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Here are some clips of Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft doing what he does best.

Selling Windows
Acting like Monkey Boy
Motivating Developers

Enjoy.

Bruce Byfield of Linux Journal has been writing articles on OpenOffice.org (OOo). He goes indepth as to the why and how of OOo. Current topics include font selection, character styles, desktop publishing, paragraph styles, and numbered and bulleted lists.

Secunia is reporting on 4 new vulnerabilities in IE that allows for well umm.. hackers to get into your system and do whatever they want. There are rumors of 9 new Windows security patches being released shortly to patch the issue. Remember kids, IE is integrated into Windows, IE = Bad, therefore Windows = Bad. Run a UNIX based system like umm .. .Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X or some other system that was designed with atleast a consideration for security.

The NZX stock exchange, according to this story has moved its database to Oracle and Linux. According to Oracle chief executive Charles Phillips, if IT chiefs want better performance, they need to spend less and go to Linux on clusters of two-processor and four-processor servers. He claims it is cost compelling, cleaner code, smaller, and has a minimal overhead. Nice.

According to an article on Asia Computer Weekly, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates warned governments and companies that open source software does not create jobs and intellectual property.

There are quite a few very interesting quotes from Gates:

“If you don’t want to create jobs or intellectual property, then there is a tendency to develop open source.”

I’m rather confused about this. Is he saying that open source is more efficient? It seems like if you are able to port to open source, have the same level of productivity but not have to create as many jobs maintaining the infrastructure that this would equate to more a more efficient software model? Technically if open source was inferior and did not meet expectations, that would create more jobs as software would have to be fixed and features added. In addition, if the software was more complex, it would create more jobs for administrators, network specialists and others having to maintain the infrastructure. However, Bill Gates seems to disagree, he believes that it will not create jobs — sounds like an underlying principle as to why people should use computers in the first place — be more efficient, do the job of multiple people, yada yada..

“[Open source] doesn’t guarantee upward compatibility or do that kind of integration [for seamless computing to work].”

Interesting, but wrong. Open Source is what it says — OPEN SOURCE. The source code IS available to users of the software. Period. As a result, the file formats are published, the APIs are exposed, etc. If the software needs to be integrated with another piece of open source software, it IS POSSIBLE as everything is documented down to the source level. The black box approach of Windows and closed source software does not guarantee integration — try taking software from different close source vendors and integrating it smoothly, good luck.

“We certainly will have open-source apps that compete with and that run on Windows. But when it comes to a guarantee or having someone who stands behind your software, [open source] is typically not something done in a capital approach.â€?

So I take it that IBM, Novell, SuSE Linux, Red Hat, Oracle, Dell and others (too numerous to list) are not standing behind the software and not doing it in a capital approach (or to put it another way (in Gate’s words): “It is not something you do as a day job. If you want to give it away, you work on it at night”. hah..

On a side note, at the end of the article, it mentions Microsoft’s next generation Windows (codename Longhorn) will not be released until 2007. Last I heard it was suppose to be released in 2006 (bumped from original estimates of being released in 2004). This is after axing many of the features that were originally suppose to be included.