Back in May 2007, Microsoft publicly claimed Free Software Violates Patents! Todd Bishop had a lengthy article on this topic. Now, nearly a year later Microsoft won’t publicly disclose what patents are being infringed by Linux and other open-source programs. Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith was appearing earlier today at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco. Todd Bishop had a chance to speak to Smith on the phone about Microsoft’s reason for not listing what patents are being infringed upon: Will we publish, on the Web, a broader list? That is not something that any other company in…
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A couple of my pet peeves with software are applications that once installed, are very difficult if not impossible to completely remove from your system without nuking you hard drive. The other type of software is the kind that makes a mess on your system when it is installed. Case in point for this post, is QuickTime. Since I use iTunes, I have to have QuickTime on my system. I never use the QuickTime player as I use GOM Player (QuickTime videos via the QuickTime Alternative codec) for all my video player needs. So I launched iTunes which I hadn’t…
I just downloaded and applied the Spybot 1.5.2 update, which of course required me to restart the computer. After rebooting I launched Spybot and noticed and a huge difference in the load time. As mentioned prior, the old 1.5.1 version would take up to a minute or even longer for the application to launch from the time you clicked the icon. Now the new 1.5.2 version loaded in a matter of few seconds. Speaking of load times, I timed how long Firefox took to launch. Much to my surprise it was up and running in about 4 seconds from when…
I noticed a couple comments on the Firefox 2.0.0.12 Released post about issues with add-ons when upgrading to this new release. I did upgrade to the released version of Fx 2.0.0.12 even though I should not have (more on this later). I did not have any issues with my add-ons no longer working or causing the browser to crash. While, I know two different readers have had this issue, I don’t know what add-ons they had installed or what OS they were using and for that matter if this involved the en-US version of Firefox. Without getting more specific details…
Foxit Reader is great alternative to Adobe Acrobat for viewing PDF files. But what if you want to create a PDF file? Sure you could pay for a program that will take your files and convert them to PDF. Or you could use MS Office saves as PDF option. Even OpenOffice has an Export as PDF option but that does the whole document as a PDF file. I ran into this problem with an OpenOffice spreadsheet I had. I wanted each sheet or page to be its own PDF document. After a quick search on the CyberNet Forum, I found…
Earlier today I posted Microsoft: Free Software Violates Patents!. Todd Bishop has a lengthy article on his blog today about this topic. However the article is more about the Free Software Foundation and it’s draft of the General Public License Version 3 (GPL, the license under which many open-source programs are distributed). Eben Moglen is the legal counsel to the Free Software Foundation and had this to say: The recent “saber-rattling” further illustrated the importance of protecting against Microsoft’s attempts “to disrupt free software production through the inculcation of a large inventory of most-likely invalid patents.” There also appear to…
Microsoft must be losing lots of money to free software such as Linux and OpenOffice.org, as they are now whining that “Free Software Violates 235 Patents”: The Linux kernel - the deepest layer of the free operating system, which interacts most directly with the computer hardware - violates 42 Microsoft patents. The Linux graphical user interfaces - essentially, the way design elements like menus and toolbars are set up - run afoul of another 65, he claims. The Open Office suite of programs, which is analogous to Microsoft Office, infringes 45 more. E-mail programs infringe 15, while other assorted FOSS…
Back in January I raved about the then FastStone Capture. Earlier this week FastStone Capture version 5.4 was released and much to my disappointment has become shareware. You get a free 30-day trial then you have shell out $30 to get the “real” (usable) version. Now granted version 5.3 may not have all the new features (not they are any exciting much less worth paying for) or be bug fee (not that I have had any issues with bugs) but it was freeware. Now, there a couple options available if you do not want to do that Shareware version. First…
After dealing with a broken theme for the last couple days I decided it was time to make some changes. For one, I went back to a two-column theme, frankly three-column are just to much (and is if three weren’t bad enough WordPress.com offers a four-column theme). With the three-column the content was just too narrow. I think the display problems over the last couple days were tied to the Garland theme as well as some of the sidebar widgets. For a while now I been wanting to make a custom header for my blog, something that I could also…
Thanks to everyone who has commented about the new theme and layout. Based on these comments I have made a couple more tweaks. The old ‘Featured Links’ section use to have ‘buttons’ for all the browsers and some of the blogs. People commented those did not look so great with the rest of the blog. Well, I have to agree the ‘buttons’ were all different sizes and just too big. I have removed all the linked images. Also recategorized the ‘Featured Links’ into either ‘Blogs’ or ‘Internet & Browsers’. I have also added a link to FileZilla, a fast and…