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Rising Frustration with Microsoft’s Compensation and Review System

Internal Microsoft documents obtained by WashTech News show that Microsoft salaries have been stagnant or nudged only slightly higher over the past two years. Comments from current and former employees about the company’s compensation and performance review system suggest a growing level of frustration among rank-and-file workers.

Sidebar: Washington Alliance of Technology Workers, Communications Workers of America, Local 37083, AFL-CIO: Microsoft to invest $1.7 billion, add 3,000 jobs in India, Gates says. GM to raise India workforce by 30%

The European Union might start a new investigation into allegations that Microsoft Corp. is abusing its dominance in products such as Word and Excel, EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said Tuesday.

[ED: i just cannot understand this evolving story. In essence, Rice said it best: "Who Knew!?", European politicians were that much harder to buy off the the domesticated, native versions here in the States. - HC]

In addition to the three major KOffice applications discussed in part 1 of this series (KWord, KSpread, and KPresenter), KOffice includes nine minor apps which fall into three general categories: subsystems, database and reporting tools, and graphics and charting programs. They present a different perspective than the main applications, which I concluded were best-suited to light use.

Nigel Cunningham, the creator of the Susped2 software suspend system for Linux [story] announced his retirement from the project in a mail sent to the Linux Kenel Mailing List.

Sharp today announced their newest Zaurus Linux PDA model, the SL-C3200, with 6GB hard drive. Like all other Zaurus PDAs, the SL-C3200 will not be sold directly to the US market. But you will likely see the devices sold here via importers who usually flash the device with English version of the OS and have been doing well selling previous Zaurus models.

A report issued today by Symantec Corp. seeks to satisfy users of both Mozilla Corp.'s Firefox browser and Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer.

In its latest Internet Security Threat Report, covering the last six months of 2005, the company now features two different ways of counting browser bugs: one that finds that Internet Explorer has the most vulnerabilities, and a second that reveals Firefox as the bug leader.

Firefox had the highest number of "vendor-confirmed" vulnerabilities, with 13 bugs reported during the six months covered by the report, compared with Internet Explorer's 12, said Dave Cole, a director of Symantec Security Response.

[ED: Color me cynical, but does Symantec's revisionism mean: that they are attempting to be more truthful? Or is it recongnition the market is changing? Or even more likely, recognition that their partnering with Microsoft and cash flow is ending with the release of Vista? When the latter occurs MS becomes the sole protector of the mass of ignorant users. - HC]

  
One of the greatest things about Linux is that it comes in a large number of different distributions. That's also one of its big disadvantages, holding up a lot of further acceptance of Linux.

Hard on the heels of the announcement of the government-targeting ODF Alliance comes the announcement of a new initiative: the ODF Adoption Committee at OASIS, which will work to promote ODF adoption in the broader end user community.

[ED: An interesting view of the ODF Alliance by an informed source - HC]

In what will no doubt be a boon for the Linux desktop Novell recently demonstrated its new OpenGL accelerated X server -- bringing with it a range of impressive 3D accelerated visuals and effects.

The total domination of top-end computing - be it grids or supercomputers - by open source is one of the facts that Microsoft somehow omits to tell us in its "Get The Facts" campaign.

In a carefully-planned operation that took more than a year to complete the British charity Oxfam switched three thousand of its users from using its proprietary collaboration platform to one which is closer to their mission: volunteer-created Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS).

biptk helps developers and performance specialists exploit bytecode instrumentation for the purpose of profiling Java applications.

While Windows Server software and Unix-based Server Software systems battle it out in the marketplace, 2005 marking this first year Windows Server software has beat Unix-based server software (notably, by a small margin), it seems that something else has appeared to emerge as part of the overall server systems story. Linux actually *DOES* have a business model, and is thriving despite what some would want you to believe. Here's my analysis of what all of this means:

The Thirty Years' War was long and dreary and mostly pointless, but in the end, some good came out of it: the Peace of Westphalia. The UNIX wars were also long, dreary, and mostly pointless, but much good came out of them too. As compared with other operating system standards -- which are often highly volatile at best or non-existent at worst -- when it comes to UNIX, the elements are so mixed in the documentation that Nature might stand up and say to all the world 'This is a standard.'

The LAMP software stack is of a higher quality than most open source software, a study initiated by the US Department of Homeland Security has found. LAMP has 0.29 defects per thousand lines of code, compared to the baseline of 0.434 for 32 open source projects analysed.

Let’s start with a little bit of history. The concept of storing your very important and precious data online is nothing new. There are already several companies which, for a monthly or annual fee, rent you a certain number of MB in order for you to save those essential data that you don’t want to lose if your personal computer begins to malfunction.

Commercial software can be costly in more ways than one. As if hefty license fees weren't bad enough, product support is limited to whatever services the vendor agrees to sell you, at a price that's tough to negotiate. Of course, you could fix program bugs yourself if you had access to the source code—but the typical software maker doesn't provide this.

So how do you break the cycle of vendor dependency? One popular choice is to explore open-source alternatives.

Teotihuacan writes on the UbuntuForum: There is a file that contains all the installation logs :

/var/log/installer/cdebconf/questions.dat In this file, there is all the questions asked to the user abd all the user's answers. So, near the end of the file, we can find the user created during the installation... and its password (not hidden).

Moreover, this file can be read by all users (contrary to the syslog).

Linux and open source pros who have followed the developments of the eXtensible Open Router Platform (XORP) should get to know a bit of Sanskrit - the word Vyatta, in particular.

Linux users who live in Toronto now have a special place to gather, get online, and sip fancy coffee drinks. It's not Starbucks, it's the linuxcaffe.