Making Progress by Making Peace

Could Microsoft reap a peace dividend by laying down the sword and making peace with the open source community? And Apple? Why peace is better than war -- and a pretty cool service that checks your mail for you and recycles what you don't want.


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Too many of us -- and I include myself -- are too willing to go to war and not willing enough to find harder, but often more successful, collaborative ways to solve problems. I often look at both the U.S. and Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) Webroot AntiSpyware 30-Day Free Trial. Click here. Latest News about Microsoft as similar entities in their respective spaces, and I'm often fascinated by how examples of good and bad judgment can be applied to both.

While the U.S. is currently locked on a war path, the next administration will likely focus on reversing this, and we might be able to look at the peace dividends that Microsoft is currently getting for similar U.S. benefits.

With this topic of war central to both those who use Microsoft products and those who live in the U.S. (and many of these folks are the same folks), I thought the topic of war in tech, or more accurately the foolishness of war in tech, would be interesting.

We'll conclude with our product of the week, a service that digitizes and recycles your snail mail, increasing security and improving audit trails -- potentially reducing related costs significantly -- all while saving a lot of trees.
Microsoft's Peace Dividend

Microsoft's Great Besmirching

I have been covering Microsoft for over 25 years - I've even written a few books about Windows. During that time, I've developed a certain respect for a company that just doesn't give up, and whose ability to spin surpasses even that of politicians. To be sure, Microsoft has crossed the line several times, but it has always worked within the system, however much it has attempted to use it for its own ends. No more: in the course of trying to force OOXML through the ISO fast-track process, it has finally gone further and attacked the system itself; in the process it has destroyed the credibility of the ISO, with serious knock-on consequences for the whole concept of open standards.

Of course, all companies try to bend the rules in the their favour, and it would be unfair to pick on Microsoft for doing the same. But what has happened over the last year and a half goes so far beyond the accepted rough and tumble of the standards game that cumulatively it can only be considered as an all-out attack on the machinery of standards-making. Consider the evidence.

Things got off to a bad start back in 2007, just before the original vote on whether OOXML should become an ISO standard, when the following emerged:

Microsoft Corp. admitted Wednesday that an employee at its Swedish subsidiary offered monetary compensation to partners for voting in favor of the Office Open XML document format's approval as an ISO standard.

… and the first ZaReason EU system went to …

my wife Mitchie, also known as Hamidah. After ordering the parts for it some 3 weeks ago, the last of those parts finally arrived on Friday at noon, and with the help of our small one (she would report that the other way round; more to that later), I assembled the first ever ZaReason Mambo system, which Mitchie will keep and use for accounting.

Antec Sonata Designer 500

The ZaReason “Mambo” is the first non-barebones machine we offer, and it is also currently the best and newest hardware we could get our hands onto, making use of only free and open source software and drivers. Selecting the parts took lots of time on market research, price and feature comparisons, and there was also a tremendous amount of help from the community, which gave great advice upfront on what would work, and where to expect problems.

It all started with the case, which is an Antec Sonata Designer 500. That is the successor of Antec’s famous P150, which was the first case of that form factor on the market which came with built-in noise dampening features. You can for instance mount the hard disks either screwed onto silicon grommets, or hung up between elastic ribbon wires. The latter method isn’t supposed for shipping, but if you really want the hard drive noise to completely disappear, it is great that you can do so - even without the use of tools.

The case also comes with a built-in 500W 80 certified power supply (made by Seasonic), and a 12cm outblowing fan with adjustable speed in the back. All things considered, it has the best performance vs. features vs. price ratio I could find. Should you dislike the blue applications of the front bezel, you can get other colours from Antec’s online store. You can also watch a video review about the case on 3DGameMan.com, or on YouTube.

Ubuntu Linux 8: Is the heron hardier?

It wasn’t long ago that Gutsy Gibbon was in the news; Ubuntu’s last release was touted as the easiest and most reliable Linux ever. Yet, some found it pretty gutless, or even just gusty, with hardware compatibility still a major bugbear. Linux 8.04, Hardy Heron, is now on the horizon. Does it look any better?

