Month: September 2008
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VMWare: A “significant portion” of our technology may include open source
VMWare’s latest 10-q filing indicates possible large scale use of open source code. Huh? What? Excuse me? Hasn’t VMWare been telling us all along that they were GPL-compliant ( I’ve never seen any code from them ) and that they didn’t use any open source code in their products? Either they’re posturing for the financials…
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Crackers target Windows Media encoder bug
It didn’t take long for exploit code to become available after last week’s Microsoft bug fix for the vulnerability in Windows Media Player. The code is distributed in 2 ways: a simple cleartext program where the shellcode has been altered and a widely deployed toolkit called e2. This causes a visitor to a web site…
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And Chrome again
It appears I’m not the only one who is not impressed with Google Chrome – Jim Lynch over at ExtremeTech has written a very interesting article asking the question – why do we need Chrome at all? The answer is of course that we don’t need another browser – the current bunch do just fine.
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Google Chrome ( again )
Not really wanting to give Chrome any more newstime than it’s already had, it’s nevertheless a requirement to cover the news properly. While Chrome certaily offers an interesting browser, I’m at a loss to explain the massive interest that’s been foisted on it since it’s Windows-only ( strange that releasing open-source software on a closed-source…
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MotoGP Misano
For the second race in a row, Casey Stoner has bit the dust after leading the race, leaving Rossi to clean up and take 1st place. Fact is, Stoner is just pushing to hard ( or something about a scrubbed in tyre? – excuses, excuses ). The Ducati GP08 is a great bike, but at…
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Quebec government sued over purchase of Microsoft software
Facil ( Quebec’s open source association ) is suing the local provincial government for purchasing Microsoft software without following government guidelines which requires government organisations to stimulate competition and look for alternatives. They indicate that Quebec has refused to look at alternative bids from open source vendors – apparently they’re spending more than $80million per…
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EU and US coming to disagreement over open standards definition
The EU Commission announced on June 25 that EIF/2.0 (The European Interoperability Framework which defines the rules for software used in e-Government) will hold the line as regards patents on standards. This means that patents will not be tolerated as part of open standards ( well duh!!! ). But apparently the Americans don’t get it…
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Breaking News!!! – CONSEGI Declaration: 6 nations say no to ISO/IEC
The fallout from the ISO confirmation of Microsoft’s Office Open XML Specification as a standard, continues and is starting to lead to some serious consequences. The recent conference in South/Latin America focusing on free software, drew some 2000 registrants to the IT event, many of whom were top government officials. The outcome ( and declaration…
