Google have announced their “Summer of Code” program, the purpose of which is to introduce students to the Open Source development process. Google will pay $4500 to each student that completes an OSS project by the end of summer.

The list of Open Source organizations supporting the program is a who’s who of the OSS community including such big names as Apache, Wine, Mono, KDE, Gnome, Net and Free BSD and OpenOffice.org among many others. Read more at Google’s Summer of code page.

Projects like this are of great benefit to the OSS community, they bring fresh ideas and new developers and they also raise the awareness of Open Source with the next generations. Google built most of their system using Open Source software like Linux so it is nice to see them giving something back. Other corporations should be encouraged to start similar projects. They get something back also, the chance to evaluate and hire new and emerging talents before they are snapped up by the usual suspects.

PC World has joined the rather large list of awarding companies for the Mozilla Firefox web browser. They awarded Firefox the “Product of the year” award and summarized it thus:

This open-source program is streamlined, customizable, and just plain better. No wonder it has attracted millions of users in just a few months. Is it merely a coincidence that Microsoft finally plans to give the aging Internet Explorer the major overhaul it has needed for years?

PC Worlds review of Firefox is fairly basic compared to some, but the conclusion is much like all the others. In short, other browsers may be better at a particular task then Firefox, but overall Firefox is the best general purpose web browser.

With over 60 million downloads, literally dozens of awards, growing market share statistics, and a soon to be released improved 1.1 version (currently in Alpha release) Firefox doesn’t look like slowing down any time soon.

AMD has announced the release of their X2 dual core Athlon64 CPU’s. If the early reports are any indication, they significantly outperform the equivalent Intel CPU’s. Even better, motherboards designed for 90nm CPU’s can handle the new CPU’s meaning you may not need to change your motherboard to adopt one of these new babies. For people that don’t multi-task much, you won’t notice that much difference after the change. If however, you are a multi-tasker (and let’s face it, who of us isn’t) you will notice a significant improvement in multi-tasking performance and hopefully you’ll see much less of the dreaded hour glass telling you to wait while the CPU catches up with you. Don’t rush out and grab one yet though, Intel has currently undercut the pricing of the X2 CPU’s meaning that we can expect rapid price cuts from AMD shortly. Right now though, it appears that AMD holds the cards for both Performance and power consumption.

The American Board of Surgery gives a written test to surgeons seeking to be board certified in their specialty. They give an all day test in written form. A recent taker reviewed his test and made a list of the questions and answers to over 100 of the questions. He then sold them on eBay.

Now, getting the skinny on tests is nothing new. I found out my junior year in college that most fraternities and sororities at a school I attended kept exam files by professor. What a huge advantage. I was a bit bothered to learn this as I felt it was unfair to those not associated with the organizations who didn’t have access. By the time I was in graduate school, the institution I attended actually made prior tests available in the library so all could have a chance to review them. What makes this situation different is that the gentleman decided to profit from the questions and answers. He sold a few sets on eBay, and now faces over $35,000 in penalties and decertification as a surgeon because of ethics issues.

Is it wrong to have a group of people who took a test mentally make “notes” and then record their information so others can benefit from it? Is it the fact that this guy wrote down the answers? If something is important one year, it will be important the next year. Is the quest for these guys to know the answers to these questions … giving out the answers certainly does that. Or was the goal to make the takers life miserable, that can only be achieved if they have to struggle their way through it.

If having the examinees know the answers (ie the knowledge of the exam topics) is actually the goal, maybe the organization itself should release the questions and answers to the 5000 most likely questions.

This article comes to you direct from Israel and is about the use of spyware being used by big companies to track their competitors. Loads of executives from big companies like Volvo Israel and Cellcom have been arrested or are under investigation for corporate espionage. Is this a sign of the future? Read the article and decide for yourself. The article goes into detail that sounds like stuff that a Tin foil hat wearing conspiracy theorist would come up with. That doesn’t mean it’s not possible though.

According to Opera, most US adult users are not aware that their web browser choice affects their security. They base this conclusion on a survey of 2,835 US users. They found that only 51% of adult users were aware that their choice of web browser can affect their security online. Not surprising really, I’d imagine that those 51% are happily using the Internet Explorer that came with Windows and probably are not even aware that there are less targeted and more secure browsers available. I’d likewise expect that if that same survey was performed in Europe the clueless figure would be much lower as alternative browsers are much more popular over there. It would have been interesting to see a test for Spyware and Viruses on those user’s computers as well, though from my own experience with clients I can already guess the result, having seen it hundreds of times myself.

Believe it or not, I didn’t arrive at my Firefox recommendation lightly. I was a long time Internet Explorer user (version 3 up till about version 5.5) when on Windows and I had a hard time changing to Firefox myself. After about 2 months of forcing myself to use it, I realised that I couldn’t live without some of Firefox’s features any more. (Like tabbed browsing for one example.) The reason I’ve installed it on all my clients machine wasn’t out of any sort of zealotry, but rather because I was sick of fixing the same PC Virus and Spyware infestations month after month after month. It pays well but it’s incredibly tedious work and it made me feel like I was ripping off my clients. Not only that but when my client’s computers are constantly running slowly or unstably, (as they often do when infested with Spyware and/or Viruses) it makes me and my services look bad. I went looking for a free solution (free because I was replacing a program they got with Windows, which to them means it was a freebie) to recommend to them and found Firefox (back when it was an early beta release) I installed it, learned its ins and outs and slowly fell in love with it. That wasn’t the final test though, I did regular Spyware and Virus and stability tests on the half a dozen PC’s that I use for testing things I plan to recommend to clients and discovered an amazing thing. When Firefox was used as the only browser, the Spyware found dropped dramatically. Most of the time no spyware was found at all. Considering the number of IE only PC’s I’ve found with literally hundreds of spyware items installed, dropping to zero or near zero was pretty amazing to me at the time. People can defend IE all they like, as far as I am concerned, the results speak for themselves. When my clients are using Firefox I don’t have to deal with Spyware. Simple as that. They are happier, and that makes me look good, Case closed.

Recent news indicates that Microsoft has planned to change their directory naming structure in future versions in Windows. Specifically they are planning to remove the “my” from such names as “My Computer”, “My Documents”, “My Pictures”, “My Videos”, “My Games” and so on. The reason for this change is to bring Windows in line with Microsoft’s EULA (End User License Agreement) and the DRM (Digital Rights Management) that will be part of newer versions of Windows. Basically you don’t fully own your files, games, videos or Windows so Microsoft has pre-empted possible future criticism of their naming scheme by removing the “My” from the above mentioned names.

The new folder naming conventions will indicate their new ownership, and “My Computer” will become “This Computer” and can be taken to mean Microsoft’s computer. Likewise “Documents” can be taken to mean “Microsoft Documents” due to their proprietary formats, in the case of Music and Videos, they can be taken to mean ownership by RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) and Hollywood respectively. This bring things in line with Microsoft’s thought that ownership won’t be as important as usage in the future. “Too many people apparently got the mistaken idea that they owned the stuff stored in those folders simply because of the folder names. We had to do something to change that misconception without making too much of a public fuss about it.” said a possibly existing Microsoft employee.

For any Microsoft lawyers reading (you know who you are) here is a written explanation of the purpose of this post.

This post might be humour, (or it might not, who knows) but the name changes are apparently fact. See for yourself.