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After one of the more prominent online OS/2 communities (OS2 World) delivered a politely worded petition with 11,000 signatures to IBM to make OS/2 into an open source product, the word has come back from IBM: Sorry, but no. Not happening.

To be honest, the more I thought about this issue, especially after realizing how much third-party material also was tied up in OS/2′s codebase the more I settled on the conclusion that it simply wasn’t going to happen.

The wording of the rejection letter itself hints obliquely at that: “…for a variety of business, technical, and legal reasons we have decided to not pursue any OS/2 open source projects.”

I suspect the legal issues have become all the more tangled since their licensing of OS/2 as eComStation, which is sold as a closed-source commercial product, and is currently in a round of betas to release version 2.0 of the product which, according to their site, is “available early 2008″.

In that light, OS/2 and its associated technologies are far from being “abandonware”, as some people have put it, so it’s not surprising that IBM would not exactly dive into a project like this with sleeves rolled up.

IBM’s stance has long been to encourage anyone running OS/2 to migrate away to something else, and while it may not be the friendliest stance to take, over time it’s become the most realistic.

I feel bad for the petitioners, even though at this point I’ve come to completely understand where IBM is coming from.

They don’t see the payoff as being worth the effort, and they’ve already got a partner company wringing extra life out of OS/2 with their own compatible project.

It was brave for the OS/2 fans to try, but maybe it’s just time to move on.

According to the Associated Press, IBM will be releasing a version of Lotus Notes email for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Hooah! Can Apple take down RIM?

If you’re a mobile professional who’s held off on purchasing an iPhone because it won’t work with your corporate email system, there may be one less reason for you to keep holding out.

The AP is reporting that IBM is set to make Lotus Notes available to the iPhone at its Lotusphere conference in Orlando next week. Of course, some terms and conditions apply.

First, your enterprise has to have a Lotus Domino server to support the application.

Existing users of Lotus Notes Web-access system will be able to use the iPhone version for free with their current license. New users will have to pay $39 per year for the Lotus license. Not a bad deal at all.

IBM is also releasing its Symphony productivity suite for Apple computers. Symphony, similar to Google Apps, includes a word processor, presentation application and spreadsheet program.

If you think these new Apple-compatible applications are indicative of a new love-fest between Big Blue and the big Mac, you might want to remember that Apple used IBM’s PowerPC chips in its computers for a long time.

It appears that Apple’s move to Intel processors didn’t sour the relationship between the two. IBM spokesperson Mike Azzi said the two companies “have a lot in common. We’re going to cross-pollinate.”

I can only imagine that this is going to make a lot of enterprise users very happy, and create more headaches for IT admins as employees drag the iPhone in and demand it be supported for email.

However, this new set of software will likely not put a dent in RIM’s enterprise dominance any time in the near future.

I was expecting The 80s Game With Martha Quinn (PC) to be a lame attempt to cash in on 80s nostalgia by cobbling together a half-assed collection of trivia questions about Max Headroom and L.A. Gear, but it’s actually remarkably thorough, well-researched, and fun. Color me surprised.

Though most of the questions cover the typical pop culture TV/music/movies trifecta, you’ll also find yourself queried about subjects like food (what were Honey Smacks originally called?), newsworthy events (Helmut Kohl was elected chancellor of what European country?) and not so newsworthy events (who won Bud Bowl I?)*.

You start your trip back in time by choosing from one of four different play modes. Each of the 80 different Episodes features questions on a single theme, like game shows, politics, or Tom Cruise.

Challenge Mode tasks you with achieving certain scores by answering questions in five specific categories: music, movies, tv, sports, and wild card. If you find all of that structure annoying, you can simply answer questions in Free Play or go head to head with a friend in Versus mode.

Questions come in three difficulties–Easy, Medium, and Hard– with harder questions earning you more points and “80s power.” Fill your 80s power meter and you’ll Level Up, which bumps up the point value of questions.

If you answer a question correctly, you’ll be given a follow up in which you have to guess the year in which the subject of the question took place. I really suck at that part.

The main issue I have with The 80s Game is its bare bones presentation, which is almost entirely text. Martha pops in from the side to congratulate or commiserate, depending on whether or not you got the question right, but other than that, it’s all just reading.

A category like Famous Faces would have been more fun with some pictures of said faces, and the Music Video questions are just begging for some accompanying clips.

What The 80s Game lacks in bells and whistles it more than makes up for in quality of questions. It digs deep for its trivia, getting quite specific about the plotlines of music videos, guest appearances on TV shows, and slogans for ad campaigns, so even “Easy” questions can turn out to be surprisingly challenging.

If only the quantity of the questions was on par with the quality.

Although it will take you several hours to complete the challenges and play through all 80 Episodes, once you do, you’re out of material.

