Chris Pearson wants some real solutions!

Apple does not pay a dividend, so an increase in their stock price and related market cap is the only value that investors can benefit from. Microsoft does pay a dividend, and is willing to give a percentage of their profits back to shareholders (sometimes in large chunks). While Apple has done well as a growth stock over the last 5 years they may eventually need to pay a dividend if they want to keep investors happy.

Apple's big run started with the iPod on October 23, 2001, about the same time that Microsoft released Windows XP. Since then Apple has release a bunch of iDevices, upgrades to their core line of computers, and a handful of other products many of which have been very successful in the consumer market. Microsoft however operates in both the business and consumer market, and saying that they have been sitting and twiddling their thumbs on their Windows and Office empire for the last 10 years would be incorrect. In the same amount of time Microsoft has released:

• 5 versions of the .Net Framework and Visual Studio
• 2 generations and 6+ versions of the Xbox gaming system
• 4 generations of the Zune music player
• 2 major desktop, 2 major server, and 4 Mobile/Embedded Operating Systems Updates

Not to mention large investments in online search, software as a service, and cloud computing. With the exception of their Online Services Division (MSN, Bing, Hotmail, advertising) Microsoft makes significant income from each of their product divisions and has more than twice the income that Apple does. Many of their business products are doing very well, and Sharepoint recently became their latest billion dollar sales product.

I will admit that Apple's products are more popular than Microsofts, but that is because they are tailored to the consumer market. Most business uses Microsoft because it costs less and makes users more productive. I personally think that the Zune HD and Windows 7 are great consumer products, and the Windows Phone 7 is designed to compete with the iPhone as opposed to the Palm OS for Windows Mobile, so it will be interesting to see how the next 10 years progresses.

The Google Docs page with the Gemini.zip file is not allowing any more downloads right now. Here is another link with more info about Gemini and an alternate download hosted on drop.io. Follow the instructions on page 2 of the original article to set it up.

Article about what was posted

If anything like that is posted publicly I would hope more than just the FBI would report it to the authorities.

Here is a great overview of the technique that was used:

http://www.virusbtn.com/pdf/conference_slides/2009/Maciejak-Lovet-VB2009.pdf

While they are targeting IIS and MSSQL the real issue is developers that don't sanitize the parameters that get sent to the database. The SQL is encoded in at least 2 different layers, so the only keywords that appear in the URL are ;dEcLaRe%20@s%20vArChAr(8000) and ;EXEC%20(@S); and It would be pretty difficult for Microsoft to block those without affecting legitimate usage. If you are using LINQ, Stored Procedures, or Parameterized Queries based on SqlCommand then this wouldn't work against your site or library. Mainly queries created as raw text strings have this vulnerability, and in this case it appears that some library or module used by a number of sites used raw SQL strings instead of the best practices recommended by Microsoft and every other SQL and web server vendor.

Jailbreaking an iPhone constitutes copyright infringement and a DMCA violation, says Apple in comments filed with the Copyright Office as part of the 2009 DMCA triennial rulemaking. This marks the first formal public statement by Apple about its legal stance on iPhone jailbreaking.

Link to full article on EFF

You should record the presentations and put them up on youtube...

I hope this means there will be an HTML5 video option for Ted.com. Their flash player is horrendous! I had to make a Ted.com userscript for full-screen video just be able to view videos full screen without it closing when using multiple monitors.

I just saw a video on Channel 9 showing that the Hard Rock Cafe is using Microsoft Surface and other touchscreen devices in a few of their restaurants. Considering the device was only release about 2 years ago and has such a large price tag I am still impressed with what they have done. Check it out:

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/LarryLarsen/The-Tech-Behind-The-Hard-Rock-Cafe/Default.aspx

Wikipedia mentions AT&T, Harrah’s, Disneyland, Sheraton Hotels and MSNBC as users of the Microsoft Surface too. I have yet to see one, but it still is making it's way into the market.

I use VirtualBox for building a test environment and it works very well. Also the graphics acceleration worked fine for the games that I tested with. Parallels Workstation 4.0 Extreme looks interesting, but the only "Certified hardware platform" is a HP Z800 Workstation, which costs $2000 to $5000. Add in $400 for the Parallels license and that gets to be a bit steep. Plus the announcer on the video sounds like he is trying to sell you a used car.