Month: July 2006

Sophos, an antivirus and security company, has a paper that summarizes the major trojans and viruses that were detected in the past six months this year.

The article has several sections covering malware, viruses and trojans, and after each section they state: “none is capable of infecting Mac OS X”.

Are they making the point that we’d all be better off if we just abandoned Windows, which is ridden with security holes and code flaws just begging for people to exploit and make life for the rest of us hell?

Microsoft have been trying to get into the portable music player business for some time now, since 2003 when they launched their Portal Media Center OS for handheld devices, and the ‘Plays for Sure’ initiative to guarantee compatibility between devices bearing this logo and Windows and WMA format files.

They have not made any significant dent in the market yet. iPod are still dominating, even though there is a whole range of other (non-Microsoft as well as Microsoft backed) devices out there to choose from, all shapes and sizes, some with flash memory, some taking flash cards, and some with integral harddrives.

This article on RegHardware suggests Microsoft’s next attempt may be to launch a portable game console to compete with Nintendo and Sony that may also play movies and music.

JRuby, a Ruby interpretter written in Java and that runs on the Java platform has an upgraded release, 0.9, that now supports running Rails on JRuby.

If you are interested in looking at the benefits of a dynamic language and using Rails concepts on the Java platform, take a look at Grails. Grails uses Groovy scripting language which executes on the Java VM, and the Grails framework is based on a lot of the features included in Ruby on Rails. Take a look here – its worth a look.

Ok, now this is just scary. From 2008, Microsoft are to be the sole supplier of ECUs (Engine Control Units) for Formula 1 cars. Given the reputation of Microsoft for supplying robust software, I don’t think I would want to get in one of those cars and drive 200mph knowing that Microsoft is controlling my engine. Actually, worse than this, if their software controlled the braking system, I don’t think they would ever pass the saftey tests..