Mapuche Indians have accused Microsoft of violating their cultural heritage by translating Windows into their language, Mapuzugun, without permission. The language is spoken by some 400,000 indigenous Chileans, some of whom have taken the software company to court for ‘intellectual piracy’. A judge in Santiago will decide in two weeks whether the Mapuche have a case.
Read more at PC Pro
Analysts are running around like beheaded chickens trying to make sense of a world gone mad. Microsoft has agreed to collaborate with a company that has recently sued it for more than half a billion dollars and has outstanding antitrust lawsuits against it in process. Yet the collaboration strangely seems to make sense.
Novell is a software company from the Microsoft era which relatively recently took a gamble and sailed into the open source Linux space. The company still makes money from its Windows-based Netware and Groupwise businesses. However, it is very much a runner up to Red Hat in the Linux market.
Read more at IT-wire
MSN Messenger 8.1 beta released. The popular messenging client that allows text chats, video chats and PC to PC calls as well as PC to Phone calls at an inexpensive rate.
Windows Live Messenger features the following improvements:
It seems that an odd exploit has been found by a company. The exploit can disable the Windows XP firewall by using malformed DNS packets.
In this day and age, it is quote rare to see people using ICS (Internet Connection Sharing) since the cost of a wired router is quite cheap. This exploit can only be done on systems running ICS.
If you have ICS turned on for some reason and are not currently using it, it is suggested that you disable the service ASAP to prevent your system from being exploited.
According to 2 Old 2 Play, the latest in the XBOX 360 update contains a special surprised unbeknownst to its users and that is DRM.
Here is a quote from 2 Old 2 Play story:
“A couple of members have notice a new addition to their 360’s since the update this morning. Media is now tagged with a “Does not expire” message. Obviously this could only mean one thing, DRM for downloads.”
As with any DRM in the past and present, there will always be a way to get around the DRM. It seems like Microsoft has stuck in this DRM technology to improve user experience maybe by offering freebies. Only time will tell of what the DRM will do to its XBOX fanbase.
In a step to attract more users to its server product line Microsoft forges ties with Zend, the company responsible for the engine used by open source solution PHP.
Although PHP has worked with Microsoft IIS for quite some time, the performance has been volatile. PHP runs on more than 22 million Web sites and is used inside 15,000 companies, and the numbers are increasing, despite the launch of Microsoft’s ASP.NET and the focus on ease of deployment. In the long run, however, deployment costs are marginal as compared to the total project cost, when factoring in elements such as, exactly, performance.
In addition to performance there are three important factors that influences the total cost of ownership. Those are Interoperability, Security and Reliability.
( Get the facts - The real ones ).Ease of deployment, if not properly handled contradicts several of such factors.
PHP is often part of what constitutes as LAMP, Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP ( although the abbreviation sometimes will oscillate between PHP and Perl, PHP is increasingly used).
One of PHP’s primary advantages is its cross-platform support, and increased performance also on Microsoft based web servers is a good thing for the framework.
