Corruption

No words can describe the evil of Microsoft. But we can start with the corruption: from corporate to Government corruption.

We watched Massachusetts progress towards open standards and independence from Microsoft's monopoly. The IT industry supported their decision with the exception of Microsoft off course. And mysteriously, Senator Marc Pacheco intervened in an IT process! Well, there's no mystery, is there?
When Microsoft has influences in Government and politics, we shouldn't wonder why they're still a monopoly.

Read more at lxer.com/module/newswir...

We read a lot of News, in particular IT. And we can't help but notice that not only Microsoft manipulates politicians in Government but they also infiltrated the media.

Read more at lxer.com/module/newswir...

IT Certification

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols of eWeek posted an article titled "Certification Helps with Path to Linux Jobs". While I usually agree with him, I'm afraid certification is a horrible way to assess professionals. Just look at the disasters the MCSE certification created. This certification only produced paper MCSEs and what's even worse is that they are platform dependent. And now the market is flooded with incompetent employees. Another problem I see is that if a particular certification becomes an industry standard, everyone will only work hard enough to achieve it and once they get it, they won't bother to learn anything more and will result in the classic lazy and clueless paper professionals.

Read more at www.eweek.com/article2/...

Web 2.0

Lately, there is a lot of buzz around two words: Web 2.0 and AJAX. Well, there is good reason for all the bees swarming around this honey.

This Web 2.0 is really a combination of common technologies and AJAX stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. So, the real deal is not the indevidual technologies but rather the effect of them combined to create Web Applications.

In my opinion, Web 2.0 is the real Microsoft kill because it make the operating system irrelivant. It work on any platform: Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, etc. Moreover, you don't even need a powerfull PC, all that is required is a web browser.

This is a really exciting time in technology. As a matter of fact, I beleive this is a revolution that turns the industry upside down. I'd like to also mention there's Ruby on Rails (RoR) yet another web application

Read more at web2.wsj2.com/the_best_...

Linux.com: The Enterprise Linux Resource

Great website for SysAdmins

Read more at www.linux.com/

Programmers and Open Source

Open Source has created a revolution in the IT industry and everything about open source seems promising. There are, however, a few who claim that programmers are not going to make any money. But I don't think so.

My vision goes something like this:

If a startup wants to get into the software business, instead starting from scratch, they can take an open source project and work on it, they can focus their efforts on customizing their product to a specific market which makes it very efficient because a specialized package is far better than a generic.

They definitely have a head start and their costs are greatly reduced. They will make money by further customizing the software to their customers' needs, support, client training, consulting, etc. to name just a few services for revenue. Clearly they make money, and their expenses are minimal while programmers are happily employed.

After all, Open Source companies like Redhat make a lot of money of open source.

$90K lost to Windows Trojan, Man sues his bank

News Link to this story:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/08/e-banking_trojan_lawsuit/


A Miami businessman is suing his bank after $90,000 was lifted from his firm's online banking account following a computer virus attack. Although this story may surprise many users that a virus or a trojan can empty your bank accout. This happens too easily because Microsoft Windows is again very insecure. This should close all arguments about Windows security.