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Gates Embraces Web Service Interoperability
djh101010 writes "In a CNN article which looks more like something out of The Onion, Bill Gates expresses his interest in participating in interoperability with rival technologies, through common standards. Specifically mentioned are IBM's WebSphere, and Linux. 'We're being as inclusive as we can,' Gates said of Microsoft's role in the cross-platform project. 'This is a fabric for someone to do e-commerce that's independent of the operating systems that are out there.'
We all know how Gates "embraced" XML for Office 11...
..When I finally own/crush Linux, I want to talk to it..
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
Just incase there was any confusion on the part of the editors.
Join Tor today!
I mean this seriously made me think of 99. Obligatory /. .com business plan?
1. Create interoperable standards so users can migrate from one OS to another without rewriting code
2. ????
3. Profit!
Except I have a strong suspicion that number 2 is:
2. Erode competitions' standing in marketplace and watch customers gradually migrate to your software, because migration is no longer a hassle
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
if you can't beat 'em, pretend you want to be friends so you don't look as bad (and hopefully they'll let you in on a small piece of the pie)
well, it's nothing one behind the ear wouldn't cure
Why does this remind me of SCO. Announce what you will, say what you must, and stick to it or no one will take you seriously. I have no problem for the most part with what Microsoft produces in the way of software (aside from the fact i would never use a MS server over a Linux Server.....duh), but i DO have a problem with their flakey business ethics...
If you're going to go for something GO FOR IT for the love of pete. Changing your mind makes ya look like an idiot.
[/end flamebait]
And by "embrace", he means "bone-crushing bear hug".
[SIG] It's like putting a moose in the blender -- a recipe for disaster!
Isn't this like a bear "playing" with a couple of salmon in a river? Somehow I doubt that Goliath (Microsoft) really wants to play fair...at this point I welcome all conspiracy theory experts to bring forward explanations :-)
If you can't beat 'em, join em...
...then beat 'em.
It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. -Frederick Douglass
April 1st is still a long way off. This is not the time of year for this type of post.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
This isn't the first time seemingly good things has been announced which dissapointed later. I'll rejoice when I see some positive results.
"Embrace"
part.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Microsoft bad! Gates bad! Standards good! What going on? Help!
It seems to me that this could be Microsoft's new strategy against the open source world.
Embrace them, incorporate ideas, etc, giving them "all the advantages of linux".
Well, that's what it'll say on the new adverts.
Gates said the Redmond, Washington-based company's work toward Web services standards would be "royalty free." That remark led to questions from the audience, which wanted to make sure Gates hadn't misstated the deviation from the company's royalty-based software sales model.
Royalty free? Not if SCO can do something about that. What I found a bit odd, would be his comments on standards: "Standards are always a give-to-get bargain," he said. Standards are also done on behalf of everyone for everyone in order to make services work the right way. It's the only way to get products working with eatch other. So for one, he is not obligated to participate in any standards, but at the same time he is as if he doesn't, his products might not perform well under other vendors' products. So in essence whether he likes it or not, he is obligated if he wants to stay in the game and make money. As for the Netscape mention, personally I don't see Netscape as being around too long as a browser considering Netscape's parent AOL recently signed a deal with Microsoft. Just my two coppers...
MoFscker
In other words, they are giving so they can get something which in the end they can use to further lock out other applications and companies from being compatible.
A famous quote comes to mind:
"I fear the Greeks, even when they bring gifts." --Virgil
Be curious to find out how they will try to spin this to their advantage while disadvantaging everyone else.
CNN did note it was odd Gates kept snickering and chuckeling to himself while making the statements.
and was heard to utter You think they bought it? as he left the interview.
This Is Something to FEAR
-Robert
A PR move, nothing more, nothing less.
'This is a fabric for someone to do e-commerce that's independent of the operating systems that are out there: Windows 98, Windows 98SE, Windows Me, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP ... oh and... what's it called... MacOS."
Hack your mind out of its sandbox.
http://i.cnn.net/cnn/2003/TECH/biztech/09/18/micro soft.gates.ap/story.william.bill.gates.ap.jpg
I wonder if dad can shot lightning out if his finger tips?
Time to plan my ski trip to hell. /me begins checking the book of Revelations for other signs of the Apocolypse.
That article opens with a quip about Gates embracing Linux, Netscape and royalty-free software but the article only states that they'll help develop a royalty free "Web services standard". Wow, big deal. Where's all the "loving" the headline promises???
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
The point is just because he said lots of fuzzy words today it doesn't mean he won't try to "cut off the oxygen supply" of those same groups tomorrow. Is he suddenly buddy-buddy with Linux? Nope, his company is still fighting it tooth and nail around the world, putting out FUD, doing whatever it takes to head it off at the pass.
Good PR moments such as this do not negate the overall approach Gates will take. Do not be fooled, he's the same old monopolist.
Bill's doing this to get the skinny on the competing technologies...then he can invent something different about it, push it out the door in the next release, and it'll look, to the MS user, that MS is right, and all these other people are wrong. Remember Gates telling the ISO that he needed to change the work of 270 nations and make his codeset a little different? IE will show apostrophies....everything else shows question marks.
Same stuff, different day.
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
Inclusive as we can - Ha! That's a loaded statement! What he means: Microsoft can't / won't.
"This is a fabric for someone to do e-commerce that's independent of the operating systems that are out there."
Someone, just not Microsoft.
Out of order? Fuck! Even in the future nothing works! - Dark Helmet (Rick Moranis) "Spaceballs"
This doesn't seem like earth-shattering news. It's kind of like saying, "Hey! Microsoft is willing to embrace HTML." Am I missing something?
Bill says: "This is a fabric for someone to do e-commerce that's independent of the operating systems that are out there."
Interoperability at the server end? Wee. That's a small piece of the pie compared to the stranglehold they have on the desktop market. This entire move is engineered to keep Microsoft with some mindshare in the server-farm arena where Open Source is kicking their backside silly.
Certainly their services will work with IBM and Linux stuff but if you really want some neat backend stuff (Embrace and Extend), then you'll have to buy Microsoft LongDong Server 2081 or whatever they name their crap now.
Bill Gates doesn't take a crap in the morning without having a plan for the cleanup.
Trolling is a art,
A disease worse than aids... you can catch it just by having a carrier hug you.
Bill had the first documented case of Extenditus, and being such a touchy-feely guy, he's embraced a lot of people since, spreading it far and wide.
We recommend an immediate quarantine of Microsoft and all organizations that have engaged in "Group Hugs" with them.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Embrace, extend, close.
Become the standard, close out the competition.
-=sig=-
Seems like the only explanation...
And I, for one, welcome our new Microsoft - oh wait...
Chuck Norris: Socialism == a thousand years of darkness.
Services for Unix
Microsoft is most likely finding a gateway between their technology and everyone else's to create a migration path towards MS products. Once everyone has flocked over, the usual grab-you-by-the-balls policies apply. What I think they're missing is that the technology works the other way too. You can use this interoperability to get off the MS train. Look at Services for Unix... it created a path that goes both ways between *NIX and MS. MS probably designed it as a one-way tunnel, but in return we got a pathway to migrate off.
Conspiracy theorize all you want to, but MS may have just handed linux the keys to the desktop.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
isn't that the business plan behind Java?
...and I can recognize evil as well as the next person, but give the guy a break. There might be very evil intentions to this, but he's at least claiming a step in the right direction. He stands to benefit if he can market stuff to geeks who have despised his organization for a long time and we all *might* benefit. Just, give him some slack for *one* article.
