The dumbest and most faulty sentence ever in a tech-article

Taken from this article on Forbes.com:

Google employees not using the secret OS are employing various versions of Unix, such as Linux or Ubuntu, and some older operating systems, like X11, he says

And "he" being "Vince Vizzacarro, Net Applications' executive vice president of marketing". That sentence is riddled with enough erronous information to make me cringe.

One, Ubuntu is a version of Linux, which in turn is a Unix-like OS. If I was gonna nitpick I could also state that Linux is in fact not an OS - it's an operating system kernel and operating systems based on it are called distributions. But never mind...

Two, X11 is not an operating system or anything close to it. X11 is windowing system software used by most desktop system for Unix-like OSes, like KDE, Gnome or XFCE for example.

So now I wonder who the idiot here is. Is Vince Vizzacarro with his fancy title as completely misinformed as he seems or has he been misquoted by the writer of the article? Either way it's a disgrace.

Maybe they're not all bad after all

Or at least they're getting better, Microsoft that is. According to a recent announcement on their website they're finally releasing documentation for their horrid binary file formats. The ones used up until 2007 at least.

This is a good thing, a very good thing even. Granted that the documentation is accurate this means it'll get easier for developers to interoperate with Microsoft's proprietary technologies and that's great since they have such a huge percentage of the market when it comes to wordprocessing, spreadsheet and presentation software (i.e. Word, Excel and PowerPoint). Good news for data portability in other words and maybe now the OpenOffice-team won't have to reverse engineer stuff until they're blue in the face to make Microsoft Office documents work flawlessly within their own applications.

I'm calling this a good day for interoperability and open development.