Vinko’s Thoughts On…

Or is that just another reason for our Windows comrade to give up and look for alternative OS?

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According the to an analysis by a reporter at Washington Post over 77.8% or 284 days in 2006 Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) users on the Microsoft Windows OS platform was vulnerable to malware and exploits, which were designed to steal personal data off users’ computers.

In comparison FireFox browser was only vulnerable for 9 days in 2006 or 2.5% of the time.

Microsoft claims that IE7 is much more secure but when it released in November 2007, exploits and malwares were immediately available.

SANS Institute has a chart that list all currently unpatched Microsoft vulnerabilities.

So, if you want to be secure, move away from using Microsoft products. At least until Microsoft gets their act together.

BTW: this is not news as security vulnerabilities had existed in various Microsoft products for many years. The difference is that most technical people, who are not blindly sold by Microsoft marketing, had realized this for years.

To all Mac users who are using Microsoft Word that came with Microsoft Office v.X and Microsoft Office 2004.

A “zero-day vulnerability” had been found by the security advisories in all versions of Microsoft Office v.X and Microsoft Office 2004.

Microsoft themselves had also issued a Security Advisory for this vulnerability.

The current solution is not to open or save any MS Word documents from untrusted users.

My personal advise to all my Macintosh friends is not to use MS Word at all. This is because MS Word documents from trusted users may be unknowingly passing you a malformed MS Word document that is designed to take advantage of this vulnerability in MS Word.

There are paid and free alternatives to MS Office. To name a few: “Neo Office“, “OpenOffice” and Apple’s “Pages” that is part of the iWork suite, are all great alternatives.

The bottom line… I try not to use any Microsoft products whenever I can. As of now, close to 5 years now I had yet to use any Microsoft software on my Mac accept for testing purposes.

Another attempt for Microsoft to further break the web sites around the world.

Before you start to call me an Apple bigot and start to bombard my Inbox with hate mail, please take the time and read my full article before posting any comments. That’s because as always I totally welcome comments from all my readers.

With the pending release of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7 (IE7), Microsoft has published a “warning” on the Microsoft Developer’s Network to web site developers.

Prior to deployment of IE 7, we strongly recommend that you test your Web sites, extensions, and applications to make sure they are ready. Microsoft recommends that Web sites and applications are ready for the release of Internet Explorer 7 this month.

Michael Calore of WIRED has a good article that points out how ridiculous Microsoft’s request is. In the same article there are also a few comments from WIRED readers that I too agree with. I will add my two cents worth here.

Being the largest software manufacture in the world, for many years Microsoft has enjoyed the benefits of the layman computer users’ ignorances of alternatives solutions. This fact of general acceptance through ignorance does not equate to an official Standards.

Instead, Microsoft should use this dominance to come right out and inform the layman end-users that past versions of IE have been flawed and non-compliant to the W3C Standards. With the release of IE7, Microsoft is starting to be W3C complaint and has yet to complete this transition.

Standards are set and outlined by Standards bodies. In the case of the web, W3C is the official accepted body, which Microsoft is part of, that outlines the behaviours of browsers for every element of a web page and beyond.

As Calore and others have said, IE7 is moving towards compliance to the W3C Standards, but this forthcoming release is well behind those of its competitors (Firefox, Safari, Mozilla and Opera) who had Standards compliant browsers for many years.

Microsoft’s insistence of web site developers add conditional codes to their respective sites to accommodate IE7 is absolutely unacceptable, especially for web sites developers who are already W3C Standards compliant. If IE7 complies to W3C Standards then these web sites will just work. The fact that these sites do not behave as expected in IE7 is 100% the fault of Microsoft.

I strongly believe that web site developers around the world should stick to the W3C Standards and use the W3C validators to ensure compliance. Especially for the larger and more popular sites: Digg.com, Del.icio.us, Flickr.com, YouTube.com, etc.

The web site developers who need to change their codes are the ones who are not yet W3C compliant. These developers had blindly follow the behaviours and interpretations of Internet Explorer (IE) and coded their sites to work with specific versions of IE for years. This sort of expectations and demand of the end-user is only acceptable in a controlled environment, as in within a corporate computer installation. Even in the latter case, web site developers should work towards the W3C compliance, since today’s leader can well come tomorrow’s loser.

So I hope that the introduction of IE7 will encourage more web site developers to be W3C compliant. Resulting in web sites and web applications that are truly platform, operating system (OS) and browser brands agnostic, which is my definition of what a true web enabled service should be.

Microsoft’s new Zune player is suppose to have community features. Not very unlike what I had described in my Blog, “The Next iPod“, on July 23, 2005.

