According to InternetNews, almost half of enterprise desktops are still using Windows 2000. There is good reason for that since Windows 2000 is quite stable, user friendly and functional once all the patches are loaded, (for a Microsoft platform anyway.) Not only that but it isn’t wasting precious hardware cycles on eye candy like Windows XP has a tendency to do and it doesn’t have the same hardware requirements as XP SP2 either.
Microsoft’s recent push to provide a much needed update to Internet Explorer is going to leave these users in the lurch as IE6 is still the last browser update they will receive from Microsoft (IE 7 is a XP SP2 and above only update). This might be part of Microsoft’s plan to convince these enterprise businesses to upgrade their Operating System when Longhorn comes out or before, but since Longhorn (or even XP SP2) has such higher hardware requirements, the upgrade will essentially mean totally new computers and many large businesses are likely balk at the idea of so big a financial outlay.

As long as new applications support Windows 2000, there isn’t really any need to rush out and upgrade anyway as most of the functionality is available from third parties and much of it is free. Firefox is a better replacement for Internet Explorer and already has most or all of the features that IE7 will ship with. It’s also available for free and has a much better security record then Internet Explorer, (In part because it is allot newer, but that’s a whole other issue.) Best of all, Firefox is not only available for Windows 2000, it also runs quite happily on Windows 98 and ME as well. Desktop search is one of the other touted features of Longhorn but you can get most of those same features by installing Google desktop search which is also free and even a version of Google desktop search for enterprise.

Internet Explorer 7 when running on Windows Longhorn, will run in reduced privilege mode by default to reduce the possibility of Spyware and Virus infection. Running under a root or admin account is one thing that Linux and other Unix look-alikes have strongly frowned upon almost since their inception. It is also a practise that Microsoft has encouraged in Windows by setting new users up with administrator privileges from the get go in most versions of Windows. Apparently that will change when the next windows release finally comes out sometime next year.
Internet Explorer 7 will NOT be available for Windows 2000, and only XP SP2 and above platforms will be supported. The XP installation will also not make use of reduced privilege mode. Anybody not running one of the supported Windows versions can install and use Firefox to get a comparable browsing experience without the cost of an Operating System upgrade.

Is it just me, or is Windows becoming more like Linux/Unix at the back end with each new release? After years of seemingly ignoring the problems that running as admin causes, they have suddenly decided that Linux/Unix developers were right and reduced privilege modes are good.

On the CIGHTML list that I belong to, one of the participants pointed out this site today for CSS Examples.

I have to say I like what I see. For example, we have worked on several occasions on towards getting drop shadows to work well. He has a simple example of how to do it with nice floats.

This article on Search Mobile Computing dot Com asserts that a widespread virus that will hamper business is not likely to strike soon. They give numerous reasons in the article, including lack of a common platform, the lack of wide spread executable sharing and the like. While the points made in the article may well be true, if you are the one affected, the fact that it is not wide spread may not be all that consoling. One big advantage to PDA’s is that they are typically backed up on a regular basis. It is only a matter of time until it will be commonplace for phones to have the ability to provide backups I suspect, although right now that is unusual for most phones I have dealt with.

In a boon for Open Source software, Nokia have announced that users will soon be able to browse the web using a browser based on KDE’s Konqueror and Apple Safari browsers. Apple choose the KDE browser core (KHTML) for their Safari browser for it’s clean design, speed and standards (“Rich Web browsing experience” in Nokia speak). That same reasoning is behind the decision to create a smart phone browser for Nokia phones. The core of the browsers is Open Source, indicating that the base Operating System is not the only place Open Source has on smart phones. The new browser will be available for all Series 60 phones and is due in the first half of 2006. This isn’t limited to just Nokia phones as the series 60 Symbian Operating System is used by many manufacturers and the fact that the code is Open Source means it can be used by any of them.

It will be interesting to see what Opera makes of this as they are currently the mobile browser champions.

Richard Stiennon VP of Threat Research at anti-Spyware company Webroot Software, Inc earlier this year announced his predictions for 2005 in relation to security vulnerabilities and Spyware problems. Most of the predictions were fairly predictable like:

The number of new Microsoft vulnerabilities will grow.

Which isn’t a surprise to anyone in the IT industry and probably a good many people that aren’t. Other predictions like: The US and European nations will pass anti-spyware laws, and the number of different types of spyware will double to 3,000 are not exactly unexpected either.

However at least one of the predictions causes a pause for further thought. In short one prediction that RSS syndication will soon be used as a tool to distribute advertising, Spyware and other malicious code. RSS is basically just XML so the medium isn’t potentially dangerous by itself, but flaws that target specific RSS readers could conceivably result in the transfer of Spyware. RSS is already being used to distribute advertising so that one isn’t a surprise either. RSS has most of the benefits of E-mail and that means it also has most of the problems. One of those problems is that malicious parties can use social engineering tricks to get people to follow links in RSS to download malicious content, which is probably what Mr Stiennon meant. The problem with that theory is that a user must first subscribe to an RSS feed to be at risk at all, which makes it considerably less reliable a method of transferring malicious content then E-mail or web pages.

One other prediction Mr Stiennon made was that Firefox would become the target of Spyware sometime in the first half of this year. I’m not so sure about this one because it is mostly the more techie users that have become hooked on Firefox and they would not be particularly good targets for Spyware since they are also the kind of users most likely to have anti-Virus and anti-Spyware software running, if they are using Windows that is.

The GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is one of the many high visibility Open Source programs and is included with nearly all Linux distributions. It has also been ported to Windows and is available for free to anyone with the desire to download it. Some believe that the GIMP suffers from usability problems and isn’t quite at the same level as Adobe Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro, however that is a matter of much debate.

In an effort to remove at least one of those complaints, one enterprising developer took it upon himself to make Adobe Photoshop users feel at home with the GIMP by re-arranging the menus and naming conventions to match Photoshop as much as possible. The result is GIMPshop and thus far the only complaint related to the work seems to be the desire that the official GIMP follow the same conventions.

GIMPshop was written initially for the Macintosh architecture, but has since been ported to both Linux and Windows.

If you are an old Photoshop hand, but don’t have the money or desire to purchase a new copy, or you might just be somebody looking for a powerful free Image editing program, you could do worse then to try GIMPshop, (Or the official GIMP if you are not fussed with the Photoshop related changes).