…just another hippy blog

"WALTHAM, Mass.—02 Nov 2006—Microsoft Corp. and Novell Inc. today announced a set of broad business and technical collaboration agreements to build, market and support a series of new solutions to make Novell and Microsoft® products work better together. The two companies also announced an agreement to provide each other’s customers with patent coverage for their respective products. These agreements will be in place until at least 2012. Under this new model, customers will realize unprecedented choice and flexibility through improved interoperability and manageability between Windows® and Linux." (source: Novell Press Release)

1. Novell and Microsoft are releasing each company from the other’s patent portfolio. This means Microsoft won’t sue Novell for patent infringements and Novell won’t sue Microsoft.
2. Virtualization. The companies will collaborate to allow Microsoft being virtualised on Linux and vice versa. Note: Microsoft and Novell are already collaborating on the Xen project along with other top-level companies Intel, RedHat and AMD.
3. Office Open XML. Novell will be writing the code to allow OpenOffice to access the new Microsoft Office XML file format.
4. "Under the patent agreement, customers will receive coverage for Mono, Samba, and OpenOffice as well as .NET and Windows Server."

A recent post published on ZDNet by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, "The world just isn’t ready for Linux", has cought my attention.

The author states that there are "areas Linux could improve on in order to transform itself from an operating system into a desktop platform": gaming, software support, stop assuming that everyone using Linux (or who wants to use Linux) is a Linux expert, hardware support.

I feel like I have to say some words in support of Wikipedia after reading a few "stories" on Slashdot.

Number One:  Wikipedia and Plagiarism

Short extract (Spo22a writes):

"Daniel Brandt found the examples of suspected plagiarism at Wikipedia using a program he created to run a few sentences from about 12,000 articles against Google Inc.’s search engine."

In short: 142 Wikipedia articles out of 12000 (that’s about 1,83%) were suspected of plagiarism (this means they contained information coming from some other source).

Number Two:   Long-Term Wikipedia Vandalism Exposed

Short extract (Daveydweeb writes):

"The accuracy of Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, came into question again when a long-standing article on ‘NPA personality theory’ was confirmed to be a hoax."

In short: the article is about a not widely known personality theory invented by Anthony M. Benis. The suspect is that the article has been mainly written by Benis himself to promote his theory. The article has been proposed for deletion and a debate has been opened.

Number Three:  Wikipedia Used To Spread Virus

Short extract (eldavojohn writes): 

"The German Wikipedia has recently been used to launch a virus attack. Hackers posted a link to an all alleged fix for a new version of the blaster worm. Instead, it was a link to download malicious software."

In short: some smart idiots (please don’t call them hackers unless you know the real meaning of this word) sent emails with a link to the fake fix in the hope that unsuspecting users would trust a Wikipedia link.