Bill Gates posing for a teen magazine in 1985
with a Mac at the back, from which he nicked the GUI

S Microsoft allows the public to have a sneak peek at Office 12, it seems rather apparent that they copied Aqua and Brushed Metal from Mac OS X (c/f related themes of Firefox and Thunderbird). The operating system (platform) makes no exception per se either while the tagline “Code is Poetry”, which was adopted by WordPress, has recently been stolen by Microsoft as well. This shocking discovery was thoroughly discussed in the blog of Matt Mullenweg, lead developer of WordPress.

More on unoriginality in Microsoft:

• Imitation at Microsoft
• No Competition = No Innovation
• Longhorn Beta Screenshots
• Healthy Competition

A screenshot of Word in Office 12; annotation contained in the image

OVELL, makers of SuSE Linux, predict that Windows Vista will be the catalyst for many to migrate to Linux. This was argued explicitly last month in the light of outrageous hardware requirements, as well as the lack of features.

CEO of Novell, Jack Messman, was implicitly referring to issues such as the inability to uninstall all browsers from Windows, unlike, for instance, games and entertainment components. Internet Explorer, after all, is forged into the operating system.

Messman claimed that certain features of Office allowed employees to waste time at work by making it easy for them to browse non-work-related sites.

…

Do you really want to pay for all the excess functionality in Windows that distracts your employees and reduces their productivity?

A few details on the release date are sure to confuse prospective users that still remain in the dark.

According to a recent report from Windows IT Pro, Windows Vista is due to ship on Dec. 7, 2006. However Microsoft has refused to confirm or deny the reports and continues to claim simply that Windows Vista will ship in the second half of next year.

Related items from the farther past:

• XP + New Colours = Longhorn (Vista)
• Longhorn (Vista): A Trainwreck?

Debian on a Compaq. Compaq were
acquired by HP and Ubuntu is based on Debian Linux.

NE of the key challenges that Linux has faced lately was its inability to get shipped by giant hardware distributors. A milestone can now be marked as Hewlett Packard begins to sell Ubuntu Linux, pre-installed on both desktops and laptops.

HP’s Sean Owen-Jones… said the company would shortly be releasing desktop and notebook PCs running Ubuntu Linux. The NX6110 notebook would be available shortly with Ubuntu and a desktop PC would also be available.

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[HP's] Schulz said that HP’s entire email infrastructure… is run on Linux and delivers in the region of three terrabytes [sic] of mail annually.

Next up: Dell Computers.

Why you might ask?

Rather recently, Michael Dell asked Steve Job (of Apple) if he could take advantage of Mac OS X, which is now compatible with x86 architectures. Mac OS X , which is Linux-based (see correction in comment), can easily be incorporated into a massive stock of Dell machines. Tiger, being the most recent version of Mac OS, is taking some niches by storm already, security and eye candy being a major pro.

More importantly, as I pointed out 2 months ago, Michael Dell gave $100,000,000 to RedHat Linux out of his own pocket while Fujitsu opted for SuSE Linux and server support services.

To spice up this discussion, a Gartner Group study concluded that mainstream use of open source in IT environments may be just 5 years away. What a glorious turn of events.

Somebody had to clean up the trash

have come across a very funny and heavily-cited story from a guy who turned down a job at Microsoft, the “king of proprietary”. I particularly enjoyed reading his reply to the recruiter, a snippet of which lies below:

On the day *I* go to work for Microsoft, faint oinking sounds will be heard from far overhead, the moon will not merely turn blue but develop polkadots, and hell will freeze over so solid the brimstone will go superconductive.

Flush the full capacities of the hardware…

…or throw away money purchasing a new computer

Details about demanding system requirements in Windows Vista are unveiled in an item from bit-tech.net.

CPU: Threading is the main target for Vista. Currently, very little of Windows XP is threaded…

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RAM: 2GB is the ideal configuration for 64-bit Vista, we’re told.

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Display: Prepare to feel the red mist of rage – no current TFT monitor out there is going to support high definition playback in Vista.

The worrisome hardware requirements were mentioned previously in an item titled Vista Perils. To be more impartial, Jaguar/Tiger are said to be resource hogs as well. It is primarily due to animations and transparent widgets, at the bottom of which there is on-the-fly indexing of data. Likewise, KDE (Linux window manager) can be computationally-expensive if customised to behave this way.

I have found a very amusing Flash clip involving Monkey Boy Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft. He sure seems to love his iPod, but so does the Queen of England.

Context: Massachusetts says Goodbye to Office – including a reference to Ballmer’s ugly side.

SN joins the on-line advertisement club. They will soon enable pay-per-click ads to be embedded in Web pages. According to ZDNet, MSN has already launched an advertising application, which upon closer inspection, leads to an appalling invasion of privacy. The Seattle Times (free registration needed for reading) reports that:

AdCenter uses information from customers who registered for services such as Hotmail or who tailored the MSN home page to their interests. It supplements that with data purchased from the Experian credit bureau.

This was predicted long ago in one of Joel’s most popular essays. Joel Spolsky used to work in Microsoft and he foresaw the exploitation of cookies and information swap:

…One day, Expedia could start offering higher fares to customers who have more than a million dollars in their Investor stock portfolio. There’s not really anything technically impossible about this, and it’s probably legal, too…