Here is what I imagine the future can be if Apple implements what I suggested above.

1. Your friend who wants to know what you’re listening to on your iPod or wants to share the music you have on your iPod. Will simply turn on the wireless connection s/he has on his own iPod, then using the built in “Bonjour” feature like that in iTunes, your friend will be able to locate your iPod and see the set of playlists you publish for others to view. S/he will be able either listen to the song you’re listening to or just choose among the songs you have published in the form of Playlists.
2. With built in Bluetooth enabled on your iPod, your friend whom you want to share your headphone with, will just have to pair his/her bluetooth headset to your iPod and s/he will be able to listen to the song or audio track you’re listening to.

Where I layed out a very similar social community feature that Apple should add to their MP3 player. Is Microsoft reading my Blog?

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The article written by Steven Wittens infuriated me so much that I decided to Blog about the subject also.

Please don’t get me wrong, I am not angry with what Steven had wrote. To the contrary, I totally agree with Steve in terms of Microsoft placing blame on the developers.

Sending out emails like these to developers/companies are just trying to support their own agenda of forcing everyone to switch out of IE 6 or earlier.

M$ is hoping that that switch, due to habit, will be IE 7, but as Steven had said these “CSS hacks” should not affect IE 7 if it was fixed correctly and fully compliant to the CSS standards.

Therefore, the fact that these pages are not displaying correctly in IE means that M$ may have corrected the CSS compliance issue, but they have missed out on the rest of the W3C standards for a browser.

So, my suggestion and wish is for all developers to do nothing to explicitly support IE 7, but rather continue to code to the W3C standards. So that more sites will break for the end-user, unless they are using one of the fully Standards compliant browser.

I personally think that M$ had been spoiled for too long. What I mean is that they had been the dominate player by default; end-users do not bother or care to install any other browser except the one that came with the computer they purchased or what was already installed with their OS. As a result of this unjustified dominance, M$ had slacked off and not correct issues/bugs that they should had fixed much quicker.

Therefore, if majority of the end-users cannot use majority of the Standards compliant web sites on the Internet, and these web sites clearly states the list of Standards compliant browsers that will work properly. M$ will be forced to finally stick to the Standards rather than forcing their own onto developers.

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Last night Bill Gates announced that he will start to involve less in the day-to-day activity as the Chief Software Architect for Microsoft. This transition will take 2 years before he leaves Microsoft totally.

Last year we saw Bill Gates steps down as the CEO of Microsoft and became the Chief Software Architect of Microsoft and now this departure announcement. Is Billy telling us something?

Some people like John Dvorak, feels that this recent announcement last night is not a big deal and will not affect the company’s operations or its stocks. But I have another theory.

Everyone knows that Microsoft had had some poor press this past 3 - 4 years. With “Longhorn”…. oops… I mean “Windows Vista” being delayed and delayed, year after year. Microsoft finally said that they WILL release Windows Vista this year, but earlier this year we found that the actual commercial wide release will not happen until January 2007, so another delay.

On top of delays, most of the original features that were announced when the code name was still “Longhorn”, had been removed or delayed to later releases.

They showed of the new Windows Vista at the Microsoft Developers’ conference earlier this year, but every feature they showed off were just features from the Mac OS X, which had existed for the past 4 years. Someone on the net even went as far as modifying the Microsoft presentation, to substitute slides of Windows Vista screen shots with Mac OS X screen shots, to proof his point.

Microsoft started to compete with Google and Yahoo, by copying Google and released a product that is similar to Google IG and Google Maps. They even copied Google’s approach and launched their products with the “Beta” label. I guess this is just in case people say that their products are no good. Microsoft would then have an excuse, and say “that the products are still in beta”.

Now with more any more people migrating away from Internet Explorer to FireFox and other standards compliant browsers. Microsoft finally announce their support for some of the W3C standards, but they do it in such a way that there are still Microsoft extensions to the Standards, hence the resulting behaviours are not what the developers would expect. So developers out there still have to condition their code so that it works in Internet Explorer.

All in all, I think that Microsoft had made some bad decisions lately, especially after Billy step down as the CEO. I am not sure if it is a coincident or is directly related to Billy’s lesser involvements with the company. Therefore, I think last night’s announcement should not be good news for any Windows fanboy. As everyone know, any innovation, if any in Microsoft, came mainly from Billy himself. The only exception is XBox 360, which had a very good User Interface design and over all user experience.

One possible reason for Billy’s departure, is that he is already too rich and he wants to focus on other things; like finding a cure for Malaria. He wants to disassociate himself from Microsoft before it ruin his own reputation.

I am sure my last statement will generate some opinions.