Microsoft Announces .net

Meenky writes: "I heard on NPR that Microsoft announced their newest product, .net. This is a product that integrates with windows using XML to store all of your information on Microsoft servers, so any computer in the world can be used as "your" computer. "

Comments

Re:How ingenious

[HiThere]

Well, if you had a patent you might have been able to sell it to someone. Unless you have a personal legal staff with highly specialized talents, I don't think you would have been able to do anything else with it. Even if it mattered anymore there was too much prior art. ASP's seem to me to be an incremental improvement, not an invention (an artistic work, perhaps, and therefore copyrightable).

Ebrace, extend, circumvent DoJ

[mikemacd]

So Microsoft will embrace and extend XML making it as useful and secure as their implementation of Keberos.

Clearly what they plan to do is to move to a distributed net os so that the OS division of Microsoft which is to be split off can be allowed to die away to insignificance and they can resume their control of the market place.

The one good thing that is happening is that more people are realizing that Uncle Bill isn't thier friend like they used to think.

Re:...paving the way to pay-per-use...

[Reality Master 101]

then send you the bill for $1.00 per Word doc you opened,

I don't know why everyone is so automatically against this. It boils down to economics. It's not going to be a $1/doc. What if it was a penny per doc, and you had access to every application in the entire industry? I think that would be mighty cool.

For example, I don't have a copy of Visio, but there have been times that I would really have liked to have access to it. But it's never been worth going out and buying it [and there is nothing like Visio in the OSS world, but that's another story]. If I could pay a penny on an as-need basis, it would make great economic sense.

Again, it all boils down to the cost. If the cost is low enough, it makes a lot of sense.

--

Re:Microbull

[pb]

I think you've isolated the problem.

There are many kinds of people in this world, and they sometimes overlap.

1) Those who RTFM
2) Those who beg #1 to please reinstall their computer for them because they can't RTFM or get their stuff to work
3) Those who make software without manuals for #2; software without manuals doesn't work. If you don't explain it, and insist on hiding it, there might be something wrong with it. This is what would be called "suspicious behavior" anywhere else.
4) Those who try to have useful discussions about these topics.
5) Those who whine, bitch, moan, and flame #4.

...and your arguments are *completely* unsound, even for a rant *OR* a flame.

It's like saying that apples have been oranges all along, I mean, what are those seeds for?

So let me help you.

1) UNIX does things properly.

2) Windows does things in a way that allows the most people to be able to use it, at least theoretically.

3) However, if #2 doesn't do things properly, how can it allow anyone to use it, ultimately? Also, how could knowing how to do a task help you when the procedure doesn't work?

Give me my pipes, my C, and my terse documentation any day, until you can show me another system that *works* as well.

Feel free to make things easier to use once you've at least gotten them working in the first place.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

A Good Idea

[debrain]

This will probably be the standard of the future, and I think that the Linux community, in particular, should be paying close attention. In reality, *nix does this anyway (you just need good authentication) over LAN's; the step to WAN (ie. Internet) isn't nearly as great as MS's kernel rewrite. *Nix just doesn't use XML (mostly, I think, because it doesn't need to.)

I think that the ubiquitous desktop is the wave of the future because it makes things better for people who don't adjust as quickly. I really don't have much of an opinion on MS doing it, but I think that everyone will go this way eventually. If MS published this as their idea, it would be quite false, since this has been around as an idea, as far as I know, since the mainframe days. Them employing that idea is fine, if it makes computers easier for the average person to use.

Real issues may arise because of bugs and viri: everyone using the same software makes bugs and viri easy to create (ala nature w/uniform genetics) If only MS can use their desktop settings, then it may prove to be a hive for bugs and viri, like Outlook et al. That's a bit of another topic altogether, though. This settings-anywhere has a ton of issues that MS probably isn't even aware of (often because they like to reinvent the wheel, poorly). But, if they get it right, it would be quite neat.

The only other issue I have is with the recurring charge that would accompany something online like that; this is something that average-joe would probably pay for on a recurring monthly basis, and that's fundamentally wrong, in my very humble opinion.

Re:It's Been Done ...

[gavinhall]

Posted by 11223:

They do it here at work to - it's basically NIS (R.I.P yp) and NFS. Set up the NFS mounts that do the home directories, and have it get user accounts from NIS. Simple, no?

Rush

[dman123]

I despise listening to Rush, but know that he is a huge Mac fan. Is it true he really wishes the DOJ would back off M$ "for the sake of the economy?" I realize that this would be consistent with his political views, but I always thought he was more "in the know" of what heavy-handed tactics M$ was always up to. I think all people who preach "alternative" OSes usually are. Please say it ain't so!

--
dman123 forever!

Re:Fantastic Idea!!

[lizardboy]

I'm Sorry to say that their service will not allow you to use Quicken any more. You will be forced to use Microsoft money from now on. In fact you will not be able to use any software other than what microsoft gives you. But this may not be a problem. They will soon buy your favorite software companies. lizard boy Buy Mac, Buy Linux, Buy Be, Just don't buy Microsoft.

Be careful

[angelo]

Be careful using up your VDE resources while in shell. Also, if you write a custom script, make sure it doesn't spawn subshells, or it will easily chomp 255 vde units at a time. Set your max run to 5-10 and you should be ok.

Re:hmmm...

[ph0rk]

portable USB hard drive: $300
spare USB cable, hub: $60
bootable CDROM with OS of choice: $15
assorted floppies, zips $30

knowing M$ won't be reading my data: priceless.

So if this is Windows, their security layer.....

[TuRRIcaNEd]

.....should be called .net Curtains?

The Register's take on it

[deltavivis]

The register is running a pretty amusing article on .NET

http://www.theregister.co.uk/cont ent/1/11538.html

Re:XML == Completely OverHyped

[Spoing]

XML is not fast... nor was it designed to be.

Agreed, though Koffice is fairly peppy, including the gzip/unzip stage when saving/loading documents.

MS turns to the internet to avoid breakup!

[Mabidex]

Remember the DOJ was going to split MS into 2 parts:

1- Windows Platform
2- Internet services, MSN, MS office etc.

By having the Windows platform transform itslef into an internet service they avoid having the DOJ destroy them.

Way to GO MS! I can hear the DOJ start choking on this already...

Yep, I love MS, Unix, and MAC...but do you care?

Re:windows.net, office.net

[generic-man]

Not owning "office.net" won't stop them. Remember that "windows2000.com" was owned by a company in digital imaging ("Windows on the World," I believe it was called) that also produced a software program called Windows 2000. Guess who owns that domain now.

Similarly, "WindowsME.com" is for mechanically engineered window cleaners. I wonder how much money Microsoft will need to throw at them before they just sue WindowsME.com outright.

Re:XML == Completely OverHyped

[Kaa]

XML is basically a big ol' delimited text file. The only things separating it from a 30-year old text file is the fact that it's hierarchical and the fact that there are parsers that let you navigate the tree structure easily.

So what's wrong about it? Plain-vanilla text files are so useful because they are both human- and machine-readable. I'll take UNIX's gaggle of config files over that binary monster of a registry any day. Yes, it's not the most efficient use of bits, but who cares?

People are advocating XML is this great new technology for universal data exchange. Well, it's NOT... no more than a standard text file is.

Ah, but you see, a standard text file is is a great technology for data exchange. It's easily debuggable, you don't have to worry about big-/little-endianess (not the mention the horrors of binary representation of reals) and everybody in the world can deal with ASCII.

Yes, XML is just text structured in a certain way. That's a feature, not a bug.

Kaa

Re:It's Been Done ...

[ZeroLogic]

That is NOT where the name iPlanet came from, Sun purchased a startup called iPlanet and put the name into storage, then when they were looking for a name for the new alliance w/ AOL, they couldn't come up with a new name that wasn't already registered, so they dusted off iPlanet and put it to work.

At least, that's the story the CEO of iPlanet gave when he came to campus

/ZL

Re:"Open" Office Document Formats?

[Spoing]

... that are based on XML. I certainly hope that's true!

If it's like Office now, they'll be XML-ized binaries with hidden or tweaked DTDs that nobody will be able to use anywhere else.

Re:Feh.

[eudas]

I vote for 'Out to Lunch'. =)

eudas

Re:So, MS is getting a trademark on ".net"

[eudas]

don't forget naming your company 'whatever.com'. (i mean, come on... your company name is supposed to be 'whatever'... your company's WEBSITE is 'whatever.com'. naming your company after its website is patently silly.)

eudas

.not

[Shagg]

Oh goody, MS has invented the mainframe... just without any of the security because that makes it "too hard to use". Like anybody is going to trust their documents to MS for protection from the rest of the dotnet community, not to mention that after they get everybody and their brother using this service, they will start charging you a monthly fee to access it otherwise they'll delete all your files.

Re:Don't want them to have my data.

[Refrag]

Security authentication for Hotmail is done through Microsoft PassPort which obviously runs on Windows NT (or 2000).

Refrag

Re:...paving the way to pay-per-use...

[Angron]

"...and MS can then send you the bill for ... $10 per Windows restart."

So I guess now we know how Microsoft plans to keep making so much money :).

MY Computer? MINE? Promise?

[(void*)]

" ... any computer in the world can be used as "your" computer."

Hmm - that sounds like Back Orifice.

Piracy

[macx666]

So it this the ultimate in scanning your "computer" by MSFT? Seems like this is the eaisest way for them to tell if you have pirated something. I might, maybe, sort of, kinda consider it if lots of bandwidth were included.
-Mr. Macx

Moof!

Re:Piracy

[linzeal]

If such a scanning were actually take place and the information sent to microsoft upon connection to the internet could we not simulate a pirated system even if we did not have one (hell, run a program in Linux).

my three cents

Re:Piracy

[geneabr]

Hehehe, What Next? A microchip in my wrist? I use Microsoft products but there is no way I'll ever use anythuing like this...

Re:Piracy

[babykong]

No No No, Behind the mastoid bone. That way your voice vibrates through to them and they can talk to you while your asleep.

Did'nt you ever see the presidents psychiatrist?

Re:Piracy

[carlmenezes]

ok. so this is what MS is really saying : "Use Linux, people, because we're gonna just destroy all your privacy for our own twisted reasons" This sux bigtime. When will they ever do anything right?

Re:Piracy

[John Napkintosh]

Anyone who uses .net to store pirated software is retarded and deserves whatever punushment is decided upon.

Re:Piracy

[Kailden]

"In the long term, all applications software will likely be provided as a service, subscribed to over the Internet. This will allow Microsoft and other software service providers to provide better customer service, transparent installation and backup, and a positive feedback loop into the product-development process. Software delivered as a service would also allow Microsoft and independent developers to respond more swiftly with backups and antivirus protection. "

Yes, I agree, using APPLICATION SERVER technology enables better support. There is nothing new here. And it does cut down on software priracy quite a bit. However, I do question what privacy the end-user has. I mean, if all the office software now runs as an application delivered from a Microsoft portal, can I really trust microsoft enough to use that in my company?

I'm confused, can someone clarify? It's not really clear whether you can buy the server software to serv apps to your company or whether all applications will be delivered only from microsoft servers.

If you could set up some subscription service to update your servers from microsoft servers, then I think it is a good idea. It would be like MSDN without the CDS in the mail.
To me, that would be the only way to let "developers, businesses and consumers to harness technology on their terms."
Besides, having a single digital identiy isn't all its cracked up to me. I think the popularity of chat rooms would attest to that.

Re:Piracy

[bmajik]

Yes.. they'll still be licensing software tradionally, and enterprises will be able to setup their own information clouds etc.. furthermore, using SOAP, those clouds will be interoperable with other web services..

.. or thats the claim, anyhow :)

part of .net is pervasive data availability. ASPs will be required to provide this.. as well as the second peice.. pervasive application availability..

Sure Bill

[legana]

The entire MS product line is being renamed with .net suffixes, reflecting a change of the company's philosphy away from selling operating systems to selling products that will be used on the network. Gates compares this change in company philosophy to the change from DOS to Windows and says that it is a "bet the company thing."

We can only hope.

It is not necessary that we succeed, it just necessary that everyone else fail. BG

Fantastic Idea!!

[garethwi]

Now, all the next I Love You virus needs to do is hit the Microsoft servers, and their air tight security will result in the loss of data for millions.

Re:Fantastic Idea!!

[Masked Marauder]

Ahhh! But think more deeply! MS has just invented a new holiday. When the Great Registry in the Sky gets corrupted, the whole planet (except the MS server drones restoring backups) takes a day off.

You'll get up in the morning and see that the coffee maker, TV, radio, traffic lights and computer aren't working, the banks and stores are closed, or else only trading by barter, and you'll say to yourself "Ah! Another Registry Day! I can go back to sleep."

Re:Fantastic Idea!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention privacy!! Give my files to MS?? Sorry, but I didn't hit my head on the wall THAT hard when I was a child...

Re:Fantastic Idea!!

[TygerFish]

Aw come on, it won't be that bad.

With fast and direct access to everything you own and
everything you do on their own servers, M$ will finally
have a reason to write email-readers with tighter
security.

Once that happens, the only way losers will be able to
dominate your computer will be by sitting at a console
and those will only be, well.... everywhere.

Re:Fantastic Idea!!

[dthable]

Yeah...hey Microsoft! Let me upload all of my Quicken data to you also. While I'm at it, I might as well send you a copy of my tax data and all of the PIN numbers. I'm sure nothing bad can happen then...

Windows.Net

[Shadowlion]

Windows.Net: Because it's full of holes, and the only thing holding it together is a bit of string.

The real reason

[doctor_oktagon]

Knowing the big MS, it probably means *anyone* can use your computer from anywhere in the world!

Re:The real reason

[doctor_oktagon]

What's new is that they never actually used this to advertise their applications before!
Next up we'll have headlines like "MS Team up with BO2K to offer full home-working systems"

Re:The real reason

[dattaway]

so what's new?

It means you can now put all your easter eggs in one basket.

Very hokey...

[Diablerie]

Just out of (morbid) curiosity, I watched Gates' presentation about this .net thing... Somewhat amusing. A sampling of Bill Gates' claims:

• Here's a good one... "Passwords are the weak link in today's networks." No, I think I'd disagree - the weak link is lousy security on systems such as *cough* Windows.
• Unintentional slip? Gates said that information sharing is good. Hmm...
• The .net servers will be running Windows 2000, which has apparently set "world-setting benchmarks" for speed and reliability. I was under the impression that benchmarks showed that Win2K is slower than even WinNT.
• The "core" of .net is XML. It was not explained why this is good, or how this particular brand of text formatting (or "protocol", as Gates insists on calling it) will be used.
• Gates repeatedly alluded to "per-minute charges" for the required broadband access. If this .net thing flies and people actually use it, then MS is set to suck a LOT of money from hapless consumers.
• Apparently, the PC "required" a "universal platform" (line Windows) in order for applications to be created. Please. I suppose that Gates is conveniently forgetting the many problems and incompatibilies which his "common platform" has caused.

For those who are interested, technology "highlights" include:

• "Smartlinks" - it looks like Microsoft's .net client will automatically scan and highlight stuff for its internal list of keywords, and then place a "customized menu" associated with those keywords. Think MS Word's annoying autocorrect misfeature on steroids.
• A command line! It seems the people at MS have discovered that command lines are actually useful! Unfortunately, then they proceeded to butcher the concept by adding "natural language" queries. This utterly reeks of DWIM (Do What I Mean) and we all know the problems with that. Case in point: the demonstrator entered a typo and that screwed up the demonstration script, forcing him to restrat the query demonstration.
• MS, partnered with Samsung, is developing what looks like a cross between a cell phone and a PalmPilot, which runs Internet Explorer.
• A "tablet PC" (and extra-large PalmPilot style device) which runs WIndows 2000 and is meant to function as an "electronic book" onto which you can download books from the net. Warning! Warning! They advertise one-click buying though the tablet PC and thus the .net sevice; I guess MS expects up to trust it with our credit card numbers too...
• A pretty hokey handwriting recognition system. What was not explained is how or why MS expects their system to work better than anything else out there.

Re:Very hokey...

[M$ Mole]

&quotI was under the impression that benchmarks showed that Win2K is slower than even WinNT.&quot

Well, you were misinformed. Actually, W2K has set some impressive records...for example, using 2 W2K servers, MS, UW, and the University of Southern California (go Trojans!!) set an over land speed record for transfer of data about a month and a half ago. If I find the link for it, I'll post it for you.

I use W2K in a production environment and haven't had any problems with it in terms of performance...in fact, I've been rather impressed with it.

Re:Very hokey...

[mduell]

All the benchmarks I have seen for win2k show that it is faster. See the July 2000 issue of PC Magazine, page 68 for a good comparison of Thin Clients (AKA terminals).

Mark Duell

Re:Very hokey...

[Project_2501]

Let me help clear up your misunderstandings

• ... "Passwords are the weak link in today's networks." -- what he means is that there are too many systems on the internet where we enter in password information. If any one of these systems are compromised, and assuming we are too lazy to use differnt passwords on each site then there is a serious risk that other accounts could be hacked
• Unintentional slip? Gates said that information sharing is good. -- he means websites do not share information with one another. Today you see each website acts pretty much as its own little island.
• The .net servers will be running Windows 2000, which has apparently set "world-setting benchmarks" for speed and reliability. -- Don't know about this, too lazy to check. It don't make a difference to me, if it ever was an issue than i suppose i would be running a company and could afford a faster machine to make up for the difference
• The "core" of .net is XML -- this means that services will truly be platform independent... this is a good thing cuz as you prolly already know...theres a little anti-trust suit going on... duh 0_o
• Gates repeatedly alluded to "per-minute charges" for the required broadband access. If this .net thing flies and people actually use it, then MS is set to suck a LOT of money from hapless consumers -- Its what you do when you provide a service, make money. Duh, I guess you linux ppl dont understand that concept.
• Apparently, the PC "required" a "universal platform" (line Windows) in order for applications to be created. Please. I suppose that Gates is conveniently forgetting the many problems and incompatibilies which his "common platform" has caused. -- What he means is that it was more efficient for one company to create one dominating platform than have a bunch of companies try to agree on a platform (too much politics, lack of vision(least common denominator rules in this environment))

-=Griffith=-

Re:XML is <just>tags</just>

[Spoing]

"People, XML is just a syntax. Unless the DTDs and schemas they use for .NET are fully documented, only Microsoft's own .NET-enabled products will be able to anything useful with the data."

Yeah, and the XML tags will all end up looking like this;

<binary>!%!@#!1234@#14%%1551%!!!#$%!$!#%SAF@#!#% !1141234<binary>

umm...

[the.mad.artist]

Y'know, this sounds way too much like "Microsoft patents 1's and 0's"...

Re:...paving the way to pay-per-use...

[rlowe69]

Maybe, maaaaybe sometime in the future, when T1 lines are standard and cheaply available in all homes and businesses, will networked apps be reality

Oh, so you mean MS is actually looking into the future for once? Good for them, it's about time.

Whether we like it or not, this is the way things will go. It's not only cheaper, but it's easier for maintainance reasons (ie. if your copy of Word doens't work, just download another one).

Once the net becomes a completely (like 99.9%) reliable medium, people will be less hesitant about leaving their docs on remote servers. Large corporations will still have their own servers to handle private docs, but most people and small businesses will just encrypt their stuff (optional) and upload it. Would you not leave things in your fridge now because you're afraid the power will go out??

But of course, the main issue is giving the masses enough bandwidth to make this worthwhile. While cable is nice, it'll end up being the 'poor man's' high speed connection in 5 years. Fiber is going down fast, and high speed wireless is going to be big.

There's also matters of security and convinence (can you get to the networked Word if you are at 32000 ft from LA to Tokyo?)

yes. A major airline (Continental?) just signed a contract with a provider to give internet and e-mail access at 32000 ft. In 5-10 years (where this net apps thing is aimed), the net will be EVERYWHERE, because people will demand it. MS is going to be releasing this stuff 'soon', but they know it's not going to be replacing their OS and Office suite packages any time soon.

Re:Ummm, profiles barely work now...

[mbyte]

Check your internet explorer to delete the temporary internet files after closing it.
Whithout this option enabled IE uses min. 1% of local hd (that can be awfull much) as cache, and puts it into %systemdir%\profiles\user\temporary internet files\

no need to say, that with that profiles get HUGE HUGE HUGE ... (> 60 mb is normal ;)

Enable that one, and profiles are down to 10 mb ... ;)


Samba Information HQ

Yeah, Right.

[Scriven]

Great idea that has been discussed before, but do the words "Not a hope in hell" mean anything to anyone.

The Microsoft Data Storage Centre(tm) (or whatever they call it) wouldn't get my business if my life depended on it. They'd strip mine that data faster than a prospector during the Gold rush.

This is my .sig. It isn't very big.

Re:Yeah, Right.

[alfredo]

This will force the ISP's to conform to MS standards, meaning W2000. This will also put the screws to the retail outlets who sell MS products. How much will it cost business use this service, 5 cents a minute? 10 cents? I see this as their attempt to turn the internet into an MS only environment.

Re:Yeah, Right.

[michael.creasy]

Microsoft wouldn't store your data, someone else would, your ISP for example. All MS have anounced in the software to do this.

Re:Yeah, Right.

[emac]

Prospectors in the gold rush didn't strip mine.
Strip mining isn't practical without heavy machinery.

Re:Yeah, Right.

[bmajik]

Win 2k is not a platform requirement for .net

any SOAP (read: XML) enabled webserver platform will work

Re:wtf?

[Darguz]

The sad thing is, clueless users will go for it, just like they go for Snotmail and LookOut!, just because it's Microsoft and their evening news program told them that's good.

When will people learn?


--

hmmm...

[ph0rk]

I wonder, how often will they, peruse, i mean, 'index' your data?

I dislike this idea.

Re:.net is not the NC

[Just Some Guy]

Whatever. In that case, they've re-implemented either

• That stupid little "Briefcase" feature that everyone deletes
• Palm HotSync
• CVS

on a larger scale. This is not new tech, except that they're possibly making it more popular among the end-user crowd.

Regarding the voice recognition, etc., I'll believe it when you can get it at Best Buy.

Regarding the community envy, I think you've got that backwards on this one. MS ridiculed the NC concept (which is a superset of this "new invention"), and now they're touting it as the Next Great Thing.

Feh.

[dougman]

Gee, so I can look forward to the glorious promise of my PIII 1Ghz Screamin' Expensive Super-Charged Tower Of Power From Hell becoming...uhmm..a dumb terminal?

Joy!

Not.

Re:Feh.

[Anonymous Coward]

uh, real men don't sit in front of computers all day.

Re:Feh.

[Golias]

Aw, cripes, moderators! Get it right. HiThere's comment was not "Flamebait", it was Flame.

He called somebody to "out to lunch" for saying running Unix was the same as operating a dumb terminal.

If anything, the post he was responding to was -1 (Flamebait), and his response was -1 (Flame).

To save you time, this post is -1 (Off Topic), and -1 (Pointing Out Idiotic Moderation)... and maybe even -1 (Troll) for good measure.

Do your worst, bitches!

And this affects me how?

[Alan]

I mean come on... a fair number of us here (a majority if I may be so bold) are *nix users anyway, and this will not affect us in any way. The technology *idea* sounds good, but do anyone here really think they can pull it off without screwing it up?

Also, knowing MS, their security on this will be "adequate" and suddenly the script kiddies out there will be able to crack into this from anywhere in the world? They'll also have to add functionality into the OS to accomplish this and hook it all in seamlessly, and this will make windows even more (if it's possible) unstable.

Oooh constellation is their new buzzword.

[Moderation abuser]

"Constellations of computers, devices and services."

"Constellations of Web Services."

"Constellations of applications, services and devices."

And here was me thinking that constellations were things to be seen up in the sky at night. What a bunch of pretentious gits.

Lets count the number of times it comes up in ther press announcements. 35 times on their web site as of 23/6/2000.

Re:XML is <just>tags</just>

[Hard_Code]

Actually XML is very intriguing as an RPC mechanism. First of all, just think of no versioning problems. Upgraded one side? No problem, the old servers or clients will just read out what they need. Also, imagine store and forwarding of RPC requests 8) You could audit log or stash requests in some space, and then serve them out. It provides the best of both worlds of messaging and RPC. Plus it's platform-neutral and human-readable.

Reverse trademark dilution

[cryptolitho]

Microsoft is basically turning a generic name of the .net top-level domain into it's own trademark. We've all heard how Xerox, Kleenex, Velcro and other companies put a lot of energy and money into ensuring that their product trademarks do not become the generic descriptor for photocopies, facial tissue, etc. This is the first time I've seen a company do the reverse: snatch a generic term from the public domain and turn it into a brand. Someone should alert ICANN.

Re:Reverse trademark dilution

[JasonSkywalker]

Apple needs to grab ".com" right away! Quick! On a related note, am I the only one who wonders why more porn sites don't use the .org suffix?

Re:Reverse trademark dilution

[cryptolitho]

Right. I didn't mean *literally* trademark it, as in registering with the PTO. Rather, it appears that MS is grabbing the term ".net" to signify a Microsoft brand. I think the prospect is very real that they'd try to create the dominant public perception that ".net" is associated with Microsoft. They have the market power to do so.

Re:...paving the way to pay-per-use...

[Masem]

My impression is that not only will there be a pay per use, but you'll probably have to buy at a flat fee (though highly reduced from the current software price) some license, then get the per use charge on top of that. I can't see them not having some 'barrier' to every app, as those apps that have limited use (visio, for example, I've only used twice ever, and most of what I can do in that can be done in Word art, abet not as easily) will not earn them the same fees as those that are ubiquitious in most places.

