And then this:

“The point of the study was actually to eliminate the FUD about Linux’s alleged legal problems by attaching a quantifiable measure versus the speculation,” he said. “And the number we found, to anyone familiar with this issue, is so average as to be boring; almost any piece of software potentially infringes at least that many patents.”

Who said that? Dan Ravicher of OSRM - also known as the guy who wrote the report Balmer is quoting.

Via The Inquirer

Update: This dates from November 2004 (eWeek). As far as I know Ballmer’s still quoting the same report.

James Turner is pissed off about Microsoft’s patent sabre rattling - as we all should be.

At the end, there’s only one thing left to say. For shame Microsoft, for shame. You’ve twisted competition into a thuggish debacle that ranks right up there with the worst of the great robber barons. How ironic that Bill Gates is trying to reinvent himself as the great philanthropist. Andrew Carnegie took much the same route late in his life, as if it could wash away his sins. We can only hope that in a few years, Steve Ballmer will look as much a fool as Daryl McBride does today.

More here.

Microsoft have a great ad for Visual Studio inside the front cover of Dr. Dobbs journal. Check out these pictures:

(click for larger version)
Before	After

The first guy has a huge ugly laptop, a meaningless award on his desk. He clearly has no manners; in spite of the two women standing right next to him he’s wearing headphones and brandishing a tacky looking PDA / MP3 player / phone / whatever. His body language screams “I’m far too important to talk to mere girls”. He’s got an unhealthy BMW fetish going on too. Not only has he left his Beemer keyfob ostentatiously draped on his desk, he also has both a model of the car (his true love I fancy) and a picture of him standing next to the real thing. Just in case we miss the fact that he OWNS A BMW.

Anyway, then he discovers Visual Studio and experiences quite a transformation. He realises the award was just a crude attempt by his employer to make him work harder without paying him more. In its place is a paperclip parody of the award. Hah! His laptop is smaller and more tasteful. He now takes his headphones off in the presence of others. His keys are just a bunch of keys. He’s ditched the vacuous status car and replaced it with a mountain bike. Amazing. I almost like him now.

Microsoft must be furious though: the ad has been printed with the panels reversed so that it looks as if using Visual Studio turns you into a boorish, smug, self obsessed cock. Too bad.

You just can’t keep a good company down, can you? I’m pretty sure that the inclusion of an analogue security hole in Vista is a first.

It just goes to show: all the DRM in the world can’t plug up the analogue hole.

Robert Scoble says:

The Vista team, under Jim Allchin, suprised me. They shipped it on time. With a lot better quality than I was expecting.

On time? Not according to this MS blogger:

Vista. The term stirs the imagination to conceive of beautiful possibilities just around the corner. And “just around the corner” is what Windows Vista has been, and has remained, for the past two years. In this time, Vista has suffered a series of high-profile delays, including most recently the announcement that it would be delayed until 2007. The largest software project in mankind’s history now threatens to also be the longest.

And what about all the features that got lost along the way? C’mon Robert - you can’t possibly spin the timeliness of Vista. It may yet prove to be the best thing since Windows 1.0 but it’s never going to be famous for having been on time.

I really don’t understand this. Microsoft are saying that Zune will not be compatible with Plays for Sure encoded content bought through the MSN music store. The story’s been floating around for a week but I assumed that once MS realised how bad it made them look they’d claim it was all just a silly misunderstanding and fix it.

It’s hard to tell from the BBC story which media might work with which player or what the possible reason for the incompatibility might be. Not that the specifics really matter; the real problem is that proprietary DRM means you don’t really have a clue what you’re buying and how its capabilities might change after you’ve bought it. DRM turns devices that are technically capable of playing just about any digital audio content into little walled gardens of artificial rules and constraints - and those walls can be moved with every software update.

The rational alternative is to download the music illegally, send a few quid directly to the artist and ask them to distribute as much of that back to their record company as they see fit. No DRM, more money for the artist and record companies getting paid what they’re worth rather than what they can extort. Unfortunately that’s illegal - so I can’t possibly recommend it.

Today Microsoft has:

• suggested it might withdraw from China over human rights concerns
• improved Vista’s EULA from the user’s perspective and
• done a Linux friendly deal with Novell

I can’t wait to find out what they’re going to do tomorrow. I reckon there’s an ad in which Richard Stallman reveals himself as a Zune lover waiting in the wings.

Here’s the current situation - just in case it isn’t entirely clear from the item below. Windows Live Local currently has an issue for some people who are using Firefox on Linux. Steve Lombardi and Stephen Stchur of Microsoft confirm that this combination is absolutely supposed to work (it’s something they’ve put considerable effort into) and believe that there may be a problem with their browser sniffing code. They’re aiming to get a fix in the next release of Live Local - in around a week.

In the meantime you can work around the problem by

1. Downloading User Agent Switcher for Firefox
2. Importing User Agent Switcher options from this file
3. Instructing Firefox to fake Firefox 1.5 (Windows XP)

Thanks to Steve and Stephen for getting on the case so promptly and to everyone who reported results.

Where’s Windows Live Local gone? It used to be at local.live.com but now all I get is a search interface that seems to lead to maps but no aerial photos. Strangely I can still see the aerial photos (which for my area are much better than Google’s) via flashearth.com but all the links to Windows Live Local now redirect to intl.local.live.com - “Live Local Search”.

Update: It’s back. Maybe somebody pulled the wrong plug :)

Update 22/09/2006: It’s still not working on Linux (tested with Firefox 1.5.0.5). Working fine on Mac Firefox. Can we have a show of hands from people who’ve previously been able to get it working on Linux?

Update: This item (dated Sept 12) on http://virtualearth.spaces.live.com states that it does work on Firefox Linux (my emphasis):

You have control over line thickness, fill color, line color and line pattern. You can draw multi-segment lines or complex closed shapes. While its not exactly Adobe Illustrator, it is quite an impressive set of basic drawing and editing tools all implemented in Dynamic HTML; No plugins required, and it works very well in Firefox 1.5 (Windows, Mac, Linux), IE6, and IE7. Here’s a Collection I am working on of the major neighborhood boundaries in Manhattan.

Update 24/09/2006: Steve Lombardi from the Windows Live / Virtual Earth team (that’s his blog linked above) tells me that this is definitely not intended behaviour and is now investigating - thanks Steve.

I’ll post more information as soon as I have it.

Stephen Stchur writes (hoisted from the comments):

This is definitely a browser sniffing problem. VE is absolutely designed to work with Firefox (on all of Windows, Mac, and Linux).

Download the Firefox extension (User Agent Switcher). Then switch the User Agent to be IE 6 for Windows. Then try browing to local.live.com. It will work.

A crappy solution, but at least it’s something until this gets fixed.

I’ve just tried that and it seems to work fine.

Update 25/09/2006: Spoke too soon - faking IE 6 prevents the redirect - but the map doesn’t actually load. I was having connectivity problems when I tried it and assumed that’s why the map hadn’t loaded - but Stephen confirms the same problem.

What does seem to work is faking Firefox on XP. That’s not one of the default User Agent Switcher options - but if you download uas-ffxp.xml and import it to User Agent Switcher you should get a Firefox/Windows XP option that will work with local.live.com.

Steve and Stephen hope to have a proper fix in the next release and asked me to pass on thanks to everyone who submitted reports.