Category: tech news

free software foundation to campaign against Microsoft

mtadros

badvista_no_littering.pngIn response to Microsoft’s attack against free software, the FSF has announced on May 16th 2007 the creation of a campaign to fight back by organizing ‘public support into action on software freedom issues’:

The new team will be composed of two campaigns managers and an international group of volunteers, with one position to be filled by current staff member John Sullivan and the other by new appointee Joshua Gay. They will work together on the FSF campaigns BadVista.org and DefectiveByDesign.org, and launch additional campaigns in the near future. [link]

e-waste dumping in Africa

mtadros

According to a UN report, an estimated 50 million tons of electronic waste generated globally every year, e-waste and its disposal is a growing problem, and much of it is dumped in Africa [link]. The Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal is a treaty on waste disposal entered into force in 1992 [link]. It is estimated that

anywhere between 25 to 75 percent of the e-waste that enters Africa, mostly through Mombasa, Lagos and Dar es Salaam ports, is useless.
It is also reported that in Nigeria alone, about 500 containers full of used electronic cargo pass through the Lagos port every month, according to a recent study by Seattle-based Basel Action Network.

I’m not Fake Steve Jobs

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Gates and Jobs meet at the All Things Digital Conference May 29-31, 07 and took the stage together [link]. Gates began by clarifying jokingly that he is NOT a fake Steve Jobs. One of the most amusing and revealing things in their talk is how Bill explains, and Jobs acknowledges, that the Apple II  actually used Mircosoft’s Basic to run. Here’s Jobs’ version of the story:

My partner we started out with, this guy named Steve Wozniak. Brilliant, brilliant guy. He writes this BASIC that is, like, the best BASIC on the planet. It does stuff that no other BASIC’s ever done. You don’t have to run it to find your error messages. It finds them when you type it in and stuff. It’s perfect in every way, except for one thing, which is it’s just fixed-point, right? It’s not floating-point.
So we’re getting a lot of input that people want this BASIC to be floating-point. And, like, we’re begging Woz, please, please make this floating point.
…
We’re begging Woz to make this floating-point and he just never does it. You know, and he wrote it by hand on paper. I mean, you know, he didn’t have an assembler or anything to write it with. It was all just written on paper and he’d type it in. He just never got around to making it floating-point.

So who comes in? Bill Gates comes in and writes the floating point for the Apple II.

Read the transcript or view the video:

gates-jobs.gif

is it the end of spam?

mtadros

The good news is that one of the top ten ‘most wanted’ spammers has been arrested. The bad news is that it will not even have a tiny dint in the amount of spam we are receiving. But his arrest is symbolic and it is still a good thing.

The spammer is 27 year old Robert Alan Soloway and he is on a Spamhaus list of 135 spammers responsible for as much as 80% of all junk e-mail:

Soloway sent out unsolicited bulk e-mails using networks of compromised computers called “zombies.” These are generally home computers whose owners typically have no idea that their machines have been infected with viruses or other malicious programs; service providers can’t easily block messages from zombies because they are mixed in with legitimate messages. [link]

 

who’s afraid of bill gates?

mtadros

bill_gates_halo_3.gifThe Scientific American is reporting that Microsoft’s Bill Gates is at it again: he is attacking open source and says it is violating 235 icsoft patents [link]. This is of course in response to the way Linux has been gaining ground and taking away from Microsoft’s market share. Apparently Microsoft sent an email to reporters this past Monday detailing its position which it had previously written in Fortune Magazine.

According to another source, patent experts say that

Microsoft’s patent complaints don’t make a lot of sense from a legal standpoint. The complaints, while possibly driving some customers away from open-source software, may make Microsoft the target of lawsuits from open-source developers seeking to prove they have not infringed, some patent experts have said.

Among those,

open-source advocates, including Linux creator Linus Torvalds and long-time open-source advocate Eric S. Raymond, have said there’s a simpler explanation for Microsoft’s action: It’s trying to create fear, uncertainty and doubt about open-source software.[link]

So.. don’t be afraid of Microsoft’s threats.