The spooks at the NSA are, of course, notorious for their role monitoring internet activity, and for their use of warantless wiretaps to monitor U.S. phones, often illegally. So computer users could easily be worried to hear that the NSA has "partnerships" with Microsoft, which makes their operating systems; Intel, which makes their wireless chipsets; and McAfee, which makes their antivirus software (so-called!).

From NSA Information Assurance Director Richard Shaeffer's testimony to the Senate Judiciary's Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland Security:

Working in partnership with Microsoft and elements of the Department of Defense, NSA leveraged our unique expertise and operational knowledge of system threats and vulnerabilities to engance Microsoft's operating system security guide without constraining the user's ability to perform their everyday tasks... All this was done in coordination with the product release, not months or years later during the product's lifecycle.

Shaeffer also talked about his agency's "trusting relationship" with the private sector, including a "partnership" with Intel and McAffee to promote a security protocol — or should we say, "security" protocol? — from the federal government.

These IT companies all want to do business with the government, so it's to their advantage to be seen as cooperative in implementing federal protocols in their products. But should consumers distrust these ties? The general consensus among private-sector security experts canvassed by ComputerWorld was, in the words of one, "I can't imagine NSA and Microsoft would do anything deliberate because the repercussions would be enormous if they got caught."

Right, because if there's anything that clearly motivates these two massive organizations with virtually guaranteed near-term revenue streams, it's fear of public shame. This is why we have not seen either entity doing anything embarrassing, recently.

(Pic: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, by Getty Images.)

The social network's spring redesign was controversial for a number of reasons, but one of the biggest complaints was its maddeningly heavy stream of information. Intended to simplify Facebook, a new unified feed of information from friends overwhelmed users with noise; vital information was crowded out. Users revolted, and Facebook had its very own New Coke moment.

Now it's created Coca-Cola Classic. The new "lite" site has already been compared to the "simplified look... of the old days of Facebook." The company told TechCrunch the new design is intended to load "a specific set of features quickly and efficiently," sort of like Facebook used to do, before it started throwing way too many features together on everyone's home stream. Here's the site's progression in pictures:

Pre-redesign (via):

Post-redesign (via TechCrunch):

New "Lite" (via TechCrunch):

Facebook, which fancies itself a limber young startup, would not appreciate being compared to Microsoft, which is flailing its way through a mid-life crisis. But its decision to launch a clean new interface to its sprawling website sounds a lot like the sort of thing the Redmond, Washington software company has been up to in recent years. The heavy-handed Vista operating system has been turned into the faster, leaner Windows 7. Microsoft Office has also added features, only to strip them out later. As former Microsoftie Joel Spolsky has written,

With all due respect to my friends on the Office team, I can't help but feel that there hasn't been a useful new feature in Office since about 1995... You can't think of any new features, so you put in the paperclip, and then you take out the paperclip, and you try to charge people both times, and they aren't falling for it...

An alternate theory: Facebook isn't reversing itself, it's merely trying to reach more modem users, including in the third world. Ah yes, impoverished dial-up users, the holy grail of any advertising-driven website!

(Photo: AP via)

The new "Google Chrome OS" is a nifty instance of branding, we'll give it that. But stripped of the marketing talk, here's what Google just introduced: A distribution of the Linux operating system, plus a "new windowing system" and a copy of Google's Web browser.

In geek parlance, Google built a "shell," not an OS. The kernel and, almost certainly, a large chunk of the "userland" programs that make up an OS come from elsewhere.

But it's in Google's interests to puff up its new technology. The press loves a nice, simple fight between tech industry giants; Google's branding is thus sure to generate loads of free buzz for Google's "operating system," as programmer and longtime tech pundit Dave Winer has pointed out. Winer:

Let's be dispassionate. Before yesterday's announcement: 1. Chrome ran on Linux. 2. Linux was an operating system. 3. Linux ran on netbooks. However, most people want [Windows] XP on their netbook, not Linux. That was true yesterday and it's still true today.

Maybe Google will eventually develop its new system into something truly revolutionary. Or maybe it will fall by the wayside like Google Base, Google Notepad — or the version of its last operating system, "Android," which was to run on the netbooks now targeted by Google Chrome OS.

No matter what happens, at least one group of users will be thrilled: The press. (Talk amongst yourselves!)

"Page's Law" seems destined to become a common companion term to "Moore's Law," a widely-used tech aphorism that says, roughly speaking, that computers double in speed every year or two.

