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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."
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?
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.
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.
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.NET "My Bob" any day now.
KFG
Actually, I think it will.
A centralized payment system is what we need most, my understanding is that this would be a feature among others.
The trouble and uncertainty of putting credit-card info inline is the biggest problem for companies trying to sell stuff online and the number one reason why it's not possible to charge for online content.
The optimal would be if there would be some kind of standard and the banks would have the service but a company would be a needed second best.
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.
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!
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
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,