Re:Microbull

[bughunter]

1) Those who RTFM; 2) Those who beg #1 to please reinstall their computer for them because they can't RTFM or get their stuff to work

LOL! How accurate! Here's a real life quote for ya:

"Sure, I could [RTFM] but it's more exciting to think I've screwed up the entire system and lost everything." --My Brother-in-law, VP of Production for a Net Media company, upon calling me for the umpteenth time to help him fix his bleedin' NT nonlinear editing box that he continually fscks with despite how me and a thousand OEM techs have warned him how fragile it is...

Re:Ummmmm....

[oojah]

Adding ".NET" is still a damned silly idea though imho.

OK, so you probably need some way of distinguishing MSOffice.NET from MSOffice but it just isn't quite somehow. Like people will use the ".NET" when talking - unless it specifically needs emphasising that you're talking about the .NET version.

The thing is, if *all* of their products end in .NET (as it seems to be suggested) then there'll be no other products to compare them with.

Mark down for pointless redundancy and because it looks silly, especially as the .NET is all capital letters.

Re:How ingenious

[rnd()]

no offense, but your comment is somewhat myopic.

ASP does not mean only that a service replaces the exact functionality of software that you already use. The ASP model lends itself well to scaling well beyond the capabilities of even the most brand-spankin' new Gigahertz moneyeating monster system that you might have.

Consider IMDB, for example, who wants a stack of cdroms on their desk! You may not like the idea of an ASP because you have a paper copy of the "internet yellow pages", but I'll take google any day.

Also, sites such as moviecritic.com and others allow for a new kind of application entirely. Does this mean that the providers of those applications (hint ... asp's) are destined for failure? Absolutely not.

In a nutshell, I'd rather use a client-server system for even the most mundane things... enter xntpd.

Re:Microbull

[Lion-O]

No, what they are talking about is building functional websites. Not about stupid basic 4 year old HTML.

Well, thats just my point but you also seem to have missed it completly; Dreamweaver, for example since I'm quite sure that there are more programs like this available, is quite capable of doing way more then stupid basic 4 year old HTML.

Imagine buying something from amazon, choosing to have the coupon amazon gives you from the webbrowser into Money.

Imagine Amazone sending you a basic format file which you can immediatly import into Money and all other accounting software available. This is quite possible at this very moment. So I ask again; where is the innovation? Don't tell me that the innovation lies into making your whole environment less secure so the website coder can do the final transactions for you? Do I sense a security hole here? I dunno but for some reason names like Melissa pop up, next to VBs script implementation into mailclients to make things easier and more efficient as well.

It's not just the concept, it's being able to do it PROPERLY and in a way that allows the MOST people to be able to use it. This is NOT something is good at. In fact Unix is absolutly CRAP at it.

In which way? Its oh so easy to call something crap in the way you are doing here without giving any arguments to back up your statements. Unix can share files over a network while being totally transperant. Besides this it can be done in a complete safe way so only authorised users can access the files. I think you are comparing apples and oranges here; Unix is quite capable of handeling this. I do agree on one point; it completely focuses on functionality instead of user friendlyness; I guess not everyone is able to set this up.

But thats why we have frontends and such which can help novice people to set things up. Don't judge a product by how many people can 'handle' it; focus on what it does and how its being done.

Re:Software leasing

[Jon Erikson]

Heh, the place where I'm working now (and at at the moment) has had no mail for over 4 days now because the fucking Exchange server died on Monday. Since it takes 4 hours for every attempt to restart it, and Microsoft's "advice" has proved a big fat steaming pile of crap, it looks like it'll be weeks before we get it back again. Out of all of MS's software, I think Exchange is the crappest by far - I don't know anyone who hasn't had it fuck up on them at least once.

---
Jon E. Erikson

Re:Software leasing

[Azog]

Yeah, you would think so. But companies do funny things.

The last place I worked, they were leasing Dell desktops. By the time the machines had reached the end of their useful life, they had been paid for many times over. It would have been far, far cheaper to just buy them up front. And everyone knew it!

But due to "cash flow" and other accounting BS, they were leased anyway.

So there is no _economic_ reason that Microsoft could not successfully lease software. Companies will do it to avoid the budget hit of purchasing 1000 copies of Office 2000 at the same time. Remember, you will have to upgrade everyone at once, or document version incompatibility issues will kill you.

Or... companies will say "fsck this" and switch to free software. Linux should be pretty good for desktop machines by the end of the year, what with Mozilla, the new Gnome, new KDE, new office apps, the 2.4 kernel, and XFree86 4.0.

(And don't bother to tell me it's good now... yes, I run it now, but I wouldn't make my parents use it just yet. This Christmas I will probably switch them over.)

Torrey Hoffman (Azog)

Re:It's Been Done ...

[Refrag]

Yes, I loved that aspect of Solaris when I was in engineering college. Although, I thought it was an attribute of all UNIX flavors.

I've been waiting for Microsoft to play catch-up for years now, and it appears that they'll never get it right.

Refrag

Who would actually use this??

[denzil71]

So what company would actually use this? Who would have the total lack of sense to actually want all thier company information and confidential data stored on another company's servers??

The whole idea is utterly mental :-)

I am however glad to see Microsoft is betting their future on this.

As for getting your application served directly over the internet - surrrreeee "Sorry boss, can't type that review at the moment, the net is a bit clogged and it's gonna take 37 minutes for M$ Office to download to my browser". Yeah, I say browser, cuz lets face it, you can guarantee you will need IE on every desktop, unless of course that also comes over the wire :o)

yeah, that's gonna work.

Re:Who would actually use this??

[demon]

The same sort of people who would switch to using a service like iMacFloppy.com because it eliminates the need for someone to admin a server, replacing a 100 Mbps LAN with dialups?

I actually copied off a testimonial from imacfloppy.com where someone said they did this. Seems pretty stupid, huh? It amazes me, but people will give up a whole lot of control, and security, for the illusion of convenience. (Yes, I said the illusion of convenience. It doesn't have to be more convenient - if you can convince the average moron that it's more convenient, whether it is or not, they'll probably go for it - whatever it is.)

Can someone please explain to me...

[osguzzler]

...why all M$ have to do is add a dot and three letters to their products to earn them the title of innovators? Wake up Mr.Everyone, you're being taken for a sucker!
...but there again, who can blame anyone for taking you for a sucker with your track record to date.

Adam:What kept you?.

Re:...paving the way to pay-per-use...

[TheGratefulNet]

$10 per Windows restart

we're already paying this, at least. our [user's] time is worth money, too. everytime win* crashes and I either lose data or have to just waste my time with senseless reboots, I lose productivity.

figuring a silicon valley computer professional is worth in the neighborhood of $100/hr and a reboot (with their scandisk being invoked) can take, say, 3 minutes (all told), that's: $5 per reboot. and who gets thru the day without at least 2 reboots of win*? there's your $10 already ;-)

--

Re:XML is <just>tags</just>

[Sneakums]

I think the promise of XML is that there will some day be more intelligent programs that can read the "field descriptions", meta-data, or whatever you want to call it, from the DTD. It's a formal way to structure identifiers for data.

The DTD does not specify "meaning" for tags or their contents. The DTD simply specifies which tags can be nested and in what combinations.

To give meaning to the data, you need a schema; I believe that the W3C has proposals for describing XML schemas.

What XML would allow, if people used it properly, is for future programs to make sense of data without having an agreed-upon format

No, it would not. You would need sophisticated AI such as seen in popular movies to do that kind of parsing. Unless two programs agree on a DTD, a schema and what the schema means in relation to the real world, they cannot interoperate.

--
"Where, where is the town? Now, it's nothing but flowers!"

Re:It's Been Done ...

[antv]

Uh, and you think Microsoft employees can't log into any system and have full access to their own email etc?

Well, if they use Sun tools they of course could

no more use of years ?

[__aahlyu4518]

Guess that would become a problem indeed, to still use the year as part of the product name. MS is increasing the pace of releases as they want to make sure the separate company that will make the OS still gets the same amount of money the complete company now is.

95,98,2000,Millennium... It would take the YYYY.1 and YYYY.2 names to keep up... That would look sloppy.

Or maybe MS wants to be the . in .NET

Re:XML == Completely OverHyped

[Anm]

XML is better than a standard delimited text file for several reasons:

• It includes standard markup to reference sub file information that is not line/character dependant through id attributes.
• It is character set independent, providing mappings from almost all major character sets to Unicode.
• It defines standard ways of spanning documents across files through external entities. This alos allows a degree of reuse.
• Internal entities allow blocks of text to be referenced/'instantiated' through the document, not unlike a C #define statement. Good for details tha might change often.
• DSSSL and XSLT stylesheets provide a standard means of converting file formats and exposing particular details of the data.

Unfortunately, it fell short of it's biggest potential achievement: to allow the layering of information from multiple sources. While XML Namespace take care of naming conflicts, they provide NO guidelines on how and where to use them. As such, there is no proper way to validate a document under more than one DTD. And because of that, we are now seeing standards that are definitively not validatable under certain DTDs. XML should have stuck with SGML styled architectures, despite how complicated they are to implement.

As for the speed issue, XML should have been written with a parallel binary format in mind.

Yeah Right!

[jwhyche]

This is the funniest thing I've seen on slashdot in a while. Put Microsoft in charge of my personal data. Tell me where do I have to take the dumb ass pill to swollow this one.

My dog will sing opera before I fall for this one.

Jeff

Re:XML == Completely OverHyped

[madstork2000]

Even if XML sucks, if M$ uses it for its primary document format, it will be MUCH easier to get alternative WordProcessors, Spreadsheets, etc, to be compatible. Because even if they extend and embrace the format they use is plainly available for all to see. It will be great to have full Office2000.net compatibility across platforms.

Though knowing M$ they will probably only let you save XML to their servers, if you want to save local it has to be proprietary binary format as always . . . Or some other stupid ploy to thwart all that good.

-MS2K

Re:Software leasing

[Salant]

Ya that would suck. They'd have a monopoly on computing.....

Nah they'd never do a thing like that your talking madness! :)

linux has had this for years...

[Nima]

I believe its called telnet....

Re:"It's all about the client, st*pid"

[Anonymous Coward]

. Microsoft is essentially trying to impose a defacto standard on how XML information will be passed around the web, using the strength of its desktop position as the lever.

Microsoft can't even stick to a proprietary standard format for word processor documents for more than two years. What hope do they really have of maintaining standards in XML?

Wow

[lobos]

This is such a new invention. Miscrosoft most be so happy to create something so revolutionary. I never thought something like this would come around. Oh, wait. Microsoft is only a couple years behind the competition on this. They're called ASPs (Application Service Providers) if you didn't already know. (Not to mention that no Microsoft server would be able to support this kind of network)

xml isn't a bad thing

[rnd()]

Hey, at least Microsoft is trying to start using an open standard for structured data. Believe me, if you've written any code that uses the XML DOM, you're probably not too disappointed about the things that Microsoft has added (they have added a few methods to the DOM standard which are very useful).

I realize that the bodies in charge of creating the standard need to keep better pace with industry, but I think the above comment gives Microsoft an undeserved bad rap on the XML front.

Storing your info is free. Getting it back...

[BluedemonX]

Micro$haft has a few things up its sleeve with this.

1) If they contain the world's data, I'm sure FINDTIDBITS.EXE will be the first "don't tell the world we've done this" app they'll code in-house.

You thought they had control over the markets now, wait til they have business data for every company in its servers... "Why is Bill Gates buying Company X all the sudden, and why is he dumping Company Y? Wouldn't have anything to do with the fact that he can browse all the data from both companies...

2) They'll expect people to sign up (read: put their tax documents, resumes, important dox etc) at the LOW price. Then suddenly the prices go W-R-E-N-C-H and it's pay that $50 a month, or you won't have access to your data.

3) And you'll need it: we have this special agreement with the government that in the name of protecting people from the spread of international communism, or protecting the children, whatever buzzword works this month - the government has the back door to all our data (a little deal with the DOJ heh heh heh). The IRS is gonna show up on Friday.

Re:Your one-stop law enforcement shop!

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

You aren't thinking creative (or evil) enough. Not just tracking - but law enforcement initiated remote shutdown of applications, knocking people off the net in real time, shutting down their home security (once smart houses take off), transferring all their money to the gov't (again in real time) and all sorts of fun. Press a button and your life turns to hell, again in real time.

They don't like what you are saying, your site is instantly down and erased. They want your money, they got it. Scary, isn't it.

Possible? Yes.

"It's all about the client, st*pid"

[Loge]

Before it can do that, people need to decide on schemas which explain how to structure a given form of data. Yeah, like that'll happen any time soon.

Exactly, and with this announcement, Microsoft is doing just that - stepping up to the bar and stating that it will define a broad set of schemas applying to both web services and clients. Microsoft is essentially trying to impose a defacto standard on how XML information will be passed around the web, using the strength of its desktop position as the lever.

Indeed, the user interface part of this announcement is particularly intriguing. As you say:
And they create a special car browser to display the number of cupholders in their cars
This is exactly what the Microsoft .NET Universal Canvas is all about. It provides an XML compound information architecture that integrates browsing, communications, and document authoring into a single, unified environment that will be optimized to work with all the new XML-based services Microsoft is defining.

Interestingly, Windows itself winds up playing a peripheral role in this scheme. As Microsoft's white paper points out, the Windows OS will be renamed Windows .NET and offered as a service on a subscription basis, just like MSN. Since Windows will no longer technically be a "product", it makes you wonder whether Microsoft developed this architecture in an effort to work around the potential fall-out from the anti-trust ruling.

Re:Ummm, profiles barely work now...

[ostiguy]

I believe his LMHOSTS comment was supposed to mean to enable profiles across the universe. WINS servers don't work across the net in practice (not that anyone would really try), but with an LMHOSTS files, one could have a domain controller and profiles accessible from anywhere.

Re:Don't want them to have my data.

[lunatik17]

Hotmail is running Apache on a FreeBSD machine.

Yes, we know this. All that means is it's not the operating system that's at fault, it's the idiots running the servers. I think that's relelvent, since they're expecting us to trust them with our files. Not only that, but it's going to take a lot of software from Microsoft to do this, so there's major possibilities for screwups on both ends.

Here's my DeCSS mirror. Where's yours?

Hey! I OWN microsoft.NET!! - READ THIS!

[Sune DK]

Well, at least I payed the Internic bill in December.
Back in December when Michael Chaney payed for passport.com, I payed the bill for microsoft.NET.
See for yourself! http://www.worldwidewait.com/ms/ms.html
No, I never received a check like Michael did...

Re:Hey! I OWN microsoft.NET!! - READ THIS!

[Sune DK]

BTW...
Do I legally own the domain?
The payment was overdue, and I payed the bill.
Does that make me owner of the domain?
*smiley*

Re:Hey! I OWN microsoft.NET!! - READ THIS!

[8Complex]

What's even worse is that you use IE to do it.

At least you have the good taste to run Agent.

BTW, microsoft.net redirects to microsoft.com's site.

Wow, whole hog now..

[Thomas Charron]

After reading the white papers, and all of the marketing materials, I've come to this conculsion..

Apperently, now that Microsoft has been judged a monopoly, they've decided this:

"Welp, they found us out. We might as well go whole hog now".

Everything in this Microsoft.NET platform, which they push as being 'The next generation of the Internet' is so based on Microsoft run service it isn't even funny. They name dropped every service they offer, from extending email off of 'Hotmail', to instant messaging based on MSIM.

In some ways, they're getting better, using open protocols such as SOAP, and using storage, etc, using XML. In other ways, the beast is getting worse..

Salant's comment -- grammar corrected

[grammar nazi]

Yeah, that would suck. They'd have a monopoly on computing.

No, they'd never do a thing like that. You're talking madness! :-)

Re:Salant's comment -- grammar corrected

[Salant]

Eeek I knew there were soup nazi's but grammar nazi's who'd a thunk it...

Marketing Irony

[LinuxParanoid]

I found it ironically funny that, checking DNS records, the owner of the obvious domain name for MS's latest techno-marketing initiative, dot.net, is a guy from Sun.

Domain Name: dot.net
Administrative Contact, Technical Contact, Zone Contact: Comay, David S (DC115) David.Comay@ENG.SUN.COM

This must be another example of Microsoft "leadership" and "innovation" at work... :)

-LP (not connnected with Sun myself)

Re:Security will be an issue

[rnd()]

This comment is about as rediculous as they come. Think about the supposed logic:

Most windows users' passwords are the user's first name.

AND The .net stuff uses Microsoft software.

THEREFORE

Any hacker will be able to steal any company's top secret information from the system.

... utter nonsense. Any system, no matter how strong its encryption, is weakened by a predictable password.

Re:...paving the way to pay-per-use...

[windex]

"...$10 per Windows restart."

They're gunna make millions off their BSOD.

*scoff*


--- 'dex

Re:.net is not the NC

[java.bean]

What this community bashes now, in three years they will eagerly clone -- see OLE2 vs Bonobo.

Dead on. You can't criticize Microsoft's lack of innovation on one hand and blatantly copy everything they do on the other hand.

--jb

My world on my back

[non]

In years gone by I had a LaCie pocket drive. 240MB, but hey, on a MacIIci it was good enough for the system (MacOS6.8-7.01) and the apps that weren't on the server. The glory of it was that I had all my quick keys, etc. In short, my world.

This being said, I don't see how on earth M$ can provide this over the net. 'specially cause that profile probably doesn't work with this computer.

Between C# & .net I think we've had enough buzzwords from M$ for one week.

Re:...paving the way to pay-per-use...

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

If they can bill for it, they know you used it. There goes your privacy. If they can bill for it they can disable it. There goes your security.

Re:Ummm, profiles barely work now...

[SmileyBen]

Erm, don't worry about incompatibility with other versions, because everyone's going to fork out masses for ech device for new zippy compatible software!

Re:.Net copyright?

[slycer]

I'm suprised that they don't have a .mil site already.

After all - they do have the army , they received it as a bonus when they bought out Satan

Re:Ummm, profiles barely work now...

[alexhmit01]

Well, if you notice, I included semi-colons.

As in, I've had many problems when using a mixture of NT 3.51 and NT 4.0 machines, or now with a mixture of 4.5 and 2K machines. I've also had nightmares where Windows 95 and Windows 98 do NOT play nicely with the same profiles.

Same client, different version.

This is pretty funny

[gwalla]

According to this article in the San Francisco Chronicle, their innovation sounds highly dubious. Some examples:

• In addition to voice control -- a staple of Microsoft videos for almost a decade -- the new software would offer users new ways to control use of their personal information and a new ``type-in bar,'' a sort of natural- language command line where users could issue instructions to their machines. If the computer needed clarification or additional information, it would talk back, out loud, in a synthesized human voice.

  A command line. Wow. With a screen reader! Funny, a friend of mine (who happens to be blind) had something like this years ago...it's called using a DOS app with a screen reader.

• Another feature, called Smart Tags, would enable the PC to recognize specific types of information, such as dates and personal and company names, and give them appropriate special treatment.

  News flash: Microsoft invents metadata!

• .NET programs would also make it easier for users to combine different types of data, including video, into their documents -- another long-promised capability that Microsoft has now dubbed Universal Canvas.

  Anyone here remember Apple's OpenDoc? Remember how well it was received? Embeddable content like graphics files is okay, but who in hell needs to embed movies or sounds in their word processor documents? This will fall flat on its @$$.

Frankly, the only new part of this whole thing is the fact that they'll be cramming all of this into a few XML formats. Can you imagine the complexity required of the DTDs for this? Yikes!

---
Zardoz has spoken!

Re:This is pretty funny

[toriver]

Now that's progress.

No, that's Infocom and Rainbird text adventures. :-) Ten plus years ago.

Re:This is pretty funny

[Defiler]

You're going to be eating these words five years from now.. Would you like to preorder a bottle of Microsoft Ketchup(tm) with that?:

"Who in hell needs to embed movies or sounds in their word processor documents?"

Re:This is pretty funny

[gwalla]

Not a command line, a natural language command line. So instead of typing "cd files" you can type "take me to where I saved my spreadsheet".

I'd be seriously shocked if it was actually natural language rather than a natural-language-ish approximation (like AppleScript). True natural language processing has eluded AI researchers for a long time.

Specifically, I'd like to see how well it handles anaphora like "the", "that", "it", "such" etc. Anaphora are any words that refer to words previously used. Try here for a pretty good explanation (and ignore the stuff at the end about creating a system of anaphora, that's geared towards constructed-language design hobbyists).

---
Zardoz has spoken!

Re:This is pretty funny

[shandrew]

Anyone here remember Apple's OpenDoc? Remember how well it was received? Embeddable content like graphics files is okay, but who in hell needs to embed movies or sounds in their word processor documents?

For what it's worth, most applications which can handle graphics (word processors, etc) on the Mac can also handle embedded Quicktime content (sounds and video and animation).

They've been able to do this almost as long as Quicktime has been around. Search for "Wild Magic", a hack that some Apple person wrote. It was probably around *1993*.

Re:This is pretty funny

[Shadarr]

Not a command line, a natural language command line. So instead of typing "cd files" you can type "take me to where I saved my spreadsheet". And then the intelligent app will say "which spreadsheet" and eventually you may actually get taken to the directory. Now that's progress.

Re:This is pretty funny

[gwalla]

most applications which can handle graphics (word processors, etc) on the Mac can also handle embedded Quicktime content (sounds and video and animation).

Of course, just because something is possible doesn't make it a good idea.

Is there any advantage to embedding stuff like animation and sound in a word processor file? Does it make something more convenient? It seems to me that word processor documents are meant to be printed out--and until someone invents a printer that can produce diffraction gratings, or staple flipbooks to a page, dead trees will never be an effective medium for animation. Likewise sound files.

---
Zardoz has spoken!

A bunch of vague vaporous marketing bullshit

[Moderation abuser]

There's nothing to see people. move along. move along.

Put it all together

[baka_boy]

It would seem that MS finally figured out how to 'beat' open source. Their solution: become the world's largest ASP, offering the industry-standard MS Office and other business products online to any customer with a decent-speed Internet connection, modern web browser, and deep pockets. They can adopt all the 'open standards,' even make the damn stuff cross-platform compatible, and still hold the reigns, because they don't have to show their server code to anyone so long as it's not distributed.

Assuming they lose their Supreme Court appeal, watch for the Windows group to become sacrifical goats. Since Windows is far from the best server solution in most cases, and IE can be ported wherever they want to put it, the applications group will literally have no use for it once everything is piped through a browser.

Plus, they can sidestep piracy, users reluctant to upgrade, and most of the other things that customers do to sap their revenue machine. I've got to hand it to whoever dreamed up their long-term strategy; it's sharp. But then, I guess MS has always survived more on its aggressive management style than its technology.

Personally, I'm not sure how I feel about this overall. Maybe if their record were better on privacy and security issues, the thought of being able to keep their code off my hard drive would actually outweigh the perpetual upgrade serfdom that businesses are going to face.

Now I understand why MS put so much time and money into making IE5 for the Mac a decent browser -- it's a proof-of-concept for their ability to outlive Windows. Hats off to the world's most effective monopoly; they've once again found a way to effectively distort the fabric of reality with their black-hole like mass.

Re:...paving the way to pay-per-use...

[B-B]

Yeah, but we have been playing the bandwith v. sw/file bloat for a long time.

I am on a cable modem right now. The download for Netscape 6.0 took just under 5 mins. Two years ago, I was on ISDN. The doenload of NS 4 took, you guessed it, about 5-8 mins. When I started using the net, I could grab files, and download avg howtos in, you guessed it, 5 mins.

By the time we all have Broadband Home Net connections on avg of 5 Mb/sec, the docs and apps we need will requite 5x that much to run like it would locally.

Besides, the bottleneck in no longer the net. Things like bus speed, internet gateway (at cable co headend/dsl headend) are the bottlenecks. These things take real time to change, and require massive spending.

Remember, many calbe modem CMTS (cable modem termination systems) commect to a T1 internet gateway. Sheesh. My cable modem alone had the same bandwith. Combine with up to 16 on a Cable local loop, and the other CMTS, all going through that skinny pipe.

Tom

WOW!!

[Shotgun]

First they created symbolic links, and now the give us X. Any day now, they'll get around to working on stability.

A potential plus

[phil reed]

If they switch the format for the Office suite to XML, that means we'd have a fighting chance to develop compatible applications, even without MS publishing the schema. That would be nice.


...phil

If you think XML is bad....

[Tenement]

try Electronic Data Interchange (EDI)

Tenement
--

Bill Gates is the devil!

[Nexeslad]

"I'll give you access to all the infomation in the world. All I ask for in return is that you give me all your information, and uh that soul of yours."

open source .NET

[bmurphy96]

Well, we all know that Microsoft will:

a. pull this off (throw enough money at it and you can do anything)
b. screw it up big time for the first 5+ versions
c. never properly secure it

But, all that said, it is a good idea. And yes, Unix has done this type of thing for years, but is anyone interested in putting together a open source project based on XML very similar in nature to what M$ is attempting to do?? Something that anyone on any platform with a decent browser could access?? I think it would be great if we could beat M$ to the punch and produce something faster and better and more secure..although it would be that by default!! I personnally don't think I would store EVERYTHING on a central server like this, but there are MANY things I would love to be able to get my hands on from anywhere. I HATE not having a central location for bookmarks for one thing!! Any takers?? Anyone interested in doing it??

I don't know if this is appropriate "slashdot" ettiquete to put my email address, but you can reach me at bmurphy@maximumhost.net if you are interested.