Okay, you may mod me down now.
In a CNN article which looks more like something out of The Onion
Puh-lease
This is offensive to anybody (like myself) who takes The Onion's news more seriously than anything from Bill and his minions.
-Phil
Shoot questions, first ask later...
IBM should have learned from OS/2 about partnering with Microsoft. Currently they are very pro Java , for example take a look at their developer website. .NET suite.
Since IBM does not have a decent web/app server they probably are trying to get a foot in the door for their
I have so far understood their "embrace" part. But what I don't get is where does the "annihilate" part come in? By standardising the XML standards Java also benefits, right? So how does M$ plan to screw Java and IBM
.ACMD setaloiv siht gnidaeR
Why do you assume Bill Gates et al. is making the same mistake that a lot of other businesses make? For example, the RIAA member companies and several others. Everybody says, "Jeez, these business people are dumb and are fighting the inevitable."
What if Microsoft realized two things:
- Linux isn't going away.
- You get free shit from them.
Effectively meaning that they can start to actually embrace and integrate services, and actually expand and mutate their business model based on the economy and world, rather than what everybody perceives as their business model.I was chatting with a SCORE member, and he said that a true business plan should be a living entity that evolves with the world around it. Why is it so hard to believe that the most successful software company doesn't heed that advice?
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
OF COURSE he's going to say something like that.
Because of what he says in this article, there are now pointy-haired managers out there that are saying to themselves, "Well, we were considering using Linux, but instead we'll buy Microsoft for now and we can still switch in the future if we want. Microsoft uses standards -- Bill would never lie to make a buck."
Bill Gates doesn't want to make people think that Microsoft is the devil.
...just my 2 gil.
IRC style: ...
BillG: I'm going to open up some standards for everybody so we can all benefit.
bersl2:
But seriously, did the Earth get swallowed by a black hole, and we reappeared in some alternate universe? Maybe here, things can make negative sense.
Lastly, who is sticking their hand up Gates' ass and puppeting him, because that's not the Billy Boy we all know and love to hate.
I'm waiting for an XML document that exploits a buffer overflow in Windows somehow. Come on, you know it will happen someday!
Why is this under the 'Microsoft' topic and not 'Humor'?
BTW - LOL on the department...
Sig? What sig? Do I have to have a sig!?!?
Somewhere, on whatever planet Bill is from, it's April Fool's Day.
"UH, yeah Bill. Someone did create a way for interoperability among OS's. It's called Java. Remember Bill....? /sarcasm
Bill Gates (to himself): "Hmm... Everyone hates me, and everyone is aligned against me, creating their own web services standards and ensuring that I won't completely capture the market. Let's see... This implies that they might take a significant part of the market, and if I'm not interoperable, I'll be essentially locked out. Ah, well, screw it."
(calls up Ballmer)
Bill Gates: "Hey, Steve -- do me a favor, would you? Round up some of our better R+D guys, and have them work up a system that lets us totally interoperate with all the other, competing web services systems out there, wouldja?"
Ballmer: "WTF???"
Bill Gates: "Why lock ourselves out of a big chunk of the market? We've got our section, now we can play with their section too."
Ballmer: "Ok, I'm on it..."
This is strictly hypothetical, but I bet it's pretty close.
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
I mean, come on, think about it.... One of the big problems with every major dotcom in the last few years is the fact that none of them could escape the fact that they were one of a ton of small fish in a big pong. Just go to google and type in a search for "Operating System", Windows and Microsoft aren't even on the radar.
.NET.... Internet Explorer is nothing more than a tool for the vast majority of users, something to help them get to websites that they want to go and facilitate interactions there. Passport Wallets did not become a de facto internet must-have.... Too many people don't shop on the web, spammers have trained the vast majority of internet users not to instinctively trust anyone (even Verisign, a _trust_ company, betrayed the trust of people with other domain registars with sleazy marketing tactics).... I recon Microsoft sees strength in themselves only by trying to keep their software updated and operating as people expect it to operate, along with traditional software sales, because their services from Passport to Hotmail to MSN probably don't account for anything more than a pittance.
If this stuff (what little there is) is true, this probably is just extends what Gates has known for a while, in spite of
Just my opinion.
It's quite hard to believe that after all the years of "royalty based" software as stated in the article that Microsoft is all of a sudden not claiming the rights to something that allows their product to be more compatible with rival products.
Although it obviously was a collaboration, it's surprising to see that MS has not attempted to claim that they are now interoperable with other operating systems, instead of saying what they are now, being that the OS'es are now all more interoperable with each other. Does this mark a change in business tactics for Microsoft? Highly unlikely. I guarantee there's *some* sort of motive behind this move, they wouldn't do anything that would result in loss of business.
Believe it or not, not every company looks to Microsoft for everything, and not every company is about making money as the only thing while screwing their customers.
Troll.
in that order??
It is always April 1st on Slashdot.
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
So, you're going to be using an XML format for the next version of MSOffice, right? Right?
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Let's see here...
Plague of painful sores
Seas, rivers, and springs turn to blood
Plague of darkness
Plague of Locusts
Great Earthquake
The four Horsemen
Gates embraces Linux
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
Well, it's because past history with Microsoft shows a very definite trend of Microsoft making proclaimations like this, then subtly slipping in things that completely change the nature of the situation. For instance, Microsoft Office has perverted XML and RTF under the name of "open standards".
The old saying of once bitten twice wary still applies. In general, we refuse to take Gates at face value and continue to look for the fine print, but it would be nice if the guy would actually change his ways...
No-one in their right mind would be quoted as saying "Naaah, we don't want to get involved in any standards. We'd far rather you use ours and be stuck with ours for the rest of your waking life. Mwah haha hahaa".
Or something like that.
(in all seriousness, they'll embrace it, add a few "extras" and break compatibility - in which case everyone else will end up having to change their product to make it work again)
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Of course he's going to embrace .NET technologies, even if they allow rivals to compete against other Microsoft products. MS has done a fantastic job of promoting the .NET framework, getting free tools out to people to learn their systems, and now they're locking in various businesses into expensive VS.NET installations. Not to mention MS Press books and other training that my workplace purchases.... they're quite smart. Evil, but smart.
Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out. -Thomas Cardinal Wolsey
Some corporations would rather buy Microsoft tools under Linux. Others would prefer to avoid Microsoft all together. If you really want to run MS Tools just buy MS Software. The cost of the systems aren't that different.
Visual Studio has been excellent since VS 97 (5.0) and continues to improve dramatically every release. I develop for MS, Linux, Solaris, and OS X. The right tool for the job is independent of the OS provider.
C++ Classes (no business logic in GUI code)
GTK for Linux FrontEnd
ObjC for OS X FrontEnd
VC++ (MFC) for Windows FrontEnd
Forte for Solaris FrontEnd
With good planning it's relatively simple to implement in this manner. We currently only offer our products on Windows & Mac OS. The Solaris/Linux builds are internal only. With BlueCurve it makes me more confident in the ability for Linux to be a good platform for our clients (extraordinarily computer illiterate) with a standard look & feel. Solaris hardware is too high to justify when we can get Windows/Linux/Mac systems for 1/2 the price.
In the end when you choose a platform for your business you need to look at all the available implications. MS quit developing Tools for Mac about 10 years ago, and it is extremely doubtful they will ever release tools for Linux.
