Dr. Bill | The Computer Curmudgeon

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The world’s most insecure operating system is getting a BOATLOAD of updates this week! Get ready to do some downlowding!

Microsoft’s Mega Batch Of Patches, The Second Largest In 2007

“IT managers and techs may want to reschedule any plans they had for fun in the sun for the rest of the week. In its monthly Patch Tuesday release, Microsoft (MSFT) issued the second-largest bunch of fixes this year — patching vulnerabilities that will affect anyone using Windows, according to Amol Sarwate, manager of the Vulnerability Research Lab at Qualys. Microsoft released nine security bulletins, fixing a total of 14 vulnerabilities. Eight of the bugs are critical; four are rated important, which is the next rung down on the risk scale; and two are rated moderate. The fixes address flaws in Windows, Windows Media Player, Windows Gadgets, Office, Excel, Internet Explorer, Visual Basic, Virtual Sever, and Virtual PC. ‘Today was the biggest patch day in the last five or six months,’ said Sarwate, noting that the patches affect three or four core components. ‘We haven’t seen this many critical patches since February. And we have the largest amount of applications affected. Anyone using Windows will be impacted by this.'”

Remember how it raised fear, uncertainty and doubt about Linux? Seems like a long time ago, huh? Well, now a judge has finally ruled that SCO owns no part of UNIX, and it (SCO) should now die an appropriate flaming death! Hooray for the good guys!

SCO never owned UNIX copyrights, owes Novell 95 percent of UNIX royalties

“Federal district judge Dale A. Kimball issued a ruling on Friday declaring that Novell owns the UNIX copyrights. Kimball’s ruling means that the end is near for SCO’s protracted litigation trainwreck, an epic assortment of lawsuits that have achieved infamy in the tech industry. Judge Kimball finds that Novell never transferred ownership of the UNIX copyrights to SCO during or after a 1995 agreement between the two companies. Judge Kimball’s ruling effectively ends SCO’s ‘slander of title’ lawsuit against Novell, which was based on SCO’s allegation that Novell had wrongfully claimed ownership of the UNIX copyrights. Since Novell is the rightful owner of the UNIX copyrights, ‘there is no basis in the evidence before this court for finding that Novell’s public claims of ownership were a misappropriation or seizure of SCO’s property,’ said Judge Kimball in his 102-page ruling. Confirmation of Novell’s ownership of the UNIX copyrights will also put an end to SCO’s lawsuit against IBM, in which SCO alleges that IBM infringed on UNIX copyrights by incorporating proprietary UNIX code into the open-source Linux operating system. Judge Kimball has determined that, under the terms of Section 4.16(b) of the 1995 Asset Purchase Agreement between the two companies, Novell has the authority to ‘direct SCO to waive its purported claims for breaches of [UNIX] license agreements with IBM and Sequent.'”

so, it turns out SCO owes Novell money. Right! Like SCO will ever be able to pay a dime to anyone! But, they will die… a fitting end.

HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is the basis of the Web, and it is changing! For the first time since we entered the new millennium, HTML will get new elements!

New elements in HTML 5

“Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) 5 introduces new elements to HTML for the first time since the last millennium. New structural elements include aside, figure, and section. New inline elements include time, meter, and progress. New embedding elements include video and audio. New interactive elements include details, datagrid, and command. Development of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) stopped in 1999 with HTML 4. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) focused its efforts on changing the underlying syntax of HTML from Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) to Extensible Markup Language (XML), as well as completely new markup languages like Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), XForms, and MathML. Browser vendors focused on browser features like tabs and Rich Site Summary (RSS) readers. Web designers started learning Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and the JavaScriptâ„¢ language to build their own applications on top of the existing frameworks using Asynchronous JavaScript + XML (Ajax). But HTML itself grew hardly at all in the next eight years. Recently, the beast came back to life. Three major browser vendors—Apple, Opera, and the Mozilla Foundation—came together as the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WhatWG) to develop an updated and upgraded version of classic HTML. More recently, the W3C took note of these developments and started its own next-generation HTML effort with many of the same members. Eventually, the two efforts will likely be merged. Although many details remain to be argued over, the outlines of the next version of HTML are becoming clear. This new version of HTML—usually called HTML 5, although it also goes under the name Web Applications 1.0—would be instantly recognizable to a Web designer frozen in ice in 1999 and thawed today. There are no namespaces or schemas. Elements don’t have to be closed. Browsers are forgiving of errors. A p is still a p, and a table is still a table…”

Freespire Linux, the free version of Linspire Linux, based on Ubuntu, is now out!

Linspire Releases 2.0 Version of Free OS

“Linspire on Wednesday released the second version of Freespire, the community-based operating system based on Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux distribution, enhancing it with its own proprietary software, drivers, and codecs. The San Diego company’s announcement comes a little over a year after the company first announced its plans to split its Linspire efforts into a commercial and free variant. The company hopes the free version will help spur use of Linux. Linspire says that the proprietary software, which comes from a variety of sources, not only Linspire itself, would provide a better user experience for those who install it. Freespire 2.0 also provides access to the CNR Server, which allows one-click installation of open-source applications. Freespire makes improvements to out-of-the-box support for several types of hardware, file types, and multimedia. This includes MP3, Windows Media, Real Networks, Java, Flash, ATI, nVidia, WiFi, among others. Support for Open XML allows users editing documents within OpenOffice to open and write to Microsoft Word .docx files, the company added. ‘Freespire 2.0 picks up where Ubuntu leaves off by adding proprietary software, drivers and codecs, to make for a more complete turn-key solution for mainstream desktop computing,’ Linspire president and CEO Larry Kettler said.”