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The Vanishing HailStorm
ElitusPrime writes ".NET My Services, Microsoft Corp's high-profile set of XML web services postponed eight months ago, seems to have dropped off the company's 2003 roadmap. .NET My Services, once codenamed Hailstorm, was to comprise 14 services including an electronic online address book and voice mail inbox and was once trumpeted as the vanguard of a .NET web services revolution by the company."
It will not be missed.
Do you remember the time they tried to build their own private internet network ? Was it already named MSN ???
I guess history just repeats itself, as always.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
See, they code-named it Hailstorm so those who thought about it knew this would happen all along.. it can be on the way down but then be gone or have changed in to something entirely different by the time it arrives.
Microsoft using clever names, well I'll be. Maybe I'm reading too much in to this though, it is late..
Microsoft did this a few years ago with .NET itself. Lo and behold it suddenly appeared. When asked why it didn't come sooner, Microsoft said that it was up on the whiteboard but had to go due to timing, departmental and budget issues.
Moral: Microsoft never kills off the technology, they just delay it until they think the time is right.
"And then I visited Wikipedia
There was never really a killer app involved. Companies with a dedicated IT department understand the utility in newer technology, but to the average person, saying something like "This is a revolutionary new technology. It will let you check your email and voicemail! And let you keep an address book!" is hardly compelling. People can already do all of those things with regular HTTP and/or other technology.
In addition, I wonder how many people actually want to have a single online identity for everything? It might be safer then using the same username/password over and over again, but I don't really know if people want to have their every move tracked and databased... although it does seem like a lot of people don't care.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Decentralization of critical data is key to security, robustness, scalability, ..., etc.
Translation: Putting all of one's eggs into one basket is not a smart thing to do.
I can't believe that people are even using Microsoft's Passport. I guess by making it a necessity in order to use certain MSN Web services like Hotmail, this was the only way they figured they could attract customers.
Why would I want to store all vital information of mine (SS#, credit card #, name, address, phone, email, etc.) on one sketchy server up in Redmond, WA?
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
What makes a man want to be a mouse? (Python's Flying Circus)
Considering that they own 95% of the browser market, I always thought it would be very easy for them to include code that would enable easy navigation to domains of their own making, such as ".msn", ".aol", etc. They could bypass ICANN or whoever administers the whole of the Net, and start selling domains or their choosing. No need for plugins, etc, the code would be there, imbedded. What's to keep them from doing this?
What you're saying is .NET is actually .NOT?
How? Do you really think that many people use a different username and password for every login they have? The current situation is that your details are spread across a number of hosts, most of which have unknown security. Crack one, and it opens up access to the rest.
Here, for the average user, security is as strong as the weakest link - the most insecure website. Using the same username/password combination for your accounts, and giving that information out wherever you get a new account means that you are implicitly trusting each account granter with all your details. afaik, passport gives you the ability to authenticate somebody without people having to trust you with their password. Yes, you're still trusting microsoft, but it's better to trust a single organisation than many.
Don't be silly. Why should they have multiple authentication mechanisms across a number of sites, rather than a single authentication mechanism shared across them all? They are eating their own dog-food, that's all.
Please, please, please! Do not use "comprise" unless you know how to use it! comprise != is composed of !!!
Example sentence:
14 elements comprise the whole.
which means:
The whole is composed of 14 elements.
I can take spelling errors, but comprise is not a commonly used word, and using it improperly just says you know the word vaguely and would like to show off your "literacy".
j
Remember: MS's MO when a product starts running horribly behind schedule (see: every version of Windows) to start dropping promised features left and right. I wouldn't read much more into it than that, unless somebody has some inside information that's provably not just more spin.
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
.NET "My Bob" any day now.
KFG
*poor self esteeme
*chronic morbid obesecity
*non existant personal hygene
Huh. Don't forget *poor grammar/spelling skills
does seem to be popular with the big boys though Liberty Alliance so I guess we will be landed with some form of it in the future.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
I remember in 1995, when the Internet was just starting to bud in the commercial world, MS wanted to kill it.
I went to some Microsoft roadshow in Indianapolis, and they were touting the capabilities of the Microsoft Network, and how everything that was possible on the Internet, was possible on MSN, only better.
It was amusing to some guy in an MS golf shirt demonstrate things such as web browsing, IRC, and FTP and how they would better be served in an MS-only environment.
A year or so later, they abandoned the kill the Internet strategy, and started up their "embrace and extend" policy.
In short, MS got it's ass kicked. They quickly swept that defeat under the rug, and you rarely ever hear about it, which is I'm sure what will happen with this defeat.