I've always said the best thing MS could do (in the past, anyway) was to distribute Linux.
For example, if they grabbed something like Caldera - with no significant upgrade path, and bundle it with their server products... They could say "Hey! Do what you want, but you'll probably find Windows easier and better). If not, they still sold a Windows server license.
This would also decimate desktop aspirations for Linux too, since they got both in the box, Joe Sixpack would prefer Linux, and even technical users would try their FVWM/Kernel 2.0 distro and say "Neat, but look how much more advanced Windows is!"
Then millions more people would at least say "I've tried Linux"
It's all in the spin.
Of course, this ain't so good for we Linux evangelists...
SYS 64738 NO CARRIER
Do not make the mistake of thinking that this extends to the desktop though. They are quite happy for you to buy Visual Studio.NET, write ASP.NET web services and deploy on Linux, as long as the clients connecting to it are running Windows.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
On Wednesday he embraced all three.
On Thursday he cloned them all.
On Friday he released the clones, having changed their names and feature sets.
On Saturday he released the first 12 patches.
Gates(eating pie on face): Blah blah blah $$$ Royalty-f%&^&* Papers report- Blah blah blah $$$ Royalty-FREE some months later when standards where implimented Gates : Royalty-free?????? i said royalty-fee. subscription based, auto-daily renewing -Royalty- fee.
I'm not going to hold my breath; it's more likely we'll see more software designed to lock in their own users and lock out the rest of the world, regardless of current PR bleating.
If they want to convince "us" (namely the OSS community/free world/whatever you want to call it) they have to come up with actions, not blather. We've had enough of the latter.
I like linux, I hate zealots and their misinformation and inability to comprehend or see things clearly.
Why is that hard to understand?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Don't forget the Java fiasco...
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
This is a fabric for someone to do e-commerce that's independent of the operating systems that are out there.'
Of course everyone recognizes this for sales droid talk, telling people What They Want to Hear.
Nevertheless, it's significant that Bill Gates not only recognizes the sentiment of user's not liking to be locked into one product by virtue of using another, but that he is actually willing to give voice to it publicly.
Especially when so much of Microsoft's corporate culture has been built upon leveraging, using products that either ubiquitous or well-designed (yes, I must admit that) to lock users into other products that are either poorly designed and/or expensive.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
IBM and MS are founders of Web Services Interoperability
The organization must be 2 years old by now. Nothing to see here, move along.
In other news, Satan moved from Hell to Canada.
When asked why, he stated, "I wanted to move to a warmer climate.".
testing out my trending skills
Isn't instant messaging a web service? And hasn't Microsoft already promised to cut off non-paying clients such as Gaim?
Or does this mean that MS is going to open Messenger to other clients like Gaim?
Let's see what happens October 15th.....
Disclaimer: I work on the XML team at Microsoft but not directly with Microsoft Office.
...for .NET, and SOAP. People this *is* a Good Thing. As long as you can get two different parties to agree on a schema, you are off and running. Open source version of this is XMLRPC and as far as 'closed' source, I am already running Project Server 2002, which has an XMLRPC implementation in it. Third party clients can parse my Project database (over 500 projects and counting) with an XML Web query and Project Server spits back the results. This stuff kicks ass, and I, for one, am pleased that Microsoft is taking a lead in it.
is the game here ... like anyone here really trusts what Bill says. MS just must be getting feedback to be standards compliant from very large customers. They will only run with this until their implementation is the defacto standard.
this sig is deprecated
How do "we" all know that, when it's not out in stores until Oct. 22? Are you an MSDN subscriber?
/2003/auxHint" xmlns:o="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" xmlns:dt="uuid:C2F41010-65B3-11d1-A29F-00AA00C1488 2" w:macrosPresent="no" w:embeddedObjPresent="no" w:ocxPresent="no" xml:space="preserve"><o:DocumentProperties><o:Titl e>This is a test of XML</o:Title><o:Author>User</o:Author><o:LastAutho r>User</o:LastAuthor><o:Revision>1</o:Revision><o: TotalTime>1</o:TotalTime><o:Created>2003-09-18T15: 29:00Z</o:Created><o:LastSaved>2003-09-18T15:30:00 Z</o:LastSaved><o:Pages>1</o:Pages><o:Words>3</o:W ords><o:Characters>20</o:Characters><o:Company>Whi te Goat Studios</o:Company><o:Lines>1</o:Lines><o:Paragrap hs>1</o:Paragraphs><o:CharactersWithSpaces>22</o:C haractersWithSpaces><o:Version>11.5604</o:Version> </o:DocumentProperties><w:fonts><w:defaultFonts w:ascii="Times New Roman" w:fareast="Times New Roman" w:h-ansi="Times New Roman" w:cs="Times New Roman"/><w:font w:name="Verdana"><w:panose-1 w:val="020B0604030504040204"/><w:charset w:val="00"/><w:family w:val="Swiss"/><w:pitch w:val="variable"/><w:sig w:usb-0="20000287" w:usb-1="00000000" w:usb-2="00000000" w:usb-3="00000000" w:csb-0="0000019F" w:csb-1="00000000"/></w:font></w:fonts><w:styles>< w:versionOfBuiltInStylenames w:val="4"/><w:latentStyles w:defLockedState="off" w:latentStyleCount="156"/><w:style w:type="paragraph" w:default="on" w:styleId="Normal"><w:name w:val="Normal"/><w:rPr><wx:font wx:val="Times New Roman"/><w:sz w:val="24"/><w:sz-cs w:val="24"/><w:lang w:val="EN-US" w:fareast="EN-US" w:bidi="AR-SA"/></w:rPr></w:style><w:styl e w:type="character" w:default="on" w:styleId="DefaultParagraphFont"><w:name w:val="Default Paragraph Font"/><w:semiHidden/></w:style><w:sty le w:type="table" w:default="on" w:styleId="TableNormal"><w:name w:val="Normal Table"/><wx:uiName wx:val="Table Normal"/><w:semiHidden/><w:rPr><wx:fon t wx:val="Times New Roman"/></w:rPr><w:tblPr><w:tblI nd w:w="0" w:type="dxa"/><w:tblCellMar><w:top w:w="0" w:type="dxa"/><w:left w:w="108" w:type="dxa"/><w:bottom w:w="0" w:type="dxa"/><w:right w:w="108" w:type="dxa"/></w:tblCellMar></w:tblPr></w:style>< w:style w:type="list" w:default="on" w:styleId="NoList"><w:name w:val="No List"/><w:semiHidden/></w:style></w:styles><w:docP r
Having said that, for those curious, here is a sample of XML generated by Word, just now created by me. I'm posting this using "Code" as the format so it is formatted correctly.
Here is the original message (I gave it HTML tags so you can see the formatting I gave it in Word):
This is a <b>test</b> of <font face="verdana" size="24"><b>XML</b></font>.
Now , here is the resulting XML after saving that line:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<?mso-application progid="Word.Document"?>
<w:wordDocument xmlns:w="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/word/ 2003/wordml" xmlns:v="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:vml" xmlns:w10="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:word" xmlns:sl="http://schemas.microsoft.com/schemaLibra ry/2003/core" xmlns:aml="http://schemas.microsoft.com/aml/2001/c ore" xmlns:wx="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/word
"Sufferin' succotash."
"I fear the Greeks, even when they bring gifts." --Virgil
Just to be a smartass - the original goes like this:
Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.
