Global Toad News

Recently VMWare announced that they are testing the VMWare product on Mac’s. This means that if you get a Mac, you will be able to run Windows, Linux and of course the Mac OS very easily. The new product is called “Fusion” and the home page is here.

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If you want to run Vista today, you can download a virtual machine of Vista Ultimate, and Microsoft will give you a key good til March 2007.  You can go here for more information.

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$440 Million dollars.

According to open.itworld.com Novell gets $440 Million dollars of support from Microsof:

Novell and Microsoft announced a deal last month to “bridge the divide between open-source and proprietary-source software,” as Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer described it. Under the deal, Microsoft promised not to file patent lawsuits against Novell customers. It will also spend US$440 million on sales, marketing and license fees in support of Novell’s Suse Linux distribution, according to documents filed by Novell with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The two companies will work together to help customers integrate their competing operating systems.

From Novell’s stand point, I can see that this deal made sense from a purely business stand point.  Novell gets 440 Million and doesn’t really have to do much, except use it’s goodwill and name to promote Microsoft.

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An interesting article at p2pnet.net states:

The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history.

That’s a little harsh, while I think the spec is not a real spec, in that it is amorphous saying that the spec is a starting point, rather than a common point of agreement for hardware.  But that is typical of Microsoft’s specs, the published specs are more for political purposes rather a true desire for interoperabilty.

In an case, I am moving towards a vendor neutral approach to operating systems, as I would like to have software that works just as well tomorrow as it does today, rather than software that works worse tomorrow than today.

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WinPooch is free open source software that (from the summary):

… is a watchdog for Windows (2000, XP, 2003, but only 32-bits). It detects modifications in your system, so as to detect a trojan or a spyware installation. It also includes a real-time anti-virus.

Basically it can be used as a replacement for Norton, McAffee, etc.  It does realtime antivirus scans, can scan internet activity, log what is connecting to where, and uses the ClamAV database for anti virus scanning.  Of course you can also use ClamWin as a standalone if you don’t want real time scanning.

All in all, I think it’s better than getting the warnings that your subscription for your $50 anti virus/anti spyware program expired and you are no longer protected.

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Someone pointed me to this image which shows how Microsoft presents it’s new terms and conditions for their new AdCenter product.

I guess in order to read it, you need to copy and paste it.  Well Microsoft doesn’t really want you to know that you are agreeing to give them your kidneys anyway.

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Well, yet another day, another Vista strewn internet.  Why someone would want to spend $400 USD on this is still a mystery to me.  Maybe the DotNetAddict can shed some light:

The blog starts out good enough:

the day Vista’s RTM build came out, I downloaded it and installed it on every Vista-capable machine I had in my possession. I’ve been using Vista for several weeks now and I’ve come to a couple of conclusions that I think might startle and shock some of you.

Shock some of us?  Surely in a good and wonderful way no doubt.

Opps, no luck there because:

Vista is not ready for primetime. By that I mean that Vista still feels like a beta. That’s right. It has so many compatibility problems with existing applications that running anything other than stuff from Microsoft that specifically says “for Vista Build XXXX” makes me feel like I’m taking my life into my own hands.

Well maybe it’s good for developers, after all Steve Ballmer’s famous developer speech shows that Microsoft really cares about developers.  Opps, wrong again:

• Visual Studio 2005 – I can’t find the words to express the irony involved in the fact that Visual Studio 2005 has known and published compatibility problems with Windows Vista. To me that would be like GM putting out a new truck that won’t run OnStar…just plain stupid.
• Virtual PC – worthless. Don’t even attempt on Vista.

But VMWare works great, so at least Microsoft Vista works with someone’s software.  Too bad that Microsoft doesn’t care if the old software from Microsoft works with the new operating system from err…Microsoft.

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According to NeoSmart.net:

On 6 of the 8 tested systems,³ recovering Windows Vista from a hibernate or Deep Sleep results in one of the following:

• When recovering from a hibernate: “Cannot find uxtheme.dll” appears whenever you attempt to run (almost) any program. No matter what you do, you can’t even run Task Manager. What’s worse, a restart doesn’t fix it, and because Windows Explorer also fails to launch with this error, you need to boot from the DVD and use System Restore – Safe Mode won’t work!⁴

The complete list is here, but it gets worse from the above, BSOD, no sound, and other wonderful goodies.

For $400 you really should get a nice operating system, at least a reliable as the free Linux operating system (that does what you want, and doesn’t have the software police beating down your door).

I still think that Windows 2000 was the pinnacle of Microsoft operating systems.  It was before the digital rights management, lock you out of your computer craze that seems to have affected Microsoft in the ensuing years, or maybe it’s just that the bounce Microsoft got from it’s collaboration with IBM over Windows NT 3 is gone, and now that IBM is putting effort into Linux, there aren’t that good many developers that want to sell themselves to Microsoft to exclusion of all else (as SCO claims that contracts are what you use against people, and they had over $50 million pumped into them at Microsoft’s direction).

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From eWeek:

There are no pre-patch workarounds available. Microsoft suggests that users “not open or save Word files,” even from trusted sources. “As a best practice, users should always exercise extreme caution when opening unsolicited attachments from both known and unknown sources,” the company said.

I suggest OpenOffice.org to open/edit and save word documents.  But heck you can just not use word for a while until Microsoft comes out with the Office 2007 upgrade.

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