Page's Law is the inverse: It says software gets twice as slow every 18 months. This helps explain why your computer seems to get slower as it ages, even though the hardware inside remains unchanged.

Brin explains the concept in the clip above. He adds that Google plans to reverse this trend and optimize its code. Whatever; the important thing is that it helps his buddy Larry get his name into the history books, in case this Google thing doesn't work out.

But since Midori is still a long ways out, Microsoft is still trying hard to polish up Vista. Microsoft recently organized focus groups of disgruntled Windows XP users and showed them a brand new OS called "Mojave." After the participants were cajoled into saying the new OS with shiny doodads was far superior, it was revealed that Mojave was none other than Vista. The trick reminds us of Folger's ads — and reminds us how Ballmer used to work at Procter & Gamble. There is the battle for Microsoft's soul lain bare: The marketers, led by Ballmer's old guard, who repackage even the slightest tweak as "new and improved!" versus the technologists, led by Rudder, who are seeking to build something genuinely new. The safe bet, alas, is on the marketers.

European consortium releases Open Source quality assessment platform

* Submitted by: Sirius
* Friday, 11 July 2008

The European Commission supported Software Quality Observatory for Open Source Software (SQO-OSS) project has announced the release of its software quality checking platform, Alitheia Core.

Developed by a consortium of European businesses, academics and open source software projects, the new application will analyse the product quality of open source software projects and assess the true potential of the development communities around them.

A demonstration of the system is available at the Alitheia Core demo server, where users will be able to see the system as run against a selection of different open source software projects.

As the Alitheia Core matures it will allow open source software projects to deploy the system for themselves to monitor their own code quality.

Alitheia Core's current features include:
- System administration allowing the installation of new project data
- Metrics: lines of code count, lines of comments count and a cross-language metrics tool
- A web-based user interface for the display of calculation results

This release should be considered a usable alpha release; whilst core functionality is provided, performance issues remain and customisation is currently disabled. The Alitheia Core is released under the 2-clause BSD license.

The Alitheia Core source code may be obtained from the project's SVN server or a pre-compiled package of the source can be obtained. Distribution-specific packages for Linux users will be available for Alitheia Core in forthcoming releases.

The SQO-OSS project is always looking for new contributors. Currently its focus is on extending the portfolio of metric plug-ins available to the system. All contributions (bug reports/fixes, code, etc.) are all gratefully received.

Professor Diomidis Spinellis, Project Coordinator said: “This release opens up SQO-OSS to the scrutiny of the open source software developers and users community. It demonstrates SQO-OSS's commitment to the deployment of a practical working system.”

NOTES TO THE EDITOR

ABOUT SQO-OSS
SQO-OSS is a community-based project dedicated to checking the quality of Free and Open Source software and making its data publicly available. It's founding partners are the Athens University of Economics and Business, the Aristotle University Of Thessalniki, Klarälvdalens Datakonsult AB, KDE e.V., ProSyst Software GMBH and Sirius Corporation plc. For more information visit the SQO-OSS community website.

CONTACT
For further information please contact:
- Diomidis Spinellis, Project Coordinator, dds@aueb.gr
- Giorgos Gousios, Project Manager, gousiosg@aueb.gr
- Tom Callway, Project Dissemination, +44 870 608 0063

1. Find software that sells for $20,000 a copy. Don't try to come up with something new. If there isn't a product already, it's because there isn't a need. With something "new" you have to convince businesses or organizations they need it. An example: automated parking garage software.

2. Pick products supporting million-dollar companies. Those companies spend lots of money convincing customers they need their products. Then the customer will get quotes from everyone and might end up buying yours instead.

3. Build the product but only with the core features. Make a "lite" version initially. Use that money to continue to make it less "lite" and higher in price.

4. Get your name out in the industry. $20K software is certainly going to be "niche" software, with not a whole lot of customers out there who buy it. Get your company name out there so everyone knows you sell your systems and could be an alternative to what they already have.

5. Present yourself as consultingware. Be there on call and devoted to them and how they're using the product.

(Photo by Manuel Faisco)

"A handful of large companies have expressed interest in seeing how it would work because organically at least 50 percent of their employees are already on Facebook," he said. The staid enterprise execs in the room promptly began shrieking. "Ads in the enterprise are extremely unfeasible," said a self-interested David Thompson, CEO of ad-free enterprise softwaremaker Genius.com. "No one wants it, certainly not corporate IT," he said. "I say it's doomed."