Seemed to me to be another promise of new tech (support) to investors/users/large corportations/etc. so people will put off using the existing tools/skip switching OSes until MS's solution hits the streets and saves them "In the near future".
8-PP
Come on honey, take me back. I've changed. Really. I won't cheat on you again. I swear. I won't ever hit you again.
Sorry Bill, but these wounds run pretty deep. I'll believe it about 5 years after I see it.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Sun's Java fiasco, or Microsoft's fiasco?
Gates was on crack
You have to wonder if this announcement has something to do with Sun recently releasing its Java-based office stack. Also, factor in Steve Ballmer's recent comments on the state of MS's security problems, Apple (lot's of innovation MS can copy, but they're not taking market share), and open source.
Perhaps MS has decided its time to "embrace" Linux, attempt to "extend" it with proprietary MS code, and then litigate the hell out of the GPL to make the resulting product proprietary intellectual property.
It would be a huge gamble, particularly if the GPL holds up in court. But MS could drain a lot of money and resources out of the open source movement even if they lose, perhaps enough even to win the war despite losing the battle.
Or maybe I'm just paranoid and Mr. Gates and Company really have decided that they've made enough money, dominated enough markets, and foisted enough FUD on the world and it's time to contribute all their code to the public domain.
Yeah, right.
TLR
A man no more knows his destiny than a tea leaf knows the history of the East India Company
towards Microsoft. They want interoperability with everyone else... but when someone wants the same thing with .NET, watch the subpoenas fly.
-- No sig for you!
Oasis have been working to get a whole bunch of people "talking" for years, mission overview here. The membership list is quite comprehensive. Lets hope something useful come of it.
Looks like a pile of hourseshit to me and you can bet Microsoft is going to try some dirty stuff in the next couple of years, but I think Bill is beginning to get a grasp of what he's up against.
Linux is Microsoft's achillies heel, the one and only thing that can really take Microsoft out; the peasants revolting and building their own community. It's everything microsoft isn't, it's free, it's open sourced, it's standards based and it's a community project. Microsoft is expensive, closed source, proprietary and is a corperate project. Microsoft's stuff is inherently insecure while linux's stuff is inherently secure.
What I do hope happens is Gates decides to throw longhorn in the trash for being the piece of shit it is and start developing on the OSS standard and makes a opersting system from scratch based on the linux kernel for the idiots at home. I'd love the idea of Microsoft working hand in hand with the OSS community, but as most of us feel, nobody trusts Bill Gates farter than they can throw him (and by the look of the picture he's gotten pudgy).
What most of us fear is Bill Gates deciding to try to steal the communities hard made and hard worked on code. Sure, if he wants to develope it and sell it under the terms of the GPL that's fine by me, and I like that idea but when your company is pulling stunts like with SCO people are going to be resiliant and understandably mistrusting if not vengful.
So, we'll see. Lets just hope for all of our sakes that he doesn't suceed in stealing the linux code and screwing all of the hackers who made it. I don't even want to think what would happen if hackers around the world decided vigalantism is a great way to go. We're all 3 meals from anarchy, and if they shut down the internet itself there's sure going to be anarchy. Think Ms Blaster multiplied by a thousand. If any of these hackers are reading this, if your'e going to do something vigalanty style, I'd suggest going ahead and destroying redmond from the inside out while setting all their information free on kazaa and when you're done with that, gut the goverment for all the data it's worth and set their info free as well.
Candy-Coated Knowledge
Just to give you an idea of how it might look in the most simple case possible. This is a XML Document saved from Word 2003. Yes, it's not retail yet, but it's the RTM version. :-)
:-)
/2003/auxHint" xmlns:o="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" xmlns:dt="uuid:C2F41010-65B3-11d1-A29F-00AA00C1488 2" w:macrosPresent="no" w:embeddedObjPresent="no" w:ocxPresent="no" xml:space="preserve"><o:DocumentProperties><o:Titl e>Hello World</o:Title><o:Author>Familjen</o:Author><o:Las tAuthor>Familjen</o:LastAuthor><o:Revision>1</o:Re vision><o:TotalTime>1</o:TotalTime><o:Created>2003 -09-18T15:32:00Z</o:Created><o:LastSaved>2003-09-1 8T15:33:00Z</o:LastSaved><o:Pages>1</o:Pages><o:Wo rds>2</o:Words><o:Characters>11</o:Characters><o:C ompany> </o:Company><o:Lines>1</o:Lines><o:Paragraphs>1</o :Paragraphs><o:CharactersWithSpaces>12</o:Characte rsWithSpaces><o:Version>11.5604</o:Version></o:Doc umentProperties><w:fonts><w:defaultFon ts w:ascii="Times New Roman" w:fareast="Times New Roman" w:h-ansi="Times New Roman" w:cs="Times New Roman"/></w:fonts><w:styles><w:versionOfBuiltInSty lenames w:val="4"/><w:latentStyles w:defLockedState="off" w:latentStyleCount="156"/><w:style w:type="paragraph" w:default="on" w:styleId="Normal"><w:name w:val="Normal"/><w:rPr><wx:font wx:val="Times New Roman"/><w:sz w:val="24"/><w:sz-cs w:val="24"/><w:lang w:val="SV" w:fareast="SV" w:bidi="AR-SA"/></w:rPr></w:style><w:styl e w:type="character" w:default="on" w:styleId="DefaultParagraphFont"><w:name w:val="Default Paragraph Font"/><w:semiHidden/></w:style><w:sty le w:type="table" w:default="on" w:styleId="TableNormal"><w:name w:val="Normal Table"/><wx:uiName wx:val="Table Normal"/><w:semiHidden/><w:rPr><wx:fon t wx:val="Times New Roman"/></w:rPr><w:tblPr><w:tblI nd w:w="0" w:type="dxa"/><w:tblCellMar><w:top w:w="0" w:type="dxa"/><w:left w:w="108" w:type="dxa"/><w:bottom w:w="0" w:type="dxa"/><w:right w:w="108" w:type="dxa"/></w:tblCellMar></w:tblPr></w:style>< w:style w:type="list" w:default="on" w:styleId="NoList"><w:name w:val="No List"/><w:semiHidden/></w:style></w:styles><w:docP r><w:view w:val="web"/><w:zoom w:percent="100"/><w:doNotEmbedSystemFonts/><w:atta chedTemplate w:val=""/><w:defaultTabStop w:val="1304"/><w:hyphenationZone w:val="425"/><w:punctuationKerning/><w:characterSp acingControl w:val="DontCompress"/><w:optimizeForBrowser/><w:va lidateAgainstSchema/><w
All settings (fonts, line spacing, etc) are using defaults and it contains the text "Hello World". No line breaks are removed. It spits out this mess.
I find it funny that the schema URL's for the various namespaces don't point to existing URL's.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<?mso-application progid="Word.Document"?>
<w:wordDocument xmlns:w="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/word/ 2003/wordml" xmlns:v="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:vml" xmlns:w10="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:word" xmlns:sl="http://schemas.microsoft.com/schemaLibra ry/2003/core" xmlns:aml="http://schemas.microsoft.com/aml/2001/c ore" xmlns:wx="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/word
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
While MS may do everything in their power to establish and control proprietary de facto standards, their work on XML and XSL consistently have pushed standards. In case you don't remember, MS owns a patent or two covering the use of stylesheets, and specifically the technology behind XSLT. They have stated that they will not enforce these patents whatsoever. They have been the driving force behind SOAP, with IBM and others joining in on the bandwagon after they determined SOAP has strong potential.
