Showing headlines posted by jezuch

A French laptop buyer has won a refund from Lenovo after a four-year legal battle over the cost of a Windows license he didn't want. The judgment could open the way for PC buyers elsewhere in Europe to obtain refunds for bundled software they don't want, French campaign group No More Racketware said Monday.

The principle of copyright is this. It is a tax on readers for the purpose of giving a bounty to writers. The tax is an exceedingly bad one; it is a tax on one of the most innocent and most salutary of human pleasures; and never let us forget, that a tax on innocent pleasures is a premium on vicious pleasures. I admit, however, the necessity of giving a bounty to genius and learning. In order to give such a bounty, I willingly submit even to this severe and burdensome tax. Nay, I am ready to increase the tax, if it can be shown that by so doing I should proportionally increase the bounty. My complaint is, that my honorable and learned friend doubles, triples, quadruples, the tax, and makes scarcely and perceptible addition to the bounty.

Why is this a problem? Because there's no central certification authority for UEFI signing keys. Microsoft can require that hardware vendors include their keys. Their competition can't. A system that ships with Microsoft's signing keys and no others will be unable to perform secure boot of any operating system other than Microsoft's. No other vendor has the same position of power over the hardware vendors. Red Hat is unable to ensure that every OEM carries their signing key. Nor is Canonical. Nor is Nvidia, or AMD or any other PC component manufacturer. Microsoft's influence here is greater than even Intel's.

It was the dawn of the third age of Java, ten years after the Sun/Microsoft war. The Java Community Process was a dream given form. Its goal: to prevent another war by creating a place where technologists and vendors could work out their differences peacefully.

[I love the analogy, I happen to be a big fan of the show too. - Scott]

The better question to ask is why Microsoft decided to set the price point where they did? And the answer to that one is quite simple: Microsoft doesn’t actually want you to upgrade to Windows 7 at all.

Back in the early part of 2008 we decided that we wanted to take a fresh look at Linux on the desktop. To do so we would start with a “switcher” article, giving us the chance to start anew and talk about some important topics while gauging the usability of Linux.

We receive all sorts of unique products on a weekly basis and I use the term unique loosely in this case. Let’s just say a majority of these trinkets are barely good enough for target practice, much less taking up valuable shelf space. In fact, it is not every day we open a non-descript box in the lab and discover an Emperor Penguin snuggled amidst the packaging peanuts. Today was such a day and I have to say it was a pleasant surprise.

A Texas court has banned sales of Microsoft Word and copies of Microsoft Office containing word until a final decision is reached in a copyright infringement trial. Microsoft has 60 days to cease sales.

[At first I thought it was on The Onion. Also note that it says "copyright" but means "patents". -J.]

Bring me a Pre that fixes Synergy, improves performance, has iPhone-like materials/build quality, full search, full copy/paste, visual voicemail and a more mature app store and I’ll leave Apple. Until then, personally, I’ll keep a close eye on the Pre because Palm totally gets it. This is what a smartphone is supposed to be and we finally, two years after the iPhone’s release, have a real competitor both in hardware and in OS.

This is a huge change for Intel, which has for decades acted as Microsoft’s bitch, doing pretty much whatever Redmond demanded for fear of being written-out of the next Windows PC hardware spec in favor of AMD or even IBM. But that was the old Microsoft. The Microsoft of today isn’t nearly as powerful, whether they yet know it or not.

I was with a big customer of ours last year, and reading through my account briefing before the meeting, I knew we were doing well. An analysis of their download activity showed they were heavy users of Solaris and OpenSolaris, and they had a large internal community of MySQL users, as well. In the meeting, their CIO said "we love where Solaris is headed." I then asked if we could help with MySQL, and he said... "I banned it."

So, as a little digression from our normal content, I felt like writing a list of the top 10 reasons to work on open-source software…but being a born Californian, I felt I had to pay a little respect to my roots. So here we have the top 10 reasons to work on open-source…as said by, like, a dude from Cali.

The Eclipse Foundation wants to know who is using Eclipse and how they are using it ahead of next year's planned mega release. One of the main innovations in the Eclipse Foundation's Ganymede synchronized release of 24 projects this year, out today, is a feature called Usage Data Collector (UDC).

I have this notion to write a series of columns from time to time under the title "Reality Check" -- columns intended to explain how the world of Information Technology actually functions. Because like any other entrenched, complex, and often closeted industry, things in IT don't really work the way many people think they do. I'm guessing the Vatican is a bit like that, too. So I'll be looking at various IT players and their roles and trying to put them into perspective, much as I did recently with a column or two about the role of computer consultants. This week the topic is Gartner Inc., or rather all the Gartner-like operations that give advice about technology to America's largest businesses: what do these guys actually DO?

[Not Linux-related, but an interesting "analysis of analysts", those who make us laugh so often -J.]

Cheating is bad, but does cheating infringe on a video game publisher’s copyright? World of Warcraft-maker Blizzard, a subsidiary of Vivendi, is trying to argue in court that it does.

Analyst Opinion - Last week, I was in China and witnessed the launch of the first generation Mobile Internet Device (MID) platform products based on Intel's new Atom processor. This got me thinking back to what we had before the MID and why some of those products were successful and others were not. Of course, now we can speculate who will be successful with the MID.

[I was reading it and thinking "what's wrong with this guy?" and only at the end noticed who was the author... You can sense Rob Enderle from a mile away! -J.]

With a little bit of digging, I’ll show you how those file formats got so unbelievably complicated, why it doesn’t reflect bad programming on Microsoft’s part, and what you can do to work around it.

[I kinda like their approach to this, as a software engineer, but it sure looks like some desperate ad-hockery -J.]

Even we at TG Daily sometimes question points he makes and we occasionally get into heated discussions. But we are very well aware of his background and experience and realize that he is one most knowledgeable general analysts in Silicon Valley today and we learned over the years that there's always a good reason why he has certain opinion.

[Some holiday chuckle from our favorite analyst -J.]

New Horizons is about to enter hibernation for its long trip to Pluto. It will be deep in slumber, but not forgotten, and we’ve taken a crucial step to ensure that its precious data will never be forgotten either. All planetary missions undergo a process called "data archiving," which protects the information against the ravages of time. These archives have proven their value -- for example, scientists are still using data archives from the Voyager missions of the 1970s. The concept of archiving is simple, but to do it right, there is much to be considered.