Keith Murphy

Well here's a problem

[cheesethegreat]

Okay, I'll admit that this is great, for every windows user. But what about the Linux users who'd like to be able to use a system like this? I think that Microsoft is probably trying to solidify it's presence before the breakup.

Hah!

[jwhyche]

I would rather have my butt shaved by a blind man with a bolo knife!

OK, So what would have been better....

[TuRRIcaNEd]

....for the average user?

It's like saying that unix has been doing COM all along, I mean, what is "|" for?

Do you really see COM as the best possible solution overall? (i.e. not just restricted to Microsoft)

The whole point of Unices + the GNU tools was that, while they were generally by hackers, for hackers, everything was comparitively shareable. There is no better way of making information understandable to the human eye than to transfer it as straight text. Writing a graphical overlay that allows a user to do these things (A GUI for the UNIX pipeline)would take a while, but it's do-able, and before you say 'Well, why don't you code it?', I'd love to, but I'm polishing off a degree at the moment. UN*X operates just as is. It is a tool, and it is not perfect, but at least anyone can have a go at it, and the offer is almost explicit that you can learn more at any given time.

My pet peeve with Microsoft is that everything they have done has been rendered too obscure for the user to see what the computer is doing, effectively to tell the user that they shouldn't look beyond the UI, that it's too much for them (Unless you'd care to pay £2500 for the development tools aand API documentation). Windows is not a major technological advancement over any OS, because you cannot have true flexibility in an OS while lorded over by a restrictive front end. I for one believe that MS software is the primary reason people don't understand the fundamentals of computers, simply because it isn't in their business interests to let users know what their program is doing. COM is nice, I'm not arguing that, but I'd rather write an intuitive interface over a UN*X pipeline than have to use a kludged component system that is kludged to a bloated GUI, that is kludged to one of either two fundamental disk interface formats, or to put it more bluntly, repeatedly polishing a turd.

I accept that the staff of MS are by and large very intelligent people, however, the boardroom philosophy borders on evil, and it is the boardroom philosophy that always wins out with Microsoft. It's bad enough that we'll soon have to pay over the odds for the aforementioned kludged operating system to run on hardware which is price-fixed by Intel and Rambus, all the while buying apps that require yet more resources. Our supply of money is not limitless, and power computing will become a preserve of the very wealthy again. In your heart of hearts, do you really want that? Because I sure as hell don't.

Re:It's Been Done ...

[Chelloveck]

Uh, and you think Microsoft employees can't log into any system and have full access to their own email etc?

I really have to wonder... Do they? Email, possibly, but given the PC-centric setup of every other office I've ever seen running Microsoft's products I really have to wonder whether or not someone in Redmond can sit down and be productive on any system on campus.

My current employer is a Microsoft shop. Most of us who have used more than one machine ended up turning off roaming profiles because they got completely hosed. (Try logging in at a desktop and a laptop simultaneously and watch that profile go south!) Even when you can login to another machine, what good does it do you if all your tools are on the local harddrive on your primary machine? If all the machines in the building are set up with the same set of apps, no problem. Otherwise you're in deep doo-doo. Okay, MS-Office is probably installed everywhere. You can access your email and Word docs. What about anything else? Can I sit down at an ME's desk and compile code? Can an ME sit down at my desk and fire up AutoCAD? No way!

Contrast this to a previous employer which was a Sun shop. Everything was server-centric just an X-Terminal on your desk. It does display only, with all your data stored in a central location. All your data. Not to mention all your apps. Even in the pre-X-Terminal days when we were using Sun3s all the data and major apps were stored centrally. The local machine just held the standard SunOS image, and every machine was set up identically. You really could login on any machine in the building and do everything you could do at your own desk.

And, somehow, the UI was faster even piping the display across the network than Windows is locally. Go figure.

Boldly Go Where All Have Gone Before

[Wylfing]

REDMOND, WASHINGTON -- June 23, 2000 Microsoft today announced a new product offering called the Network Computer (NC). "Due to customer demand, we've developed a new way of computing that will enrich the end-user experience" said a senior Microsoft spokesman. "It involves constellations of computers, devices and services that work together over the network, where NCs connect to Windows 2000 Servers to deliver the engaging content that users demand. No one has ever been able to build something like this before." General strategy: let other people develop a good idea, FUD against it until it fails, wait a little while, and come out with precisely the same idea as your own invention. Completely different take: Don't put it past Micros~1 to make something like this fail on purpose. They probably haven't spend one dime on this kind of thing so far--it's all vapor. If they throw around some really bad implementations of an old Unix capability, they can later point to it and say "look, this doesn't really work."

Wylfing

"What would be the use of immortality to a person who cannot use well a half hour?"

I got it !

[mirko]

Simple...
With .net your computer is the network.
Might be some anti-sun hype.
Do you remember their "we're the dot in .com"
and "The network is the computer" ?

--

Re:Microbull

[PantalonesVaqueros]

For the Web developer, the tools to build, test and deploy engaging Web sites are hopelessly inadequate. Many focus more on building attractive rather than useful Web sites.

Doesn't Microsoft's current website work this way... (i.e. hopelessly inadequate). Could they have a worse method of accessing their "Knowledge Base" aka "how to work around our bugs"?).

You derserve it....

[mat catastrophe]

Anyone who uses this system, period, deserves it. They deserve the headaches this will have, the threat of script kiddies getting their files and basically all other kinds of havoc.

Re:You derserve it....

[Old Wolf]

Anyone who uses internet, period, deserves it. They deserve the headaches they[sic] will have, the threat of script kiddies getting their files,[sic] and basically all other kinds of havoc.

Yeah, good one man.

Re:So, MS is getting a trademark on ".net"

[dkh]

Will be fun to see all the new law suits on domain names now. Will MS now try to claim the whole .net TLD?

Re:XML == Completely OverHyped

[chickenbird]

People are advocating XML is this great new technology for universal data exchange. Well, it's NOT... no more than a standard text file is. Both parties still have to agree and understand the format and structure of the data before it becomes useful, so that's definitely not a progression over any existing technology.

Of course it is not necessarily a technology for universal data exchange (although, HTML, despite its rather horrible and semantically-devoid implementation of SGML/XML, has to some extent shown that it is), but rather a technology for domain-specific data exchange. There there are many domains in which people HAVE already agreed on a common set of descriptive elements for their given domain. Take DTDs such as the TEI, APA, DocBook, or any of the military's MIL/IETM DTDs, not to mention the DTDs used by the IRS, Sun Microsystems, the DOE, the Library of Congress, and the ATA, etc. etc. etc. Having worked with SGML (XML is merely SGML with a little less clutter) for more than ten years now, I can tell you that it is very useful.

Carole_Mah@brown.edu
Senior Programmer/Analyst
Brown University Scholarly Technology Group

I can't type my own email

[Meenky]

My Email in posted story is wrong, sorry to who ever is getting the mail that was generated by this. Send anything you want to to j_powell69@hotmail.com. I Was using it before M$ took it over, now it sucks but at least its constant, more than i can say for my other emails, can't keep any of them for my than 6 months, but hey maybe microsoft's .NET will fix that for me! ::sarcasm mode::

Re:If even Microsoft can get it, why can't you?

[wdavies]

The M in all of these stands for "markup". As in document markup - not knowledge representation.

That is primarily where it is overblown, that it will provide application/domain interoperability.

Advantages:

(i) Yes, it provides a common syntax for delimiting data, albeit verbosely.
(ii) There are common tools for browsing and editting.

Disadvantages:

(i) Highly verbose (perhaps the advantage as well)
(ii) Highly prone to abuse (eg XML with not DTDs anyone?) and to divergence.
(iii) Differences attribute and tagged values is highly unclear.

But mainly it is not a panacea at all for information integration, which is where it is mainly being hyped.

As for Microsoft using it. Well, unless they provide synatic definitions and semantic mappings they might as well have used a proprietary syntax.

Winton

Quote in Salon article

[Joe Rumsey]

The Salon article on the subject contains this quote from Steve Ballmer, "We will run this with the same kind of openness that we've run Windows."

Run! Run for your lives!

Re:Karma Vice Cop sez:

[Karma Pimp]

Yo! 5-0 in da hood! Clear da bitches out!

. . .

Hey, what be happenin' copper? Pimpin'? Me? Nah, ya'll got me confused wit some othah brothah. I just be bustin' a chill here on da curb.

What's say you 'n me go hits da bar fo' a few? Me an da girls gots us a little envelope I think you be likin', know what I'm sayin'?

Yo, it's cool. Just take it. An' if you ever needin' a little break from da beat you just stops in at Siggy's place. No charge.

Now we be cool, right?

You wanna be a karma whore?
Fine, but don't forget...

Re:So, MS is getting a trademark on ".net"

[kevin lyda]

"just like they switched to appending the year to the name of the software after Windows 95 came out."

you mean like algol-60 and fortran-77?

Terribly Inefficient

[kbob]

Isn't this terribly inefficient? The only personal document Microsoft really wants control of is your savings account -- storing all these other documents is just a waste of disk space. What are they thinking?

K<bob>

Its not about piracy

[Rei]

Unfortunatly, I do not think this is about piracy. The way microsoft wants it, piracy of microsoft products will be impossible

If you've followed microsoft for the past several years, they've been constantly, consistantly, pushing the "rented" software concept. Their goal is that you don't own any software, you just pay microsoft a monthly fee for the right to use their products or have it cut off. This is a first, and somewhat well disguised step in this direction - everyone reliant on microsoft servers.

I hope you realize what everyone "renting" software from microsoft would do to the world. You want to talk control... your computer would become nothing if not connected to microsoft. No files, no programs, no operating system. Linux? Hardly - every program, to be widely accepted, must reside on microsoft's program servers. You want to talk about hard to reverse engineer, you don't even have a copy of the programs to work with - if you hack up your OS to allow such program-hacking, your changes will be lost the next time you boot. This is microsoft's dream - a system which can't really be torn down easily, all centralized and reliant on microsoft. Convoluted programs, protocols, and legal recourse for reverse engineering - the microsoft anticompetitive dream.

Even moreso is the legal aspect. It seems clear that the government will eventually wisen up to shrink-wrapped licenses that have unreasonable purchase restrictions. However, there is little legislation, and almost no constitutional support, for limiting service restrictions. They can cut your support for any reason they deem proper, and you have little legal recourse.

I think its apparent to all of us here, that not having *any* rights over our software is bad. But this is what microsoft wants - and this is a major step in that direction.

.. not to mention it would significantly increase microsoft's revenue...

Rage against the dying of the light. Fight plans like this to the end.

- Rei

So, MS is getting a trademark on ".net"

[Happy Monkey]

Hmmm.
___

Re:So, MS is getting a trademark on ".net"

[EricEldred]

MS might be able to buy "windows.net" as I can't find it listed.

But "office.net" and "bcentral.net" are already taken. Unless Microsoft has the power to throw them out on the basis of trademark infringement.

Perhaps somebody could help out Microsoft and pay for "windows.net" for them?

Will Microsoft now start claiming they are the "NET" in "dotNET" (Sun having already taken the DOT)?

I don't think I was the only one who advised Microsoft to change their strategy away from the PC and toward the Internet, long before 1995. But they threw us out then. Now the idea has been INVENTED HERE and is okay for Microsoft to market. That's the only news I can find in this hype.

Re:So, MS is getting a trademark on ".net"

[LiTHium[ion]]

or autobytel.com

Re:So, MS is getting a trademark on ".net"

[generic-man]

I see the 'whatever.com' businesses to be analogous to the '1-800-whatever' businesses of recent memory. There are even a couple that have made it into the digital age, like 1-800-FLOWERS.com. Very silly indeed. But knowing the way the New Economy works, sooner or later they'll all change their names to word-like forms that cost $100,000 to think of. (1-800-FLOWERS: Florion? Florant? Viaflor? Geometaflor?)

Re:So, MS is getting a trademark on ".net"

[generic-man]

Relax. They're just getting a trademark on _software_ bearing the name ".net". For example: the next version of Office will be Office.net, Visual Studio will be Visual Studio.net, and Windows will be Windows.net.

Stupid as this sounds, just wait until competitors start naming all their software products with names ending in .net, just like they switched to appending the year to the name of the software after Windows 95 came out.

Re:unplugged?

[BrerBear]

> Can they then unplug from the network and continue to work on their notebook, and can they also do it through their cellphone, a handheld, their TV? Didn't think so.

Ummmm... wrong! If you are trying to claim that accessing personal information like email and documents from any device can't be done with existing technology, you're full of it. There are scores of companies out there right now that allow you to access your information from devices and handhelds (I work for one!). And yes, I mean anyone's device, not just any device. Unplugging isn't a problem, either, that's what local caching and synchronization are for. Haven't you ever used a Palm?

If you think this .Net initiative is something new, you've drunk the MS marketing Kool-Aid. Which is just what they're counting on.

.Net copyright?

[ChrisGB]

Let me guess - 2 months down the line after MS have been running this thing, they'll turn round and claim copyright or trademark rights on '.Net'?

Just imagine... http://andover.net(TM)(C)Microsoft2000..... shudder

Re:.Net copyright?

[BilldaCat]

They're just setting up to take over .COM and .ORG, then they are going to get revenge and go after .GOV. :)

www.microsoft.mil .. now THAT'S scary.

Re:.Net copyright?

[scorbett]

I feel sorry for all the owners of existing *.net domains who will now be assumed to be associated with this new Micros~1 product/service.

I just watched Steve Ballmer's media interview, and he discussed all of the upcoming Micros~1 .NET services, like MS Office .NET, Visual Studio .NET, and MSN .NET. The strange part about that is, it seems that msoffice.net, ms-office.net, visualstudio.net, and visual-studio.net are all taken. I imagine Micros~1 is going to be filing quite a few lawsuits in the next few months.

--

Re:.Net copyright?

[Coz]

Not to any other country...

"Komrades, the Microsoft Missile Defense System is about to become operational!"

"Fine, fine... schedule our attack for the beta test period for version 3.1...."

Re:.net is not the NC

[Squeeze Truck]

Whatever. In that case, they've re-implemented either

-That stupid little "Briefcase" feature that everyone deletes
-Palm HotSync
-CVS

or:

X10
NUMA
JINI
NDS

In any case, you're right. All of this has been done before.

Re:Hmmm

[The Mayor]

I hate to come to microsoft's defense on this one...but, they've dont as much for XML as any company with the possible exception of IBM. Sun keeps trying to fsck with microsoft's attempts to further XML standards, such as XSL (it took 2 extra years to get this standard approved, almost solely the result of Sun--besides, if you remember, MS invented XSL). You can knock MS for lack of security...for an unstable OS...for making applications that fill to consume 120% of your resources...but please don't knock them for screwing up the XML standards process. Really, the only company on par with them wrt XML is IBM...

Re:XML == Completely OverHyped

[kevin lyda]

yes, html has been of use but if you'll notice one of those uses has not been standardisation or compatability.

w/o trying to i've written a web form that won't work with ie and will work with netscape (though netscape on windows sometimes fails). urgh.

fantastic

[waterhouse]

considering microsoft can't even keep web email secure, i'm not thrilled about the concept of them having more of anyone's data.

Re:fantastic

[lunatik17]

Not inflammatory, true. How many times has Hotmail's security been compromised? How many times was it because of their stupidity? More times than I can even remember.

Here's my DeCSS mirror. Where's yours?

Re:.net is not the NC

[Shadowlion]

For example, in the proposed .net world, you automatically download a copy (or a cached subset, depending upon your device) of your work from the "cloud" and automatically synchronize your changes later. This permits disconnected operation, e.g. working from a disconnected notebook or low-bandwidth wireless handheld.

As someone else said, "Feh.

Aside from gratuitous use of the word "automated," there is nothing new about this approach. This morning when I left for work, I FTP'd some files from my home machine to my laptop. When I get home, I will FTP my updated files back. If I really wanted to, I could simply set up an automated task that periodically FTPs the files back to my main system.

It sounds to me like this is simply some sort of technology that makes a shared client/server folder on a computer. When the computer connects, any changed data between the two refreshes in the background. Any changes on the shared folder get updated on the server, up until the time the computer/folder is disconnected.

So what do you need to mimic this?

* File-sharing technology. On UNIX, take your pick.
* Monitor on the server and the client (monitors a particular folder for changes, manages connections between computers)

A little bit of NFS, a little bit of user-space daemon, and voila! UNIX.Net.

What this community bashes now, in three years they will eagerly clone -- see OLE2 vs Bonobo.

OLE2? Or is it OLE? Or ActiveX? Or COM? Or COM+? Which is the acronym this month?

At any rate, your idea is flawed. Microsoft didn't invent component-based architecture, and the merits of such an approach were well-known before Microsoft adopted thier technology-acronym-of-the-day. It's a bit disingenuous to claim that every single architectural approach offered in UNIX is only offered because Microsoft did it first. Perhaps if you could offer some evidence to prove that UNIX wouldn't have done it if Microsoft hadn't done it, I would have an easier time believing you.

Re:XML == Completely OverHyped

[MrJay]

Maybe the data format of the future will be GZipped XML files, as compression works fairly well on text.

The GNOME desktop environment uses XML files for various things already, and these files are indeed GZIPped due to their large size.

XML was meant to fill a void that existed in the markup language world. When processing HTML, nothing can be said about it's content. HTML only describes the formatting of the content.

XML was designed (for example) to allow intelligent searching of documents, among other things. Given the availability of parsers in almost any language (including Java of course) this does make universal data exchange a possibility.

But us veterans know something will fuck it up.

What about the hardware side of things?

[Platinum Dragon]

Microsoft's spent a lot of time talking about "XML" and "Windows everywhere" and all kinds of software buzzwords. I don't suppose they've considered the hardware and pipes necessary to bring this "dream(?)" about.

For one thing: ASP's will require application server farms and numerous routers and firewalls that are up 24/7, with 99.99999999% uptime on each, that can handle near-100% CPU loads and lots of HD accessing without fail. Lots of RAID. Lots of 64-node machines. Expensive stuff. It seems like a bit much, but if MS expects businesses and some home users to rely on someone else's machines in another state, or even country, there'd better be some very hefty, extremely reliable hardware, running on some bloody robust OSes. I don't think we have anything yet that's up to the task; not Linux, not *BSD, not even Windows. Hell, most commerical Unices may not even be up to the task.

Then again, Win9x has trained people to believe that it's normal for computers to die at least once a week, so maybe occasional service outages won't be noticed; the blame will just shift from the home OS to the ASP.

As well...how about the connections needed? Keep in mind, the ASPs (or Microsoft itself; whoever will host these massive monster machines) will require huge pipes; they'd better be ready to take the equivalent of a Slashdotting every minute of every business day, sometimes worse. This, on top of normal network/Internet traffic. The backbone providers will make a mint, assuming their techs don't go insane from trying to handle the load. I doubt home users will accept seeing Word run at a snail's pace if their machine is an Athlon or Pentium III because they're still living off a 56k modem. MS will seriously have to put their apps on a diet if they expect info to transfer efficiently over networks. Perhaps developing cellphone and webpad thin clients will drum this into their heads, though I have little reason to believe that will happen.

What MS is demanding will require massive infrastructre improvements, and fast. Invest in chipmakers, RAM producers, and backbone companies now; they're about to become very rich along with MS.

For the record...I will use Linux even more now; I like having my data on my hard drive in my posession, where if something fails I know I can fix it myself instead of waiting for the ASP to do it. I also know I can encrypt my data if I want - what guarantees of security will MS promise for data stored elsewhere?

What I'd rather see MS pushing is a more distributed system, where "Windows everywhere" means your own devices can access each other from anywhere. I'd like something where I can still have my massive home machine to do my work and store my data, but have that machine easily accessible by my laptop, webpad, or even cell phone from anywhere else - and only by my devices through some form of cryptography and identity checking. I think that would be an even better form of distributed computing and information sharing, because the user still would have most of the control over their data and programs. It would also eliminate the subscription model problem; I absolutely refuse to drop $10 a month plus whatever so I can keep working on my essays and keep my budget up to date. I already feel sorry for university students that get suckered into this; they'll pay through the nose somehow, either directly to an ASP or to their university so the instituion can pay the charges for this scehme. That's being more tied to a software provider (either MS or an ASP) than I'd like to be.

Re:"Most Ambitious" and "Bet the Company"

[ballestra]

We need to convince people of the importance of reducing our dependence on M$, just like reducing our dependence on foreign oil.

The way people seem to be concerned about Microsoft like it's a public entity serving humanity is ridiculous. I recently read some stuff on the normally libertarian Cato.org site, saying essentially that since MS "invented" windows so they should be able to leverage it however they want. If competitors don't like the "monopoly" they should just stop being lazy and "invent" their own OS.

Even Rush Limbaugh is defending M$, saying the government is trying to punish success, and that the DOJ should show some concern for how attacking M$ will "hurt the economy".

Sometimes I just can't believe the extent to which people have bought-in to Bill Gates' viewpoint. It's mindshare over matter.

Re:.net is not the NC

[Shadowlion]

If you wanted to show your ignorance, you just succeeded.

Strong words coming from somebody either too lazy or too scared to log in and identify themselves.

And you still didn't answer the question in any meaningful way. If I'm so ignorant, why don't you correct me?

It's all clear now

[raptor21]

Microsoft: "We are the NET int the .NET"

can you say sidetracking investors?

[Numeric]

I don't think m$ will be buying their innovations anytime soon with their ".net" idea. They are trying to direct more attentions to creating more business than losing it. Simple.

Re:XML == Completely OverHyped

[Sloppy]

XML is basically a big ol' delimited text file. The only things separating it from a 30-year old text file is the fact that it's hierarchical and the fact that there are parsers that let you navigate the tree structure easily.

Well, that's what makes it so good. Most systems (Unix excepted) haven't even moved up to the 30-year-old text file "technology" yet. Have you seen Windows? I would say that, at least as far as Microsoft is concerned, this really is a major step forward.

---

Re:Microbull

[TummyX]

Hmz, I think its kinda harsh and very arrogant to call tools like Dreamweaver "inadequate". It focusses on nothing and leaves the user completly open to do -anything- with the site that he or she wants to do. Either write code from the bottom up and look at the results or drag and drop and watch the code being added. Its your choice. So may I conclude here that this man is saying that total freedom is inadequate? Since Dreamweaver is a well known product I think its quite hard to miss it.


No, what they are talking about is building functional websites. Not about stupid basic 4 year old HTML.

Imagine buying something from amazon, choosing to have the coupon amazon gives you from the webbrowser into Money. The point is at the moment the web is (for the most part) one way, and context free. With XML, everything will have meaning.


So basicly Microsoft finally managed to grasp the idea behind Unix? I mean; c'mon.. I've been doing this kind of stuff for quite some years now. Allthough I have to admit; in a total different environment. Instead of clicking I'm entering "cd /net.priv/dave/updates" to access the computer of my friend Dave in the US and check out the latest updates he has

If you think that's the same thing, you're totally deluded.

Gee, who needs computers, I have an abacus.

It's like saying that unix has been doing COM all along, I mean, what is "|" for?

Or saying that C++ is crap cause C can do it all.

It's not just the concept, it's being able to do it PROPERLY and in a way that allows the MOST people to be able to use it. This is NOT something is good at. In fact Unix is absolutly CRAP at it.

Re:blatant attempt to stay whole

[Karmageddon]

Apart from the fact that your post just repeated what I said as if you just figured it out (gosh, you're a genius) it is fortunately the case that MS did this after the court ruled. It's kind of like trying to leave the country after a court rules you need to go to jail. This would have no effect on the ruling but might serve to convince more judges that Microsoft has no intention of modifying its behavior.

But, the jig's up for Microsoft anyway. The average Joe doesn't even trust them anymore, forget about corporate partners. This is going to be a repeat of eWorld and Microsoft's previous attempts at online communities.

If ya can't beat 'em...

[Just Some Guy]

Remember what MS said when Sun advocated the same thing? "That's ridiculous! The computer is the comoputer, and the network is the network!"

I guess that desparation leads to open minds. What will Redmond "invent" next? NIS?

Re:XML == Completely OverHyped

[ethereal]

Everybody here likes text files, the point is that XML is overhyped because most marketing/PHB types don't realize that XML is a text file with some very high-level grammar and syntax rules. There's no magic XML wand that will organize your data, you still have to design a good DTD, get others to adopt it, etc. XML is great, text is great, but neither are silver bullets.

Re:...paving the way to pay-per-use...

[Leghorn]

...at $10 per windows reboot, only Bill Gates could AFFORD to run it!

Re:XML == Completely OverHyped

[John_Booty]

People are advocating XML is this great new technology for universal data exchange. Well, it's NOT... no more than a standard text file is.

Perhaps I should have phrased that statement slightly differently. I'm not saying that XML isn't good, I'm saying it's not real new and it's not real revolutionary. XML can be great in the same way a text file can be great, only slightly better due to its hierarchical structure. But to call it revolutionary (as that marketers at Microsoft and elsewhere do) is a joke.

Do I sound bitter? It's because I'm working on a project right now that involves heavy use of XML FOR NO GOOD REASON. It's screwing the project up because it's totally misused... some pointy-haired manager thought that XML was a cool buzzword so he insisted that XML be the basic for this application. Has this ever happened to you? :-)

How ingenious

[FascDot Killed My Pr]

"...integrates with windows...so any computer in the world can be used as "your" computer."

Any computer running Windows, anyway. Oh and you have to install our software.