The questions remain the same every time you play, tanking any replayability The 80s Game might’ve had.

When it comes to theme games, if you don’t care about the subject, you’re not going to enjoy the game, and The 80s Game is no different.

If you have no idea who Mallory Keaton is or couldn’t care less about Live Aid, then this is not the trivia game for you.

On the other hand, if you remember the words to “Valley Girl” or know who shot Buckwheat, you’ll more than likely have a good time with The 80s Game. Like, totally.

Besides, what other trivia game has “Lionel Richie” as a category?

* (Sugar Smacks, West Germany, and Bud.)

There are several reasons: Many of those with computer viruses are unaware that they’ve been victimized, and IT workers don’t want the world to know that their systems have been compromised.

I’m hoping some of you, anonymously or not, will be willing to contact me or post a comment below if you prefer and share your experience with malware.

With news of ever-more-sophisticated cybercrime, what is the real-world impact of malware?

Does it mean longer hours for security professionals? Does it mean being fired for mistakes? Is it nothing to be concerned about? Has it changed your outlook?

Ever since I started playing, I’ve started noticing little references to WoW everywhere.

South Park and The Simpsons have both had episodes featuring the game or in the case of The Simpsons, a suspiciously similar game.

And the more I advance in the game, the more pop culture references I notice in the game itself. I just love sly little mentions that not everyone would catch.

I started doing a little research and there are way, way too many to mention, but I’m going to list a few of my favorites.

I haven’t actually discovered all of these myself, so it gives me something to watch out for while I’m playing… besides murlocs and ghouls, I mean.

14 Pop Culture References in World of Warcraft:

1. The inscription on a couple of weapons (the Finkle’s Lava Dredger and Finkle’s Skinner) says, “Property of Finkle Einhorn, Grandmaster Adventurer.”

Ace Ventura fans will recognize this from the moment near the end of the movie when Ace figures out that Lois Einhorn is, in fact, ex-Miami Dolphins footballer Ray Finkle. “Einhorn is Finkle! Finkle is Einhorn! Einhorn is a man!”

2. This one’s also in the town of Stormwind – there’s a traveling salesman who goes by the name Antonio Pirelli.

In both the theater and recent movie versions of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, there’s a traveling hair tonic salesman named Adolfo Pirelli. Coincidence? Not in my book.

3. This one’s a little trickier. In one of the large cities in the game, Stormwind, there’s a flower shop owner named Bernard Gump. Florist Gump. Get it?

4. If you head to a town called Lakeshire and train with the fisherman there, you might be getting more of a lesson than you bargained for: the trainer’s name is Matthew Hooper. Richard Dreyfuss played shark expert Matt Hooper in Jaws.

5. More naming fun. In the Eastern Plaguelands, there’s a priest named Father Inigo Montoy, which is just one letter away from Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride (“Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”)

6. The creators must be fans of The Princess Bride, because the stable master in the town of Southshore is named Wesley. That’s not quite the same as the stable boy Westley in The Princess Bride, but it’s close enough that it had to be intentional. Right?

7. Another movie that gets multiple references is Silence of the Lambs. One quest requires players to get an ogre tannin out of a basket. (No, I don’t know what a ‘tannin’ is.)

The second the tannin is removed, an ogre runs after the player yelling, “It puts the tannin in the basket or else it gets the club again!”

This is a combination of Buffalo Bill’s “It rubs the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again,” and “It places the lotion in the basket.”

8. There’s a blacksmith in the town of Darkshire who sometimes mumbles about hearing the lambs scream. Her name just happens to be Clarise.

9. Visit the city of Orgrimmar and you’ll have the chance to check out a shop called “Boomstick Imports”. Bruce Campbell would be proud.

10. My favorite category of movies – the horror genre – does not go unnoticed in the World of Warcraft which is only appropriate since it’s crawling with the undead, ghouls, zombies and banshees.

The innkeeper in Undercity is named Innkeeper Norman and the innkeeper of Sepulcher is named Innkeeper Bates… see, Norman Bates, our favorite Psychopath hotel manager.

11. The trick in the bullet above – giving two people of the same profession names that relate to one another – is a favorite trick of the WoW game designers.

Next time you visit Undercity, take notice of the auctioneer there. His name is Yarly. Not something you’d think much of, right? But if you travel to Stranglethorn Vale and check out the auctioneer there, you’ll see that his name is O’Reely. O’Reely and Yarly is a reference to the “O RLY? YA RLY!” owls of Internet fame.

12. There’s a kitty at the start of the Naxxramas instance whose name is Mr. Bigglesworth… AKA Dr. Evil’s cat in the Austin Powers movies.

13. It isn’t just movies that are referenced. The punk movement also gets a little love from the good people of Blizzard Entertainment.