Anyone know of a good unbiased comparison between J2EE to .NET? Or biased comparisons representing both sides and talking about the same general set of topics? I'm specifically interested in architectural advantages, not artificial performance tests.
.NET advocate who will blatantly say ".NET is better." The reasons range from "because Visual Studio is great", to "ASP.NET" Web forms are way better than JSP. I'm not trying to attack .NET here, but I'm very curious to know why these folks think it's better. I'm looking for an answer that is a bit more convincing than, "it is."
I'm a J2EE developer, and on most all the message boards I read, any discussion of a J2EE technology will normally be interrupted by some
What has *science* done?!? -- Dr. Weird (ATHF)
I spoke with some of the top guys at Passport who were obviously heavily involved with Hailstorm at Digital ID World 2002 in Denver. They assured me Hailstorm was very much alive, but it had turned into a far bigger project than they had thought. In particular, I remember one guy saying something to the effect of "Well, my conscious is clean, I told Bill 2 years was unreasonable, but did he listen? Of course not". Words pretty close to that.
It may have been a red herring, but I seriously doubt it. I for one don't think Hailstorm has gone - just forgotten, at least for now.
Do you really think that many people use a different username and password for every login they have?
No, but at least now, if I find one username/password combination, i don't necessarily know where else i can try that combination. But if I find out your hotmail password, then I immediately know that I can also jack your ebay account, your MSN account, etc.
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
All the credit card companies have allready decided to go with the liberty alliance so the passport issue is not such a big deal.
For all the talk the major risk from credit card fraud is to shops not customers. You can cancel a credit card payment. This is the major problem with any new system.
It is clear that credit card fraud is possiable so that a credit card company can't just tell you that you must have bought the item or payed for the service. With new services that emphasis their security it will be much more difficult to cancel a payment.
The major reasion why you can't charge for online content is because most people are used to accessing information on the internet for free and are not all that keen on paying.
There are however some pay content sites that have worked, the best model being the supplying of information that has a limited lifetime and high value, such as business information.
The passport stuff is even worst then that.
Microsoft recently released a new game Asheron's Call 2. The only code developed by microsoft in what is otherwise a very excellent game, is the passport billing and authentication system. That is major problem with the game and is causing alot of problems.
First it is limited to worked with credit card companies from only 8 countries. This may of been planned from the DRM side.
Second it has problems with being up, so once you are in the game it is ok, but sometimes you have problems getting authenticated by passport and the microsoft servers. Sometimes it is because the servers are down, othertimes it seems to not find peoples authentication for the first attempt.
Third say you cancel in the middle of a pay period, from that point on the passport system drops your authorization. So no playing until your payment period runs out. On the bright side of this they do warn you about this.
It died because _retailers_ realised that MS would be acting as agent between the customers and themselves. This worried a lot of people, not because of security or anything, just because it locked the business model into whatever MS was prepared to provide.
.... that they just cancelled this scheme because Microsoft has recieved a $50 billion contract from the Bush administration for a much improved system. The scheme involves a sensor, in the form of a spike, that will be implanted into the skull of all American schoolchildren from the age of 6 with a pneumatic nail gun. The 6 cm long probe extends into the inner brain and links the human mind to the internet over a SSL connection. According to a spokesman of the Total Information Awareness Office This new aera of cooperation between Microsoft and IAO will greatly enhance the effectiveness of TIAS (Total Information Awareness System) and revolutionize the ability of the US govt to fight domestic US terrorism. Using the system to fight international terrorism might prove difficutl though not impossible since all vistors to the USA will be required to be implanted in customs and it might also be possible to make economic or military aid contingent upon the complete implanting of citizenry of nations who wish to recieve such economic/military incentives, direct military invention migh also be an option when dealing with "rougue states". Microsoft spokesmen on the other hand have been reluctant to comment on allegations by internet news site/discussion forum www.Slashdot.org that this is just another step in the corporations ultimate quest to poke its nose into the private thougts of all humankind with its evil hardware/software and thereby achieve world domination.
... Karma to burn
If you havent noticed by now I will be kind and tell you, That was a sarcastic rant!
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Yeh, you're right, but I don't trust MS, and now I can't get customised updates from my local cinema chain cuz they've gone 'passport'
Who on earth says I use the same username/password combination for all accounts anyway? Don't be stupid.
Im not some kind of MS cheerleader, but I will say, I'm a perl guy who never liked using Perl to output HTML (sorry Slashdot authors, you guys do great, I just hated doing it), I liked ASP, but VB SUUUUUUCKED when youre used to Perl. So when C# came out, I bought a couple books.