They may have applied XML in a very non-standard way with MS Office, but their work on the standards themselves (XML, XSL, SOAP, and related tech) is quite exemplary.
--Be human.
Gah! Just mod me into oblivion; someone else posted the same mess while I was composing the post. :-P
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I know this redundant. But, I have to say it:
Microsoft has said this before, and the results have always been bad for developers and consumers (for example the Java and XML debacle).
I don't mind Microsoft using existing standards; I do violently oppose them guiding the course of standards, because they have been shown to be a bad steward for any public standard they get their hands on.
I would be so bold as to argue that it is not out of hubris that they are as they are, as much as from greed.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
Thank you google! http://news.google.com/news?num=30&hl=en&edition=u s&q=cluster:www%2emiami%2ecom%2fmld%2fmiamiherald% 2fbusiness%2f6794978%2ehtm
Not much complicated, they want the server side. But how do you get the server side, when there are tons of written code, running on a stable Os(think about your favorite non-MS os here) ? For MS, what they can provide is much cheaper and developer friendly solutions(vs.net, sql server compared to oracle, sun and ibm stuff) and most important, INTEROPERABILITY. Just as it happened in the desktop development with VB, some developers and companies will find out that they can do easier development on MS servers using vs.net and say C#, and also be able to expose it to other running apps using Web services. There are even papers in MSDN giving detailed info on Web services interop posibilites with java. Ms has to provide an attractive choice to it's potential customers in server side and without interop. with existing code, this is only a dream. So they'll be supporting this till they decide it's time to break interoperability.
Grundgesetz * 23. Mai 1949 - 30. November 2007 - http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/
The trouble is that it would also lend credibility to Linux and MS does not want that. No, the weak spot in Linux that I could see MS going after is not the kernel but the whole GUI supersystem. They could spawn off a Microsoft GUI for Linux and still own 95% of the code people care about. MS will have to co-exist with Linux on the server side, it's too late for them to change that, but they can cement OSS desktops out of the market by usurping the Linux desktop market. The chance of this happening without Linux gaining some significant desktop share first is very slim.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
The assumption is based on the fact that Microsoft's business has been built on leveraging their advantages in one realm to take over another. There are a number of MS products that would never be used by anybody if it wasn't for the fact that they come bundled with other products that are good.
My sense is that Microsoft will play as though they are open to working with these third parties because they really have no choice. Under the covers they will do what they can to subvert these other systems.
For the record, I'm sure IBM or Sun would do the same thing if they had the power to do so.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Exactly.
.net webservices can talk to all these systems, then Bill's a candidate vendor for my project. If they can't, I can't use Bill's groovy dotNet buzztechnology and he makes zero dollars and zero cents.
Say I'm setting up a holiday booking site on the Web. I'm going to offer the whole package.
so I need to talk to, let's say, an airline booking system written in COBOL on a VAX, a variety of car hire booking systems , some in C on Solaris, some in J2EE on Linux, and so forth, a whole bunch of hotel chains' booking systems, train companies, maybe theme park tickets...
If Bill's
Whatever else he may be, Bill's not a sufficiently rubbish businessman to turn down that money.
TomV
Well said!
Saying Android is a family of phones is akin to saying Linux is a family of PCs.
I fear the geeks, even when they bring GIFs.
- The Amazina Llama
And when you're 2nd or 3rd place, it's wise to do as the leaders do.
:)
Then if/when you gain a stronger footing, you can open your Dirty Tactics (tm) book and begin the takeover.
Then once you're #2 or #1, you start deviating from the standards, thus making it more difficult for the losers to interoperate.
Stuff a couple more billion in the bank, donate a couple million with grand fanfare, and you're really showing who's boss
.sigs are for post^Hers.
"Breaking Windows" by David Bank?
The central premise in this book is Bill Gates' philosophy of product development. Although the author presents it as a pragmatic, thought-out business plan that evolved from Bill Gates' examination of the market, to me it always came across as a response to basic insecurities that exposed more of Bill's personality flaws than any understanding of the market.
It goes like this: it doesn't matter how good the product is; it doesn't matter how well a product works; customers are fickle and will switch software at the drop of a hat. Therefore, the only way to keep customers is to 'lock them in', to leverage Office to increase Windows share and Windows to increase Office share by continually tying them together and forcing one to require the other. I am paraphrasing and working from memory, read the book.
My points are:
1. the basic business philosophy of Microsoft is so deeply rooted in the insecurities of it's founder and the founder is still in control
2. the whole idea of "open" standards is completely contrary to the concepts of "lock-in" that has worked so well for Microsoft up to this point
that this DOES sound like something from an alternate universe as one poster here has noted and that this has about as much chance of being even partially true as a snowball's chance in hell.
The biggest issue with the concept of royalt free licensing is the rest of the license. I can create a standard and patent it, then create a "royalty free" license for it. Then I also add to this license clauses that prevent its use in GPL software. Suddenly that wonderful standard gets turned on its head.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
"We're being as inclusive as we can", Gates said...
I.e. inclusive enough to give away 15% of the market to rivals and keep antitrust guys off our backs, but not inclusive enough to risk losing customers to any web services running on alternative OSes?
--LinuxParanoid, who doesn't yet believe Gates's philanthroipc altruism extends to other software companies
P.S. Note Gates's observation that "Standards are always a give-to-get bargain" and ask yourself "what does Gates think he is getting?" There are a variety of possible answers.
> For instance, Microsoft Office has perverted XML and RTF under the name of "open standards".
How exactly Microsoft perverted XML?
Most of us remember Microsoft's Acquisition of Connectix "Virtual Server" and emulation technologies. Is this a sign of Microsoft making concessions in an attempt to win back some of the markets they have lost (Germany) or are losing (China)?
Something intelligent here.
Microsoft is famous for three words. We have now heard "embrace", so we will await "extend", and then "extinguish"
If you want to convince people that Microsoft is becoming more open, you have a lot of work ahead of you learning how to distribute standards, sample implementations, and other documentation:
Until you start distributing stuff so that people can actually download and use it without Microsoft products and without signing their life away, all that talk of embracing open standards is just meaningless fluff.
Wow, got a problem with this business practice, huh? Well, can you name any major software company that has "embraced" standards, without extending them? Not Sun. Not Netscape. Not IBM. Maybe some Linux company?
I'm not defending the practice, just pointing out that it's considered legitimate by the software community at large, and used by some of the largest names in the industry. And that includes, but doesn't consist only of, Microsoft.
would that be like "Red Herring studios"
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Standards from Microsoft are dangerous, even when royalty-free licensing is offered so that they can be implemented in Free Software.
Consider for example the ECMA standards 334 and 335 for the core parts of .NET - while Microsoft has promised royalty-free licensing for any and all patents that may be neccessary for implementing that standard, they are at the same time embracing and extending their own standard, and they have filed at least one patent application that seems to be designed to give them a monopoly on their extensions to the standard.
In some situations it may work to simply refuse to go along with the standards attempts from MS. Unfortunately, MS has so much leverage that this won't always work. For example, with .NET just ignoring it IMO won't work, that's why we're working on creating a competing "standard set of libraries" for the stuff which goes beyond the stuff that is safe from patent-based attacks (the safe parts are what is specified in the ECMA specs, for which MS has promised royalty-free licensing, plus everything which is thin wrappers around stuff that is simply too old to be affected by .NET patents, such as for example System.Windows.Forms). The strategy of the DotGNU project is to re-use a good number of existing Free Software libs (written in C) and compile them for .NET - again since those libs are old, they're safe from being affected by any .NET patents.