In the Alterac Mountains, there’s a non-playable character named Nancy Vishas. This is likely a nod to Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols and his girlfriend Nancy Spungen, whom he stabbed to death in 1978.

14. Finally, not one, but two Homestar Runner references.

First, a non-playable character in the Searing Gorge named Master Smith Burninate…. as in the Strongbad drawing Trogdor the Burninator.

I wonder if there’s a poorly-drawn dragon lurking somewhere that I haven’t found yet.

The second reference is a bad guy named Jorb. This may or may not be a reference to the Homestar short “A Jorb Well done” where Coach Z is unable to pronounce the word ‘job’ correctly.

Those are a few of my favorites. So tell me, Warcraft people, what have you come across that made you giggle to yourself?

Although Vista is grabbing all the front page attention with its soon-to-be-released Service Pack 1, XP hangers-on are hopeful that the upcoming Service Pack 3 can solve the nagging problems of software middle age.

Early results show that SP3 might even provide a performance boost. So Vista may be hip, but XP is getting a hip replacement.

The XP SP3 Release Candidate is available now, with the final version set to ship in the second quarter of this year. Whatever the actual date, you can bet that Vista SP1 will ship before XP SP3)

XP SP3 adds four new features. Only two seem really significant, one for corporate environments and one for the small-business/consumer side.

For the corporate world, XP SP3 will support the Network Access Protection (NAP) feature that is already available in Vista and Windows Server 2008.

It allows IT managers to deny a PC access to network resources based on whether they are configured according to company policies.

For example, if a PC does not have the latest antivirus signatures installed, NAP can limit its access so that it can only contact a remediation server that contains up-to-date signatures to be downloaded.

Given the concern that many companies have about security, the NAP feature could have been one that pushed them to upgrade to Vista. Now, they can stay put with XP and still reap the benefits.

It seems so much like the right thing to do that I can hardly believe that Microsoft has done it. Perhaps the goal is to sell more Windows Server 2008 licenses?

Consumers get a Vista feature transplant in XP SP3 with the ability to install without the need to enter a license key during setup.

Within 30 days of installation, the user needs to enter a product key or XP will go in to a reduced-functionality mode similar to Vista.

The final two XP SP3 features seem relatively trivial: additional cryptographic providers, and enabling black hole router detection by default.

XP already has the ability to detect black hole routers with a single change in the registry, so the feature here just seems to be that the setting will be enabled by default in SP3.

So if these are the only new features and the rest of the changes are patches, why would SP3 be faster? It’s a bit of a puzzle.

Maybe the tests were anomalous, or perhaps there is a benefit from several non-security-related patches rolled into SP3 that haven’t been previously released.

Whatever the reason, it actually leaves me looking forward to this mid-life OS boost.

The Web portal, which took over Netscape Navigator in the $4.2 billion acquisition of Netscape Communications in 1999, said development on the browser had recently devolved into a “handful of engineers tasked with creating a skinned version of Firefox with a few extensions.” Firefox is the open source browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation.

While internal groups within AOL have invested a great deal of time and energy in attempting to revive Netscape Navigator, these efforts have not been successful in gaining market share from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

-Tom Drapeau, director of development

While once commanding 90% of the browser market, Netscape Navigator now accounts for less than 1%, and AOL had no interest in spending what it would take to revive the brand.

Instead, the company, which was once a subscriber-supported portal, preferred to spend its resources on its transition into an ad-supported Web business.

The change left “little room for the size of investment needed to get the Netscape browser to a point many of its fans expect it to be,” Drapeau said.

Instead, AOL said it would leave it to the Mozilla Foundation to do battle against IE. When AOL acquired Netscape, the latter company was working on converting its browser into open source software that was later called Mozilla and became the foundation of Firefox.

Mozilla also was the underpinning of version 6 of the Netscape browser released in 2000. The Mozilla Foundation was formed in 2003 and AOL continued to develop versions of Netscape based on the work of the foundation.

Given AOL’s current business focus and the success the Mozilla Foundation has had in developing critically acclaimed products, we feel it’s the right time to end development of Netscape-branded browsers, hand the reins fully to Mozilla, and encourage Netscape users to adopt Firefox.

As of November 2007, IE accounted for 77.35% of the market, and Firefox 16.01%, according to Internet metrics firm Net Applications. Netscape had 0.6%.

AOL planned to release security patches for Netscape Navigator 9, the latest version of the browser, until February 1, 2008. After that, all active product support would end for all versions of the browsers.

AOL, however, planned to post a Netscape Archive link for people who wanted to download versions of Netscape without support.

Besides the archive, two other sites offering information would continue to exist: UFAQ and the Netscape Community Forum, AOL said. Netscape.com would also remain live as a general use Internet portal.

