Talking Linux IP with Bill Gates

  Submitted by John Mills Microsoft 90 Comments
"If you could ask Bill Gates one question, what would you ask? I spent an hour today with Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates on the company's Redmond campus. I chose to ask Bill about Microsoft's intellectual property stance against Linux and its open source developers, from the SCO Group's litigation against IBM to Steve Ballmer's recent claim Linux infringes on Microsoft patents after signing a patent indemnity with Novell."
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Vista Flaw Could Haunt Microsoft

  Submitted by csousa Microsoft 32 Comments
"Microsoft has a problem. Vista, its long-awaited update to the Windows operating system, can't run the current version of SQL Server. The company is working on a SQL upgrade that is compatible with Vista - called SQL Server 2005 Express Service Pack 2 - but it's in beta and can be licensed only for testing purposes. Microsoft hasn't set a release date for the new SQL program. So companies looking to install Vista, which went on sale to corporate customers Nov. 30, are going to have to get their database management software someplace else."
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FSF Launches Campaign Against Microsoft Vista

Open Source 433 Comments
"The FSF today launched a campaign with a twofold mission of exposing the harms inflicted on computer users by the new Microsoft Windows Vista and promoting free software alternatives that respect users' security and privacy rights. "Vista is an upsell masquerading as an upgrade. It is an overall regression when you look at the most important aspect of owning and using a computer: your control over what it does. Obviously MS Windows is already proprietary and very restrictive, and well worth rejecting. But the new 'features' in Vista are a Trojan Horse to smuggle in even more restrictions. We'll be focusing attention on detailing how they work, how to resist them, and why people should care", said FSF program administrator John Sullivan."
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Mozilla Betas Thunderbird 2.0

Mozilla, Gecko 29 Comments
"The Thunderbird email client doesn't get half the attention that its big brother, the Firefox browser, gets, but the Mozilla Foundation has finally gotten around to lavishing some love on it, and the first beta of version 2 is now out. If you think there's nothing more that can added to an email client - except for the fabled seek-out-and-destroy-spam option - prepare to be pleasantly surprised. The new Thunderbird comes with numerous new features."
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Non-OS-Dependant Malware

  Submitted by anonymous Privacy, Security 20 Comments
"All too often people talk about the disadvantages of the Windows operating system: it has too many security flaws, it is not properly patched, it is not security oriented… Until the much talked about Vista system finally reaches our computers, there will still be plenty of time to protest. However, with the new malware dynamic, the idea that malware is restricted to specific operating systems is becoming anachronistic. It no longer matters whether the victim is a home-user or a company employee. It is now irrelevant whether the system administrator is just someone who lives round the corner or a highly qualified IT manager."
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GNU Classpath 0.93 ‘Dreamland’ Released

  Submitted by Mark Wielaard Java 11 Comments
GNU Classpath 0.93 'Dreamland', a core class library for the Java programming language, has been released with lots of enhancements (free swing, html, corba, new i/o, graphics2d/cairo support). The release announcement also details pointers to supported applications and screenshots, the status and future of the 1.4 and 1.5 generics branches. An update on the Summer of Code student work. Plus some prelimenary ideas on cooperating with the Sun GPL OpenJDK Java project. And the GNU Classpath commitments to the Free Software community for the future of various projects around GNU Classpath, the users and GNU/Linux distros relying on GNU Classpath.
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Vista: Why Bother?

Windows 83 Comments
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has written article in which he wonders if your operating system isn't broke, why 'fix' it? If what you're running now works for you, why should you move 'up' to Vista? Joe Wilcox responds to SJVN: "Colleague Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols asks 'If your operating system isn't broke, why 'fix' it?' The very question is the problem. The question reflects a sentiment I hear too often as an excuse for keeping old technologies in place - long after their real usefulness is gone."
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David Pogue Reviews Vista

Windows 46 Comments
"It doesn't matter what you (or tech reviewers) think of Windows Vista; sooner or later, it's what most people will have on their PCs. In that light, it's fortunate that Vista is better looking, better designed and better insulated against the annoyances of the Internet. At the very least, it's well equipped to pull the world's PCs along for the next five years - or whenever the next version of Windows drops down the chimney." More here. Free registration might be required.
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Get Vista and Samba to Work

  Submitted by c Internet 104 Comments
Early adopters of Vista may notice that it will not connect to Samba share folders out of the box. This will be a bit of a pain for many enterprise customers. The technical reason is because Microsoft Vista’s default security policy is to only use NTLMv2 authentication. To get Vista to work with Samba follow this simple tutorial.
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