Hundreds of millions of Internet users were annoyed because of Windows botnet-based DDoS aimed at one (1) person. ... Some people out there used no fewer than six Windows botnets to go after this one guy. And, in the process, they knocked out, for hours at a time, most of the major social networks.

It happened because Windows is an insecure piece of junk. Anyone who knows anything about security knows that this kind of disaster was only a matter of time. Windows botnets are responsible for DDoS attacks and most of e-mail spam. You cannot secure Windows. Microsoft keeps saying that they will, and they always fail. Period.

the results were mixed. Boot times, despite dedicated tweaking from Microsoft were slightly worse than in Vista SP2 or XP SP3 (by over a second). Shutdown times, though, showed much improvement over the slow XP, and even some improvement over Vista. Since the 7100 build, Windows 7's performance in Microsoft Office and iTunes has improved significantly. In the Office benchmark, though it still gets beat by both Vista and XP.

The Linux operating system, which is also derived from Unix and is available without payment under a General Public License, has gained some acceptance, especially in emerging markets, as competitive pressures lead OEMs to reduce costs and new, lower-price PC form-factors gain adoption ... Partners such as Hewlett-Packard and Intel have been actively working with alternative Linux-based operating systems. ... User and usage volumes on mobile devices are increasing around the world relative to the PC. OEMs have been working to make the Google Android mobile operating system more compatible with small form-factor PCs or netbooks. ...Certain 'open source' software business models challenge our license-based software model. ... To the extent open source software gains increasing market acceptance, our sales, revenue, and operating margins may decline.

People keep doing [passing poorly revisioned Word docs in email and storing them in random network locations], but it is an astoundingly awful way to work.

I chose MediaWiki, the open-source software that powers Wikipedia. It was relatively easy to install on a virtual Linux server. ... The real win, however, was that everyone started using it. One day you wake up and everything is on a wiki somewhere. How did that happen? It happens in much the same way as typewriters suddenly disappearedbecause a better alternative arrived. Wordand I know I'll be attacked for saying thisis the new typewriter.

WEEKS AGO we wrote about the FTC planning to put an end to bribed bloggers. We have already filed a complaint about Microsoft's PR department (Waggener Edstrom) which is bribing bloggers and we finally find that New York state fines companies for fake testimonials. But the nature of today's complaint is different.

This complaint is mostly sparked by a Microsoft-employed "Technology Evangelist" that keeps flooding us with Microsoft-promotional comments whilst he tracks the site (for Microsoft, he is just one among many, whose role involves unethical and sometimes illegal practices). It is probable that there are others who do the same thing in this Web site (anonymous or pseudonymous) because there are no disclosures and at least 2 other Microsoft employees commented in our site this week (in defense of Microsoft).

the contents of the agreement have not been disclosed, the parties indicate that the only financial consideration in this agreement is royalties paid by Melco Group to Microsoft.

The survey, which received feedback from 1,000 IT administrators, found that nearly 60 percent have no current plan to adopt Windows 7. The survey, conducted by Quest Software's ScriptLogic unit, received the 1,000 responses from 20,000 surveys it distributed. Just over a third of survey respondents said that they plan to deploy by the end of 2010, while 5.4 percent said they expected to move to Windows 7 this calendar year.

Abundant performance delivered by today's quad-core processors has shifted the performance bottleneck from the CPU and memory to the disk I/O subsystem in most of day-to-day usage scenarios. ... which one of modern operating systems is capable of utilizing fast hard drives and multi-core CPUs most effectively?

In all file search, classification and storage utilization analysis operations Ubuntu is faster than both tested Windows operating systems by a huge margin. ... users and IT professionals constantly working with large amounts data should seriously consider using Ubuntu Linux as the main file and data management platform.

The worm cost the council more than £43,000 in lost traffic fines as the council could not use its Windows computer systems to issue the fines by the last date when they had to be issued [they ended up later than 28 days]. Microsoft experts were among consultants called in by the council — and they took home some of the £1.2 million which the body paid out to get the problem resolved. ... There was a total of £178,000 in extra staffing costs incurred by the council, of which £169,000 went to clearing a backlog of benefit claims and council tax bills, the report said. Additionally, compensation had to be paid to those whose benefit claims were delayed. And it all came during a time when the world, and the UK in particular, is affected by the ongoing global financial crisis.

The Chrome OS is being designed to power computers that range from small netbooks to full-size desktop machines. The Chrome OS is a direct attack against Microsofts lucrative — albeit vulnerable — Windows operating system. ... its no secret that Windows Vista was a nightmare ... The Chrome operating system [despite overlap] should not be confused with the Android operating system that the company launched for mobile devices.

this war on dissent ... the evidence against him was essentially that he was associating with a website, didn't operate the website. [FBI wiretaps showed his decision and urging of others not to violate] civil injunctions that were imposed on certain demonstrations. ... the government alleges [encrypted email is] evidence of his criminal intent.

the journey that Andrew Stepanian has gone through is a frightening example of ... this incredible attempt by the government to envelop political activists, criminalize dissent, convict them and then send them to special housing units based on a political agenda.

Florian Schiessl, the acting head of the Munich LiMux project, says, "We'd do it again". ... The target is to convert 80 per cent of the city council's 14,000 computers to Linux by mid-2012 at the latest. ... by the end of this year in fact, all the town hall staff are to drop Word, Excel and Internet Explorer and use free OpenOffice software and Firefox, the open-source browser, instead.

Other authorities are now following Munich's example. Like many cities, the German Foreign Office and the Office for Information Security (BSI) [are dumping M$].... The council's attitude to free software is unambiguous. "We don't mean free in the same sense as free beer", explains Schiessl. He says with Open Source, programmers can improve software and extend it with additional applications, instead of having to rely on a specific company. This benefit carries weight for other city councils as well. Mannheim, Schwäbisch Hall and Treuchtlingen, Bavaria, for example, are relying at least partially, on free software.

Debian's decision to include Mono in the default installation, for the sake of Tomboy which is an application written in C#, leads the community in a risky direction. It is dangerous to depend on C#, so we need to discourage its use. .... This is not to say that implementing C# is a bad thing. ... [writing and using applications in mono] is taking a gratuitous risk.