The Netscape browser made the commercial Web possible by providing a ubiquitous platform to view and interact with Websites.

The browser was based on the Mosaic browser developed by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina at the University of Illinois. Andreessen and James Clark, former patriarch of SGI, founded Netscape Communications in 1994.

The Web software maker was among the stars in the dot-com era of the mid- to late 1990s, becoming the most successful public stock offering of its time. Netscape Communications forced Microsoft to restructure its entire product line to become Internet compliant.

Microsoft’s tactics in grabbing market share from Netscape Navigator with IE was one of the main issues in the U.S. Department of Justice’s antitrust cast against Microsoft.

Microsoft was found to have abused its Windows monopoly and was forced to make changes in its business practices.

For any users feeling nostalgic for the days of old can install Netscape’s theme and extensions pack for Firefox.

Source: Netscape blog post

Basically it’s stuff you can use without having to pay for it and without worrying about proprietary software issues.

Most of the criteria for inclusion in the Open Source Living revolve around the nature of the licensing for the product — it has to be freely redistributable, not discriminatory in its licensing, with source code available, etc.

To that end, the programs already listed in the Open Source Living Directory are something of a “who’s who” of open-source success stories: Firefox, OpenOffice, 7-Zip, and so on.

A fair number of Mac-specific open-source programs are also featured: Camino, Vienna, and NeoOffice.

The layout and design of the site are friendly and clean; it doesn’t look like something that was thrown together in an afternoon.

The Open Source Living was originally derived to list free programs regardless of their source or licensing provisions, and so there are still a few programs listed in the Open Source Living catalog that are free without being open source like Irfanview.

Over time, though, they will be dropped in favor of applications that are entirely open and since I’m an Irfanview user I’m curious to see what could eventually replace it.

I like resources like this for two reasons. One, even someone like me can remain unaware for a long time of a well-developed and highly useful open-source project, and it’s a pleasure to stumble across such a thing in a forum where other people have already vetted it for quality.

A listed project that I’m now curious about, Haiku, picks up where BeOS left off, and if done right could be a serious desktop contender. That’s a long way off and won’t come without major hurdles, but my attention has definitely been captured.

Two, it’s a way for newcomers to open source — people who simply don’t know what’s out there — to get introduced to the available applications without having to dig through an installation repository or just stumble around.

They can find out relatively quickly what’s worthwhile, what other people are using and benefiting from, and what applications cover what sort of duties like the difference between OpenOffice or Scribus.

Perhaps in the future we’ll see features like detailed community feedback or comments on each entry, but for now the forums on the site are handling that job.

Today I’ve got a new release of one such Linux distro: VectorLinux version 5.9.

VectorLinux, built using the ever-popular Slackware distribution and now using the 2.6.18.5 / 2.6.22.14 kernel (depending on which edition you’re using), has been designed to work as well as possible on an older system, although it comes in a couple of different editions to take advantage of newer hardware whenever possible.

Because of the fact that VectorLinux been written to run on older hardware, a lot of legacy device drivers have been kept on board — for instance, by using the older IDE drivers rather than the cutting-edge libata kernel driver set.

If your system is old enough that it doesn’t even boot from CD, there are instructions for creating a bootable floppy and using that to bootstrap the CD.

The Standard edition uses the Xfce desktop environment, and can also run FluxBox or JWM if you’d rather use those. I prefer JWM — not too bloated, not too minimal.

The whole thing’s been configured to run in as little 96 MB of RAM and 2GB of hard disk space. I love their statement about processor requirements: “a Pentium w/200 Mhz or better.”

The SOHO edition uses KDE and likewise requires a slightly better machine: a Pentium running at 750 Mhz or better, 256 MB RAM, 3GB hard disk space, and a 1024x768x24-bit color depth display.

Bootable live CD versions of both Standard and SOHO are also available, and for those with the video hardware to run it, there’s the Beryl / Compiz Fusion desktop available as an option.

5.9 has been built from Slackware version 12 and includes pretty up-to-the-minute versions of everything you need — for Internet browsing, for instance, there’s Firefox 2.0.0.11, Opera 9.5.0 beta 1, and the SeaMonkey suite (1.1.7) , all available from the CD or from the repositories.

The package-management system is slapt-get, Slackware’s package system, so if by some chance you have come from the Slackware side of things you ought to find this pretty familiar and you can even point VectorLinux at the Slackware repository if you want to get packages from there instead.

One really intriguing feature, new to 5.9, is “Vlpackager”, a way to package source code to be built on demand, although this is the kind of feature that only the more really adventurous users will want to mess with.

Like Puppy Linux (my other current favorite “small is beautiful” distribution), Vector is designed to be tiny, swift, and to get the job done, and it seems to succeed nicely on all three counts.