Microsoft Wanted to Mask Linux Report Sponsorship, E-Mails Reveal

  Submitted by Flatline Microsoft 11 Comments
Microsoft executives pondered whether to remove the company's name from a 2002 report done by research firm IDC that touted Windows total cost of ownership over Linux, according to e-mail messages entered into evidence in an Iowa antitrust case. The report, which IDC released in December 2002 and was plugged by Microsoft in its then-new "Get the Facts" publicity campaign against Linux, compared total cost of ownership of Windows 2000 and Linux server software. The IDC study, which was identified as Microsoft sponsored when it debuted, claimed that Windows 2000 offered a lower TCO in four of five enterprise scenarios. Before its release, however, company executives worried that adding Microsoft's moniker would only fuel the fire from Linux partisans.
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Apple in Continuing Difficulty Over Options Issue

  Submitted by alcibiades Apple 21 Comments
Apple has given warning that it could be removed from the highly regarded Nasdaq Global Select Market, as the maker of iPod and Macintosh acknowledged for the first time that it was the subject of a federal investigation into its stock option practices. The company, which last June revealed 'irregularities' in its stock option grants and took an USD 84 million (GPB 43 million) charge six months later, said that the investigation by the US Securities and Exchange Commission could lead to further restatements and delays to its financial reporting.
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Novell Could Be Banned From Selling Linux

  Submitted by mwtomlinson Novell and Ximian 135 Comments
The Free Software Foundation is reviewing Novell's right to sell new versions of Linux operating system software after the open-source community criticized Novell for teaming up with Microsoft. "The community of people wants to do anything they can to interfere with this deal and all deals like it. They have every reason to be deeply concerned that this is the beginning of a significant patent aggression by Microsoft," Eben Moglen, the Foundation's general counsel, said on Friday. Update: The FSF claims this is being hyped.
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Netcraft: February 2007 Web Server Survey

  Submitted by jayson.knight Internet 15 Comments
"In the February 2007 survey we received responses from 108810358 sites, an increase of 1.93 million from last month. Apache has a decline of 442K sites this month, and sees its share of the web server market slip by 1.47 percent to 58.7 percent. This is the first time Apache's market share has been below 60 percent since September 2002. Microsoft-IIS gain 935K sites, continuing an advance that has seen Microsoft steadily chip away at what once seemed an insurmountable lead for Apache. In our Feb. 2006 survey, Apache held 68% market share, giving it lead of 47.5% over Windows (20.5% share). In this month's survey, Microsoft's share has improved to 31.0%, narrowing Apache's advantage to 27.7%."
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Meet the LG Prada, iPhone’s Competitor; Google Maps for PocketPC

Wireless 33 Comments
A new video showing the touchscreen-based UI of the LG Prada phone has hit YouTube. The phone is going head to head with the iPhone UI-wise and it shows the path that the majority of phones will look like in the years to come. It is not clear if the LG Prada is a smartphone that allows you to run native applications or just a 'feature phone'. On other mobile news, Google released a native Google Maps application for PocketPC and MS Smartphones (screenshots) that works better than the J2ME version.
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Bill Gates on Vista, Apple’s ‘Lying’ Ads

Microsoft 164 Comments
NewsWeek interviewed Bill Gates about Vista, its reception, and Apple, among other things. On the complaint that some of the features in Vista appear to come from the Mac: "You can go through and look at who showed any of these things first, if you care about the facts. If you just want to say, "Steve Jobs invented the world, and then the rest of us came along," that's fine. If you're interested, Jim Allchin will be glad to educate you feature by feature what the truth is. I mean, it's fascinating, maybe we shouldn't have showed so publicly the stuff we were doing, because we knew how long the new security base was going to take us to get done. Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine."
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ReactOS’s Project Leader Speaks up

  Submitted by Floris Lambrechts ReactOS 19 Comments
In preparation to hist talk at the upcoming FOSDEM conference in Brussels, ReactOS project leader Aleksey Bragin in an interview details the code audit that the project is going trough, and reveals the intellectual property minefield that such a large reverse engineered OS brings. "I can't stress this enough: up to now, no suspicious or illegal code has been found during the audit. Buggy code - yes, this was either fixed or rewritten. Also, another part which is sometimes speculated about - that the remaining 3% of the unaudited codebase is illegal - this is completely wrong."
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Vista’s DRM: Interview with Alex Ionescu

  Submitted by frik85 ReactOS 30 Comments
"As Vista’s deployment ramps up, news has begun to circulate that its highly regarded Protected Media Path has been defeated. The Protected Media Path is an array of Digital Rights Management technologies that allows 'premium content' to be 'enjoyed' by the consumer. The individual that has been labeled responsible for this feat is Alex Ionescu. Alex Ionescu is highly experienced and talented programmer whose primary work concentrates on the community-based ReactOS project. ReactOS is an open source operating system based on the Windows architecture. To get a better understanding of his work, Slyck.com interviewed Alex who dispelled many of the myths surrounding his work, while also providing insight into his accomplishments."
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Installing JDK6 on Debian Etch

  Submitted by anonymous Java 9 Comments
"I find Debian an outstanding distro for server needs with its latest version Etch nearly been released as of the day I'm writing this. Java 6 isn't available from its repositories and I doubt it would for Etch. So it's time to grab the situation into your hands and install it manually."
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Allchin: What Comes Next

Humor 39 Comments
Jim Allchin, who officially quit Microsoft after 17 years of service Wednesday, posted on the Windows Vista Blog about how he thinks his day will look in the near future. "3:15 PM: Went to drive the afternoon carpool run. Spent 20 minutes waiting in line behind other parents whose kids weren't even outside yet. Need to write paper about Next Generation Carpool Queuing solution (NGCQ) that integrates Windows Live Presence with the driveway scheduler. Must get appointment with school principal when it's done."
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Review: Office 2007

Microsoft 52 Comments
The Inq reviews Office 2007, and concludes: "It's hard to define, but the new office suite feels good and is comfortable to use. That said if your requirements don't stretch beyond the normal usage of the odd letter, a spreadsheet to balance your budget and some email then there isn't a lot to recommend forking over cash for Office 2007, when there are several free options out there are increasingly attractive and compatible with Office documents."
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Fedora 7 Test 1 Released

  Submitted by anonymous Fedora Core 28 Comments
"Fedora 7 Test 1 has been released today. For this particular release, we only did a Desktop spin of the package collection. We are still fine tuning targetted spins of the collection as part of the merger of Core and Extras. We also produced a LiveCD that has the ability to install to your harddrive."
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Visopsys 0.66 Released

  Submitted by poundsmack OS News 4 Comments
Today marks a new release of the Visopsys operating system, version 0.66. "This is a maintenance release, featuring the ability to resize Windows Vista partitions, more reliable loading on various systems, better exception handling, color text in graphics mode, improvements to the C library, and a number of bugfixes." The changelog has all the details.
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