What else would you expect from a company with such a shady track record?

Microsoft’s Record Quarter: Shareholders Paid for Most of the Upside Surprise

“Said another way, Microsoft achieved record breaking earnings during the Vista launch quarter by taking money out of its assets, not through amazing sales of Vista and Office.”

Guess what? Microsoft delivered headlines which attribute this ‘success’ to nothing but Office and Vista sales. On several occasions, Microsoft has refused to say how many units they actually sold. They seem to just be emptying their savings in order to create an illusion which they are comfortable with. According to the following, the company has lost over half of its cash reserves in just two years, but it is all happening very quietly.

Software Notebook: Microsoft’s cash pile isn’t what it used to be

But Microsoft has taken a series of steps to reduce its cash balance. Specifically, by Microsoft’s count, the company has paid out nearly $100 billion through dividends and repurchasing its own stock in the past five years.

have not been posting or spurring much activity in my personal blog recently, but this one message is important enough for me to stress here.

Microsoft has recently announced that it would introduce a rival to Flash. It calls it “Silverlight”. I mentioned this a couple of years ago when it was called “Sparkle”. Bear in mind, however, that a lot of truths are being hidden and the intent here is to make the Web incompatible with Free operating systems. The points to remember:

• Silverlight does not support GNU/Linux.
• Silverlight is built to make the Web accessible only to proprietary platforms, even if one can view the source.
• Silverlight can be ‘extended’ at any given time. There is no industry consortium.
• Microsoft corrupts terminology by using the terms ‘Open Source’ and ‘cross platform’ inadequately. It is not the first time this do this. They used ‘cross platform’ to describe programs that work in Windows Mobile, Windows, and XBox.

Don’t be misled. Use Adobe Flash if you must. Better yet, use Open Web standards and make use of cascading style sheets, maybe even JavaScript.

“Let’s all just pretend”

More mind control through exclusions of information and expression. China keeps chopping off bits of the Web.

Seems that the web is not only cause of youthful addiction to games, but also can cause people to think in non-socialist and non-communist ways. Clearly bad all around.

Made with the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP)

couple of years ago I complained about AdSense placing anti-Linux ads (from Microsoft) right inside my Linux pages. It was then that I was told about an option which prevents this from happening.

Earlier today I logged in to my AdSense account again. It’s something that I only do twice a month. What did I discover? A new little feature that apparently gives advice to publishers. Here is the message I received:

Aha! So the high payers are apparently not allowed on my sites. Who could that be?

The apple does not fall far from the tree. This may explain why many Linux sites out there still display blatantly anti-Linux ads from Microsoft. Isn’t advertising lovely? Microsoft knows no bounds.

ACK when I communicated with Google, I came to realise that they have engineers whose sole/main purpose was to ensure the site stays online at all times. A few days ago I had another odd realisation, but perhaps a very obvious one. To search engines, downtimes are a hugely damaging thing. If people are unable to search for something immediately, they will choose a different tool. They must. By testing the water elsewhere—as such a downtime would lead to—failure can encourage them to switch to the rival.

Ordinary sites, as opposed to such complex tools, do not have this problem. How many of us use a single search engine exclusively? What would happen if one day we found that the grass is greener elsewhere? Search, as opposed to a flow of information, tends to have immediate need. It cannot be deferred until the favourite site returns. So, defection can be a matter of availability and its impact should not be underestimated. Downtime on a corporate network rarely has any long-term impact, unlike search tools whose quality is a subjective thing.