Greetings,
Norbert.
The purpose of Bill G.'s comments is simply to announce to the computing world that M$ wants to repeat the cycle, starting at the first E. We have seen all this before. M$ is always invited to the table when the world wants to make standards, they always walk away with the meal. And the world -always- invites them back again, but that's another rant ;-)
Will Microsoft actually follow thru on their support for the Web Services authentication protocol SAML? SAML is an alternative to .net passport - proving single sign-on. Sun's Liberty supports SAML tokens.
When .net supports SAML, without delaying by reccomending another rubber stamp from ECMA, then I'll take them seriously. Until then...
Bill Gates is a very smart business man. This is something you can't argue with. He may not be very moral, but that doesn't matter.
Why would he do this? If he feels that Microsoft's position in the OS market is shaky, the best way to insure survival is to insure that Microsoft will be need in some other way. This seems like a move to position Microsoft in a position to be important to Web commerse, regardless of which server OS you use.
Whether or not you would like to believe it, if Linux triumphs magnificantly and everyone in the world starts using Linux, you'll still be using a lot of Microsoft software. If he can't have one market, he'll make sure he gets another market.
...and not by their words
It's actually used extensively across MS products. I guess part of it is to make sure there's no way it could conflict with someone else's schema if they happened to be parsed by the same filter. But to me, I see that it's compliant with standards and seems to be a good attempt at interoperability. So woo.
funny munging
You don't understand. XML is meant to improve interoperability, not defeat it. Look at that XML. Can you tell me what any of it means? XML is supposed to describe the data so that another application needs to know nothing about the application that created it. For example, consder the following snippet:
(Please forgive some stray characters--Slashcode seems to be fucking up the ecode block.) Now, you can clearly see the structure of that document. You know what each piece of data is and how it relates to other pieces of data.
Now, look again at a snippet the Microsoft example:
I think you can see that they clearly missed the point of XML. It's very broken and quite likely, Microsoft are doing this simply so they can say "look, we use XML, therefore, competition can interoperate with us." Cars are great, but the reality of the case here is they've built a car with skiies rather than wheels.
It's not that it's big--it's perfectly fine if the data and the metadata are big. So long as the metadata describes what the data are, everything works out nicely. Then you would have another set of definitions that describe what the data look like. This is what OpenOffice.org does. Their output files are actually tarballs that contain an XML formatted copy of your data and then seperate stylesheets to describe its appearance (sound familiar?).
And what if it doesn't mean that? Have fun debugging your filter.
Join Tor today!
"I was chatting with a SCORE member, and he said that a true business plan should be a living entity that evolves with the world around it."
I think the above is a great ideal and I personally prefer to work for companies that work like that, but many don't.
For a lot of companies they got successful, or maybe they feel they got successful, partly by luck. It was a matter of having the right product at the right time and making the right guesses about the market. A LOT more businesses fail than succeed because of timing or bad guesses. Starting a business is almost like gambling.
So when you hit success it's far far easier to resist and fight new markets than to submit to them, because the existing market is one where they're already a success while the new one would almost be like starting over again.
(Before you mod me down, at least read half the comment)
Gates has realized that Microsoft cannot hold the crown of the software world forever. It's great at competing against companies that it can buy out or undercut, but it can't do either of those to Linux. IBM lost their crown when it failed to realize the PC, and the software running on it, were the new champs of the computing business. Ironically, I think this is the first step in Microsoft converting from a software company to a services company. It's pretty hard to make money on software if some geeks are giving it away for free.
The decade of windows is about to close, it became the best OS for the average (non-programmer) user when Win 95 was released, and before that Macintosh had their decade. Linux's decade hasn't started yet, but Windows only has a few years left, and Bill realizes that. If you look at the way the economy is turning, you can see that while the pure programming jobs may go overseas, services can't. Many companies are already using the "give the software away, charge for services" model of doing business (actually, the company I work for is selling the software, services, and a required maintainance contract - I'm feeling pretty safe), and are surviving just fine.
Not that Microsoft hasn't turned every one of these initiatives in the past into either an "embrace-and-extend" or "embrace-and-block" (by being one of the founders and then never giving final approval to the standard) strategy. Maybe they'll go through with this one this time, but expect to see Microsoft make an about-face on software in the next ten years like they did with their position on the internet back in '97. It's just a matter of time.
Kurdt
I'm not anti-social. Just pro-technology.
'This is a fabric for someone to do e-commerce that's independent of the operating systems that are out there.'
platform independent applications? Errr.......I liked that better the first time when it was called java.
Embrace..Extend..Estinguish..
This is news?
Don't Tread on OpenSource
Seriously... is he?
Jelous that he didn't get part of that legal battle.
Now he can push his code in, and claim it's used without a license.
That bastard. He killed Kenny!
I suppose this is the Embrace part of the Embrace and Extend campaign.
All you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be
What is the smoke and mirrors angle is how Micro$loth loves to join these "consortiums" to help develop and propagate these supposed open standards. "Embrace and extend" is insulting given their track record. But in the end the M$ implementations are a little out in left field at best. At worst they are flawed. I am in the process of reviewing a GPL C# IDE and still trying to pick out the proprietary points that are hidden in the background. Micro$loth has these other web sites giving free code, free docs, free tips, etc. in the guise of third party involvement. But it's actually them heading up the projects.
Reminds me of The Church of $cientology. They have these masked organizations getting their tentacle into areas behind the scenes. Like primary educational presence. Kind of parallels the Damien Thorn...er...Bill Gates Foundation :-)
The strategy of the DotGNU project is to re-use a good number of existing Free Software libs (written in C) and compile them for .NET - again since those libs are old, they're safe from being affected by any .NET patents.
Even assuming this makes sense technically (see below), surely if you no longer care about portability between Dotnet and dotGNU, you've just lost the main justification for the dotGNU project?
If I have developed a Dotnet app, but I can't compile it on dotGNU because it calls Windows Forms, or ASP.NET or ADO.NET... why on earth should I care that, if I could compile it, the generated bytecodes would be the same instruction set as found on Windows? By definition, there cannot be any value for me to have portability at the bytecode level if it is missing at the application level. And, if I do go as far as changing every non-core API call in my app, I'm hardly going to care much if the bytecode is different - I have to maintain and generate two versions anyway.
Without portability, it seems positively perverse to seek to extend the influence of Microsoft technologies on Linux when there are already very well established equivalents (Java, Python, Parrot). Java-on-Linux investments alone must total something in the order of billions of dollars per year, judging by the number of large organizations doing rollouts of this type - I'd guess that currently Java is the single biggest factor pushing Linux into commercial organizations today.
So precisely what value is dotGNU bringing to the table?
Regarding the incorporation of old C libraries into DotGNU, it seems rather optimistic to assume they can just be wrapped or turned into managed code (ask MS about the effort invested in doing that for their code). Do these libs happen to support Dotnet style internationalization, multithreading, access control...? If not, you've got a huge chunk of work to do - and all to get you roughly where Python is already!
Bill should just love it because it is based on 100% Microsoft technologies.
I hope some kind soul will do this.
