Archive for the ‘Windows’ Category

« Older Entries

Microsoft acknowledges Linux threat to Windows client

Wednesday, August 5th, 2009

Microsoft for the first time has named Linux distributors Red Hat and Canonical as competitors to its Windows client business in its annual filing to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

The move is an acknowledgment of the first viable competition from Linux to Microsoft’s Windows client business, due mainly to the use of Linux on netbooks, which are rising in prominence as alternatives to full-sized notebooks.

“Netbooks opened Microsoft to the possibility that some other OS could get its grip on the desktop, however briefly,” said Rob Helm, director of research for Directions on Microsoft. “Now it’s alert to that possibility going forward.”

Read the entire article

Posted in Linux, Windows | 1 Comment »

Microsoft Office Opens Up To Firefox

Saturday, July 18th, 2009

When Microsoft offered more details about Office 2010 earlier this week, The VAR Guy noticed a rather interesting nugget of information involving Microsoft Office for the Web’s anticipated browser support and software as a service (SaaS) strategy. The software giant, it seems, will be giving equal time to Firefox (the open source web browser) and Apple’s Safari. Here’s the scoop.

Read the entire article

Posted in Windows | No Comments »

Chrome vs. Bing vs. You and Me

Tuesday, July 14th, 2009

This is all heady stuff and good for lots of press, but in the end none of this is likely to make a real difference for either company or, indeed, for consumers. It’s just noise — a form of mutually assured destruction intended to keep each company in check.

Microsoft makes most of its money from two products, Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office. Nearly everything else it makes loses money, sometimes deliberately. Google makes most of its money from selling Internet ads next to search results. Nearly everything else it does loses money, too.

Read the entire article

Posted in Chrome OS, Windows | 1 Comment »

Windows of mass destruction

Friday, July 10th, 2009

For most of this week, prominent Web sites in both South Korea and the United States have been being bombarded by DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks. At times, these assaults have knocked out multiple major sites. North Korea has been taking the blame for these attacks, but no one has any proof yet. What we do know is that the weapon that’s doing this damage is compromised Windows PCs.

Here we are in 2009, after Windows has been ‘fixed’ over and over again. We’ve seen major new revisions, such as XP SP3; an entirely new version, Vista; and, by my count, at least 60 major security patches, and a malware worm dating from January of 2004 is still alive and well and attacking from Windows.

Read the entire article

Posted in Windows | No Comments »

Ubuntu better than Windows XP & 7 at file management

Thursday, July 9th, 2009

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. In order to optimize system’s responsiveness, performance-hungry computer enthusiasts carefully selecting top-notch, 10K RPM mechanical drives and stunningly fast SSD disks. But, what about the operating system – which one of modern operating systems is capable of utilizing fast hard drives and multi-core CPUs most effectively?

The performance advantage of the EXT3 file system used in Ubuntu Linux may be very significant when processing large amounts of small to medium-sized files and computer users and IT professionals constantly working with large amounts data should seriously consider using Ubuntu Linux as the main file and data management platform.

Read the entire article

Posted in Ubuntu, Windows | No Comments »

Why Google Chrome OS matters already, on Day 1

Wednesday, July 8th, 2009

The most important single fact you need to keep in mind is that everyone who uses a computer already knows Google, and most of them trust it. Only PC power users know about Linux and are numbered in millions compared to the hundreds of millions who know Windows.

Here’s how it will work in Chrome OS. When you launch an application on the Web, say Google Docs, Chrome will use Google Gears to not only provide the ability to do work offline, but also to cache your online data in the open-source lightweight DBMS Sqlite. As a user, you’ll never see any of this. You’ll just find yourself doing most of your work in the Chrome browser interface.

Once Google has this working really well, you may not even be able to tell when you’re on the net and when you’re not. I’m told off the record by Google engineers that the goal is to make the desktop invisible. You’ll be spending 99% of your time in the browser.

Read the entire article

Posted in Chrome OS, Linux, Windows | 1 Comment »

PC Invader Costs Ky. County $415,000

Tuesday, July 7th, 2009

Cyber criminals based in Ukraine stole $415,000 from the coffers of Bullitt County, Kentucky this week. The crooks were aided by more than two dozen co-conspirators in the United States, as well as a strain of malicious software capable of defeating online security measures put in place by many banks.

The criminals stole the money using a custom variant of a keystroke logging Trojan known as “Zeus” (a.k.a. “Zbot”) that included two new features. The first is that stolen credentials are sent immediately via instant message to the attackers. But the second, more interesting feature of this malware, the investigator said, is that it creates a direct connection between the infected Microsoft Windows system and the attackers, allowing the bad guys to log in to the victim’s bank account using the victim’s own Internet connection.

Read the entire article

Posted in Windows | No Comments »

London Stock Exchange to abandon failed Windows platform

Thursday, July 2nd, 2009

TradElect runs on HP ProLiant servers running, in turn, Windows Server 2003. The TradElect software itself is a custom blend of C# and .NET programs, which was created by Microsoft and Accenture, the global consulting firm. On the back-end, it relied on Microsoft SQL Server 2000. Its goal was to maintain sub-ten millisecond response times, real-time system speeds, for stock trades.

It never, ever came close to achieving these performance goals. Worse still, the LSE’s competition, such as its main rival Chi-X with its MarketPrizm trading platform software, was able to deliver that level of performance and in general it was running rings about TradElect. Three guesses what MarketPrizm runs on and the first two don’t count. The answer is Linux.

Read the entire article

Posted in Linux, Windows | No Comments »

Opinion: Death knell heard for Microsoft and really all proprietary efforts

Saturday, June 27th, 2009

Open source (and in many cases open platforms) is headed our way in force. That’s the message coming out of every major manufacturing company today. No longer are companies willing to pay the price (in money and the intentional depression of technology) by catering to Microsoft and its proprietary architectures and related policies and procedures.

I think in truth end consumers don’t really care whether or not they have Windows-powered devices or something else. It is the vendors themselves, the manufacturers and carriers who are saying “No” to Microsoft in this regard, opting instead for the platform which will get the job done (perhaps even with better graphics, speed, less bugs, faster update times, etc.) while making them more money. You see, a lot of the expense in Windows-powered devices does not come from the device itself, but from the Windows license paid to Microsoft, which for netbooks is reportedly up to $50 per machine, a fee the OEMs must collect by passing along that expense to end consumers.

Read the entire article

Posted in Linux, Moblin, Windows | No Comments »

Berlin art colleges switch to Linux

Friday, June 26th, 2009

Berlin’s art colleges are completely switching over to Linux. Most of the productivity software on the workstations has already been swapped for free alternative products as part of a project that started over eighteen months ago. The IT team at ServiceCenter-IT, responsible for the migration at three colleges; the Hanns Eisler music college, the Ernst Busch drama college and the Berlin-Weissensee art college, is hoping for an easy migration, as users will be able to keep on working with their familiar applications. Starting in June, their workstation PCs will switch to Ubuntu Linux and their servers will use Debian.

The change is being made because the existing hardware cannot be upgraded to Windows Vista or Windows 7. The colleges would have had to spend five-figure sums to buy newer hardware and pay additional license fees for Windows. The money that they’ve saved is now going to be spent on teaching.

Posted in Linux, Windows | No Comments »

« Older Entries