Here I am a few months later, and I just finished a project for a client where I "single handedly" built a fairly complicated retail website (online shopping), 3 web services, 3 command line (cron type) apps that run on their internal servers and keep the webserver's contact and product database up to date across the internet via webservices. And one GUI app to manage some key features from their end. And I did it all in C# using the same .NET objects and building just a few of my own.
Again, this is not an MS employee talking (read my comment history), I'm stating only the truth. Im sure Java is awsome, I spent a little time with it, and honestly was going to move to that next, but C# just seemed slick coming from Perl, and I really have enjoyed working with it.
Incedentally, I don't use Visual Studio.NET for much. It's a fine IDE, and I use it to create GUI apps (Im no masochist, screw trying to place form widgets by typing in pixel coords), but other than that I do the rest with EditPlus.
Give it a look. MS products usually piss me off, and much of what they do is so ill-willed or poorly-thought out, but I swear, I feel like .NET was written by someone ELSE. It's just really nice for small guys like me who want a lot of power.
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
It's all three, don't you see It's a great new idea that combines everything into one. One OS, one programing language, one network...
Aww, hell. I don't know. I gave up trying to find out what it is.
hmm... for fun I enjoy launching DDoS attacks against 127.87.42.5
Microsoft announced that they were scrapping / postponing this due to a lack of interest from customers. Basically, people thought (correctly) that it was a stupid idea. A few years back, Microsoft tried selling Office as an online ASP Service over the web. It was a stupid idea and no one used it. Clearly they saw this was going to be the same thing.
None of this is exactly a Red Herring -- Microsoft follows a pattern of announcing some far reaching plan, then seeing who responds / complains and then adjusting / cancelling before they actually make any concrete plans (or most likely write a line of code).
I am not a number! I am a man! And don't you
Crack one, and it opens up access to the rest.
When not using Passport, this is not true. I have the same login/password for several websites, but I always manually log in. If one of those websites was cracked, how would the others be compromised? Answer: they won't.
it's better to trust a single organisation than many.
We are talking about Microsoft, here. I'd rather have individual logins for each website. Each one is totally self-contained, even if the same username and password is used (see above).
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Hailstorm, I thought, was .NET's raison d'etre. All these information technology services, implemented under a Windows framework, and a totally redesigned operating system, built to seamlessly integrate them.
.NET server (basically Windows XP Server from everything I've heard), and a somewhat cross-platform (with Mono and all that) and network aware VisualBasic replacement in C#?
So what the hell is it now? Passport,
I'm shocked that more in the Linux community don't avoid this whole thing. Why Ximian is having anything to do with this is beyond me. I think any links with MS right now is a mistake. Linux has no reason to attempt to suckle any of the many teats of MS. Compatibility is one thing, but to think the lion is just going to let you sleep beside him forever is non-sense. When he get's hungry or pissed enough, it's your ass. Mono will eventually find this out. .Net is still largely only a reality in the programming world. Which means technically, it's still not a reality. It's all marketing hype at this point. Until a user can see it, and cyberly touch it it's useless. Frankly, I believe it's a means for MS to spread its code in an attempt to shackle competitors later with licensing. Unfortunately, Mono is just an example of how the bait is working.
>
Do you really think that many people use a different username and password for every login they have?
True, many people (foolishly) use the same username and password for multiple sites... but at least they have the ability to use different ones if they choose.
I take drugs seriously.
It was, or at least the central idea was. MS was looking for a Java killer, and found it at some university (damn for the life of me I can't find out where), where they had the CLR pretty much already done. C# is pretty much a 1:1 mapping of capabilities of the runtime to a language with C++/Java syntax, and the other languages are existing MS languages bashed into the CLR. Not to say MS hasn't contributed to it, it has greatly, but it follows the MS pattern of not really innovating new things, but taking someone else's idea and executing it much better than they were able to.
Excellent. When AC2 tanks, no game company will ever touch passport authentication again. I was afraid that they'd embed it into something with no real competition that would force people to use it and get used to it...
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
I don't think that the idea of Passport is necessarily bad. (The way Passport is sold, not the demographics harvesting that Passport is actually about.)
There is a problem, which is multiple logins, lost passwords, filling out obnoxious forms, etc. Mozilla and IE partially solve this, but what is really needed is a kind of generalised SSH agent, that contains all of a user's identifying information. This agent would run on the user's machine, and sites would be granted trust on a very limited basis.
In addition to the agent, some changes to xhtml or whatever markup language is being used, attaching semantic meaning to form elements. Things like "given name", "family name", "phone number", etc, would be standardized across all web sites that adopt the technology.