Prediction #1: We will never hear about this again.
Prediction #2 (somewhat related to #1): ASP's are never going to take off in a big way, at least not for "desktop" software. With the possible exception of email service (for small businesses), ASP's are going to be the 2001 equivalent of the 1996-7 "push technology".
--

Re:How ingenious

[Squeeze Truck]

Yes, licensing is always a concern. Speaking as someone who has dealt with Microsoft in a business setting for night 5 years however, I must say I have never seen MS do anything that would even remotely undercut:

a) their yearly license-fee harvest, or
b) the desktop (viz: windows).

.net, Thin clients, Terminal Servers, Java, whatever. They make interesting month-to-month copy for ZD, but those "ground floor" adopters always get burned in the end when MS realizes it no longer has to pay lip service to them to appear "with it". Savvy managers know this, and wont want to touch it with a 10-meter cattle prod until most of their business partners are already using it. Read: it simply will never get off the ground, even if it is Microsoft.

Re:How ingenious

[Honclfibr]

Pull your head out of your desktop for a second there, and take a look at the real world. By that I mean, look at the business world. Case in point: the company I work for pays rougly $40,000 dollars PER LICENSE for software to compile and simulate Verilog code. We own 4 licenses and are purchasing 4 more, and I still run out of licenses sometimes. Would we have a use for an ASP with a large block of licenses, where we either A) Pay only for the time that we spend actually using the simulator, or B) Buy "timeshare" block during the day where we can use the VCS simulator? I believe we would. We have a relatively fast connection to the internet, and the Verilog simulator we use is nearly all text input and output anyway (input 100k of Verilog code, output waveform analysis and gate-level code), would run just fine on a company 300 miles away over a T1. Hell, I'm on an NT box right now and I use an X-Server to get to the simulator anyway(Not for long of course, there's an Ultra/10 sitting on my floor waiting for the MIS guys to set it up...because, of course, I'm not allowed to touch it yet...bah) I believe there's a huge market for this, and the only thing stopping me from going out and doing this myself is the lack of several million dollars in startup cash to buy the initial licenses and servers. I guarantee you though, there will be millions made (and probably are already) by those who get together the venture capital and start "renting out" high-dollar licensed software like that used in simulation, or the large expensive product databases used by small businesses like glass cutters (just the example that pops into my head because I used to work for a auto/home glass installer). I agree with you that the microsoft .net idea is a useless design. But ASP's, while they may never catch on in the home-user market, are gonna be big big big in the commercial and industrial sector. I only wish I could get in on the ground floor - but of course, I'm only 20, still a student. I'll have to see what the hot technology will be when I graduate in two years...

Re:How ingenious

[Squeeze Truck]

Woops.@@That should be "nigh" as in "nigh-invincible".

Re:How ingenious

[TheGratefulNet]

asp's are taking off.

I personally know of a company that is building a hardware device (networking gear) that will assist in speeding up ASP access. if their research is right, there is a big market for ASP use.

perhaps not a replacement for word processing, but big business might just love having all the benefits of app. use with none of the admin or support costs.

--

Re:How ingenious

[antic]

Will this service of theirs always be dependent on an external server, or will businesses run secure, internal servers? So, the outside lines to the Web can go down, but as long as the LAN is up, employees can still write their docs?

Remember that corporate/intranet demand is what *really* drives Microsoft. That's why Outlook, etc is, by default, insecure - because it's intended for use primarily behind big company firewalls where they need to send tonnes of HTML mail reports, and auto-running PowerPoint presentations, and all that junk. That's also why Internet Explorer doesn't abide by standards 100% - because it's coded in a way to facilitate functions demanded by the huge Microsoft customers (the companies).

I'm unaware of the exact licensing system they're proposing, but you'd think that shifting to an application rental system would stabilise their revenue stream somewhat. There are ways that it can work for the customers - which I'm sure they'll give a go.

And I don't think it's an entirely bad idea. I use a few applications from their Office suite (Outlook, Word, Access), and I only use Word occasionally. I'd prefer to pay-per-use, rather than have to fork out for every update, or buy all of Office, etc.

However, that said, for home users, being ever-reliant on a Net connection at this time is not going to work wonderfully. Perhaps in a couple of years when they release this thing, Net connections will be more reliable and affordable (especially here in Australia).

Re:How ingenious

[timster]

I don't know about you, but all the modern offices I'VE seen basically SHUT DOWN when the net connection goes dead *anyway*. Plus the connect is up almost 100% of the time.

Re:How ingenious

[babykong]

If the next version of Microsoft office is in the ASP model, then the majority of Microsoft users will, like sheep to the slaughter, follow microsoft office right into that model. If the company stays together, then the operating system will be tightly woven into mocrosoft.net. If the company is split, then microsoft.net, the applications, and the browser/user interface are all on one side. They talk about the next generation internet. This is embrace and extend applied to the internet, they want to own it, and this plan allows for that even if they get broken up. And you know what? Most of your clueless neighbors and your pointy haired bosses are going to go right along with it. Microsoft has evolved passed the law. Resistance, however, is not yet useless. Don't be assimilated.

Re:How ingenious

[Wah]

ASPs are a useful service, they'll be around for a bit, but I seriously doubt that anyone wants to run a word proc that is dependant on a Net connection for functionality. M$ is flying off into their own little world with these NGWS or whatever, more power to 'em (they'll go farther away)
--

Re:How ingenious

[Darguz]

> ASP's are never going to take off in a big way,

Well, never is a long time. Certainly with the current state of the Internet, ASPs are not widely practical. But it's an idea that occurred to me well before the term ASP started floating around (too bad I didn't patent it :). I think eventually we will get to a model where most data and applications are centralized, with more generic terminals/clients. Think Star Trek PADDs, for example.


--

so what?

[sgt101]

If you don't want to pay then use something that is free... it isn't as if there are no free alternatives, and if there isn't a free alterenative: write one.

no OSS visio? nope try Dia

[nmarshall]

you can find Dia at...

http://www.lysator.liu.se/~alla/dia/

nmarshall
#include "standard_disclaimer.h"
R.U. SIRIUS: THE ONLY POSSIBLE RESPONSE

Re:It's Been Done ...

[TummyX]

Uh, and you think Microsoft employees can't log into any system and have full access to their own email etc?

duh. it's obvious this is different.

Re:Software leasing

[oojah]

And if they do do this, they'll be changing the Office file formats quite a lot most probably!

If a competing product existed that had a satisfactory amount of features and compatibility with the MSOffice file formats but *wasn't* leased in this way then this would be a Bad Thing for MS.

More benefits

[harmonica]

• an XML file can be validated against its DTD
• if people share the same DTD, they can easily synchronize their data
• if people use different DTD's for the same kind of data (e.g. an address book), it should be easy to convert the data between both DTD's using a simple query language or something like XSL

And I also don't think that speed /should/ be an issue because XML is supposed be used for middle-ware -- there still is a database that gets a query and returns the matching items (you don't really want to put 100 GB of your enterprise's information into a text file ;-)). But for interchange, XML beats the rest. One of the reasons Oracle pushes Java and XML, they want to be everywhere, and both 'buzzword technologies' are designed to be cross-platform.

Can't resist the imagery...

[zarcher]

Microsoft is casting their .NET, ensaring and entangling users in the new millenium.

A beautiful idea

[Huusker]

Gates repeatedly alluded to "per-minute charges" for the required broadband access. If this .net thing flies and people actually use it, then MS is set to suck a LOT of money from hapless consumers.

Yep. Microsoft has been fascinated for years with the idea of a per-use licensing scheme, but they couldn't find a way to make it work technically. Any PC can be hacked.

But what if part of the app is sitting on an server in Redmond? The new Office 2003 will have the GUI and some local editing logic on the PC. Global stuff like find-and-replace get executed on the Redmond server.

This is an incredibly beautiful idea (from Microsoft's standpoint). It provides total control as well as absolute protection from piracy. They don't even need to worry about backward compatibility. Just put up the new version while updating the Word documents in Redmond to the new format.

The only danger is somebody creating their own server farm that is compatible with the PC front-end (basically replacing the Redmond side). That can easily be delt with by using strong asymmetric encryption (a la Authenticode) so the front-end demands the server present the proper Microsoft-signed digital certificate. And if the front-end is hacked around this, there are always the lawyers to fall back on.

This is really beautiful. They can finesse the whole anti-trust case. They can cheerfully publish the Win32 API and the OS source code for us lamers while they shove all of the new technology onto untouchable servers.

Re:A beautiful idea

[wnissen]

C'mon moderators, this guy is on to something! Imagine if MS was really the one to pull off the thin client network computer. They wouldn't even have to sell software, just charge per minute on the server end. Very little opportunity for piracy, and depending on how the computer is constructed, no opportunity for other software. We all think the NetPliance is neat because we can run linux on it, but what if every PC was a NetPliance? I'm fairly convinced that where MS leads, the desktop follows. I think MS has the clout to lead the market in the direction of thin clients running only MS provided software.

If MS announces that its next desktop operating system will be for thin clients, if I'm an OEM I get working on that kind of system. I certainly don't pay attention to the whiny linux user who wants a real PC. The only thing that I see standing in the way is the reluctance of desktop PC manufacturers to produce PCs that are any lower end than they already are.

Walt

Re:you've gotta give it to MS...

[cybercuzco]

"Im sorry if you heard Disneyland, but I distinctly said military school"

-H. Simpson

its the same principle with MS

Sun calls this a SunRay 1

[Ignant]

Insert a "Smart Card" into any of thier cool thin clients, and your up. Stateless as well.

Re:Sun calls this a SunRay 1

[catseye_95051]

Well noit exactly...

A sun-ray is run ona remote protocol that virtualizes the screen and input devices. As such, running programs on a Sun Ray is jsut like beign on the host.

There is n oway that MS can get the kind of bandwidth-performance needed for this kind of true remoting through throwing around ascii XMl packets.

Same market line but Sun has technology to back it up.

Re:It's Been Done ...

[TummyX]

Gee, what ever happened to roaming profiles, Windows Terminal Services and the like? Not only is WTS faster than X, it's much easier to setup and use. My university's ITS department has a nice roaming profile setup that works fine. Students don't have their own PCs on campus you know.

Translation...

[SOMMS]

QUOTE: 'This is a product that integrates with windows using XML to store all of your information on Microsoft servers, so any computer in the world can be used as "your" computer.'

TRANSLATION: This is a product that only integrates with windows using BUZZWORD to keep all of your DATA on Microsoft "servers", so any hacker in the world can use your "computer".

What kind of security?

[hardburn]

Do you really want the company who brought you Outlook to give accsess to your computer anywhere in the world? I bet if somebody reverse enginered this thing that they would find a slightly-modified version of Back Orfice 2000.

------

check out Dia for visio-nature

[jslag]

there is nothing like Visio in the OSS world

check out Dia - part of Gnome office

I'm only a casual user, but it works fine for churning out those entity relationship diagrams that my friendly business manager likes so much.

----------------

Re:check out Dia for visio-nature

[jallen02]

OH Cut it. :-) Come on Dia is no where *NEAR* Visio.

I have been using Visio for about two weeks of heavy use and through random clicking today I ended up at the Gnome-Office site from gnome.org and I checked out Dia, even went so far as to download it and compile it on my FreeBSD machine and it *PALES* in comparison to Visio. To do the work I have been doing today I would *GLADLY* pay what I did for visio than struggle through the work in Dia

It is fairly new as a program and Visio just has it beaten hands down. Maybe when it grows into a real application and not just a working prototype that the UI will probably change 90 times and throw off any hardcore usage for some time. Yes im slamming it.. quick run to your moderate into oblivian buttons.

Its simple I can do work in Visio that I just *CANT* do in Dia. Period. Does the cost of visio mean anything if I have to get this work done? Lets see im making about 20 dollars an hour.. Hmmn, if stuffs taking me twice as long using inferior products just go run buy Visio and save tons of cash. Hmmn anyways Dia is just not that great just yet.

Jeremy

Re:check out Dia for visio-nature

[nchip]

OH Cut it. :-) Come on Dia is no where *NEAR* Visio. -cut- To do the work I have been doing today I would *GLADLY* pay what I did for visio than struggle through the work in Dia
Well, then why not fix dia instead of whining? the source is out there, dude. And if you arent a coder why not pay someone to do it. In long term it will be cheaper for you than a monthly bill to Redmond...

Re:check out Dia for visio-nature

[jallen02]

I am a coder, I could fix Dia, but why not pay for something that does the same thing. I couldnt pay someone to fix it quicker than I could to pay for VISIO.

Re:check out Dia for visio-nature

[nchip]

Well, if you pay now for visio, you only get the current version. If pay for coding dia, you will also get all versions coming. And by making dia better, other people will start using and developing it, And with more mass it start gaining features faster. think about it as a long term investment. (I know that it is a unknown word in IT industry...).

Re:XML == Completely OverHyped

[SuperKendall]

Another advantage of XML that other posts have not mentioned is that you can have structural rules for an XML file in a DTD document, so you can tell if the XML file you have is a valid instance of the type of document you thought you had.

When XML schemas come into wide use things will be even better as you can do some type validation.

Hmmm

[SnapperHead]

Yesterday, they release c "crap" to screaw up Java. Today, they are going to break xml and a number of other systems.

M$ - "Where do you want to go ..... TODAY!"

Re:XML is <just>tags</just>

[bellings]

I don't know why the XML angle is being pushed so much; this could all be done with any structured data format, be it text or binary.

Of course it could be -- XML is just a Data Definition Language. The "industry" could have just as easily decided on any other DDL -- an extended BNF grammer, or SGML, or something based on Lisp S-Expressions. But we haven't standardized on any of those other DDL's -- we've pretty much decided, instead, to use XML.

So, if you have a need for a Data Definition Language to describe an extensible, heirarchical, and portable lexical structure for your data, then you should consider XML. Alternatively, if you have an unethical marketing department, and you want to pretend to have an extensible, portable, well-defined lexical structure for your data, then you should definately use XML. If you don't have either of those things, then perhaps you should just keep doing what you're doing...

Re:XML == Completely OverHyped

[bing]

Has this ever happened to you?

Now that you mention it...we just went Gold today on a product at my workplace which mis-uses XML to obtain buzzword compliance!

<bitter>
And the worst part is, the developer who created the obfuscated, uncommented mess which I was thrust into the responsibility of making work (and doing it right was not an option--I asked) disavowed all responsibility for it as soon as it compiled and instead went on to do other "cool" things. </bitter>

Moving off-topic here...
My favorite proposed mis-use of XML these days is what Sun is advocating for JSP/EJB: Using XML to create "Custom Actions" to effectively act as a middleware layer. What it instead does is create a set of XML wrappers around beans so that instead of having a clean, efficient method of accessing them, you have a whole bunch of extra parsing, indirection, and code execution. Just the thing for a high-transactional volume system. Sounds like somone at Sun is still pissed at OMG for dissing RMI to me.

-bing

I don't even speak for all of the voices in my head, much less my employer.

Circular

[Kirch]

This has a circular nature to it. Doesn't this remind you of the big mainframe days. Oh BTW, anyone with a broadband connection that is stable and run by idiots (I know, a contraction!) can do this very thing with Windows NT 4.0 Server Terminal Edition or Win2k Server Terminal Edition and sell services to local business offices. All you need is a good server with enough RAM, a little /. savvy (which we all have :) ( ---- Karma whoring!) and you're in business! Kirch

Re:There's some sense in this...

[Meenky]

Remember your university account is on a UNIX machine not microshaft. UNIX has far better security and tools for doing something like this. Anytime software has to be dumbed down for the general public its going to cause problems, that is why this is a bad idea, more user friendly == easier cracking (generally).

Therapy is expensive. Bubble wrap is cheap. You choose.

Microsoft bought .net ?

[bee]

Gee, I knew that Microsoft was taking over the world, and I figured they'd try to get their own top-level domain eventually, but I never anticipated that they'd make a grab for one of the existing ones...

---

Re:Microsoft bought .net ?

[beagle]

Don't you remember - it's "embrace, extend, extinguish." :) We've heard this all before! :)

Just this time, it's the Internet and not just another company (a la Netscape).

M$ = <pissed>grasping at straws</pissed>

[Jon_E]

Sounds like a vaporware response to the recent iplanet Portal and Wireless server products .. Their .net site seems *really* slim on the product offerings

<laugh>While they claim to have invented XML</laugh> .. their white paper seems to be a description of their future bastardization plans. "..The loosely coupled XML-based Microsoft .NET programming model introduces the concept of creating XML-based Web Services.." - methinks i've seen too many other loosely coupled M$ standard "interpretations" (Unicode, Dynamic DNS, Java)

Seems more to me that M$ will do for the internet what NetBios did for networking .. create bad substandards that generate a lot of noise, confusion, and traffic - and then hopefully everybody forgets about them .. (if we all ignore them long enough will they ever go away?)

.je
"microsoft.net .. now I can watch my machine helplessly die from anywhere in the world .."

Re:Software leasing

[jejones]

Hmmm...that's a good point. Having everyone's data in a centralized location would mean that they not only could upgrade the app to use an incompatible format, but could make sure everyone's data were upgraded too, to make absolutely sure that anyone attempting to write a program interoperable with a MS app is screwed. Of course, that would be advertised as a feature.

Ummm, profiles barely work now...

[alexhmit01]

Local profiles become corrupted all the time. Roaming profiles get screwy between different versions (NT 3.51 -> 4.0 -> 5.0/2K; Windows 95 - 98). Over a 10 Megabit connection, they are slow to setup if that machine wasn't the last one you used. Over a DSL connection (a client is using DSLs and a private network to run a cheap Wan...), it is unbearably slow, and thats a dedicated DSL for that computer.

This sounds like a horrible idea. If it is "because we can" that's pretty cool, just for the neato factor (although possible now with LMHOSTS files), but as a real approach to computing... right... Unless they are planning to REALLY strip down what goes in a profile (a good idea) and try to make the concept work... but even then, the point seems dubious.

Re:Ummm, profiles barely work now...

[LiveFreeOrDie]

Roaming profiles get screwy between different versions (NT 3.51 -> 4.0 -> 5.0/2K; Windows 95 - 98).

Roaming profiles aren't meant to be compatable between diferent clients. In fact, the profle files for NT and Win9x aren't even the same file (NTUSER.DAT for NT, USER.DAT for 9x.

although possible now with LMHOSTS files

I don't see what WINS resolution has to do with the topic.

Pay per use?? Ack!

[WS6]

Hey, please tell me that someone else out there thinks pay-per-use is a terrible idea. Am I the only one who wants to actually own my tools? I can see the use for pay-per-use for trying things out, but why on earth would I want to have to pay a subscription fee for software that I use all the time?? It's just another way to squeeze more money out of the consumer.

The car analogy may be heavily used, but I think it fits. If Nissan tried to charge me a per-year fee for my long-since-paid-for car, I'd be furious. (it's bad enough to pay for maintenance...) Yet MS is thinking about doing something similar with their software. *sigh*.. I guess I'll be hanging on to my copy of Win98 for a long time, and dual-booting with a new release of Linux...

Re:Pay per use?? Ack!

[WS6]

You said:

> I don't own a car, and only use one a few times a year.

But I already said:

> I can see the use for pay-per-use for trying things out, but why on earth would I want to have to pay a subscription fee for software that I use all the time??

It's not that I'm totally against the idea of being able to subscribe to software, I don't like the idea of having to subscribe so there's no maximum cost... it just bleeds you of money indefinitely

And the car analogy? I guess it works for me more b/c most of the cars I've driven have been >8 years old. Even leased cars eventually give you the option to buy. Having to keep paying a monthly charge to the manufacturer for the lifetime of the car - which is really long with good maintenance - seems really dumb to me. Subscription = you never own. Good if you want to use something for a short period of time. Crappy if you hang on to things for a bit longer... I know, I know, but I still have a lot of old software, bundled or otherwise, in case I want to use it again (Even though I have a copy of Quake III, I dusted off Wolfenstein 3D a while back. Still fun after all these years)

Re:XML is <just>tags</just>

[ballestra]

I was wrong about DTD's. You're right that they only specify the structure. I was thinking of "the promise" including RDF, which is a something the W3C is working on as a document type for semantic data. The last chapter of Tim Berners-Lee's Weaving the Web is about his vision for how this would enable what I described.

I don't know about the technical details of how it will work, but the intent is that the combination of XML documents, XML schemas (which I believe are the equivalent of DTD's, written in XML rather than SGML), and RDF documents will allow the automation of semantic relationship matching without having a central hierarchy or data repository.

As far as the AI required, I'm only slightly informed. I never took an AI class, but my college roomate did. He explained to me how in his class they would feed a logic structure and data into an ai program, and they it could answer questions like true/false or list the set of data that fits this logic criteria. There's nothing very impressive about that, but I don't think it's a stretch for a similar program to make cost/benefit comparisons when you feed it pages which may contain cost and benefit data.

Wouldn't it be pretty simple to build a data structure to relate things like prices. First you need to list all the different words people use to mean price, like {cost, price, payment, value}. Ok, so the list is incomplete, so if a search engine could find a similar list with a set like {payment, price, remittance, fee, charge}, then th program can assume the combined set is all talking about the same thing. So it will look at (price:number) and (fee:number) in the same way. Then you do the same for all the various names and symbols for currency, so the program can get conversion multipliers off a known financial database or web site, and then convert all the currency values to make a comparison. Take it further...

I just don't think it's hollywood sci-fi for an AI program to sort (car costs $1000) below (automobile price 20000 DM), or to sort out (mileage: 100k miles) from (odometer reads 220km). It won't be perfect, but it would be more useful than current search engines which only match keywords.

XML == Completely OverHyped

[John_Booty]

This is a product that integrates with windows using XML to store all of your information on Microsoft servers, so any computer in the world can be used as "your" computer. "

I've been working with XML for about six months now. I would have to say it's one of the stupidest bizzword-fads I've ever seen

XML is basically a big ol' delimited text file. The only things separating it from a 30-year old text file is the fact that it's hierarchical and the fact that there are parsers that let you navigate the tree structure easily.

People are advocating XML is this great new technology for universal data exchange. Well, it's NOT... no more than a standard text file is. Both parties still have to agree and understand the format and structure of the data before it becomes useful, so that's definitely not a progression over any existing technology. Also, XML is not fast... nor was it designed to be.

Re:XML == Completely OverHyped

[wdavies]

Hear, hear, hear !!!

The only reason it has taken off is because people think "Gee, it looks like HTML". And when will people wake up to the fact that seeing <PRICE>20</PRICE> tells you little... :) The worst thing about XML is that there is no consistent data/object scheme, even though this should have been a breeze.

<PRICE UNITS="DOLLARS" VALUE="20.00"/>
<PRICE><DOLLARS>20</DOLLARS></PRICE>

and lots of other combos :) Assuming you can agree on what PRICE even is (eg includes Sales Tax etc).

I guess it is reasonable (and heavily verbose) to mark up with XML... but it really is kind of sad to see it being such a big hit, when much better thought out interoperability schemes get no press (such as KIF, KQML, FIPA).

All the effort in XML seems directed towards making it work better in the directions of querying/relatiting concepts.

XML is fine for CSS.... and maybe for making previously cryptic configuration files more editable. But think about MacOS X - Are the XML files really going to be any more easily understood than the old UNIX/X config files ?

Widget.window.x = 10
Widget.window.y = 10

versus

<WIDGET><WINDOW><X>10</X></WINDOW></WIDGET>

Nothing against XML, one just has to ask, what does it really buy me ?

Winton

Re:XML == Completely OverHyped

[TummyX]

XML is basically a big ol' delimited text file. The only things separating it from a 30-year old text file is the fact that it's hierarchical and the fact that there are parsers that let you navigate the tree structure easily.


C is basically a big ol' delimitated text file. The only things seperating it from a 60-year assembly program is the fact that it's expressive, easier to learn and there are compilers that let you write programs faster.

Re:XML == Completely OverHyped

[EvlG]

I agree. Have you looked at the spec for Ant (the new Java-based build tool from Jakarta project of Apache) or the Servlet 2.2 "web app" spec from Sun, or the Tomcat configuration spec from Jakarta/Apache/Sun? Those all use XML for the configuration files, and its a complicated mess.

Its sort of powerful, yes, and it does keep you from having to do the dirty work of actually parsing the file yourself, but it sure makes server administration cumbersome and error prone. Configuring Apache is just so simple: load the httpd.conf, type in a directive or 2, and you're done. With Tomcat, I have to load the XML file and type all the silly tags, which basically means I have to type almost twice as much text to get the same configuration stuff. And then theres the fact that all the tags make the actual configuration parameters hard to read...it's a mess. Ant is the same way. Having it all XML based is sort of a downer, because otherwise, it's a very cool concept and implementation.

XML is probably most useful in communicating between heterogenous services, since it does provide a way to ensure that the data you get makes sense to you. Things like MathML and the like are going to be huge wins. But using XML for ALL text-centric data is just misguided I think. It has significant drawbacks (not the least of which is the speed and size issues.) I think there's going to be a shakeout soon, and something better will come along as a result of some programmer scratching this itch...

Re:XML == Completely OverHyped

[0xdeadbeef]

It would probably be 10 times the size and twice as cryptic.

But it would be a cinch to write a graphical configuration tool for it. Oh wow, and you could use XSLT like it uses M4 now.

Re:XML == Completely OverHyped

[dubl-u]

XML is basically a big ol' delimited text file. The only things separating it from a 30-year old text file is the fact that it's hierarchical and the fact that there are parsers that let you navigate the tree structure easily.

The fact that it's parseable with a generic parser makes all the difference in the world.