Ubuntu have a regular release schedule with subsequent versions being named with a superlative and an animal, both words beginning with the same letter of the alphabet. This letter, might I add in geeky fashion, is the alphabet letter indexed by the major version number. Hence, version 7 used the letter G for Gutsy Gibbon, being the 7th letter of the alphabet, and coming up is letter H’s turn for fame in the form of Hardy Heron, version 8.

Despite this amazing bit of tech trivia, the question on most people’s lips are “Will my wireless card finally work?” along with “What’s new?” and “Is it worthwhile upgrading?” I’ll come to these in just a moment.

First, one important thing must be mentioned. Gutsy Gibbon promoted the latest and greatest in Linux technology. It showed off a sporty new facade, compiled together loads of device drivers, and was in general aimed at having a terrific feature set and a greatly improved user experience in general.

By contrast, Hardy Heron has been designated as one of Ubuntu’s periodic Long Term Support – or LTS – releases, for which the company commits itself to providing three years desktop support and five years server support. This means that Hardy Heron isn’t going to go anywhere soon; it’s here for the long haul. This invariably means the designers have focused less on putting brand new stuff in but rather more stability, more robustness and more reliability.

This should please those who found Gutsy Gibbon disappointing – and indeed, Gutsy was an experimental version of Ubuntu. It’s experimental nature did give a fresh look but also meant it didn’t end up being capable of providing a stable and robust experience to all people on all systems. To these users, Hardy Heron will hopefully prove more, well, hardy. By being named as an LTS release I’m expecting it to come with high reliability built in and much less in the way of new, unproven, untested items.

Mozilla Turns 10 Today

Today is a special day.

March 31, 1998 is the date that Mozilla was officially launched. It’s the date the first Mozilla code became publicly available under the terms of an official open source license and a governing body for the project — the Mozilla Organization — began its public work. It’s always been known in Mozilla parlance as “3/31.” We’ll be celebrating Mozilla’s 10 year anniversary throughout 2008. Today I want to look at our first ten years, and a bit at the next ten years.

Ten years ago a radical idea took shape. The idea was that an open source community could create choice and innovation in key Internet technologies where large, commercial vendors could not. This idea took shape as the Mozilla project.

Mozilla was not the first group to pursue this idea. GNU/Linux and the BSD operating systems were already providing a very effective alternative at the server-side operating system level; the Apache web server was already proving that an open source solution could be effective even in areas where the commercial players were actively competing. Each of these gave strength to the idea that this new effort could be successful.

At its inception, Mozilla was:

* An open source codebase for the software we call the browser
* A group of people to build and lead an open source development effort — the Mozilla Organization (also known as “mozilla.org”)
* A larger group of people committed to the idea — and the enormous work involved — in building a browser we all needed
* An open source license granting everyone expansive rights to use the code for their own goals — the Mozilla Public License (which is now at version 1.1)
* A website
* A mascot (the orange T-rex, alternatively referred to as a lizard)

During the years since 3/31 we have taken that radical idea and proved its power. We have broadened the idea beyond anything imagined at our founding. And in the next ten years we’ll continue to be radical about building fundamental qualities such as openness, participation, opportunity, choice and innovation into the basic infrastructure of the Internet itself.

2007: Microsoft in Review

It’s no small secret. I hate Microsoft. I think they are the most vile and corrupt corporation in the tech industry. Their monopoly hampers innovation and they favor litigation, corruption and marketing tricks to maintain their position over simply creating great products. I have read and heard many people claim Microsoft is changing, improving, and the evil Microsoft of the pass is fading; I strongly disagree with this view, and it takes no more then a cursory look through Microsoft’s actions in 2007 to see why:

Attacking Non-Profits Seeking to Help Children in Poor Countries

Professor Negroponte wants to make the world a better place. His vision? An affordable laptop in the hands of every child. He founded a non-profit group and created the XO, an amazing machine targeted specifically at children living in poor countries, with features such as mesh networking to easily connect and share info, a screen viewable outdoors, tiny power consumption and a battery rechargeable through a solar panel.

Microsoft earlier labeled this a toy and attempted to mock it, but in 2007 as the XO began to become a reality the real attack began. Microsoft collaborated with Intel to create the Classmate, a competitor to the XO funded by big corporations to take on the little non-profit XO; they are not seeking to help children, only to prevent the XO from taking market share away from them globally (the XO uses Linux and AMD hardware).