microsoft directly. Why on earth is he doing it? Answer: because Microsoft has something very important to communicate.
Summary: Internet Explorer 9 removes security features and lies about its standards compliance using improper benchmarks
MICROSOFT made some Internet Explorer patches available last week, only to discover that Internet Explorer is under a new wave of attacks (due to flaws which cannot be patched until next month). What did Microsoft do? To the gurus out there it advised that they apply some registry hacking. Windows is easy, eh? SJVN writes about this issue which we covered before:
Summary: More brainwash from Microsoft’s front group, the BSA (with former employees of Gates Senior); Europe’s patent office — not Europe itself — may be having problems
COMPARED to the rest of the world, Europe is doing pretty well (financially too) and China, where intellectual monopolies are mostly disregarded, has many countries owing it money. We don’t want to turn this into a discussion about national debts, but the point we are trying to make here is that the BSA, a Microsoft front group with Gates (senior) connections that’s quietly attacking Free software across the world this year, is simply delusional. We have already shown that the BSA lobbies to legalise software patents in Europe.
Proprietary giant is licensing open source to its partners. What is going on?
Over the past few weeks Microsoft has been licensing Linux to a number of its partners, most notably Amazon. Although the idea of Microsoft, a company steeped in proprietary software, licensing open source software is ludicrous it’s not completely unexpected. It’s also not the first time Microsoft has played the Linux patent game and we can expect to see more deals in the future. So what’s going on?
Back in 2007 Microsoft stirred up the open source community by claiming that Linux infringed on more than 200 of its patents. Although the specific patents were never actually revealed it was enough to stir emotions and kickstart a campaign in which Microsoft planned to sow fear, uncertainty and doubt among corporate users.
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