I don't know how many times I've had to implement parsers for weird-ass, half-baked, undocumented file formats apparently written by chimpanzees. (For example, RTF.) And then once I've figured out the features, I have to run about a zillion tests to make sure I'm emulating the right bugs, too. And of course, once somebody gets the idea to change the file format, then I need to do it all over again.

With XML, this problem goes away. I can focus on the data, not the representation. That's a big win!

A good comparision is programming a garbage-collected language versus one where you have to do memory management yourself. Sure, I can write C code that is more hardware-efficient than the same stuff written in Perl (or Java). But writing the Perl is faster (and the Java's more maintainable) because I can focus on higher-level issues than pointer arithmetic. I'm generally willing to burn CPU cycles to free up my cycles. That's what computers are for.

XML gives the same boost to data exchange between loosely coupled systems. It surely uses more disk space and processing time. But so what? Thanks to Moore's law, hardware doubles in capacity every 18 months. Programmers, sadly, don't. Use this fact to your advantage!

Re:XML == Completely OverHyped

[Valdrax]

But think about MacOS X - Are the XML files really going to be any more easily understood than the old UNIX/X config files ?

Hell, yes. Have you seen the browsing interface. It allows you to hierarchically browse through the data. If you still want to use 'vi' to do all you configuration, then it's not going to be any easier, but if you want to use the tools provided, it will make life simpler by letting you more easily find what is relevant to what you are wanting to change.

Re:XML == Completely OverHyped

[TummyX]

No, C is a big old COMPILED text file that's transformed into something utterly different than a text file when you run it. Of *course* all code starts out as a text file, how else would a human write it, aside from coding in machine language?


Actually C is a programming language, that can be compiled - transformed into a more useful format for computers.

XML is a markup language that can be parsed - transformed into a more useful format for developers.

Re:XML == Completely OverHyped

[bellings]

XML (and its Big Cousin, SGML) is not even a standard file format, any more than ASCII is a standard file format. But it's a very useful part of your toolbox if you want define a standard file format.

If you plan to create a new open, non-proprietary, portable, and extensible file format, seriously consider basing it on XML -- it's been designed to help you do exactly this, and it does it quite successfully. There's an every increasing number of tools to manipulate XML-based file formats, every time you blink another developer or end user learns how to use one of those tools, and its much easier to get both management and outside developers to buy into any new XML-based file format. Not suprisingly, HTML has helped immensely in this respect -- there probably isn't a web developer alive who isn't aware of the extensibility and interoperability of the HTML standard, and it's the 800-pound gorilla example of what to do (and not do) when you design and implement a new XML (or SGML) based file format.

But XML based file formats are not intrinsically open, non-proprietary, portable, or extensible. If you're careful, smart, and lucky, you can create exactly such a format. Sadly, though, if you're carful, smart, and devious, you can create exactyl the opposite -- a closed, proprietary, non-portable, and brittle file format. If your marketing department is evil, you can probably even convince many, many people that your new proprietary, closed, brittle, non-portable file format isn't any of those things, simple by hyping out those the three little letters: "X-M-L".

XML is a great new technology for universal file exchange, in exactly the same way that ASCII or Morse Code where great new technologies for universal file exchange. It's a reasonable, useful standard, where no reasonable, useful standard existed before, and its a standard with a great deal of industry buy-in. But, of course, it will not bring about universal file exchange by itself, and of course you should be very leery of anyone that claims that it will. XML does not intrinsically create openness and interoperability, but its extremely useful technology bringing us down that path.

Re:XML == Completely OverHyped

[anonymous loser]

Both parties still have to agree and understand the format and structure of the data before it becomes useful, so that's definitely not a progression over any existing technology.

Isn't that what schema are for? Or perhaps you didn't get to that in your vast XML programming experience yet.

Re:XML == Completely OverHyped

[Andrew Cady]

Actually C is a programming language, that can be compiled - transformed into a more useful format for computers.

XML is a markup language that can be parsed - transformed into a more useful format for developers.

Except that XML is *not* a markup language, it's a language for *writing* markup languages (a meta-markup language). I think that was the user's point. XML is not a common data format any more than ASCII is; it is the DTD's for XML document types (and likewise, the ISO C standard for ASCII .c files) that must provide the universal data standards. XML itself does not do this.

Re:XML == Completely OverHyped

[modok]

The worst thing about XML is that there is no consistent data/object scheme

I am not sure I understand this argument...The fact that you have a choice as to whether something is an attribute or a tag makes the language inconsistent? Is this any different than any OO language where programmers have a choice to store attributes as a primitive or promote them to a first class citizen by making it a class?

I suspect, design patterns (like Gang of Four) exist that allow people to properly structure the schema of their data for the task at hand. I will look at your other data interchange formats to try and understand your point better (KIF, ...).

Nothing against XML, one just has to ask, what does it really buy me ?

The example that I always see is the mythical unix system where all of the /etc files were XML. Now whenever I had to edit the file I could see if I made a syntax error before kill HUP'ing. As a hacker, I could go from app to app and see the same API for manipulating the config file. As a fresh project developer I could get this free (as in time to develop) parser to use. As a third party vendor (or another free project), I could write some fancy GUI configuration tool without having to port parsing routines.

I do not think XML is the greatest thing since sliced bread, but I do see alot of work eliminated by having such a standard.

Also, I think XML can be much simpler to read than ad hoc formats in many cases (especially when I first encounter the new format). In some cases XML is not as clear (typically because it is not as concise). Very few things are the best at everything though.

-Tom

Re:XML == Completely OverHyped

[Augusto]

Even if you can read the file, your program must be able to understand what it's reading and act upon it !!!

It doesn't do me any good to read your schema, if I don't know that "FOO" means.

I'm sorry, but it is overhyped. I use it, to configure servlets, but by God, it just made my configuration files about 10x bigger and more difficult to edit !!!

Re:XML == Completely OverHyped

[John_Booty]

Thank you! You stated my point better than I did. :-)

Re:XML == Completely OverHyped

[Auxon]

Good grief ... you've been working with XML for six months? And you think "XML is basically a big ol' delimited text file. The only things separating it from a 30-year old text file is the fact that it's hierarchical and the fact that there are parsers that let you navigate the tree structure easily"? I don't believe you HAVE been working with XML for six months and think that. XML allows the context to be marked up along with data. Yes, XML is text. That's good. But the power of XML is in the contextual information that goes with the data. SGML and it's baby XML allow data exchange that we've never been able to do before, or if there were ways, it was proprietary, or too complex to use effectively. Yes, XML is overhyped for what it can do TODAY. But in a couple of years, that will not be HYPE. There are standard XML dialects available. People will use them, so they don't have to make their own. Schemas will become standardized. Right now, they are not, but that means that the stupid people who are wasting time and money going against other people's DTDs will not be able to exchange XML effectively without writing XSLTs to convert data between companies and people. XML is extensible, which means in the future when a schema is out-dated, you will be able to extend it, without breaking the old XML. XSLT will be able, in the future, to automatically convert XML between schemas - all you'll have to do is map the elements and attributes to the new/other schema. It will be EASY to convert between to different schemas. Even between languages. Say you have in XML, Bob Smith which tags the DTD defines, and you want to talk to some French XML-using program that stores contacts: Bob Smith All you need is to run an XSLT (XSL-Transformation) from the English to French tags, using a simple visual editor that links the tags. You could also combine tags, like and into one like Bob Smith for other schemas and programs that use XML for different uses. Once you establish the transformation, you don't have to do it again for that data source. That means time is saved massively. So even if there isn't full agreement on the way to mark up data, it will still be a huge leap for data transfer. Not only that, but XPath and related specs describe ways to transfer data, access it from any point and element type, and other things that are FAR beyond what we are able to do today without massive coding time, and even then, the program that does the parsing is only good for the data source you mapped it to, because there is no semantic tags and context to determine what that data MEANS. Even if a human has to look at the tag names to know what the data is supposed to mean, we have still saved time. But because of XML related technologies, most of this can be automatic. You can get a list of all elements, attributes, CDATA, processing instructions, displayed any way you like, to determine what to do, and if the schemas are the same, you don't even have to do that. Microsoft plans on making standard schemas. That's what they are going to do, and yay for that, because we need 'em. But most of the standard schemas and DTDs will be made in B2B. The big companies will define schemas that smaller companies will use to be able to be suppliers, partners, distributers, etc.... As long as the schemas are good, and encompass the transactions that take place, it doesn't matter who makes them. The smaller companies will be able to extend schemas or map to their own specific schemas easily, in co-operation with their business partners, or alone. It doesn't matter. It's just whether it will be easy for them. I believe it will be, once the tools become available. It will be as easy as writing an email message, which also uses standard message formats, and which people argued wouldn't happen once upon a time.

Re:XML == Completely OverHyped

[Auxon]

And XML will allow you to write these web forms! Use XML/XSL for IE, and XML XSLT'd into pure standard HTML for Netscape ... you can do it using CGI scripts, ASP, Perl and lots of other ways, and you only have to make ONE XML document. The scripts check which browser is being used, and automatically outputs it as required. It's easy as pie.

Re:XML == Completely OverHyped

[Alex Belits]

Isn't that what schema are for?

No. Semantics of the data still remain in the code that processes it, everything else is a minor convenicnce -- the more complex the data usage is, the less noticeable is the convenience.

Re:XML == Completely OverHyped

[_xeno_]

I worked with XML a while ago, and I'd have to agree: it is completely overhyped. Yes, it is better than a plain-text or (horrors) a digital file. However, it is by no means a method of trading data universally (yet). Before it can do that, people need to decide on schemas which explain how to structure a given form of data. Yeah, like that'll happen any time soon.

More fun - it being extensible, even if (for example) all car companies decide on a given schema, it is still possible for one company to break compatibility by adding new data. Say that the default schema doesn't have a place to list number of cup holders (it's an example, ok? :)), so it adds a field called <CUPHOLDERS> . And they create a special car browser to display the number of cupholders in their cars - well, this won't work with the offical standard, now... all this meta data being put off into nowhere...

Actually, what I was working on was trying to come up with a solution for that, involving RDF files. The theory was people could encode computer-readable examples of what the data meant and then dynamically create pages which would allow you to search through something. Unfortunately, I don't think a solution was ever reached.

Also, from the XML spec, "Terseness is of minimal importance." These XML files can be HUGE. Maybe the data format of the future will be GZipped XML files, as compression works fairly well on text. But until there are universally agreed upon schemas, XML will remain just a method of creating a hierarchical structure to represent data.

Re:XML == Completely OverHyped

[John_Booty]

C is basically a big ol' delimitated text file. The only things seperating it from a 60-year assembly program is the fact that it's expressive, easier to learn and there are compilers that let you write programs faster.

No, C is a big old COMPILED text file that's transformed into something utterly different than a text file when you run it. Of *course* all code starts out as a text file, how else would a human write it, aside from coding in machine language?

If you were to use that logic (C==text file), then UNIX is a big old text file, since it's written in C. Does that make sense? Not really.

XML is a big old text file, period.

Privacy, according to Ballmer

[The Fun Guy]

I heard the NPR story. Steve Ballmer (Little Big Brother) said, (rough quote): "People are very concerned about privacy on the internet. The best way to ensure complete privacy is to have all of your information, your credit cards, your birthday, your friend's phone numbers, whatever, in one centralized location that is completely secure, so you can set the restrictions on access to your data. This is exactly what we're proposing."

He seemed so ardent and sincere, it was like he didn't think anyone could possibly question the fox's motives in volunteering to guard the henhouse (for a modest fee, of course!). What a pompous, sanctimonious jerk! A quote from Bill G. (Big Big Brother) was something like, "We're poised to take over everyone's business transactions on the internet, and to make this a part of future versions of Windows." Is there anyone, anywhere who doesn't see this as blatant disregard for the antitrust ruling that was just handed down? Maybe they think that by the time it all goes through the appeals process, they'll own the world so the future ruling won't matter... do they think the courts are cut off from the daily news, and won't take this into consideration? Just the *proposal* of .NET should result in unfavorable rulings in the appeals, even if .NET doesn't make one dime.

The depth of their delusions of godhood is just staggering... we want what's best for you, now do it our way or we'll kill you. Talk about being divorced from reality!

Wasn't .net .....

[doctor_oktagon]

.... meant to mean "supplier of network infrastructure" i.e. ISPs and the like?
Another stoopid hijacking of names, which just leads to more confusion. *sigh*

Re:.net is not the NC

[Golias]

.net is different from network computers. I think it was Bob Muglia who said "this is not dumb clients and smart servers, this is smart clients and smart servers".

Thanks for the marketing spin.

Hmmm... let's see... OS on the box, apps and storage on the network. Sounds like the same old client-server model to me. Off-load a few of the OS preferences and you move a little closer to the "thin" client concept, but it's still SSDD.

What this community bashes now, in three years they will eagerly clone

s/'this community'/'Microsoft'/
s/three/six/

(see: all Apple developments of the last two decades)

Ahh... haven't flamed a MICROS~1 astroturfer in a while. Feels good.

It's Been Done ...

[090h]

Gee, Sun has been able to do this for years! Sun employees can log into any system in any office, and have full access to any of their information. Email, calendaring, files, etc. In fact, I do believe that it where the original name of "iPlanet" came from ...

Re:It's Been Done ...

[bellings]

Cool! I'm running Solaris x86 on my machine at home. If I walk into a random Sun office, how do I go about calling up my profile?

I'm running Redhat 6.1 at work. My boss is running Mandrake 7.1. How do I go about calling up my work profile every time I sit down at his machine to show him something?

How do I call up the profile from either machine on the Windows PC in the airport lounge when I travel?

I am not aware of any existing standard for transfering profiles and applications between machines -- not even between machines running the operating system. There are some pretty hacks that exist in closed windows, unixen, and linuxen clusters, but there's nothing that exists in any type of worldwide application.

It scares me if people think any of the existing technologies for doing this are adequate -- it is currently a major pain in the ass to sit down at an unfamiliar computer and to try to do any productive work. There are some obvious things that could make this much, much better. Smart people can probably find unobvious was to make this even better than that.

Re:It's Been Done ...

[Refrag]

I know that NFS is Network File System, but what is NIS?

At least Microsoft finally caught on to adding FS quotas to Windows 2000. Does it anyone know how well it works?

Refrag

Re:It's Been Done ...

[Refrag]

The coolest thing was being able to open the apps I wanted to open on login and arrange them however I wanted, and then save my workspace. Next time I login my mailtool and everything else load up exactly where I told them to. Damn Solaris was cool. Can you do that type of stuff under Linux?

And, applications don't steal focus from each other. Which happened about 5 times in WinNT while I was trying to write this!!!

Refrag

Re:It's Been Done ...

[bkocik]

NIS == Network Information Services. It's a bit like LDAP if you're familiar with that concept, though NIS (or at least it's predecessors, yppasswd, ypserv, ypbind and friends) was around before LDAP. It allows such things as keeping all user account information on one central server, as well as containing information about hosts and so forth.

Regards,

Re:It's Been Done ...

[gavinhall]

Posted by 11223:

NIS was YP. It's a method for having user information over the network. (On such a solaris box, type 'ypcat passwd' to see NIS's passwd table). Just set up a home dir on the network with that, and *boom* you're set!

Regarding below, session management is exactly what the doctor ordered. GNOME should do it, just save the session when you log out (you can set it up to do that automatically).

Re:It's Been Done ...

[Starselbrg]

First, I'm assuming you want to transfer profiles between roughly equivevalent (sp?) platforms; you aren't going to open up you're GNOME desktop without GNOME. I'm also assuming you already have an account; you can't do anything without an account. I'm also assuming you have a connection between the two; if you can't transmit data, how could you transmit a profile? If all of these requirements are met, then there is one really easy way to get your "profile" from one computer to the other:

ftp

Actually, if you can you should scp, you should always use scp. Nevertheless, if you want your GNOME profile, .gnome*, if you want KDE, .kde*, etc. You should also copy over your .xinitrc or .xsession (depending on what init level you use).

That's it.

Re:It's Been Done ...

[TummyX]

WTS IS faster than X.

I works great over a 19.2kbps connection. Normal X does not.

Most Unix guys I've talked to agree as well.

Re:It's Been Done ...

[bellings]

You seem to understand the problem exactly. As long as someone has taken the time and trouble to install exactly the same batch of software on both machines, and as all the configuration files generated by the sys-admin are compatible, and as long as someone has installed any of the network-centric login schemes, I can transfer a "profile" between machines fairly easily.

Who cares. I can do that with windows, too.

I seriously doubt the ".net" stuff is going to do anything to address any of the real difficulties with transfering profiles between machines -- Windows X and it's suite of applications are far too brittle to be truly "network centric", and repairing them would involve destroying one of Microsofts few trump cards -- backwards compatibility.

Re:It's Been Done ...

[Refrag]

That's what I thought it stood for, but I didn't want to presume too much. Thanks for the description.

Refrag

.net confusion

[acidrain]

And I was already wondering what the hell ".net" really ment. I'm also suprised that thier marketing goons didn't try ".com" as thier product. Embrace and extend boys. Embrace and extend....

Re:.net confusion

[doctor_oktagon]

I remember when Demon Internet actually changed their main site to "demon.net", and was suitably impressed at the time: it seemed like some order was being restored to the jungle that is DNS.
I realise now this was a complete waste of time, and even when we get .banc .shop .pr0n etc. nothing will change either!
I'm still holding out for .sukkas! which I expect will be transferred to Mr T ;-)

Re:Ummmmm....

[slycer]

Quick Quick!!
Someone register these domain names.
ms????????.net - ie msoffice.net.

Re:Software leasing (I love this)

[MagnusDredd]

Yeah, I love this. Check out this train of thought.

M$ wires network access into Windows, Office, and other M$ apps in such a way that these products communication with M$'s servers is involuntary (for the user).
M$ then builds into this network communication framework required registration number checking, and personal registration.
M$ puts in checks to make sure that all the software on on the machine is registered to users that match. Example: If Windows is registered to Big Bird, and Office is registered to Kermit TheFrog, then their servers report your machine for possible piracy.
M$ checks your registration number against all others already registered.
M$ then stops 'selling' Office, they start requiring a net connection and sell term (1, 2, or 5 year) licenses.
M$ checks your copy of office from time to time to make sure that your license is not expired and if it is then they send a kill signal to your copy of Office (Time Bombs and other such fun self-destructive software being made legal by DMCA), which then deletes a needed .dll or does something which disables it.

Now here is the part I love. This is where the fun begins.

Some Cracker buys a copy of Office does something to invalidate the license or anything to get M$ to send the kill signal to the copy of Office.
The machine is running a packet sniffer which logs everything. This file gets analyzed and reverse engineered.
Now the cracker writes an program that spoofs a Microsoft IP and sends 'Office self-destruct signals' to either random computers, network broadcast addresses, every IP in the network of a hated company, or just sends packets a la network scan method (192.168.0.1, 192.168.0.2, 192.168.0.3, etc).
Ten thousand script kiddies download this program and wreak havok. Leaving a mangled pile of corporate softawre in it's wake.

What does it mean?

[slickwillie]

1. It is a preemptive strike against DOJ. "Well, Jeez, we can't really break up the company NOW, can we?"

2. They want to cut software resellers and retailers out of their profits. No more M$ shrink-wrapped products (Yay!).

3. C# was just a smoke-screen. This is the real Java killer.

4. They saw that non-M$ ASPs might make alot of money using M$ software, so they want to put them out of business.

Re:XML is <just>tags</just>

[ethereal]

Shouldn't there be a ^M at the end? Also, all the quotes will be replaced with '?'

[grumbles] lousy cross-campus NT development environment...

XML is <just>tags</just>

[Sneakums]

Oooh, more XML.

People, XML is just a syntax. Unless the DTDs and schemas they use for .NET are fully documented, only Microsoft's own .NET-enabled products will be able to anything useful with the data.

I don't know why the XML angle is being pushed so much; this could all be done with any structured data format, be it text or binary.

--
"Where, where is the town? Now, it's nothing but flowers!"

Re:XML is <just>tags</just>

[mindstrm]

Yeah.. but a single xml tag around the whole config file and their own proprietary binary data inside means that they really can use any of the tactics they used to, and nothing changes at all.

They use the word because it makes them sound 'friendly'.

Re:XML is <just>tags</just>

[Sneakums]

Some random observations:

My comment regarding AI was aimed more at the program being able to parse previously unknown data formats (even if they do use XML syntax) to extract the required information. Doing the actual comparisons, etc., would not be beyond us even today, I think, assuming that the program was fed the data is a well-defined format.

An XML schema is not the equivalent of an SGML DTD. XML is simply SGML with restrictions on tag minimization (<em/foo/ versus <em>foo</em>), case sensitivity and some other stuff I forget. XML and SGML DTDs are pretty much alike. XML Schemas are indeed marked-up using an XML DTD.

Currency conversion is rife with special cases. A case in point is converting between currencies in the Euro zone. You don't. What you must do is convert from currency A to Euros, and then from Euro's to currency B.

--
"Where, where is the town? Now, it's nothing but flowers!"

Re:XML is <just>tags</just>

[Matts]

People are missing the point about XML.

Yes its just a syntax. But its an accessible syntax.

What does this mean? It means developer freedom. It means that even if MS decides that they're going to customise SOAP and make their own proprietary SOAP based format (which they've almost done already with their enveloping format), there's not a damn thing they can do to stop me using Perl's XML::Parser to create an MSSOAP service or client. And it won't be hard like sniffing network packets to try and reverse engineer samba. I'll just look at the structure and bam! Instant reverse engineering.

Why should this matter? Because there are still a lot of Win boxes out there, and if my Unix skills allow me to interoperate with those boxes then all the better.

And XML is slow. Big deal - this is MS talking about integrating it, not Linus. So we get our nice zippy Linux boxes talking away to slow, bogged down in XML parsing, Windows boxes. Sounds pretty good to me actually!

I think MS are way off the mark here, for what its worth. XML is a great interchange format (slashdot.xml is much better than the old ultramode text format, for example), and its pretty darn useful for doing web and other documentation work (content/design separation and all that), but as a low level network service or IIOP replacement? No thanks, Bill.

Re:XML is <just>tags</just>

[ballestra]

I think the promise of XML is that there will some day be more intelligent programs that can read the "field descriptions", meta-data, or whatever you want to call it, from the DTD. It's a formal way to structure identifiers for data.

I agree that as it's used today (for data exchange, I'm not talking about XHTML and the more graphical applications) it's no better than an agreed-upon text or binary format. What XML would allow, if people used it properly, is for future programs to make sense of data without having an agreed-upon format. So, even if there are five or ten or a thousand different formats for "I've got something for sale, any takers?" intelligent agents can decipher all of them and give you meaningful search results to questions like, "show me the five (cheapest/closest-match/newest/closest-in-location ) items for sale that meet my criteria"

I'll rejoice when/if this happens, but in the mean time I'll have to search ebay, yahoo auctions, aol auctions, amazon auctions, the local classifies, etc, and manually compare them. (Sigh...)

Re:XML is <just>tags</just>

[Sneakums]

In Europe, reverse-engineering is legal where it is required for interoperability and compatibility. We don't all live in the US, you know.

--
"Where, where is the town? Now, it's nothing but flowers!"

Re:XML is <just>tags</just>

[Sneakums]

All good points. My point is that XML is not special or unique. It's like Java; it has its uses.

--
"Where, where is the town? Now, it's nothing but flowers!"

Re:XML is <just>tags</just>

[jamesm]

Because then MS is seen as embracing and promoting an open standard. Aren't they nice?

Re:There's some sense in this...

[sv0f]

I've had a university account for the last decade, and I use it for exaclty this purpose.

the andrew system at carnegie mellon worked this way back in the late 1980s. everyone had an account, which entitled you to some hard drive space. you could sit at any andrew terminal, log in, and it was as if you were at your own graphical work station. your email and newsgroups and everything would come up just as you indicated in your preferences. the windowing system was nice, an early competitor to X. the andrew file system, which was distributed, drove the whole thing -- i think it's still in use, and at least mentioned in tanenbaum's book on networks. i can't remember the flavor of unix that was used, but i think it was berkeley-ish and not, at the time anyway, mach. also, i think the workstations has local disks to which your files were cached, so that there wasn't a huge performance hit for all disk access.

it was my first exposure to unix, workstations, networks, etc., and i realize only in retrospect how advanced it all was.

i don't know what to make of the .NET deal. it does sound like the old mainframe/terminal, but if it leans more towards what the andrew system was, then it will offer windows users a better way (modulo security issues and general microsoft bugginess, of course).

I think its a good idea

[michael.creasy]

The demos looked really cool. I think it is a great idea for a small tablet to be able to recognise my handwriting and work on it in the background. I like the idea of my mobile phone and pda and desktop all acting together.
This is the way things are going to go, I five years we'll wonder how we survived when all our devices didn't have a permanent connection and could synchronise data automatically wherever you are.
Yes it means storing some data in a public place, but we used to do that when we all used terminals to access a singal machine, so what's the difference ? Before long we started having our own machines and before long we will run our own central servers from home, not everyone will, but some of us, you can bet on that.

Re:I think its a good idea

[Sneakums]

1. The tablet is nothing to do with .NET per se; it was a bit of flash to cover up the fact very little of what has been announced is actually available right now.
2. Demos are designed to be cool; it is essential to their nature. Remember the demo of NT 3.5 that was actually pre-recorded and mimed to by the presenter? Demos are not a reflection of reality in many cases.

--
"Where, where is the town? Now, it's nothing but flowers!"

Re:I think its a good idea

[pac4854]

> so what's the difference ? The difference is that now it'll be done by convicted felons. Sorta makes you feel warm and fuzzy all over....

