Monthly Archives: November 2005

Observer article on MS’s “Web Services”

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John Naughton over at the Observer has written his his less than impressed take on Windows Live and Office Live.

The core of his thoughts is expressed in these paragraphs:

On the other hand, Gates and co are smart folks who know in their bones that web services represent the future. But they’re stuck, because if Microsoft were to become a major provider of such services (which it is technically quite capable of doing), it would be tantamount to cannibalising its core business – the lucrative Windows and Office franchises. After all, to access web services, all you need is a browser – and it doesn’t have to be Microsoft’s own Internet Explorer. Nor does your computer have to run Windows. Firefox running on Linux or Safari running on a Mac are just as good for web mail or search as Explorer running on Windows.

So Microsoft has a problem. It can’t go all-out for web services – which explains the pathetic fudge announced on Tuesday. The new ‘live’ sites will only offer supplements and complements to Microsoft software running on your computer.

My only quibble with that is that he forgets the fact that they could possibly, with ActiveX, at least make it necessary to run IE, although Linux users on Intel systems may be able to get away with running IE under Wine to access these services.

Lots of Space Stuff!

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OK – here’s a bunch of space related stuff from around the net.

The Planetary Society have revamped their website which looks a lot nicer than the old one. Their blog is always useful to keep an eye on to track news, and Planetary Radio has got to be one of the best podcasts I’ve found so far! If you listen to it, be warned, the location of the RSS feed has changed – it’s now here.

JAXA, the Japanese Space Agency, has some good and bad news. The good news are some amazing hi-res pictures of the asteroid Itokawa, the bad news is that they’ve had to abort the drop of the marker and rover onto its surface due to an “anomalous signal“.

The UK built satellite Inmarsat-4 is due for a launch from a sea platform near Christmas Island.

The ESA’s Venus Express is now due for launch on the 9th November, and good news for Mars Express, it’s Planetary Fourier Spectrometer is now working again after reporting a fault a few months ago.

Oh, and as Jason says, now is the time for the Taurids meteor shower.

BBC OpEd Piece on Sony’s “CD” Rootkit Fiasco

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Bill Thompson has written a good opinion piece over at the BBC called “The Rootkit of All Evil ?” on the recent Sony DRM Fiasco.


Fortunately, it is possible to avoid buying discs like this. Philips, who defined the CD standard and then made it widely available, has been very clear that these music delivery systems do not count as Compact Discs and cannot use the CD logo.


As far back as 2002, Philips representative Klaus Petri told Financial Times Deutschland that “those are silver discs with music data that resemble CDs, but aren’t”.

“HELP STOP CRIME/FRAUD” spam/scam

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Well well well, it would appear that Nigeria’s “Economic and Financial Crimes Commission” has decided to email me personally to tell me that I may be the victim of fraud, and should email my “Name, Address, email and telephone number” to their excite.com email address (or should that be the universia.pt one in the headers ?), and forward it to all my friends so they can do the same thing.

Of course it’s not at all suspicious that a Nigerian agency would be sending from a Portuguese IP address that has been blacklisted for repeated 419 scam emails by SpamHaus – oh no!

Anyway, if you want a laugh at the email the 419 scammers are now sending out in their attempts to use the commission that was set up to get them to get you instead, read the whole posting..
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Massachusetts OpenDocument Format Meeting

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From Groklaw – a blog of notes from the Massachusetts ODF Meeting where some pollies registered some displeasure of having not been involved, and sounded like they’d been reading too much misinformation from Microsoft. 🙁

There does appear to be at least one valid issue, and that is disability access, though sadly I’ve not seen details of what this exact problem is. Personally I would thought that to be an implementation issue rather than a document format issue, so I’m probably missing something there because Andy writes:


The disability issues are real, and the ITD seems to have been caught off guard on this. They should have been all over this issue a year ago, but seem to be going in the right direction now. Still, a bad tactical — and ethicall — mistake.
 (sic)

These two quotes in particular from Andy’s blog are quite telling:


Senator Pacheco doesn’t understand the difference between open source and open standards (and certainly doesn’t understand the difference between OpenDocument and OpenOffice). More than once, he indicated that he thought that the policy would require the Executive Agencies to use OpenOffice, not realizing that there are other compliant alternatives.


The hearing was stacked against the positive, in that although Quinn and ITD General Counsel Linda Hamel were given plenty of opportunity to speak and answer questions, no one else who was in favor of the new policy was permitted to give testimony (I know of at least one major, supporting vendor that tried and was refused), nor were any questions from the audience allowed.

Update: Scanning through Andy’s real-time notes shows another interesting little factoid:


the new policy applies only to the Executive Agencies. It does not apply to the Judiciary, although the Judiciary is actually way ahead of us, with over 2000 desktops already ODF enabled.