Set up a Windows 2003 server running ASP.NET and also a copy of the new high end MS Office that writes XML documents. Write a web service (i.e. a front end to a remote function call) that...
Now other office suites, such as OpenOffice.org, or any software package could simply make such a function call to such a server to convert documents into MS-XML as a prelude to further processing the MS-XML into OpenOffice.org-XML.
Heck Sun could host such a service.
Standard macros could be included in OOo which convert Word documents, via. this network based service, into OOo documents.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
*Bill checks his bank account, chuckles, and realizes it all doesn't matter*
Seriously, creating something that is interoperable with anyone else is the *last* thing Microsoft will do. They didn't get to where they are by being interoperable, and they aren't hurting enough to resort to that. If Microsoft is good at one thing, it is saying one thing and doing another.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Please see the post I made in this thread about a great new open, interoperable web service based on 100% Microsoft technologies.
I sure (genuinely) hope Sun, or IBM or someone would set up such a web service running on Windows 2003, Office 2003, ASP.NET, and make my suggested web service available to all commers.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
I mean it's not your doing I know - but loudly trumpeting XML compliance and arranging for it to be no bloody good to anyone would be just the sort of trick your employer is famous for,
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
Microsoft has never had a problem with open standards in markets that they don't control. Weren't they lobbying for an IM open standard a while ago? At the time AOL had the lion's share of the market. At this time no one controls the Web Services market, if there even is one.
Right now Web Services is all about standards, since there isn't much in the way of implementations yet. MSFT and IBM seem to be at odds with the other major players; seems like every major new standard is being duplicated. Can't we all just get along?
Does Bill Gates seem to look more scary as he ages? That grin he has in the caption picture looks quite devious.
/., I think he's up to something with this move.
Oh, and like the majority of
How Microsoft embraces standards in general:
."
> OSS projects have been able to gain a foothold in many server applications because of the wide utility of highly commoditized, simple protocols. By extending these protocols and developing new protocols, we can deny OSS projects entry into the market.
How Microsoft supports Office on the Mac:
> Gates wrote, "Apple let us down on the browser by making Netscape the standard install." Gates then reported that he had already called Apple's CEO (who at the time was Gil Amelio) to ask "how we should announce the cancellation of Mac Office . . .
> In Waldman's [Microsoft executive in charge of Mac Office] words:
> "Sounds like we give them the HTML control for nothing except making IE the "standard browser for Apple?" I think they should be doing this anyway. Though the language of the agreement uses the word "encourage," I think that the spirit is that Apple should be using it everywhere and if they don't do it, then we can use Office as a club."
How Microsoft supports multimedia standards:
> Eric Engstrom, a Microsoft executive with responsibility for multimedia development, wrote to his superiors that one of Microsoft's goals was getting "Intel to stop helping Sun create Java Multimedia APIs, especially ones that run well (ie native implementations) on Windows." Engstrom proposed achieving this goal by offering Intel the following deal: Microsoft would incorporate into the Windows API set any multimedia interfaces that Intel agreed to not help Sun incorporate into the Java class libraries.
How Microsoft embraced Java:
> Microsoft's Executive Vice President, Paul Maritz, outlined Microsoft's strategy to win the browser war with Netscape and simultaneously "neutralize Java" by "tying" the "user interface" and "APIs" "back to Windows," by "get[ting] control of JAVA with JAVA support/tools", and by "get[ting] control of then leverag[ing] the programming model."
> As reported to Bill Gates in April 1997 by the manager responsible for execution of Microsoft's strategy:
"When I met with you last, you had a lot of pretty pointed questions about Java, so I want to make sure I understand your issues/concerns...
> 1. What is our business model for Java?
> 2. How do we wrest control of Java away from Sun?
> 3. How do we turn Java into just the latest, best way to write Windows applications?"
> "at this point its [sic] not good to create MORE noise around our win32 java classes. Instead we should just quietly grow j++ share and assume that people will take advantage of our classes without ever realizing they are building win32-only java apps."
I could continue with quotes from the Caldera case, the Bristol Wind/U case, and so on.
Time and again, Microsoft has claimed to support a technology or standard, and it turned out that they were lying, and it was just another fraud intended to trap developers and users.
Microsoft has never been punished for their crimes of sabotage and fraud.
It's the same people running the company.
There is no reason to believe that this time will be different.
I think a good majority of the momentum Linux has recently gained has been because of the media. True, the media is probably talking up Linux based on it's price, but that's not the sole reason. Most places I know are at least trying Linux, first based on what they read, then on price. Once they use it for a while, they find they like it for technical reasons, not price-point.
When was the last time Bill said he would play fair and didn't? When will business wake up?
I used to wonder what was so holy about a silent night, now I have a child.
Interoperability doesn't mean a few nice things in that general direction that last a few months.
Interoperability is stuff like Sun using IBM's Java implementation. (Or IBM making their own and using Sun's).
Interoperability is both IBM and Sun shying away from making their own branded Linux. They could. Easily. Too easily. But would you feel comfortable running Sun-branded Linux on your IBM mainframe? Microsoft is still far too much of a control freak to be credible at not sabatoging interoperability with competitors. Mistakes will happen, but you do not want to be in a position where your mistakes will justifiably be taken as sabatoge.
"These laws they're passing won't even compile anymore, let alone execute." - anon
When Microsoft talks "standards" and "interoperability", it generally means...
We'll take an existing standard, make it "better" (bloat, non-standard syntax, non-compliant), market the crap out of it, and then everyone else can adopt it so that your products work happily with ours.
In other words... "make your program work with our software which was coded by pot-smoking-monkeys-on-typewriters (tm), and it will be interoperable."
Actually I was thinking all those articles with RMS, ESR and other "open source luminaries" speaking about "embattled SCO" sound right out of the Onion. Or Fark, actually.
It doesn't get any better than "they're smoking crack" on national media.
But don't let that bring you down.
Sorry, but that's plainly not true. Apple is, and also have been, the least standards complaint computing platform of all desktop computers. They do not create/adopt standards for their software, unless they have to (HTML), and when they do, they do exactly the same things that every other software company does. Sorry, but Apple is DEFINITELY not even close to a "good" example of a company that DOESN'T do this.
Is this anything like "Trustworthy Computing"? As with all things, I'll believe it when I see it.
-R
There in lies the reason for Microsoft doing this demo with IBM. They will show that they can play in the open standards arena but will make anybody who wants to do it on Windows, do it with their tools. The MS .Net framework is proprietary and a lockin. Just like Microsoft held out XML for 2 years and said that MS Office would use XML, they then circumvented the usefulness of those claims in their implementation.
This is just bait. Bite this and they'll have you on their hook.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Good work guys you have shown that you are stupider than Microsoft.
XML is structured. So why the hell is there "extra" structure by dividing the document up into parts, rather than just using XML?
I know, it's so the parts can be "shared" and that somehow that will save memory or something, right. The exact same thinking leads to the Linux desktop environments that need hundreds of shared libraries of exactly the right version. This feature is either not going to be used at all or will just cause users headaches when "the shared style sheet is the wrong version" errors come up.
Also to the Microsoft dolt who said the XML was large because it contains "default settings". Default settings are indicated by NOT being there!!! Moron.
I'm sorry but we are seeing crap from everybody: Microsoft, Linux desktops, other companies, standards organizations. The only projects I really can respect are perhaps the Linux kernel and some programming tools. Also Plan9 looked good, why not study how they design things?