Re:Security will be an issue

[styopa]

New MS .net, allowing crackers easier access to millions of computers through one site.

By using our MS Inova$ion (copyright pending) we have designed a way for on cracker who has entered our site to gain access to millions of machines world wide to do their bidding.

Are you a person who creates virsus but is tired of having to wait for a virus to propogate through normal channels? Through proper insertion into MS .net a virus can do multi-billion dollar damage in a matter of seconds.

Do you want to DDoS a site, or multiple sites, but waiting for trojan horses to work is starting to frustrate you? With MS .net you can access millions of machines though just one, so you don't have to wait.

Order MS .net now.

Ugg. If this product was release by a company that I could trust it would be a different story. Unfortunately MS has betrayed any trust that I might of had for them time and time again.

The New Microsoft Trademark

[Alien54]

The New Microsoft Trademark(TM) is of course going to be .NET

So sometime in the near future everyone using a .net TLD is going to get a letter from the Microsoft Lawyers(TM) to cease and desist the infringement of Microsoft Trademarks(TM)

Can this be another plan by Microsoft to take over the Internet?

God, it sounds like something out of Pinky and the Brain.

If even Microsoft can get it, why can't you?

[dwalsh]

Who moderated that up?

XML is a simplified version of SGML.

SGML was used to create HTML. Is HTML useless?

XML is being used for similar roles (e.g. WML in WAP).

People are jumping on the bandwagon, and people like you are finding that it doesn't bring benfits for the particular thing they are doing. Here's the lowdown - you shouldn't have been using it to begin with. That's your fault, not XMLs.

XML isn't suitable for every purpose. For instance, when dealing information typically described in a binary format, XML may not be the best choice. Some people use it anyway...

XML is a modern version of ideas going back decades. It is particularly suitable for document type information. Examples of this are HTML, Docbook, NITF etc. The further you get from these types of information, the less applicable XML is.

XML has been hyped. Yes, some of it is overblown, but XML is going to be important. People have started backlashes against other movements such as Hypertext, OO, Java etc. Older programmers could probably add more to the list e.g. relational databases, them new fangled "assemblers", ASCII... :-)

wtf?

[gopherguts]

Right. Given Hotmail's past history of having security holes big enough to fly a 747 through and LookOut! --er, I mean Outlook's history of same, does Bill REALLY think I'm gonna trust something he built with my 3 gig pr0n collection?

ASPs will be big

[Moderation abuser]

But no-one in their right mind would ever try to extend the windows paradigm to an Application Service Provider. There's just no way that can work.

Where ASPs will be big:

Oracle Financials, SAP, web mail.

If you can get a web interface on to it then maybe.

Re:Microbull

[nahtanoj]

They really seem to like the word "constellation" don't they? I'm sorry, but calling someone a star does not give them a heavenly body, and calling this network a "constellation" will not make it stellar. Before MS, there was a lot individuality on the 'net. Now MS is trying to reverse what they have done in part to try and make a few bucks and kill a few competitors. I personally believe that the ambivalence that they have sown will kill them in this respect. I think that people will not take this up, and MS will lose. Of course, they will probably start bundling it, and with most people as dumb as they are....

shiver

Ciao

nahtanoj

Not MS Servers

[michael.creasy]

MS won't own the servers, it is more likely that the servers will be run by your ISP or employer.

Re:Not MS Servers

[doctor_oktagon]

No, the servers will be 0wn3d by some 13 year-old k1dd1e!

Practical for non-Windows?

[ChrisDolan]

Since it's XML (i.e. decipherable) and *if* the you can designate your own prefs server, it shouldn't be super-hard to make something like this work cross-platform for at least some of the prefs. For example, if you have set your windows background image to some jpeg on the web with this, you could buld a prefs manager for X which parsed the same online prefs file to get the same background image.

Certainly some prefs would be platform specific (like the location of the "Documents" directory), but others (like email address or screen saver delay time or mouse-focus method) are equally useable on any platform.

And since it should be extensible, one should be able to add X-specific prefs to the list.

This could actually be a very nice cross-platform feature, given full-time net accessibility.

Oh joy!

[Madman]

Gee, I want Microsoft to be in charge of my personal data! Given the high quality of their products and their well documented intergrity and ethics, it's a cinch I want them to control every personal document I have!

Privacy

[LaNMaN2000]

Everybody's personal preferences stored on a central server, by Microsoft...Am I the only one concerned by this?

Re:Privacy

[Sneakums]

Judging by the lack of replies, I would imagine so.

--
"Where, where is the town? Now, it's nothing but flowers!"

Nothing but .net

[aufait]

Gives new meaning to the phrase: nothing but net.

Hmm...

[Maran]

Correct me if I'm wrong but....

This is a Microsoft application.

It is integrated with the Microsoft Windows operating system.

That would be a really big breach of the Microsoft ruling then.

Why do I get the feeling that they'll get away with this one as well

Maran

Re:Hmm...

[PurpleBob]

Even if they weren't weaseling out of it, the ruling would theoretically go into effect in September.
--
No more e-mail address game - see my user info. Time for revenge.

New Revenue Model

[Crusadio]

OK, I read "The Whitepaper" and although they do mention a bit of new technology (new for MS anyway), it mainly seems to be the description of a new revenue model. Instead of selling you software (OK, selling you a license to use their sofware), you'll be renting software, storage space and services from MS (you didn't think this would all be free did you?). Sounds like Balmer's old idea of a yearly licensing fee for Windows, doesn't it?

realistically...

[epukinsk]

Everything Microsoft is talking about is both "nothing new" and "not as inherantly wonderful as microsoft would like us to believe." But was TCP/IP new when Windows 95 came out? No, but that doesn't mean Microsoft's implementation didn't made my life a hundred times easier. I never want to look at Trumpet Winsock again.

Microsoft is willing to trade up some "ideal" for "useful" and for "marketable." I think that's why GNU hasn't taken off in the consumer marketplace... GNU developers don't seem to be willing to sacrifice "ideal" at any cost.

We have to wait and see how MS implements this. Microsoft didn't get where they are by putting bullshit in the software and the good ideas in the press release. They got where they are by putting prettying up good ideas in the software and leaving the bullshit for the press release.

-Erik

If Microsoft Doesn't Do It...Someone Else Will

[A_Mythago]

One thing that is interesting about this is the fact AOL is already dominating the Internet arena, and with the upcoming merger with Time-Warner is poised to make significant inroads into the broadband market, making it much more attractive to consumers.

If you take a look at the list of assets and capabilities the AOL-TW conglomerate will offer, the only thing they would lack to provide a similar set of services would be a "pet" operating system to bundle.

Imagine this scenario:

Linux continues to grow in popularity and develops into a (more) user-friendly alternative to the various Microsoft Windows OSs. As Microsoft begins to deploy "Next Generation Internet" and being hounded by the DOJ and competitors alike, AOL decides to release a low-end "Net Box" built around Cyrix chips and "AOL-Linux". Using a campaign blitz across its vast multimedia holdings (and limiting access to Microsoft for its own commercials), it begins to dominate the sub $500 PC market.

Of course AOL has not been idle during this time, and has entered in "strategic alliances" with several applications companies, and begins to offer "net centric" applications scaled down for home users (similar to Microsoft Works).

Due to the continuous updating of the Linux source, AOL doesn't have to spend as much as Microsoft on R&D, so offers free upgrades to its integrated operating system. That with a "multi-level" approach to marketing (free basic upgrades with your $35 a month for internet, deluxe upgrades available at a "nominal fee"), as well as reducing pricing for packaging other services (AOL TV, AOL Phone, etc.), causes multitudes to "make the move to AOL".

Between a slowing but still viable Microsoft and the new AOL juggernaut, the Internet is polarized between the two and the competition stifles all comers (similar to the way our two main political parties stifle competition from any other party).

Of course imagine how fast AOL-TW could implement this kind of plan if the DOJ is successful and forces Microsoft to make its source code available and breaks it up. It would take Microsoft a couple of years to really reorganize after the kind of breakup that has been proposed...time that AOL-TW would gladly use to consolidate and extend its influence throughout the digital realm.

Bottom line. Although I may not agree with the idea of Microsoft running the "net centric" world, it is going to happen one way or another. Yes, a breakup might help competition in the short term, but that big of a power vacuum will be filled by the strongest...and unfortunately very likely that will be AOL.

Just some food for thought.

"Breakup AOL - 2015"

THAT's random

[LionMan]

Well, I don't know how NSI will be taking this . . .
But seriously, this has GOT to be the most blatant attempt for M$ to gain control of as much as they can.
Scenario:
1) This .net thing becomes popular
2) People put a lot of their files there
3) Supreme court rules to break up M$ (final ruling)
4) M$ says that this will not fit entirely under either the "OS" nor "applications" nor "internet stuff" category, so "none claim control of it" (as a scheme of course to keep the company together)
5) people panic that their files will be destroyed because nobody will control them
6) mass riots against all law-sustaining bodies
This might be a problem.
But really, who would put their files in Microsoft's hands? What will they do when they have access to all my files? I wonder . . .
MS guy looking through logs late at night: "Wow, this guy has a HUGE collection of recipes in his account! I can sell his name, number, email, address and all his other personal information to cooking companies who pay me a lot of money!"
For the sake of mankind, don't let them do this!

.NET, the good and the bad

[Usefull Idiot]

It makes sense that they would want to introduce such a technology, when it becomes available a large number of people will have high bandwidth connections. I do not believe that most people, by choice, would use this service though.
Why I believe people will not want to use this service:

• Bandwidth - The person using it will have to have a fast connection, which not everybody will have or want.
• You don't have to go through Microsoft to do this. All you need is a computer, the right application(s), and the right 'net connections.
• Why would you pay a rental rate when you can pay a fixed amount for previously suggested equipment.
• Will people really trust Microsoft and The Internet that much? Will it really improve that much when they release this?
• It's new, and people will not know how reliable it is (what will replace the ever popular blue screen?).
• They haven't shown any technology that is beyond the currently available software.

How they may actually get some people into this:

• They can simply make it the only way to work with all their software (I don't think this would work for very long, if in the end it isn't beneficial).
• Make it a permanent part of the desktop (it's also a way to annoy the heck out of people). If you shove it in their face, they will come.
• If they maintain low rates, they may lure people that constantly travel.
• Market it towards small or start up companies that need, but do not have, a WAN or Permanent Internet Connection (although that would counter the logic that the user needs a high bandwidth connection to access the services).

This is almost analogous to that breakthrough technology they called DivX.

duh!

[burris]

Silly, that's what strong crypto is for!

Burris
(Of course, you can't get strong crypto from MSFT)

Re:duh!

[SaintAlex]

yup. Then when quantum computing becomes established, say "adios" to essentially *all* forms of crypto. May as well be rot13.

-SaintAlex.
After all, by the time people are actually stupid enough to do this, quantum computing should be coming around...



Observe, reason, and experiment.

Re:duh!

[mortenal]

sorry, but the dos kernel isn't portable to quantum computing, so m$ won't develop for it.
Think that was flamebait? You've obviously never met me in person...

This is PERFECT! No, really!

[GooseKirk]

Let me get this straight.

Microsoft thinks people in the future will be willing to pay a per-use or subscription fee to use a spreadsheet and word processor.

At my company, most users were perfectly content using Office 95, and most (including me) have seen little benefit and actually some harm in upgrading to newer versions of Office. Not that Office 95 is the be-all and end-all of office apps, but the fact is there's only so much an average user does with these applications, and I seriously doubt there's going to be anything so insanely great about these .Net applications that people are going to throw away their paid-for applications and sign up for a per-use service. And for cryin' out loud, like figuring out how to access your files from anywhere is really a big schlep these days. Jesus. Even my grandma could figure that one out, what with all the free storage services on the net.

And at the same time they're going to open up the file formats with XML, so theoretically anyone can easily make a compatible application.

"Hey, boss... lookit this. We can sign up for Microsoft's service, where the security is dubious, the connection unreliable, and we have to pay money every time we do anything and if we don't then we lose access to all our files. Or look, we can download this Star Office [or K or whatever] and it's totally compatible with Microsoft applications and it works better and it will never cost us a dime."

Or gee, look, there's a service that does the exact same stuff only with reliable non-MS software and it's advertiser supported, so it's totally free for the user.

Or hey, there's an appliance with a reliable, embedded OS and the application server is included with the monthly ISP. Sounds like a good deal for grandma.

Bzzzt. Thanks for playing, Microsoft. Too bad you bet the farm on this dumbass .Net idea. Hope the market for mice gets really, really, really big in the future...

Now they are only 12 years behind..

[spamtrap]

They are ALMOST where NeXT was 12 years ago. Except their GUI stills sucks, no bundled voice mail, not multi user, more security holes than Los Alamos and their MAMA was CPM ;-)

Can't wait to see how the PC rags just RAVE about this.

Re:.net is not the NC

[aphr0]

Why are you dumping on microsoft for not innovating when you blatantly rip off a tired old phrase from other people?

Re:...paving the way to pay-per-use...

[nathanm]

MS can then send you the bill for $1.00 per Word doc you opened, or $10 per Windows restart

As much as Windoze crashes, the $10 restarts would become MS's primary source of revenue.

Re:Microbull

[ODiV]

"Compare to renaming a script information.txt.vbs (hide file extensions on by default, user sees only 'information.txt' ... )"

What's even worse is that some files (.shs .lnk) have extentions that hide themselves even if you have extentions turned on. This is what that Life Stages virus used. So if you have information.txt.shs you can only see the txt even if you can see all other extentions. Pretty stupid imho.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Is their revenue stream so weak

[ericlj]

Is their revenue stream so weak that they need to go to the annual-license model for Windows.

I have to hope that even the average first-time computer buyer will be able to compare a new Windows machine (which requires activation like a cellular phone) with a new Mac (or Linux, or BeOS) machine, which actually includes rights to use the Operating System and determine that it might be a good idea to lock down the right to the operating system at the time of purpose. -- I'm probably an optomist!

Re:Is their revenue stream so weak

[witz]

Check the annual reports - their revenue is enormous, profit margins are ridiculous.

Re:Is their revenue stream so weak

[alfredo]

But you must remember that about 38% of that revenue comes from investments. Many of their markets are saturated. Look at what they had to do with Back Office. they had to change the licensing to bring in more money. Before it was seats, not it is seats and shifts.

Look for them to use this to charge by the minute. You won't be paying a flat fee, but you will be charged by the amount of time you use their software. They will probably charge for the amount of disk space used.

I would also be very afraid of intellectual property. What will you have to sign away to use their software?

Re:Is their revenue stream so weak

[ericlj]

I believe this story has been linked to by Slashdot before, but here is an alternate view of Microsoft's accounting practices. While we don't have all the information needed to be sure, I don't think we should ignore the possibility that this man (Bill Parish) is right:

http://www.billparish.com/msftfraudfacts.html

Heh

[Trith]

I like to call this technology NIS + NFS

Re:...paving the way to pay-per-use...

[MicroBerto]

"I'm gonna hax0r your microsoft .net account and make it so that the http://goatse.cx picture comes up as your background!" bwahaha

Mike Roberto (roberto@soul.apk.net) -GAIM: MicroBerto

Huh?

[CMiYC]

Did anyone else read the whitepaper and press release on their site, and find yourself going "huh?"

I don't it, myself. All I read was how current development tools suck, and that the web is like a mainframe.

Where is this talk of integrating your computer with the internet?

---

"Open" Office Document Formats?

[arc.light]

According to this Wired article (last paragraph of first page), MS will...

[shift from] storing data in the company's proprietary Office formats to open standards.

... that are based on XML. I certainly hope that's true!

Re:Security will be an issue

[Defiler]

There ARE no companies you can trust with more than 15 employees.

.net...the final frontier?

[Fjord_Redd]

Yikes. Is this what the world is coming to? Has Microshaft finally convinced the world that resistance IS futile? Let's hope not. This most recient announcement (which doesn't necessarily mean that the product will be available any time soon this decade) proves yet again how microshaft refuses to "innovate" beyond current technology. Indeed, there are already more numerous ways than there are microshaft hackers (I think 5 to be precise). If you don't like ftp-style transfer, there's numerous programs that run off ftp connections that allow file transfer to any computer, making it "your computer." Maybe i'm missing the whole point of this newest attempt at "innovation," but i just don't see how this is anything new at all.

Re:Microbull

[Hard_Code]

This smells of Application Service Provider. Hey, don't PURCHASE office...just PAY us each time you use it over the net.

blatant attempt to stay whole

[Karmageddon]

this whole scheme is a blatant attempt by Microsoft to circumvent the breakup order. They're going to start bitching and moaning and whining about how everything is integrated now.

But once again, BillG ("Bilge") will learn that lawyers and judges are (a) not stupid and (b) easily irritated by nerds who think "technicalities" will get them off the hook. Why does he have this reputation for being so smart?

Stop the fucking knee-jerk MS-bashing

[Frog]

It's really boring.

windows.net, office.net

[Phroggy]

I heard about this yesterday somewhere; Microsoft intends to use Windows.Net, Office.Net, etc. for online versions of their major software.

Interesting that Microsoft doesn't own the office.net domain.

I noticed that stupidpaperclip.net isn't registered yet. Anyone feeling up to the task of throwing together a parody site?

--

Don't look now, it is called SOAP

[tilly]

Hey! Let us allow any application here talk to any server in the world by tunnelling a protocol on top of http! And if they care about their privacy, make that https!

And so a generation of application designers make mistakes, and firewalls need to learn to deal with SOAP. Except the pesky https encoded ones, which you cannot peek inside. So ban those.

Care to take bets on whether the boys from Redmond will have something critical (like say the verification that your usage period has not expired) that absolutely must go over https?

Cheers,
Ben

What will they think of next?

[arberya]

It is amazing how M$ take some half decent ideas and botch them up. It is almost like running the 100m dash, but stopping at the 80m mark, because you were in front when you got there first.

Re:What will they think of next?

[signe]

It is amazing how M$ take some half decent ideas and botch them up. It is almost like running the 100m dash, but stopping at the 80m mark, because you were in front when you got there first.

You forgot the part where they pull out their sniper rifle and take out all the other runners so that they can't reach the finish line either.

-Todd
---

Re:...paving the way to pay-per-use...

[thogard]

I just see it as paving the way to ".net (TM)*"

* .net is a Trademark of Microsoft

Per minute == lead balloon

[r2ravens]

Gates is talking about per minute charges. If there is anything I have observed from the society around me (world wide even) it is that per minute charges are about as popular as barium enemas.

We in the US pay for our local telephone service as a flat fee with unlimited local minutes. This has been the paradigm for a very long time. Whenever The Phone Company (of old) tried to offer per minute use plans they were a great flop.

I hear all the time of people in Autralia or Europe bemoaning the per minute charges there. They would jump on the opportunity that we have here.

What makes Bill think that people are going to pay by the minute or by the document to use an app across the wire? Performance will be slow, especially across 56k and in the end you have have to leave your document on an unsecure (although they claim it's secure) Microsoft server.

I don't know if there is enough marketing savvy (Read: FUD) in the world for MS to pull this off.

Besides, Apple already has this up and running (on the storage end anyway) and I think that other companies that have had the lead time on this issue will be able to deliver long before MS.

Of course they could just be planning to attempt to monopolize the Application Services and other markets... Nah, they'd never do anything like that.

Russ

Re:LOOOOK. People here are so silly

[TummyX]

Uh.

Well, so we'll solve those problems, get computers to work out who's talking to it (using vision etc as well).

Secondly, it's useful, imagine driving in your car and being able to talk to it in natural language like that.

What are you IDIOTs so eager to diss this kind of COOL technology?

Does it really make you feel superior to the rest of society that you know something they don't?

I don't care at all, I know I know lots about computers, but I want computers to be intelligent.

Should be ultimate goal of computer scientists.

Re:Coda

[ajones]

If history is any guide, people (non-hackers) will actually use it.

Re:There's some sense in this...

[shren]

I have a shell account that I use from io.com, so I can get all of the unix functionality I used to get at school over a ssh connection. It's nice having the benefits of unix without having to administrate the astard myself. Only 10 dollars a month - slap it on your credit card and forget it. I've thought that there's all kinds of interesting possibilities about integrating windows and a shell account - say, auto-mirroring certain files and stuff - but I've never written any code in that direction.

If you hop over there and get one, remember, Shren sent you. *grin*

Re:...paving the way to pay-per-use...

[The Madpostal Worker]

I see they charging per license, and then a Client Access License for the NT sever that houses the apps. Thats the thing that *really* pisses me off about IIS is that you need a CAL for the maxium number of simulanioues clients.

/*
*Not a Sermon, Just a Thought
*/

WorkSpot?

[Bernal KC]

Could someone take a stab at comparing and contrasting this effort with what WorkSpot is offering?

Windows only?

[Old Wolf]

Who said this was Windows only? The article implies that it allows you to store XML files on their .net server. (Note, once again, MS using open, published standards). It won't be long before Linux developers come up with their own client for it.

This is a good idea, regardless of what OS you have.

LOOOOK. People here are so silly

[TummyX]

Look, .NET is not just about stupid monolithic servers doing everything (sun vision), it's also about a vision of the future which I've had since I was little...here's a little excerpt from bill's speech.

Let me show you how this works. (Typing.)

COMPUTER VOICE: Which index would you like?

JEFF RAINIER: (Typing.) Okay. Checking for the latest updates on that index.

COMPUTER VOICE: As of 9:10 A.M. the Dow industrial average is down minus 64 at 10,433.74.

JEFF RAINIER: Did you see how the computer asked me questions to resolve ambiguity and kind of worked with me like a person might have? That's the sort of power and intelligence that's built into the .NET platform.

Let me show you one more example. (Typing.)

COMPUTER VOICE: How long do you want to meet? (Typing.) Where do you want to meet? (Typing.) Do you need to check my schedule? (Typing.)

JEFF RAINIER: Ooh, I think my typo there caused some problems. Let me try that one more time.

COMPUTER VOICE: What would you like to do now? (Typing.) How long do you want to meet?

JEFF RAINIER: Okay, this is looking more promising. (Typing.)

COMPUTER VOICE: Where do you want to meet? (Typing.) Let me see if you are both available at this time. Okay, I've scheduled an appointment with Mark Leimberg on Friday, June 23rd at 2:00 P.M. for 30 minutes in his office.

JEFF RAINIER: Okay, you've seen how this interface works with typing, but this is much more natural and easier to use if you speak to your computer.

Imagine for a second using your cell phone to call in and get high priority mail messages, maybe make dinner reservations or even check for the latest news, all from your .NET server.

Now you see? I want to just be able to tell my computer in natural language "hey, find some time and schedule a meeting for me with joe sometime on wednesday"

That's just neat. The more the computer does for me the better. I don't need to reafirm that I know how to do repetitive tasks day in and day out just to feel cool and elite.

Re:LOOOOK. People here are so silly

[Meenky]

We're not silly, we just don't trust Micros~1. I personally would rather use the power in my computer to do something really usefull reather then let it eat all my CPU time trying to figure out what I want it to do. learning how to use a system is a much better solution than making a system smart enough to figure what you want it to do, typos could cuase much more damage in an "intelligent" system like this. Say you're looking at stock quotes and you tell the computer that you're interested in buying some. the computer might interperate this as a command and buy some on your behalf. instead of gathering information like you wanted it to. I feel that "smart" computers with natural language querys are a bad idea, have to think about what you want, instead of just typing without thinking, will give you better results. Remember that Demos are always better than the actual software. Never believe demos. They are just shiny PR pieces. Maybe when M$ stop taking credit for doing things that other ppl have already done and claiming that its revolutionary then maybe the silly ppl here will have a little more respect and trust for MircoShaft. As for me its going to take Billy Boy something a whole lot more impressive than this to get me to buy it. "The more the computer does for me the better. I don't need to reafirm that I know how todo repetitive tasks day in and day out just to feel cool and elite." Thats not why I feel elite, I feel elite because i use more of my CPU cycles for doing things rather than keeping my OS up and running. In a world without walls, who needs windows and gates?

Re:Security will be an issue

[anticypher]

Right, that was my point. I've collected windoze user passwords as part of a security project, and it was amazing to see how many (l)users continued to use very weak passwords even after an employee education program. So the client had to implement a 3rd party password management application which assigned "good" passwords, but that failed when all the secretaries started writing their password on post-it notes and leaving them on the bottom of the keyboard.

Out in the real world of mom and pop (l)users, where there is no forced education programs, they will continue to use weak passwords. This means they can go from a computer at home to a friends house and enter their logon details, and have access to their baby pictures just as they were home. Now, their friend's kid has installed a keyboard logging utility, and now has their logon details, and can access their data as well. What about dishonest cybercafes? University computers?

Expect M$ to slowly evolve this .net idea from a curiosity to a required method of storing user data, with the only access to the proprietary XML document encoding via M$ products.

Now scale the problems AOL are having with 13 million users to a M$ sized operation with 100+ million users. See where many opportunities for abuse start to open up, no matter how well they think they have secured the user's data?

If M$ has their way, they would love to force all business users onto a per use license with ever increasing fees, and they can hold the company data hostage because it is held in a completely proprietary M$ format, and the data is physically held on M$ controlled machines. Even if a company wanted to move from the M$ world to an open source world, M$ could force them to sign a multi-year agreement to gain access to their data. And even if they could intercept the data, the XML would only be interpretable by M$ applications.

the AC

Lets look at my options here...

