prawnonthebarbie writes "Microsoft is battling the trend for frazzled office workers to give up on Outlook and auto-forward all their mail to Gmail: the company is promising 2-GB mailboxes in Exchange 2007 rather than the piffling 50-MB mailboxes most workplaces have now. Speaking at the launch of Vista, Office, and Exchange in Singapore, Microsoft Product Marketing Manager Martha DeAmicis said Microsoft had built clustered replication into Exchange so corporate IT admins wouldn't be worrying about backing up big mailboxes to tape. However, its killer feature appears to be its plans to make those gigs of email available on Joe Officeworker's mobile phone."

FrankNFurter writes to note the launch yesterday of the FSF's BadVista campaign against Microsoft's new operating system. BadVista's aim is to inform users about the alleged harms inflicted by Vista on the user and about free software alternatives. Quoting program administrator John Sullivan: "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."

pyrbrand writes "Despite the iFanboy jabber that Zune sales were horrific, CNN has a story to the contrary. Turns out Zune was the #2 Digital Audio player in its first week of sales. Not a bad start for the challenger to the iPod throne. As others have pointed out the Amazon sales rank may have been thrown off by Zune sales being divided between the three colors."

F.M. Petain writes, "It looks like Microsoft's first move in the 'Linux owes us' game is to move a Pawn. A few days ago, a Novell programmer, Noel Power, submitted patches to add VBA compatibility to Open Office's spreadsheet module. This is great for people trying to convert the business desktop from closed source to open source, but is this gift really a ticking time bomb? What happens when Microsoft declares that the VBA code was stolen?" The patches may have been submitted only a few days ago, but the code must be considerably older; the article claims that nine distros in adition to SUSE already support the VBA extensions in their versions of Open Office. (Linux.com and Slashdot are both part of OSTG.)

An anonymous reader writes, "Novell has published additional details about its agreements with Microsoft concerning Windows and Linux interoperability and patents. It seems the company is receiving an up-front payment of $348 million from Microsoft, for SLES subscription certificates and for patent cross-licensing. Microsoft will make an upfront payment to Novell of $240 million for SLES subscription 'certificates' that Microsoft can use, resell, or distribute over the term of the agreement. Regarding the patent cooperation agreement, Microsoft will make an up-front net payment to Novell of $108 million, and Novell will make ongoing payments totaling at least $40 million over five years to Microsoft."

Jimmy T writes "Microsoft and Secunia are warning about the discovery of a new 'Zero-day' vulnerability affecting all Microsoft based operating systems except Windows 2003. Both companies states that the vulnerability is currently being exploited by malicious websites. One attack vector is through Internet Explorer 6/7 — so be aware where you surf to."

eldavojohn writes "While many users reading Slashdot embrace Linux, ZDNet is running an article on why the rest of the world isn't ready. One note for Linux developers: 'Stop assuming that everyone using Linux (or who wants to use Linux) is a Linux expert.' While a lot of these topics have been brought up as both stories and comments on Slashdot, this article pretty much sums up why Vista could be absolutely terrible, and people would still believe there is no other option." From the article: "The one area of Linux ownership and use where it becomes apparent that there's an assumption that everyone who uses Linux is an expert is hardware support. Your average user doesn't have the time, the energy or the inclination to deal with uncertainty. Also, they usually only have the one PC to play with. Hardware just has to work. There's a very good reason why Microsoft spends a lot of time on hardware compatibility — it's what people want."

narramissic writes, "The Center for Digital Democracy and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group have filed a complaint with the FTC, asking for an investigation into Microsoft's use of customer data collection in its adCenter Web advertising service. The groups claim that 'Microsoft has embarked on a wide-ranging data collection and targeting scheme that is deceptive and unfair to millions of users.' Microsoft, for its part, says the groups 'have got it all wrong.'"

kaufmanmoore writes "Cnet is reporting that some video Ipods made after September 12th have the RavMonE virus loaded onto it. In Apple's announcement they take a swipe at Windows security and encourage Windows users to install anti virus applications."

An anonymous reader writes "Bowing to pressure from European antitrust regulators and rival security vendors, Microsoft has agreed to modify Windows Vista to better accommodate third-party security software makers. In a press conference Friday, Microsoft said it would configure Vista to let third-party anti-virus and other security software makers bypass 'PatchGuard,' a feature in 64-bit versions of Windows Vista designed to bar access to the Windows kernel. Microsoft said it would create an API to let third-party vendors access the kernel and to disable the Windows Security Center so that users would not be prompted by multiple alerts about operating system security. In addition, Redmond said it would modify the welcome screen presented to Vista users to include links to other security software other than Microsoft's own OneCare suite. From the article: 'It looks like Microsoft was really testing the waters here, sort of pushing the limits of antitrust and decided they probably couldn't cross that line just yet.'"

sdhorne writes "There is a good technical discussion over at InfoWorld on the merits of launchd and what is lacking in a comparable Windows secure solution. It is a throw back to the UNIX vs Windows security discussion that has been hashed out for many years." From the article: "it always traces back to Microsoft's untenable policy of maintaining gaps in Windows security to avoid competing with 3rd party vendors and certified partners. Apple's taking a different approach: What users need is in the box: Anti-virus, anti-spam, encryption, image backup and restore, offsite safe storage through .Mac, and launchd. Pretty soon any debate with Microsoft over security can be ended in one round when Apple stands up, says 'launchd', and sits back down."

torrensmith writes "Paul Thurrott attacks the Apple Mac OS X Leopard Preview. He does have a few kind words for Apple and its leader Steve Jobs ("They do good work. It's too bad they feel the need to exaggerate so much.", but overall, he rips apart Apple for mimicking Vista, even going so far as to call the Apple fascination with Vista "childish." Paul does include a healthy review of the latest Leopard features, but quickly returned to his bashing of Apple. "

Gimble writes "eWeek has an article up that looks at the performance of portals using open source stacks and comparing them to their MS equivalents. The article's conclusion is that .Net outperforms the open source stacks, mainly because of its tighter integration, but also notes that running the open source stacks on Windows (WAMP) delivered strong performance." From the article: "Based on our forays into user forums for many top open-source enterprise applications, there are many IT managers attempting to run open-source products on Windows servers--attracted, no doubt, to the benefits and efficiencies of using open source without having to become Linux administrators. The results of our WAMP stack tests indicate that these folks might be on to something."

morpheus83 writes "Ricoh claims they have developed an optical component that reads and writes all disk formats -- Blu-ray Disc and HD-DVD, as well as DVD and CD -- with one pickup and one objective lens. The component is a 3.5-mm diameter, 1-mm thick round diffraction plate with minute concentric groves on both sides which function as a diffraction grating. Based on disc information the drive can identify which format disk is loaded, Ricoh's optical diffraction component adjusts the laser beam with its diffraction grating for each format and passes it to the objective lens."

Apache4857 writes "It appears that Microsoft has finally caved. BetaNews is reporting that Microsoft is sponsoring an open source project to enable conversion between Open XML in Office 2007 and OpenDocument formats. The project, hosted on Sourceforge.net, made its initial release today. The Word 2007 conversion utility is expected to ship ship by the end of 2006, and similarly conversion utilities for Excel and PowerPoint are expected early next year." See the announcement in Brian Jones' blog (Jones is the Microsoft program manager responsible for Office file formats).