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Microsoft Shown Involved with Baystar and SCO 269

Posted by Zonk from the cheeky dept.
baryon351 writes "Back a few years ago, when SCO looked like it was hemorrhaging cash, a surprise investment came out of the blue from venture capitalists Baystar. They invested $20 million in SCO and aided their anti-Linux cause, enabling McBride & co. to continue with (now shown incorrect) claims of line-by-line code copying of SCO IP in Linux. Now one of IBM's submissions to the court reveals Microsoft was behind it after all. Baystar's manager says about Microsoft's Richard Emerson: 'Mr. Emerson and I discussed a variety of investment structures wherein Microsoft would backstop, or guarantee in some way, Baystar's investment ... Microsoft assured me that it would in some way guarantee BayStar's investment in SCO.' Despite the denials about their involvement, Microsoft helped SCO continue this charade — and on top of that halted all contact with Baystar after the investment, reneging on their guarantee."
User Journal

Journal Journal: A Spiritual Crisis

Journal by stinky wizzleteats

To believe or not to believe...

A thought exercise. I admit (attest??, proclaim??) I haven't fully bought into this, but here goes...

Atheists: "Faith has no basis in fact."

Religious types: "Duh, if it had fact, it wouldn't be faith."

I understand this point. I've been a Christian all my life and know the words when Jesus spoke to Thomas "Blessed are they who do not see, and yet believe" We're taught there this is merit in faith without seeing.

Here's the thing:

Television For an Audience 45 Light Years Away 324

Posted by kdawson from the waiting-for-syndication dept.
beebopdebop writes, "The Irish Times notes that Europe goes intergalactic tonight with the broadcast of a program conceived for aliens and broadcast towards a point 45 light years away in the direction of the Big Dipper. The two naked hosts will present their own unclothed bodies as examples of our physical embodiments, and will tell about daily human existence. Music, art, and our own personal messages will be transmitted as well as discussions from sociologists, scientists, and space experts. This project is the brainchild of the French-based Centre National D'etudes Spatiales and is rooted in seriousness as a natural extension of the gold-plated ambassador disks of Pioneer 10. Those of us wishing to be included can still post messages to be sent into space via a CNES antenna. We will have to wait 90 years to learn whether or not some lifeform was listening."

Business 2.0 Says 'Boycott Vista' 756

Posted by Zonk from the business-gets-surly dept.
amyandjake writes "Business 2.0 has a story about Vista's delays, the amount of time wasted by Microsoft bringing Vista to market, and the fact that it doesn't seem to have any compelling features for upgrading. The last paragraph of the story says 'Boycott Vista. Keep your old Windows XP PC around. Don't buy a new one. That's the only way we have to let Microsoft know Vista is an overhyped, late, and pointless update to XP — a perfectly fine operating system.'" Relatedly, torrensmith writes "Paul Thurrott is at it again with his seemingly never-ending supply of information about Windows Vista. This time, he discusses the things he dislikes about the program, in the article The Dark Side of Windows Vista RC1."
User Journal

Journal Journal: Movie review - The Descent 1

Journal by stinky wizzleteats
In short, it sucked.

It was scary. The backdrop element of claustrophobic caving combined with the core terror element was effective at generating fear. that about wraps up the good news.

WGA Turning Off PCs in the Fall? 857

Posted by Zonk from the no-more-clippy dept.
thesaint05 writes "We all know about Microsoft's WGA initiative that started last July. Most of us were troubled to learn that the WGA has been 'phoning home' to Microsoft at every boot. Well, get ready, because eventually Microsoft may be turning off copies of Windows without WGA installed. According to a Microsoft technician, 'in the fall, having the latest WGA will become mandatory and if its not installed, Windows will give a 30 day warning and when the 30 days is up and WGA isn't installed, Windows will stop working, so you might as well install WGA now.'" A new version of WGA was released on Tuesday and, at least for the time being, Windows users have the option of removing WGA from their systems.
User Journal

Journal Journal: The Effects of DRM - From Ignorance to Activism

Journal by stinky wizzleteats
Anyone who knows me knows that I am a very serious advocate of free software and that I adamantly oppose things like DRM. It may surprise very few to know that my wife, until very recently, was not. I would try to explain the importance of things like fair use, the broadcast flag, etc. - but ultimately, nothing I said every really translated into something she could care about in her daily life. It was all too abstract and took too much effort to take the time to understand.

