Author: Dr. Bill

Wow! Talk about a day in history! According to the Terminator movie’s timeline, SkyNet will become self-aware today, April 19, 2011, at 20:11 PM. So, say hello to our cybernetic master! Just sayin’!

How long will it be before we look back at this date and say, “Wow! They missed the actual date of self-aware artificial intelligence by just “x” years!” Kinda sobering!

Oracle is giving up on OpenOffice… and turning it into a REAL Open Source project again! Booyah! Now, we will see if LibreOffice “folds back” into the OpenOffice effort! You just don’t tick off the Open Source community!

Oracle Gives up on Commercial Open Office

“Oracle announced Friday that it will no longer sell a commercial version of the Open Office productivity suite, and that the open-source OpenOffice.org will be transitioned to ‘a purely community-based open-source project.’

‘Given the breadth of interest in free personal productivity applications and the rapid evolution of personal computing technologies, we believe the OpenOffice.org project would be best managed by an organization focused on serving that broad constituency on a non-commercial basis,’ said Oracle Chief Architect Edward Screven in a statement.

Oracle will ‘begin working immediately with community members to further the continued success of Open Office’ and plans to continue supporting standards like ODF (Open Document Format), he said.

Screven went on to confirm Oracle’s commitment to other open-source technologies, such as Linux and MySQL. ‘Oracle is focused on Linux and MySQL because both of these products have won broad based adoption among commercial and government customers,’ he said.

Oracle’s decision suggests the company has had difficulty selling many Open Office licenses since it acquired Sun Microsystems, which sold the software under the name Star Office. Its move is apparently effective immediately; a number of links on its website related to Open Office were dead on Friday.

Although Oracle didn’t specify so, the future of its recently announced Cloud Office product also seems in question. Website links for Cloud Office were also gone on Friday.

It’s also unclear how Oracle’s decision will affect offshoots of the OpenOffice.org codebase, such as the Document Foundation’s LibreOffice, which emerged last year amid concerns over how Oracle was dealing with community members.

Previously, the Document Foundation, which counts Google and Red Hat among its supporters, asked Oracle to join the organization and lend the OpenOffice.org brand name to its efforts.”

Not that surprising. But, they are both good browsers, and I never thought I would say that about IE, ever! But, M$ has done a lot to clean up the IE badness!

Firefox 4 leads IE9 in downloads and usage

“Firefox 4, which launched last week, has attracted considerable interest among technology enthusiasts. The browser was downloaded 7.1 million times during the first day of availability alone. It passed 15 million downloads within the first 48 hours and is currently nearing 40 million total downloads.

By comparison, Microsoft’s recently-launched Internet Explorer 9 only netted 2.5 million downloads during its first 24 hours. Firefox 4 is also outpacing Internet Explorer 9 in actual usage, according to statistics provided by StatCounter and Net Applications. They show that Firefox 4 usage represents between 4 and 5 percent of the total browser market whereas Internet Explorer 9 is hovering between 1 and 2 percent.

It’s worth noting that neither browser has been rolled out to regular end users via the standard update channels yet—the statistics are based entirely on voluntary downloads by early adopters. Mozilla’s Asa Dotzler attributes the early popularity of Firefox 4 to strong grassroots support from the browser’s vocal community of independent advocates.

Firefox’s cross-platform footprint and backwards compatibility with Windows XP—which isn’t supported by IE9—may also have played a role in boosting Firefox’s momentum out of the starting gate.”

According to Microsoft, “Google stinks, Chrome stinks, Chrome OS WILL stink!” Yeah, right! All you are showing is that you fear the Google! But, Microsoft does appear to be taking HTML5 and the new IE 10 development very seriously!

Microsoft debuts IE10, announces PDC 2011 dates

“The wait is over. Microsoft’s MIX11 conference kicked off today in Las Vegas, with Dean Hachamovitch’s opening keynote. Hachamovitch is a Microsoft corporate vice president and the man with a plan when it comes to Internet Explorer.

During MIX10, Hachamovitch debuted the IE9 platform, which got its official release last month. Today, along with Windows divisional president Steven Sinofksy, he debuted IE10 platform. ‘We’re about three weeks into development of IE10,’ Hachamovitch said. Hachamovitch’s clothing foreshadowed what was coming, about half-way through the keynote. He wore a T-Shirt with ‘Ten,’ where the Internet Explorer logo replaced the ‘e.’ In another surprise move, Hachamovitch announced that an IE10 preview is available now at the Internet Explorer Test Drive website.”

Here’s a link, for the adventurous: Internet Explorer Test Drive

“The IE10 demo compared to Chrome, too. Considering Firefox has considerably more usage share than Chrome, the Google whacking says something about which is the greater competitor from Microsoft’s perspective. Google launched Chrome 1.0 in December 2008. Version 11 already is beta testing. Meanwhile Microsoft revved two IE versions, which will soon be confronted not just with a Google browser but Chrome OS.”

Cisco bought Flip just two years ago for $590 million dollars, but it is leaving the consumer market, never it’s strong suit, and focusing on it’s real strengths. They plan to keep the “Flipshare” web site open a little longer, but it is not clear how long, or whether they will sell the Flip company, or simply close it down.

Shame. It was a pretty neat product. Also, Cisco will be laying off 550 people. Ouch!

Is that like “Happy kitties are happy?” Anyway, I watched Geekbeat Live on YouTube Live today. And, today is the first day the live feed for YouTube is up.

YouTube is going LIVE

“With over 2 billion views a day, it’s easy to think about YouTube as a place to watch videos recorded in the past. But you’ve told us you want more – and that includes events taking place right now. In response, we’ve live streamed a number of popular concerts, sporting events, and interviews, but primarily on a one-off basis.

Today we’re announcing the initial roll out of YouTube Live, which will integrate live streaming capabilities and discovery tools directly into the YouTube platform for the first time. This begins with a new YouTube Live browse page (www.youtube.com/live), where you can always find the most compelling live events happening on YouTube and add events to your calendar. Subscribe to your favorite YouTube live-streaming partners to be notified of upcoming live streams on your customized homepage.

Today, we’ll also start gradually rolling out our live streaming beta platform, which will allow certain YouTube partners with accounts in good standing to stream live content on YouTube. The goal is to provide thousands of partners with the capability to live stream from their channels in the months ahead. In order to ensure a great live stream viewing experience, we’ll roll this offering out incrementally over time.”

Lot’s o’ fixes! Critical security updates, pretty much what we have come to expect with Windows! 17 separate patches for 64 security issues… ouch!

Microsoft Preparing ‘Ugly’ Security Patch on Tuesday

“Windows security experts had been expecting a large April security update after last month’s thin offering, and Microsoft’s advance notice appears to meet those expectations — and then some.

Microsoft announced today that it plans to roll out 17 patches on Tuesday in its monthly security update, with nine fixes deemed “critical” and eight considered ‘important.’ Remote code execution (RCE) attack risks dominate April’s slate, as 15 of the 17 security bulletins address those considerations. Two security bulletins point to information disclosure and elevation-of-privilege threats.

‘No matter how you look at it, it’s ugly,’ said Paul Henry, forensic and security analyst at Lumension. ‘We’re well into a new year and things have not improved. In fact, they’ve gotten worse.’

The first critical security bulletin appears to be the long-awaited cumulative fix for Internet Explorer. It will address every supported Windows operating system and covers IE 6, 7 and 8 browsers.

The remaining eight critical security bulletins are all Windows OS-level fixes with RCE exploit risks. Critical security bulletin No. 6 also includes a fix for Microsoft Office.”