There are two stories in the news today of organizations either moving to, or choosing Google over Microsoft.

Sidekick users have found themselves in quite a situation to say the least.

The Sidekick is a special kind of phone. Instead of storing information, such as contacts, calendar data, photos, and other key data on the phone itself, it stores the data on remote servers. When the Sidekick is turned on, the data is downloaded from the servers and any changes are synchronized to the remote servers.

I just ran into a less-than-documented issue with OLE DB and SQL Server 2008 64 bit Enterprise. The particular error message was:

OLE DB provider 'HP3KProvider' for linked server 'HP3000' returned data that does not match expected data length for column '[HP3KProvider].sid'. The (maximum) expected data length is 28, while the returned data length
is 18.

So what if the data is smaller than what was expected? Well, SQL Server cares and errors out. To get it to stop doing this, a trace flag is needed.

I came an article the other day that reminded me of my moment when I switched from Windows to Linux. Heralding from 2003, this piece details Sterling Ball, CEO of Ernie Ball, the world's leading maker of premium guitar strings and their forced adventure into Open Source, and it's immediate rewards.

Slashdot reported Sunday that, during a routine round of Windows updates, some computers received a Firefox plugin from Microsoft, without their knowledge or consent.

For the uninitiated, Firefox is a freely available, open source web browser. It has become a very popular browser as Microsoft's Internet Explorer has been losing market share according to a couple of companies who keep track of these types of statistics. They determine these statistics using, among other metrics, your user agent.

You can now use the Firefox plugin at http://www.go-mono.com/moonlight and the link at http://www.pic2009.org/page/content/live to stream the inauguration. This plugin was created in part by Microsoft engineers volunteering for the mono project.

Silverlight, a proprietary technology developed by Microsoft, has been chosen as the sole method for streaming the inauguration. This has many in the tech community up in arms because Silverlight requires the Windows operating system and is not available in Linux and Mac.

Of course, you can use a virtual machine or just watch it on television, but this is a bad decision if the new administration is trying to put on an inclusive and accessible inauguration as they claim.

I read an article on Slashdot detailing an announcement by Microsoft. This announcement states that Windows XP will be available to OEMs, or computer system builders, until May 2009.

Vista was supposed to replace Windows XP on new computers in January of this year. However, sales of Windows Vista and a public outcry persuaded the company to extend the sales of OEM copies of Windows XP through 2010.

"Then it told me to reboot my machine. Why should I do that? I reboot every night -- why should I reboot at that time?

So I did the reboot because it INSISTED on it. Of course that meant completely getting rid of all my Outlook state."

--Email from Bill Gates regarding Windows Usability 2003

Full text of email can be viewed at the Seattle PI's website.