Record Meteorite Hits Norway 281

Posted by Zonk from the duck dept.
equex256 writes "Early Wednesday morning, a meteorite streaked across the sky in northern Norway, near Finland and Russia. A witness (Article in Norwegian) went up the mountain to where it hit and reported seeing large boulders that had fallen out of the mountainside, along with many broken trees. Norwegian astronomer Knut Jørgen Røed Ødegaard told Aftenposten, Norway's largest newspaper, that he would compare the explosive force of the impact with the Hiroshima bomb. This meteorite is suspected to be much larger than the 90-kilo (198-pound) meteorite which hit Alta in 1904, previously recognized as the largest to hit Norway. From the article: 'Røed Ødegaard said the meteorite was visible to an area of several hundred kilometers despite the brightness of the midnight sunlit summer sky. The meteorite hit a mountainside in Reisadalen in North Troms.'"

Stupid Engineering Mistakes 592

Posted by CowboyNeal from the back-to-the-drawing-board dept.
lee1 writes "Wired has bestowed on us a list of the ten worst engineering mistakes of all time. We have the St. Francis Dam designed by 'self-taught' engineer William Mulholland, which burst and wiped out several towns near LA; the Kansas City Hyatt walkway collapse; the DC-10, and more, but my favorite is the one I'd never heard of: a giant tank of molasses that ruptured in 1919 and sent 'waves of molasses up to 15 feet high' through Boston, killing 21."

20 Things You Won't Like About Vista 771

Posted by Zonk from the keep-counting dept.
feminazi writes "Computerworld's Scot Finnie details 20 things you won't like in Windows Vista, with a visual tour to prove it. He says that MS has favored security over end-user productivity, making the user feel like a rat caught in a maze with all the protect-you-from-yourself password-entry and 'Continue' boxes required by the User Account Controls feature." From the article: "In its supreme state of being, Microsoft knows precisely what's best for you. It knows that because its well-implemented new Sleep mode uses very little electricity and also takes only two or three seconds to either shut down or restart, you want to use this mode to 'turn off' your computer, whether you realize it or not. It wants to teach you about what's best. It wants to make it harder for you to make a mistake."

O'Reilly and CMP Exercise Trademark on 'Web 2.0' 229

Posted by Zonk from the can't-have-confusion-2.0 dept.
theodp writes "On May 16, the USPTO notified CMP Media, which co-presents the Web 2.0 Conference with O'Reilly, that its trademark for Web 2.0 was entitled to be registered. Eight days later, CMP sicced its lawyers on not-for-profit IT@Cork, taking the networking organization to task for not only using the term Web 2.0 for its free conference, but also for linking to a What is Web 2.0 article penned by Tim O'Reilly." It should be noted that their trademark only applies to the titles of industry events (CMP is a show organizer).

Vista Beta 2 has Major Problems 683

Posted by CmdrTaco from the so-does-every-version-of-windows dept.
WebHostingGuy writes "In a review by Gary Krackow from MSNBC who reviewed Vista Beta 2 over the last week he had very disappointing problems. "for me [it] was one of the worst operating system experiences that I've ever encountered." Built-in audio and wireless didn't work on his Levono laptop. It took four days to get the first installation."

Dan Geer's Monoculture Bomb Goes Off 308

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the things-that-could-have-been-a-lot-worse dept.
Andy Updegrove writes "Three years ago, celebrated security expert Dan Geer lost his job at @stake when he co-authored a paper on the dangers that the Microsoft 'monoculture' represented for end-users. Last fall, he authored a similar warning in a Perspective piece he wrote for CNETNews.com, applauding the action of Massachusetts in adopting OpenDocument Format, thereby reducing its vulnerability to the same type of risk. Four days ago, Dan's prediction came true, when users of Word (but not those that only trade files created in StarOffice, OpenOffice, or other ODF compliant software) began to be infected with the Backdoor.Ginwui virus - a malicious Trojan program that hitches a ride on bogus Word documents. In short, an object lesson that in IT, as in biology, those that exist in diverse gene pools are at a lower risk, both individually and collectively, from those that subsist in a proprietary monoculture."

John Dvorak's Eight Signs MS is Dead in the Water 711

Posted by CmdrTaco from the well-we're-all-obsessed-with-google dept.
j79 writes "John Dvorak has written an opinion piece on why he believes Microsoft is dead in the water. He discusses Vista, Office 2007, MSN and MSN search, the Xbox 360, Pad-based computing, .Net, and Microsoft's obsession with Google. "
User Journal

Journal Journal: Got scanned by the **AA 1

Journal by stinky wizzleteats
I was absently checking out my April web site stats, and found some interesting data. Mac is up to 7%, Firefox beat out IE by 10% - woah! 2.5 gigs! What the hell?!

I did some digging, and found out that one address - 64.27.6.178 - had pulled a gigabyte of data down from my site. ARIN.net reports that this address is part of a netblock owned by "Hollywood Interactive". Hmm... I wonder what this could be about.

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