microsoft

Remember, right after Microsoft's $240 million stake in Facebook was announced, when a Forbes blogger reported that two New York hedge funds were also contributing $500 million? And how funny was it that Fake Steve Jobs (also known as Dan Lyons, also on the Forbes payroll) proceeded to post the same news, except that he infused it with hilarious FSJ neologisms like "hedgetard?"

At the time, most people seemed to take it as the truth. After all, the $15 billion valuation for Facebook turned out to be true, so Facebook observers were likely in a state where … Read more

Linux isn't perfectly secure, but Microsoft Windows is architected for security failure, as IT Wire points out. Good design decisions in Linux may well account for the glaring difference between security in Linux and insecurity in Windows:

The reality is Windows is naturally insecure for a variety of reasons, not least being Windows' users were always conditioned to login and run programs as the administrator user. Windows Vista has made an attempt, too late, to stifle this behaviour but the far number of complaints about the intrusive UAC box is testament to how many ordinary, daily, Windows tasks require administrative privileges - not necessarily due to legitimate need, but often just bad programming.… Read more

That's what this news would lead one to suspect. In sum, Mandriva won a deal with the Nigerian government, only to have Microsoft fight tooth and nail after the fact to win it back. Just good competition, right? Maybe. But Mandriva's CEO points to something a bit more (or less, depending on how you look at it).

In an open letter to Steve Ballmer, Mandriva CEO Fran?ois Bancilhon called out Microsoft's tactics:

Then your people entered the game and the deal got more competitive. I would not say it got dirty, but someone could have said that. They fought and fought the deal, but still the customer was happy to get CMPC and Mandriva.… Read more

For a computer, dealing with color is just another math problem. And Microsoft wants to change the way your PC counts.

The company has developed a color space--a way to encode colors as numbers a computer can process--called scRGB. If the company succeeds in getting it to catch on, the technology could help add depth and richness to photos taken with digital cameras and viewed on a computer or TV screen.

Today's cameras and computers usually employ a color space called sRGB, developed in the 1990s by Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard, that describes colors as a particular combination of … Read more

Once again Microsoft continues to muddy its SOA (service-oriented architecture) strategy with a push into model-driven development (MDD). While on the surface it may appear that this is meaningful, in fact all Microsoft is doing is dumbing down the already mediocre tools and "prescriptions" that currently suggest an obvious misunderstanding of the fundamental (primarily vendor-enforced) components of SOA, which usually include items like business process management, enterprise service bus, registry and governance.

Instead, Microsoft has a set of things that are not in line with any other vendor or standards group: "a bundle of BizTalk Server 2006 … Read more

It's a small thing, but Sony got some good news today related to its troubled PlayStation 3 video game console. In fact, the system helped set a new Guinness World Record.

The record was set by Stanford University's Folding@home project, a distributed computing system utilizing PS3s among other computers, to help scientists study the effects of a process called "protein folding" on a series of serious diseases.

Well, Guinness has apparently certified the project as the world's most powerful distributed computing system. According to a release from Sony, Folding@home topped 1 petaflop last … Read more

There was a day when Microsoft's confidential internal documents had to be leaked in order to show the company's views on open source (dubbed the "Halloween Documents" by Eric Raymond). Not so anymore. We haven't had a leak in a few years, but we've had more information than ever on what Microsoft intends to do about open source.

Unfortunately, the older Microsoft gets, the more complex its relationship with open source becomes, as the following "Halloween Documents" demonstrate: