According to the press release, Microsoft and Novell are joining forces to create a new research activity with the aim of improving virtualisation, Web Services (for SOA) and document format interoperability. There is also a deal on patent infringements (i.e. buy SuSE and be indemnified against any infringements of MS IPR).
This is no ordinary deal. MS rolled out the big guns in the form of heavyweight endorsements from the likes of Intel, AMD, HP, IBM, Dell and many more. The deal is also restricted to SLES, the enterprise version of SuSE, clearly indicating the target market for this collaboration. To get the ball rolling, Microsoft will purchase about 70,000 coupons from Novell to [click title to read more…]
On Bill Gate’s own website, he promotes the use of XML for system interoperability. He makes special note of WS-* being developed by MS, BEA, IBM and others. We’ve been hearing a lot about interop from the big players in recent times. I was particularly intrigued by the MS article last September on MS/BEA interop, which showed (albeit with simple unit tests) that WS-I appeared to work.
I’ve been having a bad time recently. There’s a nasty bug in Windows Explorer that has been around for quite some time and the people in Microsoft just never seem to get around to fixing it. If you create a folder X, and then create a file Y in X, and then delete Y, you’ll find that you can’t delete X, even though X is empty. Explorer complains that the folder cannot be deleted because it is in use by another application. Strangely, that other application turns out to be Explorer itself. That piece of information came from a free tool called “Who Lock Me?”. Unfortunately that tool’s only solution to the problem is to kill the offending application, which [click title to read more…]
Microsoft is planning to validate your copy of Windows before letting you download security patches or other updates. This has been coming for a long time, so it’s no big surprise. The danger is that many users of illegal copies of the operating system will not replace them with genuine copies, and will instead let their illegitimate software become a security risk, thus affecting the rest of us. It’s going to be a rough ride.