(Score.5, Interestin writes "The NZ Automobile Association has just announced that it is dropping Open Office and switching back to MS Office. According to their CIO, 'Microsoft Office is not any cheaper, but it was almost impossible to work out what open-source was actually costing because of issues such as incompatibility and training.' In addition, 'you have no idea where open-source products are going, whereas vendors like Microsoft provide a roadmap for the future.'" About 500 seats are involved. MS conceded to letting Office users run the software at home as well.

mistermark writes "Two years ago this community discussed my encrypted file server. That machine has kept running and running up until a failing drive and a power outage this last week. So, it's time to revise everything and add RAID to it as well. Now you can have an on-the-fly encrypting/decrypting NAS with the data security of RAID, all in one. Here is the how-to."

Redrum writes "Everyone thinks that Apple's iPod runs an OS called Pixo, and that the iPhone ushered in a brand new epoch based on OS X. That myth has been busted: the iPod runs Apple's own Mach/BSD kernel, and Pixo is only used as a graphics layer. Daniel Eran outlines the story behind Pixo and what OS X means for Apple. It's no joke; the story was confirmed by Tim Monroe, a member of Apple's QuickTime engineering team, as is easy to verify yourself." Update: 07/15 19:48 GMT by KD : Turns out to be an April Fools joke.

Unequivocal writes "A new Wired magazine blog entry shows that Microsoft has patented a technique for preventing and reversing music piracy at the hardware level. 'Microsoft and Apple are thinking along the same lines when it comes to enabling users to copy music between their wireless devices. Certain cellphones already allow you to [transfer music] via Bluetooth file transfer, but Microsoft's patented idea would take the concept further, by allowing users to trade MP3s that may have come from file sharing networks to one another, expiring the song on the recipient's device after three plays, unless the user pays Microsoft a fee in order to continue to listen to the track, with a percentage going to the person who provided the song. As the abstract puts it, "even [the] resale of pirated media content [can] benefit... the copyright holder."'"

extra88 writes "Heise online is reporting that Sun has released their OpenDocument Format (ODF) plug-in for Microsoft Office 2000, XP and 2003. The plug-in allows Microsoft Office (for Windows) users to open ODF files and save their work in ODF formats used by OpenOffice, StarOffice, and other programs. According to the ReadMe, the plug-in adds "ODF Text Document (*.odt)" as a format to Word's Open and Save dialogs and adds Import and Export options to Excel and PowerPoint."

Alfaresy writes "As previously reported by Degadget back on June 19th, the iMac update due this summer and is expected to be available in 20- and 24-inch versions, while the 17-inch version set to be discontinued. Apple's next iMac revision is currently tracking for release in August, and will have a brushed aluminum enclosure with measure just 2-inch thick, according to ThinkSecret's sources. Furthermore, ThinkSecret's sources say, "The elegant new enclosure will somewhat resemble the current white iMac but is said to feature a shorter space below the actual display, where most of the internals are housed." The upcoming iMacs are expected to be based on Intel's Santa Rosa platform with speeds to reach the highest point at 2.4GHz."

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft has responded to the latest round of EU requests by asking how much the EU thinks they should charge for Windows Server Protocols. The EU has stated the Microsoft should charge based on 'innovation, not patentability' and that they have 'examined 160 Microsoft claims to patented technologies' concluding 'only four may only deserve to claim a limited degree of innovation.' The EU is also starting to discuss structural remedies as opposed to the behavioral remedies they are currently enforcing. At what point has/will the EU overstepped its bounds?"

driehle writes "In an article published in IEEE Computer magazine I recently looked at the economics of open source. I argue that large system integrators will do best and that open source startups will keep struggling. For developers, open source creates independence and new career paths as committers, while non-committers will fall on hard times. The race is on!"

Bruce Schneier has said that trying to make digital files uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet. With Vista, Microsoft seems to have done a pretty good job of making premium content files not copyable. Now a few readers have tipped us to a new wrinkle: Vista also makes it very, very slow to copy, rename, or delete ordinary files. Here is a Microsoft TechNet thread on the problem. The Reg reports that Microsoft has a hotfix for what sounds like a subset of the more general problem complained about on TechNet; but they will only give it to customers who ask nicely. And a hotfix is fussier to install than a proper patch.

AlexGr sends us to InternetNews.com for an account of a Microsoft VP demonstrating Microsoft's ASP.NET AJAX product running on Ubuntu at AJAXWorld. In his earlier keynote, Brad Abrams had declared that, when it comes to AJAX, Microsoft is not the cathedral and open source isn't really a bazaar. He noted that ASP.NET AJAX is available under Microsoft's permissive license with full source code. "The Web is built on open standards and we at Microsoft believe that we have to enable those open standards," Abrams said.

xtaski writes "Wired's 'Cult of Mac' blog offers up video of Novell's spin on the Apple Mac vs. PC ads. The twist: a young lady portraying that winsome third party, Linux. There are two ads available for perusal, and the second is definitely the better of the two."

jeevesbond writes "The Mono Project announced that it has developed a Visual Basic compiler that will enable software developers who use Microsoft Visual Basic to run their applications on any platform that supports Mono, such as Linux, without any code modifications."

According to NanoWerk, UC Riverside researchers have come up with a memory device based on telescoping multi-walled carbon nanotubes. According to one of the researchers, 'This finding leads to a promising potential to build ultrafast high-density nonvolatile memory, up to 100 gigahertz or into the terahertz range" and a prototype could be demonstrated "in the next two to three years.' Similar devices from UCLA and Caltech based on bistable rotaxanes are farther along in being integrated into actual memory circuits, but tend to break after a fairly small number of position changes. Carbon nanotubes may promise more durable switches.

philos writes "According to SANS ISC, there's a vulnerability in Solaris 10 and 11 telnet that allows anyone to remotely connect as any account, including root, without authentication. Remote access can be gained with nothing more than a telnet client. More information and a Snort signature can be found at riosec.com. Worse, this is almost identical to a bug in AIX and Linux rlogin from way back in 1994."