[NeoWin via CrunchGear]

Out of this thin straw, Google is spinning a golden tale of a low-cost entry into the enterprise market, and Salesforce.com a move against Microsoft, which has been touting the integration of its rival business-software suite, Dynamics, with Microsoft Office.

Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff is honest in his own way about matters. "The enemy of my enemy is my friend, so that makes Google my best friend," Benioff told the New York Times. A Microsoft executive countered with the meaningless Valley bromide, uttered whenever a rival emerges: "It validates our strategy." He would have done better if he had simply laughed.

Explains Dziuba:

When you play with someone who has been in the military, they spend 10 minutes before the match going over strategy when all you really want to do is play. In the end, the civilians on the team end up shooting the marine because he's barking orders to everyone on the field who is just trying to have a good time.

(Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images)

Or here's an idea, Sony: stop trying to milk profits and start giving consumers laptops that actually work out of the box.

That's because Vista itself provides ample reason why customers might not feel great about buying Windows Vista. SP1 is not as much an upgrade as a set of belated repairs, addressing some of Vista's crippling slowness. We'd heard a rumor that SP1 might be delayed until next year. Not so. Apparently, our source just meant "a version of Vista worth shipping." Due date? Never.

First, VMWare commands its sales team to call the Microsoft announcement a "desperate" "hodge-podge":

Microsoft announced a hodge-podge of items related to virtualization in a desperate attempt to make it look like it had a new, coherent vision and strategy for virtualization...
MSFT includes many recycled items in the announcement to make it look substantive. In actuality, they are just rehashes of old items. Microsoft is not delivering anything new, substituting marketing in place of real substance...
The new items are a collection of loosely connected pieces thrown together to look like a coherent virtualization plan. Microsoft is still talking vision...

Microsoft's announcement introduces new conflicts into the Microsoft-Citrix business partnership and begs the question "When will Microsoft dump Citrix and take all of the business for itself?" Is this just a partnership of convenience for Microsoft until it ships its own product?
Tell your prospects that are considering Citrix, that MSFT will soon cut Citrix out of the loop ... and Citrix is allowing it to happen.
New Conflict #1: Microsoft System Center or Citrix XenServer for Management. This declaration hits at the heart of Citrix's stated business model for virtualization — to generate revenue from the management of Windows virtual machines with Citrix XenCenter. System Center and XenCenter are clearly competitors.
New Conflict #2: Calista acquisition creates more direct competition with Citrix SpeedScreen (ICA). This acquisition strikes at Citrix's core business since ICA is Citrix's key differentiator and competes with RDP.

Despite generally negative review scores, it would seem that Wii owners were consumed by the prospect of more mini-games (and a second Wii remote) nearly on par with the thirst that Xbox 360 owners had for more Halo. An impressive feat for Nintendo, but more impressive for Microsoft, considering Wii Play had a seven month head start on the first-person shooter.

The top ten best selling games in the USA for last year are after the jump.

01. Halo 3 (Xbox 360) - 4,820,000
02. Wii Play with Remote (Wii) - 4,120,000
03. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (Xbox 360) - 3,040,000
04. Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock (PS2) - 2,720,000
05. Super Mario Galaxy (Wii) - 2,520,000
06. Pokemon Diamond (DS) - 2,480,000
07. Madden NFL 08 (PS2) - 1,900,000
08. Guitar Hero II (PS2) - 1,890,000
09. Assassin's Creed (Xbox 360) - 1,870,000
10. Mario Party 8 (Wii) - 1,820,000

The irony is that BEA rose to prominence on the notion that its application server would make things simpler for database buyers. Buy any database you'd like, and BEA's application server would connect to it. Likewise, MySQL grew as a cheaper, open-source alternative to databases from IBM and Oracle.

A database here, an application server there, a bit of open-source software on top of that all sounds nice in theory. It proved in practice to be a headache for the influential tech buyers at large corporations. One salesperson calling on them, one phone number to dial when things went wrong, it turns out, is what they really wanted.

The consolidation was inevitable, if perhaps a bit sad. The goal of the stack game is to make sure that your software is the layer on top — the one that matters to programmers, the one applications are designed for. BEA and MySQL both had grand ambitions in that regard. Those are now coming to an end. Sun and Oracle will no doubt make grand statements about how compatible their software is, how well their children play with others. Ignore those. The history of IT tells us those promises are false.