[namlhaz]

I can:

1) Keep doing what I've always been doing; which is to say, using a free ISP to download open-source/shareware type software off the 'net, never have to pay for any of that, keep all of my data on my own HD, be able to get at my own apps and applications whenever I like, etc. OR:

2) Use M$'s 'services', pay to use my apps on-line, have all my data in the hands of M$'s servers, let M$ know exactly what I'm doing app-wise, be shut out from my own IP [Intellectual Property in this case, not Internet Protocol addy ;)] if the M$ server goes down, leave all of my data vulnerable to VBScript worms and the like, and on top of it all be forced to work with already-bad M$ apps, using a Web interface.

I'd say this one is a no-brainer.

...paving the way to pay-per-use...

[Masem]

Maybe, maaaaybe sometime in the future, when T1 lines are standard and cheaply available in all homes and businesses, will networked apps be reality. There's also matters of security and convinence (can you get to the networked Word if you are at 32000 ft from LA to Tokyo?)

IMO, the primary reason MS wants to go this way is that with net connections, you *can* count the number of times certain apps have been open, send that info securely back to MS, and MS can then send you the bill for $1.00 per Word doc you opened, or $10 per Windows restart. Pay-per-use has been in the works for a good year or so by more than just Microsoft (RIAA wants that too), and anything that depends on a net connection to work is going to be frowned upon until realistic pricing models and cheap fast net connections are in place.

Re:...paving the way to pay-per-use...

[shandrew]

If they can bill for it, they know you used it. There goes your privacy.

That is not necessarily true. There are several papers written on anonymous electronic payment schemes. Do a search. I'm sure one has even appeared here before.

Re:...paving the way to pay-per-use...

[jihad23]

Thats the thing that *really* pisses me off about IIS is that you need a CAL for the maxium number of simulanioues clients.

No, you don't. You do NOT need CALs for anonymous users (ie. people browsing your web site).

--
Turn on, log in, burn out...

Re:...paving the way to pay-per-use...

[SurfsUp]

there is nothing like Visio in the OSS world

What about Dia?
--

Re:...paving the way to pay-per-use...

[TFlagg]

MS can then send you the bill for $1.00 per Word doc you opened, or $10 per Windows restart.

If this were true, isn't it kinda ironic that Microsoft is paving the way? Don't ya think?

Re:...paving the way to pay-per-use...

[Punto]

Again, it all boils down to the cost. If the cost is low enough, it makes a lot of sense.

Does paying ${whatever the cost is, don't know} for a copy of windows98, or Office, makes any sense? NO. That's the whole point.

--

Re:It's too bad that most of y'all don't understan

[rob_one_nyc]

The last thing the world / net needs is "a new era of dominance" I want good tools that work well and play nice with others. Microsoft has never seemed interested in providing that, only in protecting their dominant position and restricting my choice by any means necessary. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

Microsoft Sucks

[Galaga88]

Microsoft is evil, Windows is evil, Linux gives me orgasms, I need more beer, buy Jon Katz's book, GNU is better than sex, information should be free, Metallica sucks, I'm being censored, my head is no less than 55 centimeters up my ass.

Are we ready?

[2starr]

I think the real question with this strategy is are we ready for this level of internet dependancy? Let's take one area: security. Okay, we know Microsoft's record for security. Come now. Are they going to be able to say that my information, which can be stored on their servers so I can use any computer as "my computer", is realy going to be safe? And what about speed? I know there has been some good progress in getting DSL, etc. out, but I for one still live in a small town. I'm lucky if I can connect at 52K. Though I actually think this is a good direction to be heading (as Sun said, "the network is the computer"), I'm not sure we're ready for the broad-sweeping scenario that MS is suggesting... yet. I'd love to see them dump some real research (dare I say inovation?) into things like better security and ways to distribute information faster & better.

I have a better idea

[Jetson]

How about if Microsoft gives away the technology (with sources, of course) so that those of us who don't trust "Big Brother" can run our own server at home. Many of us already use ssh and secure tunnels to do something like this anyway.

The funny thing about all of this is that some of Microsoft's EX-employees have started companies to do the same thing....

If there are french-reading people out there...

[GeZ117]

I've wrotten an article critic about this.
No, this is not off-topic, this is just not in english.

IBM all over again...

[EnderWiggnz]

It used to be that Big Blue and their mainframes ruled the land of computers.

ONE of their computers fulfilled the needs of your business. They provided hardware and software support, and all you had to do was pay a monthly (exorbinant) fee to have IBM take care of all your data in this one central location.

What stopped this? The PC revolution. Microsoft took over computing because they offered greater flexibility, personalization and control?

Now they're going to try IBM's model?

Why on earth would you attempt that again?

We'll see. I dont think that I'd be happy if all of my data - my resume, budget, expenses, etc. - were sitting on a hard drive other than the one on my desk.

And I dont think that a whole lot of people will be, either...

Re:IBM all over again...

[zettabyte]

I guess it gets into security. I do believe in the idea of a central repository for data. Call it the 'core', the 'mainframe', the 'crypt' (i wish), whatever. But, for that idea to work, I see two fundamental needs:

1. A fast, reliable network connection from anywhere (within reason).

B. Extremely tough, reliable, trusted encryption for your data.

We have neither now, nor would most of us trust Microsoft to provide the latter. This is an evolutionary process, and this idea, stemming from Sun/*nix environs, is being tested by MS. MS seems to be attempting to adapt to the Internet era (yow! did i just say that?).

I'll wager they're not successful b/c they don't understand security. Their whole OS philosophy stems from the single, standalone machine days. Anyway, enough of that.

This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

hey

[Anonymous Coward]

I could keep all my bomb designs safely off site. They would never find them when they searchd my apartment.

Re:Software leasing (I love this)

[grammar nazi]

Interesting train of thought MagnusDredd, You stretched it out a great deal, but this is certainly possible.

It's probably a typo, but I just wanted to point out your misspelling of the word software towards the end of your comment. Please try and be more careful in the future.

GNU Alternative!

[Bizzaro]

Although Micro$oft has provided very few technical details (okay, maybe NO technical details), there seem to be some similarities with a largely unknown GNU project that started years ago: Pied/Piper.

The reason you may not have heard of Pied/Piper is because it is a new name for a collaboration between 4 older projects with the same goal: Overflow, gMessaging Service, The Loci Project, and BlueBox/YellowBox.

Pied/Piper is an effort to bring "The Unix Way" to the GUI, "connect-the-dots" to the CLI, and to distribute applications AND APPLICATION COMPONENTS across the Internet.

Note that we just released version 0.0.1, and there is much to do to get the 4 original projects working together. But, feel free to check us out, join the mailing list, and contribute code (that would be best :-)):

http://theopenlab.org/piper

Help keep Micro$oft from controlling the Internet!

Jeff

--
This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.

Your one-stop law enforcement shop!

[Archeopteryx]

Wow! This is a great idea! ::sarcasm mode::

If I were in law enforcement this product would make me cum in my drawers! One place where all of the essential data exist for tracking people, money, communications, and associations. Now, all we need is one "easy" federal judge, and the keys to the kingdom are in hand!

This is almost too much like the plot of that really awful film "The Net".

Beware!

It is not for today

[mirko]

Many JobServe addicts might have been hunted by Microsoft HR forces during the last summer. I remember being interviewed in june 1999 in a luxurious Hotel in Paris and this was about developping this product.

If we consider the lack of Green Cards that prevented them to actually get their newest recruits before October, then we could be sure that the product might not even be in a suitable alpha stage.

In the meantime, I can just telnet any server in the world, export its DISPLAY to my machine and just have the same thing done.

Finally, Bill Gates abandonned his place to Steve Balmer during the Winter and was then supposed to lead this product.

--

Now it only take 400 minutes to close Outlook!

[tjstork]

In all seriousness. What they are going to do is make a language that does what Java does... has a virtual machine. Then they will rewrite all of Office to it and it will run on anything. Gates and company are going to let Windows go. They won't admit it publicly are going to take the big plunge, and leverage their office suite to promote their virtual machine. It's a huge risk and if that's the case, then cutting could be little more than a motivational kick in the ass delivered by Reno and company, motivating a pretty lack and uninnovative giant into doing some technologically interesting for a change. This could turn out to be either a disasterous or humourous thing. These MS guys are as gruesomely admirable as the Borg or Mandreds drones. If all Microsoft had was notepad and file manager, Gates and Ballmer would try and leverage that somehow against someone. One wonders though Gates calculating relentless will give way to a more Ballmerian Buffonnery...as feared as that of Monty Python's Black Night. Old Steve might be jumping around on leg saying... "You cut off Windows! It's just a flesh wound! Have at you...!"

Re:Australia has untimed local calls [moving OT]

[mysta]

I hear all the time of people in Autralia or Europe bemoaning the per minute charges there. They would jump on the opportunity that we have here.

Ummm... last I checked all my local phone calls were flat fee (as low as AUS$0.15) and unlimited time. Unless you mean "local" as in "anywhere in Australia"? In that case, we do have timed calls. Just so we're not comparing tomatoes and tomatoes, what does "local" mean in the US?

Mind you, if we did switch to timed local (as in my friend down the road) calls I would be most unimpressed.

So what's their audience?

[lari]

A trip through the Microsoft site wasn't particularly enlightening on where they hope to go with this... besides the typical goal of world domination. However, it seems to me that this isn't aimed at you, or me, or most of the people I know.

The impression I get is that this is going to be at least in part focused at the sorts of people who get very, very nervous at the thought of installing and updating applications -- the kind of people who call tech support or their local helpdesk when they get a box with a button that says "OK", just to make sure that everything's OK. People who don't understand the concept of backing things up, and then get very upset when they get their company computer re-imaged and lose a four-month project. But people who have lots and lots of little electronic "toys" that they can't imagine life without.

When Ballmer says that they've "already got the fundamental building blocks in place" he's not blowing smoke, either... while the hardware end of it is probably not more than a few sketches somewhere at this point, they *do* have the two most important parts -- an interface that everyone knows and can find their way around (after using Word, you can sit down at Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Project, Publisher, FrontPage, et cetera ad nauseum) and a name that is pretty well burned into the brain of anyone with any awareness of computers.

And with the name, the market share, and whatever the heck concept they come up with, they can put together something that a fairly massive number of people will use.

See, it doesn't have to be good. It just has to be easy, and it has to be there.

No one ever went broke underestimating...

DIY

[wytcld]

The access from anywhere thing, sure it's worth it. So you hang a Linux applicance on your DSL or cable or whatever always-connected system, and you access it from anywhere. No bucks to Redmond. Of course, you have to get online from the road, but many DSL providers will also give you a national, toll-free dialin account.

Now, there's a bit of work to do on the Linux end to produce a simple enough 'access from anywhere' box for the masses. But it's fairly trivial work (this is Unix, after all) - and it could be a real advantage for Linux to have the apps that you can access from anywhere on your own base box, while Microsoft will now be committed to having its apps only do satisfactory remote access via their pay-by-the-minute services.

So the new release means: "Here's how we're going to cripple our next generation of products, to try to tie the user to yet another product we plan to offer."

Re:INVENTED HERE

[unitron]

Don't you just know that Scott whatshisname over at Sun who hates Gates and MS with a purple passion is probably still rampaging around trashing the office furniture over MS's hijacking of the very idea he's been trying to push for a few years now?

BTW, anyone who thinks this is a good idea needs to be judicially restricted to only dial-up access for a year or three.

eXtremely Misleading Lie

[TheDullBlade]

"With XML, this problem goes away. I can focus on the data, not the representation. That's a big win!"

You can still hide data any stupid way in XML, like serializing your classes.

For XML to make any data more readable, certain standard ways of doing things must be followed. If you can get everyone to follow a standard way of doing things in XML, you could get them to do it with ASCII, or with a bitstream.

The XML standard is a hideous bloated tick of a document. A compliant XML parser is not a trivial piece of software. All that extra effort had better be for something pretty damned spectacular, but when you step back and take a look at the big picture, all XML really adds is bloat to everything. Monstrously bloated data files. Bloated libraries included in bloated executables. Bloated standards. Bloated resumes.

A well-documented non-XML format designed intelligently with ease of re-implementation in mind is as easy to read as a well-documented XML format designed intelligently with ease of re-implementation in mind, and poorly designed formats of both kinds are also equally difficult to read. Any ease in reading XML-based formats is purely due to the correlation of using XML and a concern with ease of re-implementation of reading programs. It is easier to read an XML-based format because someone who thinks of making an easy-to-read format is likely to think of using XML.

you've gotta give it to MS...

[unbrokenlamb]

They've got a flair for naming things. ".NET" sounds WAAAAAAAY better than "mainframe".

Software leasing

[phil reed]

As part of this announcement, M$ also announced that their Office products would be provided on a "subscription" basis. This could be unbelieveably bad - if you fail to pay your subscription fees, you could find yourself locked out of your own documents. No corporation will be willing to put itself in the position of being held hostage to Redmond.


...phil

Re:Software leasing

[GeZ117]

> As part of this announcement, M$ also announced that their Office products would be provided on a "subscription" basis. This could be unbelieveably bad - if you fail to pay your subscription fees, you could find yourself locked out of your own documents. No corporation will be willing to put itself in the position of being held hostage to Redmond.
That's not new. Reread this to verify it. For those who don't want to follow the link, it's the "Copyrant" YRO article.
The idea is pretty much the same: having the customer paying insensibly, 24/7. The user must give his money without "feeling" he's loosing money. That was also all the hype for the neteconomy: you buy, you buy, you buy, you buy lots of useless piece of crap and you end up with an huge debt.

Re:Software leasing

[Inoshiro]

Hehe.. sounds like fun :)

Management has this horrible association that paying lots of $$ for software means the software is useful. I know of one guy locally who wanted an NT print server for his company (running lpd under NT, because his printers were lpr compatible ethernet printers) because, "we have all this software laying around which we paid lots of money for."

Why not use Linux? Not expensive. Eventually people will learn, but so far, it's mostly a hard-way only kinda thing :-/
---

Re:Software leasing

[Inoshiro]

"No corporation will be willing to put itself in the position of being held hostage to Redmond."

Have you see the number of places that will fork out thousands for this very pleasure, running MS Exchange and not using backups or any kind of RAID setup? A lot of managers honestly don't have a clue, which is why the marketters from MS can manipulate them so easily.
---

This will speed up the rush to Linux

[sunset]

I can't believe these guys. A couple of days ago I was predicting 18 months before Windows is in big trouble, but now it's looking more like 6.

Re:So invest in cisco

[anticypher]

And while you are investing, Lucent, Nortel, and all the major carriers too :-)

I don't think this will work how you think it will work. The application code will never be transferred, only a java or C-sharp applet which can be cached locally. Communication will be HTTP carrying XML (unless they come up with a XTTP:// URI) between the client machine and the ASP.

The documents will be stored at a number of ASP/data warehouses spread out all over the place. It will be many companies, each paying license royalties to M$, and passing those costs on to consumers.

The applet on the (l)user's machine will be an XML browser which will perform some of the front end GUI functions and provide for quick response time. To the user, it should look no differently than running an application locally, except that many of the critical functions will run on the ASP servers, and not locally. That will prevent pirating of the whole application.

The communications stream will be encrypted, not so much to protect against intercept, but to prevent open source XML browsers from getting a copy of the data. The M$ XML browsers will not have a copy and paste function. You wont be able to copy the data you have typed in, so you can't paste your information in the window of a local text editor and save your work as part of a move to open source. The M$ XML front end will only allow you to crosslink the data to other documents or M$ approved applications.

When the open source scoundrels crack the XML format of people's documents, and create an XML browser that can retrieve those documents and save them in a truly open format, M$ can just go and change the XML format and push out new browser applets. Just what is happening with the Instant Messenger wars AOL and M$ are fighting. The access protocols change slightly every few hours, and the users have to grab an updated copy of IM just to keep using the service. Having java/cool applets as the front end makes the download automatic.

the AC

Nifty logo

[Eirik Refsdal]

I like their nifty logo on the left side on http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/topics/f2k/defa ult.asp best. Nice colors.

Who, Why, What, Where, and How

[WillAffleck]

Who - MSFT

Why - To get you to pay for renting apps from them, even when you use a Linux box, especially when you travel.

What - Holding your data hostage, they can deny you conversion of said data if you break the UCITA wrapper that says you can't say bad things about them. They can also sell it to marketers "to assist in an improved user experience". They can help the feds by having the secure keys to your data, so that you can be busted more efficiently. And if you raise too much fuss, they can make you disappear from the system.

Where - All over the world. Not just domination here, but as a method of grabbing total World Domination (TM - The Brain). Especially when you travel to an island resort, where only the .NET will be available, so they can really get all the *nix geeks.

How - They have the cash, They own the other companies, They will force companies to partner with them or they will Embrace and Extend them. Now that they don't have to worry about the DOJ for 18 months, it's time to Take Over The World (TM - The Brain).

Any questions?

Set up your own server at home, duh!

[bratgrrl]

Why trust Microsoft, or any other third party? Screw 'em! They want to screw you! Do it yourself on your own machine. You don't have to be a genius to use PC Anywhere. Or you have access to all sorts of more sophisticated tools, if PC Anywhere is beneath you.

M$ Final Solution

[wiZd0m]

Well it is pretty clear in the Bill Gates speach on the new microsoft.net website what they have in mind (Pay attention to minute 21:30 seconds of the speech)

There is a very strong analogy with what we do now and what we did with windows. And it is even more analogeous for the internet to what we did in 1995 with windows, the browser and the 18 months that followed...Today, it is far more ambitious

Can it be clearer?

Good idea

[Kanasta]

So, they're going to more or less run a WinVNC server somewhere with all your apps on it, and give you a viewer you can use from any computer in the world.

OK, so they can run a server 24/7 for me, and I can't. Apart from that, why are they reinventing someone elses wheel again?

Except that VNC runs on unix, Win9x/NT, and mac.


---

The future of microsoft.NET? One word...

[eswan]

Divx.

Re:.net is not the NC

[shandrew]

Regarding the community envy, I think you've got that backwards on this one. MS ridiculed the NC concept (which is a superset of this "new invention"), and now they're touting it as the Next Great Thing.

This is a common Microsoft marketing strategy. If there's something interesting that might become the "next wave" that someone else is doing, they say "Hogwash! Our strategy is the best, and it will rule forever." Quietly though, they copy and improve on the "next wave" strategy, and eventually present it as their own.

Sometimes this presentation is real, and sometimes it is vapor just to scare incoming competitors away. I'm not sure which one this is. Historically, Microsoft is quite predictable.

But mostly, I just like this picture. Half Third Reich, half Pansygates.

Read the whitepaper

[FooRat]

About 85% of it is pure marketing fluff, but if you read carefully, you can sift some of the basic ideas out of it. In fact, the ideas embedded in this document are so innocuous that I suspect that they are deliberately trying to hide the ideas in generalised descriptions written to make them sound like something you want.

Here they complain about existing technology:

"Personalization consists of redundantly entering and giving up control of your personal information to every site you visit."

"Web sites are isolated islands and cannot communicate with each other on a user's behalf in any meaningful way"

Then presenting their "vision":

"It means, for example, that any change to your information -- whether input via your PC or handheld or smart credit card -- will instantly and automatically be available everywhere that information is needed."

"Information Agent-- Manages your identity and persona over the Internet and provides greater control of how Web sites and services interact with you. Maintains your history, context and preferences -- your past, present and future on the Internet. Supports privacy-enabling technologies such as P3P. Unlike today's Internet, your personal information remains under your control and you decide who can access it. Enables you to create your personal preferences just once, which you can then permit any Web site or service to use."

Basically what they are saying here is that corporations will be able to freely transfer your personal information amongst themselves (and of course this will be completely legal because of a click-through EULA, I guess.) They try to make it sound like you will be in control of your information - but you can bet your ass this "service" "won't look like the brochures" when it actually arrives.

This all sounds to me like MS wants companies to be able to know everything about you, and everyone's databases will be massively cross-linked. Naturally there will be unpublicised government back doors as well.

And of course MS will get some money every single time anybody does anything online.

Many of the other ideas that do sound positive (e.g. being able to access your "online profile" wherever you are) amount to precisely what Unix/Telnet/X11 have been delivering for over ten years now. Except that .net will require much more bandwidth and much faster computers than the Unix solutions, because Unix/Telnet/X11 were designed from the ground up to handle that.

Microsoft is at it again.....

[carlmenezes]

seems these guys keep finding new ways of being pains-in-the-butt. forget uploading data. let's upload viruses instead :) and wouldn't it be a nice piece of irony if Microsoft's servers could be used to host Microsoft hate sites? :) But seriously, these guys need to know there is a word called privacy.

Bloated XML and Isomorphisms

[Saint Stephen]

Don't you realize that for every exact but bloated XML text representation there is an equally compact binary representation? Replace each of the 65000 tags with a unique byte and pack that data....... Compressors will have a field day with XML... It's the uniform and hierarchical representation that is the key...... just wait till we have XML Server like SQL Server it'll be just as much faster and huger than SQL Server is over a simple grid..... dig?

Re:Bloated XML and Isomorphisms

[PigleT]

You might be vaguely interested in the idea of XDBM btw - as in GDBM but the underlying flatfile "database" format is XML. Sounds good to me, anyway... :)
~Tim
--
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,

.net - UK thought of it first :-)

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft trying to brand things with ".net" then ? Well, let's hope that the ".net" magazine in the UK sues them first :-)

The monthly magazine is now up to issue 73 (just over 6 years old), which means that it actually pre-dates Internet Explorer. C'mon Future Publishing, sharpen your lawyers and go after Uncle Bill!

Hide your domains, people!

[hal200]

Don't you see what they're doing?!? They're trying to 'embrace' the entire .net TLD! Soon, simply having one will be grounds for a trademark lawsuit! And what happens when they introduce the commercial service, .com? Anarchy, I tell you! Anarchy! And ol' Billy Gates will be sitting there as the licensing cheques flow in, applauding himself on his 'inovation', and we the people will be subjugated under the oppresive arm of the MS-DOJ....RMS, ESR, Linus, Allan and Steve Jobs will be hunted criminals. Dogs and cats living together! Mere mention of Linux, Apple, Netscape, or AOL will be punishable by death! This is the end of civilization as we know it, people! Put your slavery hats on, we're going for a ride!

Incidentally, for the humor impared, this has merely been a product of a coffee-deprived mind. Any relation to any conspiracy, living or dead is merely conicidental! ;)

I've got a better idea...

[proxima]

It's so much more fun to set up a Linux/BSD server of your own (the hardest part is getting an IP and bandwidth to host it for most) and setting up NFS and/or samba. Forget the XML, it doesn't matter what sort of files you put on the server, binary, data, whatever. Then just mount/map the server when you log in from anywhere, Windows or *nix. I trust my own uptime compared to some NT server, thank you.

There's some sense in this...

[teraflop user]

I've had a university account for the last decade, and I use it for exaclty this purpose. Initially it just gave me a constant email address, but I've gradually moved to keeping more and more useful information in a private directory. This includes addresses and phone numbers, any projects I'm working on, data for tax returns and so on.

The benefits are enormous, especially if you are reasonably mobile, and even more so if you live in more than one country.

But I can only do it because I have a university account. I could just about get by using the personal webspace provided on an ISP account, but using encryption, grep, .forward and other tools would be much more difficult.

If Microsoft are looking to offer this service then I think they are making a sensible move. It would make more sense for ISP's to put together an appropriate service, but despite fierce competition non-one seems to be doing so.

Maybe an Apache module would kick some ISPs into action? Maybe Microsoft will catalyse the creation of such a tool.

Re:There's some sense in this...

[Darby]

more user friendly == easier cracking (generally).

Not really. Mac's are by far the most user friendly, but the least crackable systems.

---CONFLICT!!---

Re:There's some sense in this...

[generic-man]

As a current CMU student, I can say that things still work this way. The fact that I can use tools like Kerberized Telnet and afs on my machine (with some additional software) keeps me in Linux whenever I have to get programming work done. I can do all of my work over Kerberized Telnet, even running X applications, without having to worry about uploading my data. The UI is consistent in that my local copy of xemacs looks and feels just like the remote copy. However, dorm network hiccups can be rather infuriating when an assignment is due in mere hours.

Plus, the fact that I can sit down at any Linux/Sun machine on campus and have my configuration the way I want it (right down to the Netscape bookmarks and AfterStep menus) is a real boon. I've seen some very clever X configurations from seasoned CS users. Some even run VNC to remotely control their Windows and X setups in their dorm machines. Unfortunately, Mozilla won't compile under Andrew Linux. I cleared out all my directories to fit it in the 50MB limit -- and even tried putting the source in /usr/tmp after that failed, but no dice. Oh well.

Re:Just wait

[Tony-A]

They don't even need to get cracked. Think dining philosophers and how many ways are there to screw up cooperating asynchronous processes.Think of NT Server with everything loaded on. Now scale it an order of magnitude or so.Think of using MSN to actually do work. This sounds like a bigger pie in the sky than the worst of the claims for Artificial Intelligence.

Hey, I've got a new product too!

[SecretAsianMan]

I've just released a new product called (drum roll, please) Windows (TM)! The Windows Technology (TM) allows one to see through walls! No, I'm not kidding. Just install Windows (TM) in your own home, and you will be provided with several ample-sized viewports, each made of a clear solid known as ActiveGlass (TM), allowing you an unobstructed view of the world outside your home. Look for Windows (TM) at your local home improvement center starting in summer 2008.

Hasn't this already been done?

[Shocker69]

I think they already did this, they called it Windows.

Where's the beef?

[catseye_95051]

I'm sorry, but that's aotu tyhe msot appropriate thing i csn think to say.

