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On Amazon.com, when browsing for Essential .NET Amazon.com was nice enough to tell me that fellow purchasers also wore "Clean Underwear". I was a bit disturbed that Eddie Bauer felt it was needed to specify that the underwear I was buying was in fact clean.

GO HERE

Oh, absolutely agreed. Check this blog entry out from a Microsoft employee.

Apparently, Microsoft isn't anti-open-source now, and the FSF has a nefarious hidden agenda that somehow in over a decade and a half of consistantly sticking to its principles has yet to be revealed.

Of course, the author fails to enlighten us as to what this "agenda" might be.

Obviously you can't simply airbrush all MS employees together. Some of them are really into Linux. Many simply don't care, or don't see how it's relevant. A few are just curious (MS veep to me, "so, what apps do you guys use then?").

Then a few (probably the ones with heavy investments in MS stock) flip out over it. I think Bill Gates falls into the middle category - he simply doesn't care.

I mean does anybody else get the impression that Bill is pretty well insulated from what's going on in the company? I've read something like 3 interviews with him in the last few weeks, and none of them talk about anything other than his latest cool toys. He's practically never questioned hard about Linux for instance (although sometimes ballmer gets it), he just talks about how great the Tablet PC is, or how fab enormous computerised watches are.

I can't say I blame him. After all he's been through, with a passion for technology and practically unlimited funding I'd be very tempted to draw away from the business and simply focus on playing with cool stuff. But he's basically a figurehead these days, nothing more. An icon of what Microsoft once was.

People who bought this book also bought clean underwear, ladybug rainboots and cheetah print slippers

MS in blog parody takedown
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/28/27774.html

By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco

It's a pity that Microsoft's Beth Goza, who we teased here last week, has taken down her weblog. Far from wanting to see it disappear, it ought be preserved in a time capsule.

But not only has Beth's blog gone underground - so has the parody which inspired our story. It's disappeared from no less than five mirror sites.

Even more extraordinary, a witch-hunt is on to find the perpetrator. One member of the PocketPC community says legal action is being threatened against the author, whose identity remains a mystery.

"The phrase 'it will soon be out of our hands' was used by one figure close to Beth," we're told.

It would be remarkable if Microsoft's expensive legal and public relations machinery were deployed in what is essentially a private matter.

And highly unlikely, too, as parodies are protected under the First Amendment.

Microsoft's approach to the press is singularly enlightened, when compared to say an Apple. The company takes barbs in good grace, and doesn't deploy feudal divide and rule tactics. It's never, to our knowledge, sued a journalist. Of course it has its favorite hacks, but in general the philosophy is - they're always going to be mean to us, they'll always be around: meanwhile, we have a message to convey, and stuff to sell.

Evil and elitist?
So were we being evil and elitist, as some of you suggested?

As I replied to Jonathan at StretchingThoughts.com, it's onlyelitist if you think that blogs are folks' only form of expression.

The king of webloggers Jorn Borger - he was the first to use the term and it's still the best - used to use a quote by Tolstoy in his Usenet sig:- "In human stupidity, when it is not malicious, there is something very touching, even beautiful... There always is." And there is something bewitching about Beth's ruminations such as " just for the record i like it when my foods touch" a line worth of Ralph Wiggum.

No, what's strange is when an attack on one blogger is perceived as an attack on blogging in general. That implies that there can't possibly be a quality threshold in blogdom, and confirms John Dvorak's worst fearsabout groupthink. This is an unnecessarily defensive reaction and quite wrong. If blogs are writing, there's good and bad writing.

Of course, John was being satirical, and he wasn't decrying blogdom: only the mentality that blogging is in of itself revolutionary and no criticism can be voiced, and no quality threshold can be drawn; that we must not differentiate between good and bad, because it's all somehow equally valid.

The parody itself was pretty mean and spiteful. But it's a parody. We hope that groupthink doesn't extinguish parodies, as they help us see that the Emperor has no clothes.

Please let us know if you've been contacted in relation to this investigation. And in the meantime, enjoy some other fine online journals by Microsoft staff:- which might be low on cheap laughs, but high on content:- min jeschwad, Inkblog, and more highlighted in this Kuro5hin thread.®

http://netcrucible.com/blog/2002/07/21.html#a226

This guy is apparently ex-DOD and now works for Microsoft.

See Unofficial MSXML XSLT FAQ" for some info about the old Working Draft, XSLT 1.0 and Internet Explorer.

• http://www.schemavalid.com/faq/xml-schema.html#a4
• http://www.netcrucible.com/xslt/msxml-faq.htm#Q13
• http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~ht/XMLData-Reduced.htm
• http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/NOTE-XML-data/

Here are my notes, detailing the parts of the plan I found interesting:

Two initiatives for customers:
Get Secure:

• All virus-related PSS calls for all customers (not just enterprise) are now free. 1-866-PC-SAFETY.
• Premiere Support and Microsoft's Consulting Service as of today are offering a Security Assessment Service for large enterprises; this service may be for fee (at discretion of local offices), but will not be profit-driven, and will eat significant costs where customer situation warrants).
• Regularly updated Security Toolkit will be distributed. Each will include all known patches and tools, and a one-click "make my system secure." First toolkit mailed and web-distributed on October 15. As of tomorrow, the tools should be available to MS Employees to hand out to customers. All of the tools are fully supported, and are made to run on NT4, Windows 2000, and Windows XP. This is not "resource kit" or loose collection of unsupported tools. Localized versions come later, since getting tools available quickly is top priority.
• New set of additional security tools will RTM in December.
• Toolkit will not be perfect starting Oct. 14; will make continual improvements based on feedback.

• Mid 2002 availability of federated Windows Update for enterprises. This lets enterprises run their own windows update service under their own control.
• Feb 2002, Provide version of windows update that can be configured to accept and install updates with zero user intervention.
• Make security bulletins simpler and integrated with update technology so an IT administrator can simply approve a security patch and have it automatically be pushed to the whole enterprise.
• Security patches will now contain absolute minimum fix; no QFE, etc. stuff lumped in.

Internal Efforts (Not Customer-Facing):

• (Historically) Windows 2000: Hired a bunch of people to do penetration analysis and code analysis, and placed unprotected servers on the net to let hackers attempt cracking it. Built and used automated code analysis tools to detect some common security bugs.
• Windows XP: Code analysis tools have been improved to detect many more types of security bugs, and continued increases in investment in security analysis.
• Currently BrianV organizing a full pass review of how security is handled in all groups to look for deficiencies.

Public:

• BrianV con-called with 1000+ CIOs and other IT people to get feedback and comment; has handed out his e-mail to everyone.
• Any customer should be able to call that phone number above (or contact any Microsoft employee) and get the one-click "make my system secure" tool kit for no charge.
• BrianV will be point-person working with competitors, government agencies, etc. on industry-wide solutions. "We think that some of these problems require industry-wide solutions, but we realize that it is incumbent upon us to drive solutions". Brian will take a more visible role in driving these solutions.

So the way I see it, we will be successful to the degree that we:

• Assure that no customer ever again finds it difficult, confusing, or time-consuming to keep their system secure.
• Improve security going out the door so that fewer patches are required (IMO, this wouldn't have made a difference in any of the recent worms, but is still a good goal for countering potential future threats). The goal here is to be the platform with fewest known vulnerabilities that need to be patched, using any metric you care to apply.
• Be a lot more proactive in contacting, encouraging, and helping customers keep their systems secure.