IBM had another decent time last week in
what is turning out to be a rather decent year. With critics lining up to praise
its enterprise server strategy, Big Blue agreed a deal to buy
DataMirror, its squillionth software
acquisition in the past couple of years. It also enjoyed a little schadenfreude
as a vote to make Microsoft’s
Office
OpenXML (OOXML) an ISO standard ended in deadlock. IBM has been an acerbic
critic of the OOXML march towards standardisation and even if this is only a
Pyrrhic victory, it will go some way towards compensating for other ancient
feuds that went Microsoft’s way, such as Windows vs OS/2, OLE vs OpenDoc, MS-DOS
vs PC-DOS, and so on and so on…
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Bad Week
Harry Potter fans that had planned a wizard experience queuing at midnight to
bag the final book had to avoid a pirated edition with each page photographed
and uploaded to the web. Security guru
Bruce
Schneier blogged that he did not “think it was possible to keep the book
under wraps … there are simply too many people who must be trusted for the
security to hold”. That is a lesson for anybody trying to keep data safe: reduce
down the trusted circle. But with Amazon
and supermarkets knocking out the book for under £9, what do online readers
value most: their eyesight or the price of a round of drinks?
Word of the Week
McDonald’s. “When I think of Linux, I think about fast food. Red Hat is like
McDonald’s, it has total market share and dominance. Whereas Suse is like
Wendy’s: it has a better product and features and functions but just doesn’t
have the market.”
Do you agree?
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