Changing their Marketing and company focus at the drop of a hat to follow market conditions. IDIOTS!
love is just extroverted narcissism
Yeah, FTP and the microsoft way of treating everything in ascii.
Gave me one helluva hard time in installing (actually downloading) the NVidia drivers for Linux before realising, that some utterly brainless idiot at Microsoft Corp. decided that ascii is the default for FTP-servers.
And from all companies to actually decide on ascii as a default for just about frigging anything the BloatBoys in Redmond would be the last you expect to pull such a shitty.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
The embrace and extend policy you mentioned is ongoing, and the fools still think they can make the web an IE only place. They are doing this by a combinatin of making IE suck and promotions of horrid M$ only junk like activeX. So while they have changed their tune, the trajectory is the same. It's a stupid policy that will ruin them, because beter free alternatives are available.
The net result is that nothing actually works. Last weekend, I got a real shocking demonstration of just how bad IE really is. My father in law has a windoze 2000 box at the mercy of the smart updater. He has the latest and greatest IE6.0 with all the patches, and he has Norton Utilities to try and fix M$ registry problems and all that. I made a CD full of baby girl movies and tested it on his machine to see what he would see. He did not see much. IE was unable to display thubnails named ".thumb_number.thm.jpg", it was unable to display portable net graphics on it's own and object linking embeding for png and avi was horribly broken. Quick time, set as the default veiwer was able to display png files but not as thumbnails in an index. Media player was unable to display avi films, despite the fact that avi is a microsoft format. Media player played the sound and gave a picture of some stoner screen saver. Quicktime was able to display them on it's own, but IE insisted that Quicktime display inside IE. Everytime you pushed on a link, it piped up a dialog box that asked you if you wanted to run the movie inside IE. The default was yes and "remember my preference". If you clicked "no" it would pop the same dialog again as if it did not believe your first answer. It never remembered the "no" answer. Four clicks to view a movie or one click not to. Quicktime was unable to display the movie inside IE. Eventually, we made a mistake and the default behavior was the broken one. I really could not believe that it sucked that bad. This is the company that would try to manage my online identity?
M$ lost him that day. I downloaded Mozilla for him, it worked perfectly and that was it. This is a guy that gets his news from CNN, had swallowed the M$ propaganda about anti-trust and had an aversion to Netscape over it.
M$ needs to retreat and fix their junk, but it's way too late. They will be overwhelmed by the quality of free software. Bob, MSN, NET, it's all the same noise.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Recall that Microsoft renames technical platforms at an alarming rate. This happens so frequently that I conclude it is part of their business model, though I've never understood the advantage of it. Maybe it's a way of locking technical professionals in or out (I'm definitely an outie) by making it unproductively hard to keep up with MS stuff and the rest of the world at the same time. Anyway, is it possible that Hailstorm is alive and well, but about to be renamed to some other meteorological phenomenon, maybe PartlyCloudyChanceofFlurries or something?
mt
IE troll about web standards.
802.11b troll
PDA troll from a guy who says he keeps his PDA in a drawer.
Wow, all in the last 25 comments. Now, above in glorious living print is a C#, Visual Studio, boast, perl smash. No sane person can favorably compare an M$ environment to a free on anymore.
Perl works great for me. Combined with bash scripting, GNU utilities like find, grep and friends, ordinary C/C++ programing, hell even FORTRAN, or any of the other compilers of the GNU compiler collection, and you have unmatched power and flexibility. No other platform offers as much. Find me an equal to ImageMagic. That's just a small example. Most common work is already done and modifying it to your particular case is not difficult. If that's not enough, you might consider security issues and the perpetual "upgrade" path that will break your M$ junk with more junk of equal or lesser quality and utility. In the free world, upgrades improve your old stuff and replacements are generally better.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Take a look at your Yahoo! Profile. They have your name, birthday, address, phone number and any information you have ever given to a Yahoo! property. I was shocked to discover information about me on my wife (then fiance)'s profile. Turns out we had ordered plane tickets once and these people diligently tracked and recorded that information.
Yahoo! is a lot more insidious now than Passport ever will be.
Mmmm.. Donuts
So they can copy the same services for an online .Net component.
.Mac.
In the future, look for hailstorm (or whatever name it's released under) to include net backup, calendar publishing, web stuff, and whatever else Apple adds in to
Oh, and probably all the lookup stuff built into Sherlock.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer.
Yes, it's an old one, but it bears repeating.
But only for AOL users, not the general public.
Both browsers have some sort of general keyword system setup so you can type in "cars" and go to some car site... probably. No one uses it though because google will take 'em where they want to go
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.