Sounds like MS is paniced by Sun's Application Serveice Provider model and that they'll loose relevance if it actially takes hold, so once again they scrambeld to get a buzz word complaint annoucnement out.

Wake me when they start showing real usable product.

P.S. Anyone seen a real UPnP device yet??

This is NOT about dumb terminals.

[entropy7]

If you read all the information this is very far from being about dumb terminals.

MS hate dumb terminals - why would they go in that route?

Its a long term strategy about moving the majority of business to business and business to consumer data around as XML.

It beats the crap out of the way current web pages operate. It sucks ... everything currently runs off the server. Now turn it around.. E.g. Imagine if I could get CNN content as XML, then I could view it on any device - not just a web browser.

Then imagine what you could do with it using your local processing power. I can view the content/data the way I want to. I can process it the way I want to. If all information was transmitted this way, it would make for some really interesting ideas and things you could do...

The real danger

[kfg]

I've yet to see a single post on the real danger that ".net" type applications pose to both business and the single user.

First, there is the obvious. If you run a business the idea of putting all of your companies internal documents in the hands of a single outside commercial entity is irresponsible in the extreme. It in effect gives that outside entity overriding control of your company and its actions.

The only way to avoid this is by keeping a complete set of internal documents on hand anyway, *and the apps to run them.*

So you gain what by using ".net"? Access? You already have that through your own network, which as above we see you will have to maintain anyway, and through the internet and VPNs.

For the private user your use fees will eventually add up to more than the cost of the app would. You have NO control over the app and its upgrade history and how this might effect your documents and you're likely to be able to store all of your personal documents on a CD anyway, affording access, portability AND security all in one swell foop.

Now, the real real danger. Security. I'm not talking about hackers here, which are an obvious risk, especially since they know they only have to crack ONE server to access ALL data.

No, I'm talking about LEGAL security risks. With all of your business and/or personal documents on a seperate commercial entities server the 4th ammendment no longer applies to YOU. It only applies to that entity!

Your documents may be supoenaed and seized by any legal agency that can obtain a warrent against the SERVER. What's more, because they don't need to supoena YOU you remain unaware that such an action has even taken place! Think about that for a few minutes. It should scare the living bejezus out of you.

If it dosn't you arn't paying attention.

For my part I will NEVER place a personal document on a server not under my personal control. No business of mine will ever place an internal document on a server that isn't company property. I will never WORK for any company that does so and any company that I own stock in that does so will hear from at the first stockholders meeting thereafter. If they refuse to change their policy in this regard I will charge the officers of that company with gross negligence.

It's always a bit amusing to watch clueless people driving the nails into their own coffins, just so long as they don't have the power to drag you to the grave with them. Microsoft's relentless pursuit of this policy will, in the long run, only hasten the move to alternative secure operating systems. Especially since they are doing this at a time that personal storage is both cheap and abundant, and growing more so every day.

Even IF, in the short run, people accept this, and that's a BIG if, how long do you think it will take before people drop it like the proverbial hot potato after they see the first prosecution of a person or business based on documents siezed from an outside server without their knowledge?

Recycled Feature

[bopal]

Another recycled feature by M$.
When you have your home directory on a server
connected to the internet, you can do the same
with your unix box.

Microsoft sux

[ThighMaster]

Microsoft will not admit that the center of thier business( OS platform dev for PCs ) is old hat. Java, Jini, Wireless communication devices, all will make Microsoft a minnor player in the information revolution. I cant believe that msoft actually thinks people will believe that they can provide this type of technology well.

Security will be an issue

[anticypher]

From the people who brought us Outlook, with its multi-billion dollar damages due to lack of security, now bring us a central place to store everyone's files.

Expect the word "hacker" to take another tarnishing when .net gets cracked.

It doesn't matter how many bits of encryption they use, when the average windoze (l)user's password is their first name. So there will be many cracks of this system, and some of them will be embarassing.

And what happens if some (l)user decides to use this at work, so they can take their work home with them. Now a company's secrets are stored on a M$ server, where just about any one can peruse them. M$ will claim somewhere in the fine print they must review all content on a regular basis to prevent illegal material from being stored, and if they just happen to see a competitor's secrets, we can trust them to not take advantage of it.

Now corporate firewalls will have to block access to this site, as with the other new net services offering the same thing. I doubt .net will ever become very successful unless M$ uses its monopoly power to force everyone to use their servers.

the AC

Salon article on "MS dot.net"

[upstateguy]

Salon magazine has an article article about the announcement and their take on this...it's not even *predicted* by MS to be out by 2002 so don't hold your breath:

"Most Ambitious" and "Bet the Company"

[dman123]

I read an article on my.netscape that included in it the following...

"This is far more ambitious than anything we've done in the past," Gates said at a Microsoft Forum 2000 conference at the company's headquarters in Redmond, Wash. "You could say it's a bet-the-company thing."

Isn't that what Gates said about Windows 2000, and probably every major product announcement in the past 5 years? They sure seem to be betting the company often since the DOJ has gotten serious. Is it a scare tactic to think we'll say, "Oh no. If we don't use this Microsoft will tank and then the whole US (or world) economy will suffer?" Puh-leeze.

--
dman123 forever!

.net is not the NC

[Anonymous Coward]

Before making uninformed comments people ought to enlighten themselves by watching the .net presentations at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/topics/f2k/spea kers.asp.

.net is different from network computers. I think it was Bob Muglia who said "this is not dumb clients and smart servers, this is smart clients and smart servers".

For example, in the proposed .net world, you automatically download a copy (or a cached subset, depending upon your device) of your work from the "cloud" and automatically synchronize your changes later. This permits disconnected operation, e.g. working from a disconnected notebook or low-bandwidth wireless handheld. Don't the Oracle NC and Sun SunRay require a permanent high speed server connection to function?

Watch the videos. There is some really good stuff (and some way-out science fiction -- like quality voice recognition without a noise reduction microphone headset).

What this community bashes now, in three years they will eagerly clone -- see OLE2 vs Bonobo.

Re:.net is not the NC

[Golias]

Hmmm... let's see... OS on the box, apps and storage on the network. Sounds like the same old client-server model to me. Off-load a few of the OS preferences and you move a little closer to the "thin" client concept, but it's still SSDD.

No, you idiot. Microsoft makes backup copies and stuff. Read the MSDN entries on the .NET data structures.

Oh, they run backups of the server data... kind of like in the client-server model. Wow, what a revolutionary concept. Next you are going to tell me that they are about to invent hard drive mirroring systems and RAID arrays.

More of the same M$ spin: "We just started doing it, so that makes it new."

Nice try, astroturf boy.

Not quite right:

[jabber]

This is a product that integrates with windows using XML to store all of your information on Microsoft servers, so any computer in the world can be used as "your" computer.

Umm, more like:
This is a product that integrates with windows using XML to store all of your information on Microsoft servers, so any data in the world can be used as THEIR data.

Sheesh! You'd think people would have learned by now. The only thing M$ 'innovates' is new means of leeching money from consumers under the false pretense of convenience.

Re:Just wait

[lunatik17]

Actually, I think MSN is mostly run off of UNIX, Probably *BSD.

Here's my DeCSS mirror. Where's yours?

Re:1st

[C.Lee]

>I think it's good that MS really understands the power and potential
>of then net. And as a final trolling thought.... Why didn't you Linux
>developer's do this first? It isn't a novell idea.

We're too busy laughing. Want to wager on how long it'll be before some script kiddie running a M$ OS brings this whole Microsoft house of cards tumbing down?

I saw this coming from six feet away

[CosmeticLobotamy]

Okay, maybe five. I live in a small room. it had to come in before I saw it. I used to think that "My Computer" meant, "Hey, this computer belongs to me, a valued customer," or some such. Now I understand. That's Billy G. talking. It's HIS computer. Sorry I was using your computer Willy. Won't happen again. (Just in case The Gatekeeper is reading this) I think the Justice Department is stupid. Keep on Innovating(TM)*, oh Defender of the Truth, Bringer of the Light, and Maker of a Really Great Operating System.

Innovating (Patent Pending)is a registered trademark of MicroSoft. No innovation of any kind is permitted without the express, written permission of the NBA and MicroSoft.

MicroSoft: We own your sorry ass.

Don't want them to have my data.

[Raistlin99]

Personally I don't want microsoft to have my data because accessing it would be a pain in the ass, especially over a regular internet connection. However everyone is posting that Hotmail has security holes and Outlook is messed up. I'll agree on Outlook but Hotmail security can't be blamed on Microsoft completely. Unless NT got good enough to handle the traffic Hotmail is running Apache on a FreeBSD machine.

Amusing bit

[Knile]

From the Q&A with Steve Ballmer: "Microsoft .NET services, products and tools will give businesses the power to engage seamlessly and securely with customers and partners, and provide consumers with an integrated, secure and easy-to-use Internet experience."

Because we know that MS products always work seamlessly. And nothing they create ever has security problems.

Integrated means "You must publish the materials using Office 2000 while on Windows 2000 and..."

The day a MS product is truly "easy-to-use" is the day.. I dunno. Cows fly home out of my, no that's not right.

.net uses SOAP - basically RPC/DCOM over HTTP! Yuk

[cowbutt]

See what Bruce Schneier says in his latest Crypto-Gram.

Hint: he doesn't like it. And neither do I.

More development by the marketing department

[ReconRich]

This looks like another Brilliant Idea from M$ Marketing. It has all the telltale signs of the same genius who put VB Script in everything so that virus writers could have a high level language to use. I personally can't wait to live in a world where I just rent my own data from Bill; isn't that some kind of copyright violation or something? IMNSHO, we should just make Gates Dictator For Life, and then we won't have to worry about anything.

-- Rich

Corel vDrive?

[gavinhall]

Posted by 11223:

Aybody here heard of Corel's vDrive? A network drive (20mb) that you can access from, well, it's basically the same as what Microsoft just announced. Gotta hand it to Microsoft - stealing ideas from Corel!

ssh vs .net

[shomon2]

This bbc article is more biased toward the move being linked to the legal stuff going on with the DOJ.

It seems like a predicatable move: if everything microsoft does is net-centric, then it gets harder to meaningfully split it. And by the time the split gets implemented, the decision will be out of date.

Most of microsoft's whitepaper on this is centered around the "mainframe" a centralised model that http operates on. The internet is more than just the web however, but that's what the FUD is about here. Personalised stuff on other computers is a job for ssh, telnet, rlogin, all that stuff.

If this is the direction MS is going to take, any competitors are going to have to find ways of doing ssh, etc, but in a way that's as user friendly as the dot net method. Somehow, I think this will accelerate the development and evolution of remote login programs..

Hmm, maybe the battle will be fought on the command line after all, but it might go GUI in the process... :)

Not that hard actually

[hsk0]

I just registered a domain name and setup web hosting on Concentric. I was surprised at how easy it was, and how functional. This was their low-end CH-1 option, $25/mo. I get 20 mailboxes, 100M disk space and 7GB transfer per month. They have a nice browser-interface for reports and various administrative functions, plus "VDE" which seems to provide most of a Unix shell environment.

[Not 100%, e.g. CHMOD doesn't exist because they use ACLs so some ported scripts could fail but functionally it's about the same in the end, and easier for simpler things.]

Not something I'd recommend for the technical illiterate, but you don't have to be a Unix guru to do quite a lot, and you can always pick up more as you go. Sounds like you're well past the *nix-newbie phase so something like this would be a snap for you. Assuming you didn't have the college account; $25/mo is pretty good, but $0 has its appeal :-)

-- Howard

Re:Microbull

[martinflack]

please don't continue this about the .vbs files. The same could easily happen under the UNIX-like systems. I could attach a Perl script and say "Please run this for free money" and the dumb user runs it and the script does what it does. Same thing. There are just more clueless Windows users.

Except, of course, on Unix it would run as your user and thus only be able to write to a handful of files, and certainly not the system binaries. On Windows it could, oh, I don't know... format your hard drive?

Re:Microbull

[martinflack]

For the Web developer, the tools to build, test and deploy engaging Web sites are hopelessly inadequate. Many focus more on building attractive rather than useful Web sites.

Hmz, I think its kinda harsh and very arrogant to call tools like Dreamweaver "inadequate".

Actually I don't see any qualification to show that they refer strictly about non-MS tools. Visual InterDev and FrontPage are in the category of web design tools they speak of. Wow! I never thought I'd see Microsoft actually admit that their software is crap. Here it is in black and white. ;)

Isn't this just telnet...

[ca1v1n]

...but with a bunch of bloated features to enable strict control over intellectual property, and to reconcile all of the confusion created by using a windows registry?

Why is it that every time Microsoft makes an "Innovation" it turns out to be a crappy attempt to reproduce something that has been standard in *N*X systems for 2 decades, but wasn't "secure" (read: bloated and proprietary) enough to protect their paranoiac intellectual property interests?

Microsoft is lining up with RMS!

[Sq]

Knowing the big MS, it probably means *anyone* can use your computer from anywhere in the world!

But don't you realize what this all means ? Your computer is no longer yours, it belongs to everyone! That is a basic of communism! Ohmygod, microsoft is becoming communist, just like the RMS !

Oh, wait, it is a good thing isn't it ?

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox

[Pseudonymus Bosch]

Jakob Nielsen has a very good impression on this.

He thinks this will finally bring micropayments into reality.
__

It's already predicted in 'Holloween Document'.

[SoftStep]

/* This part is an excerp from an internal memorandum from Microsoft; (Here, OSS means 'Open Source Software') "... Consequently, OSS poses a direct, short-term revenue and platform threat to Microsoft, particularly in server space. Additionally, the intrinsic parallelism and free idea exchange in OSS has benefits that are not replicable with our current licensing model and therefore present a long term developer mindshare threat. However, other OSS process weaknesses provide an avenue for Microsoft to garner advantage in key feature areas such as architectural improvements (e.g. storage+), integration (e.g. schemas), ease-of-use, and organizational support." */ /* This part is an annotation by Eric S. Raymond (author of 'The Cathedral and the Bazaar'); { ... I'm told by a former Microserf that the references to "Storage+" here and in the executive summary are much more significant than they seem. MS's plan for the next few years is to move to an integrated file/data/storage system based upon Exchange, completely replacing the current FAT and NTFS file systems. They are absolutely planning on one monolithic structure, called "megaserver", as their next strategic infrastructure. The lock-in effect of this would be immense if they succeed. } */ ( http://opensource.org/halloween/ has more on this. )

Hahahaha! Silly, stupid MS...

[The Evil Beaver]

But more laffs at the unwashed masses that let MS be one of the top businesses. It's stupid having such a backtracking, backwards, and blind corporation leading the computer software industry. If people actually used their brains, MS would have either died out or started creating virtually bug free and actually useful working software a long time ago.

M$ being the .NET? Now that's scary :-)

[crovira]

Given the sieve like consistency of M$ product security and the promiscuity with which the system bares it vulnerable Office innards to every script kiddie who can move a mouse, I suspect (and fervently hope,) that MIS managers of businesses big and small will give this idea the trouncing it deserves.

Think of it. We already don't have to pay for a good OS (Linux,) or can pay (Solaris and the upcoming OS X[BSD] or Amiga [Linux]) instead of shelling out to Redmond.

Now M$ wants to nickle and dime you to death for using the applications you were extorted into buying in the first place. WordPerfect Suite and StarOffice and a whole raft of free software looks better and better.

M$ is Gates is a thief and a bully. (That was the gist the finding of law!)

Re:A question: Will it be cheaper?

[justin_cave]

I think it's more a matter of the software price correlating more strongly with the usefulness of the product to the individual customer. Let's take Photoshop for example. Right now, it costs roughly $600, so only high-end customers buy it, since they're the only ones that can dervie $600 worth of benefit. Certainly, there exist people who could derive, say, $200 worth of benefit by using either a basic subset of features or by using it only for a short period of time. Every now and then, I might need to play with an image or two, but I probably wouldn't derive more than a few dollars worth of benefit. Adobe would sincerly love to keep selling all its $600 licenses, sell a bunch more $200 licenses, and even more $5 licenses. If people rent software and pay based on the feature set they need and the length of time they use the software, they can do exactly that. For a high-end customer, the price probably won't change much. For the low-end or occasional customer, though, there's the possibility of getting access to professional-quality tools at amateur prices.

Microbull

[Lion-O]

Just when you wondered 'what could they possible come up with next' you get news like this ;) Anyway, I skimmed the site a bit and came up with quite some "remarkable" sections.

For the Web developer, the tools to build, test and deploy engaging Web sites are hopelessly inadequate. Many focus more on building attractive rather than useful Web sites.

Hmz, I think its kinda harsh and very arrogant to call tools like Dreamweaver "inadequate". It focusses on nothing and leaves the user completly open to do -anything- with the site that he or she wants to do. Either write code from the bottom up and look at the results or drag and drop and watch the code being added. Its your choice. So may I conclude here that this man is saying that total freedom is inadequate? Since Dreamweaver is a well known product I think its quite hard to miss it.

The fundamental idea behind Microsoft .NET is that the focus is shifting from individual Web sites or devices connected to the Internet, to constellations of computers, devices and services that work together to deliver broader, richer solutions.

So basicly Microsoft finally managed to grasp the idea behind Unix? I mean; c'mon.. I've been doing this kind of stuff for quite some years now. Allthough I have to admit; in a total different environment. Instead of clicking I'm entering "cd /net.priv/dave/updates" to access the computer of my friend Dave in the US and check out the latest updates he has. This whole thing is kinda silly if you think of it; in the past Windows would warn us if we accidently left netbeui and such linked to a dial up adapter (people can access netbios shares over the internet in this case) and just when we finally learned not to do this it gets re-instated? ;)

Microsoft .NET will take computing and communications far beyond the one-way Web to a rich, collaborative, interactive environment. Powered by advanced new software, Microsoft .NET will harness a constellation of applications, services and devices to create a personalized digital experience

And offcourse using .XML to do all this marvelous miracles. Well, by looking at the past I can only think of one thing at this time; they are trying to take over and flood the Net with a complete new standard leaving all other net based products (Unix/BSD/Linux/OS/2) out of the game. We want to use Unix based products? Well, would not surprise me if SCO got upgraded to handle this stuff.

And yes; I know that more products can handle XML. But that would only leave the question if the XML being used will be genuine or, just like kerberos in win2k, some MS mutated new flavor. Basicly the whole idea scares me. If they truly want to set up a functional environment like this the least thing they could have done is making Windows more secure and use this engine into this new product. At this moment Microsoft is not capable of securing Windows, take a look at the vsb scripts in the email, and yet they truly believe that they can build one giant "windows .NETwork" over the Internet and still insure the safety of the locally stored documents? Don't make me laugh.

.net?

[~packetfire~]

.not


'nuff said!

Whoohoo. No more email viruses

[nachoman]

No more email viruses...
How you ask??

Well... You see, you will no longer need to download them in email form, they just magically appear on your computer.

I can see it now, Cracker makes kickass virus and infects his 'own' computer thus infecting everyone else.

Or what about this...
Format c:
WTF?? I just formatted the internet...

web-phobic to web-centric?

[Firehawk]

from http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/topics/f2k/whit epaper/page6.asp

Ten years ago Microsoft set out a vision of a world with Information at Your Fingertips. Back then, information was anything but: modems were connected at 4800 baud, most messages were sent by fax rather than e-mail, and few people had even heard of the Internet. Although we envisioned a world in which people could connect with the information they wanted, when they wanted it, from whatever device they wanted, we had no idea what technologies would help make that a reality. Today, we do.

I thought that 10 years ago, Microsoft totally eschewed the Net. Even in 1994/95, they were actively promoting the Microsoft Network as a replacement for the Internet...

Sounds like GRID

[Camelot]

.. which is going to be _the_ thing for distibuted computing. See this link, for example.

Who needs Microsoft anyway ?

HA!

[BigD42]

The .NET platform breaks new ground in terms of using Internet standards</i>

and God knows they will keep everything standard....right?

Cough...Kerberos...Cough

More info

[Ravagin]

The Post also covered it here.
qu ote {
"You could say it's a 'bet the company' thing," [said Gates]..."Our entire strategy is defined around this platform."
}
Sure it is, Bill.
===
-J

Re:How ingenious - ASPs are going too far

[matthew_gream]

I agree with your prediction, and think that what will occur is a blend and mix between desktop and serviced software.

The core software runs on your desktop, and you access services as you need them, to varying degrees of heavy and lightweight services. The end result is a blur between 'desktop' and 'network' anyway, the problem is that many people don't see that it will be an integrated blur, so have taken the extreme view that 'it will be ASPs!' failing to see the big picture.

What must be...

[Desco]

If the Open Source community is really as smart and resourceful as they think they are, they'd develop some innovative (*SCOFF*) way of using the net, patent the idea, and push it hardcore on distributers... And either not license it to M$, or charge and restrict them BIGTIME so they can use it and not E&E it.

-Desc0-

Linux®

[yerricde]

Remember what happened with that guy that claimed Linux as a trademark.

We worship him. His name is Linus B. Torvalds.

If they credit my acount when windows crashes . .

[Money__]

I can use the apps for free. ;)
___

And if you don't read French...

[yerricde]

If you can't read French, copy the link and paste it in a field at GO.com Translator to get surprisingly good results. It's a new version of the Systran software that powers AltaVista's Babel Fish.

Ever notice that French uses "left shift" (<<) and "right shift" (>>) operators to enclose quotes?

Its to kill the disk huggers

[RobGuth]

after reading these comments, i wonder how many of you realise what microsoft is REALLY trying to do.
My parents have a small business, ive set them up with a network between their computers, and we have computers at home, which are also networked. ALL of them have internet access.
So logically they use 1.44 meg floppies for ALL their intercomputer transfers!!!!!
yes, it frustrates me also.
but i think that this is the NORM in small businesses these days. the people behind the computers dont have the enthuasiam to learn how to use the networks available to them efficently.
by using a disk, they have a physical object which they think is safe. they also have no problem finding a disk in their breifcase. where as finding a file on a server causes many problems.
I think microsofts aim is to get all these windows 3.1 type people onto an easily usable diskless enviroment.

Leasing in general

[cameldrv]

There are actually good reasons for doing this. IANAL, but as I understand it, if you purchase a capital good such as a computer, you have to depreciate it over a period of years on your taxes, that is, if you buy a bunch of laptops, you pay the money now but you don't get to deduct it on your taxes until later. With a lease, you deduct the lease payments so you don't have the delayed deduction. This can be worth it even if the lease is more expensive than buying it outright.

A question: Will it be cheaper?

[Convergence]

If they're getting about 40,000 per license per year. (Or about 160,000 a year) What makes you think that suddenly it'll get cheaper.. Would they wan their profit margins to drop by a huge amount? Hell no!

What they'll do is they'll just charge you about 15,000/month. (or XYZ an hour, knowing that you'll use 15,000/XYZ hours in the typical month.)

.net copyrighted?

[abh]

Great, I suppose that now Microsoft will copyright the ".net" name, meaning that all domain names ending in .net are now in violation.

The wrong thing, and unsexy

[matthew_gream]

The concept is valid; future computing should and will involve a sort of displaced 'desktop' as you may have it; so your data partially resides on your personal computer, and in space - and presumably you can access space through different devices: pc's, phones, etc. Likely result is that Microsoft will make it too Windows specific, what a blow to a technological future.

The other thing: their logos are just not sexy. '.net' is a pretty sexy name, but they need to redesign their sense of style.

This SOunds Great

[reldridg]

Hey this sounds great I can get to pay per use and they also get to keep track of all of my personal information. I am hoping I can set this system up right next to my state of the are fully supported DIVX system. If I could have both of those going I would be the envy of all of my friends.

NFS

[CAPSLOCK2000]

Whats in there that can't be done with an NFS mounted home dir?
Still I like the idea. I'm waiting for the day this thing gets cracked and everyone can see the pr0n stored in Bill Gates profile.
BTW how is this supposed to be pronounced? "dot-net", "point-net", just "net" or something else?

Oracle Internet File System

[l0ki]

I wonder what exactly MS will tout as the true differentiation, other than better advertising, of .net vs. Oracles internet file system? It allows basically the same thing. Its a client side redirector that lets the client see a "local" drive that really resides inside an Oracle DB that sits "anywhere". One large difference is that is is here, supports multpile platforms, and you can implement it yourself within your own LAN or WAN. Not uploading to MS... Same kind of idea from 2 very different/similiar/successful companies. Could this be a trend that will continue- the assisted death or at least coma of the desktop- replaced by appliances and smaller clients? Or will it die off as a fad? I think it has been and will continue to be the trend for devices to get smaller and bandwidth to get bigger, allowing this sort of thing to proliferate. But, ONLY once sufficient privact and security procedures are in place. Let's face it, if someone wants your data from a net connected server (be it .com,.us, or .net...) they eventually will get it- by social engineering, or by poor security. Maybe the safest place for your data IS a powered down laptop sitting on you nightstand, but it may not be the most useable... Security Vs. Useability... Age ol war.

Conspiracy theory

[Sri Lumpa]

MS can then send you the bill for $1.00 per Word doc you opened, or $10 per Windows restart.

So that's why the used us to unstable operating systems during all these years.

Data Security

[Refrag]

And your data will be the most insecure it has ever been. Yea, I'd trust my data to a Microsoft-run server. Whatever. I wouldn't even trust them to store my pr0n files. :)

Refrag

Ooh cool!

[Greyfox]

They've finally got something like Telnet/X. X is actually quite tolerable over a DSL line and you can .xinit to launch the rest of your environment.