Hey on those apostrophe things, I can't blame them too much. I really blame the stupid standards organizations who thought that a block of useful 1-byte codes (0x80 through 0x9f) have to be reserved because some machines may strip the high bit and confuse them with control characters.
Those codes should have been filled in with the most useful punctuation marks and missing accented letters. It would be better if this had been decided more carefully, but instead the standards organizations kept trying to do the "right" thing (by their weird definition of "right" which is to make the most complex standard possible) so Microsoft (probably not with any evil intent or world-domination plan) went and filled it in with their own set, chosen to make American secretaries happy.
So too late. Those codes have been assigned by Microsoft, and it is time for the standards to realize they made a stupid mistake, and alter Unicode and ISO-8859-1 to contain the Microsoft assignments and say that is the new standard.
This is the sort of standards interopability that Billy is talking about. When the organizations are too slow or stupid to do something reasonable, I'm all for Microsoft or somebody going in there and forcing a change. As long as it is completely open and easy to copy, which these assignments are. Now what most people fear hear are closed or obfuscated "standards" and in that area Microsoft has a lot of bad history and a silly speech by Billy is not going to convince anybody they are changing their ways.
PS: I would respect Microsoft more if their software was not so stupid. So they added punctuation so that single quotes can be a different character than apostrophe, good. But then they make word so stupid that it turns all apostrophes into close single quotes, thus breaking the entire reason for this. This sort of idiocy is where Microsoft is truly evil. If it were not for competing processes, they would have pretty much changed the code for apostrophe, by accident, due to the unbelievable incompetence of some of their programmers.
Actually, it's good you posted that...some people believed I made mine up.
And yours also has random semicolons put through it like mine did after I posted it. Interesting. Freaking Slashcode.
"Sufferin' succotash."
It's a trap!
</admiral akbar voice>
So maybe this is one MS got _right_!?!? :)
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
It is what MS always does.
It promotes interoperability when its platforms are not the dominant players in a field.
Remember how its efforts to get AIM opened? Now it's not asking it anymore since MSN is competitive enough.
Now it's apparent - how much market share does Apache have now? How about mod_php? How about IIS? ASP? Is there any wonder MS is seeking interoperability?
I missed the part where you described how Apple embraced and extended.
Move along, no sig to see here.
Don't worry, that's allowed according to the relevant section of the W3C Recommendation on Namespaces in XML:I think (off the top of my head) that the reason the markup is so verbose , even though 'All settings (fonts, line spacing, etc) are using defaults' could either be because my defaults might not be the same as your defaults (different locale, for example) or because in defining the schema, they may have decided to make a lot of these elements / attributes compulsory, to be on the safe side. Or both. Or neither of course
Actually, looking at it a bit more carefully (OK, repairing it and reformatting it after what
After the <w:docPr> it's just
<w:body>
<wx:sect>
<w:p><w:r>
<w:t>Hello World!</w:t>
</w:r>
</w:p>
<w:sectPr>
<w:pgSz w:w="11906" w:h="16838"/>
<w:pgMar w:top="1417" w:right="1417" w:bottom="1417" w:left="1417" w:header="708" w:footer="708" w:gutter="0"/>
<w:cols w:space="708"/>
<w:docGrid w:line-pitch="360"/>
</w:sectPr>
</wx:sect>
</
and a closing </w:wordDocument>.
Which makes me think it isn't that far from an HTML file with a bunch of <style> in the <head>. Would be interesting to know if the VBA shows up as something pretty much equivalent to <script> tags. You could immediately dispose of a lot of stuff by XPath-ing down to the <w:body>> and ignoring the <wx: stuff.
There's very little there that you wouldn't have seen in a Word Perfect document using 'show codes', AFAICS.
TomV
Heh.
warn your friends, warn everyone!
Kinda like Microsoft where they haven't been successful outside of the PC desktop/low-end server market.
Very good point and it's why a free market is a more inventive one. Kinda like evolution. New ideas push old ones asside when they have a distinct advantage. Of course this all requires a "free" market and we all know the current technology market isn't free with Microsoft's unrestrained monopoly.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
The Mozilla.org team developed the core of Netscape 6 and 7, but Mozilla.org until recently never had much of a "product team" and didn't market Mozilla to end users. Much of what was the Netscape product team is now the Mozilla.org product team.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Ignore Slashcode-added semicolons:
<?mso-application progid="Word.Document"?>
<w:wordDocument w:macrosPresent="no" w:embeddedObjPresent="no" w:ocxPresent="no" xml:space="preserve">
<o:DocumentProperties>
<o:Title>This is a test of XML</o:Title>
<o:Author>User</o:Author>
<o:LastAuthor>User</o:LastAuthor>
<o:Revision>1</o:Revision>
<o:TotalTime>1</o:TotalTime>
<o:Created>2003-09-18T15:29:00Z</o:Created>
  ; <o:LastSaved>2003-09-18T15:30:00Z</o:LastSaved>
<o:Pages>1</o:Pages>
<o:Words>3</o:Words>
<o:Characters>20</o:Characters>
  ; <o:Company>White Goat Studios</o:Company>
<o:Lines>1</o:Lines>
<o:Paragraphs>1</o:Paragraphs>
<o:CharactersWithSpaces>22</o:CharactersWithSpaces >
<o:Version>11.5604</o:Version>
</o:DocumentProperties>
<w:fonts>
<w:defaultFonts w:ascii="Times New Roman" w:fareast="Times New Roman" w:h-ansi="Times New Roman" w:cs="Times New Roman"/>
<w:font w:name="Verdana">
<w:panose-1 w:val="020B0604030504040204"/>
<w:charset w:val="00"/>
<w:family w:val="Swiss"/>
<w:pitch w:val="variable"/>
<w:sig w:usb-0="20000287" w:usb-1="00000000" w:usb-2="00000000" w:usb-3="00000000" w:csb-0="0000019F" w:csb-1="00000000"/>
</w:font>
</w:fonts>
<w:styles>
<w:versionOfBuiltInStylenames w:val="4"/>
<w:latentStyles w:defLockedState="off" w:latentStyleCount="156"/>
<w:style w:type="paragraph" w:default="on" w:styleId="Normal">
<w:name w:val="Normal"/>
<w:rPr>
<wx:font wx:val="Times New Roman"/>
<w:sz w:val="24"/>
<w:sz-cs w:val="24"/>
<w:lang w:val="EN-US" w:fareast="EN-US" w:bidi="AR-SA"/>
</w:rPr>
</w:style>
<w:style w:type="character" w:default="on" w:styleId="DefaultParagraphFont">
<w:name w:val="Default Paragraph Font"/>
<w:semiHidden/>
</w:style>
</w:styles>
<w:docPr>
<w:view w:val="normal"/>
<w:zoom w:percent="100"/>
<w:doNotEmbedSystemFonts/>
<w:proofState w:spelling="clean" w:grammar="clean"/>
<w:attachedTemplate w:val=""/>
<w:defaultTabStop w:val="720"/>
<w:characterSpacingControl w:val="DontCompress"/>
<w:optimizeForBrowser/>
<w:validateAgainstSchema/>
<w:saveInvalidXML w:val="on"/>
<w:ignoreMixedContent w:val="off"/>
<w:alwaysShowPlaceholderText w:val="off"/>
<w:compat>
<w:breakWrappedTables/>
<w:snapToGridInCell/>
<w:wrapTextWithPunct/>
<w:useAsianBreakRules/>
<w:useWord2002TableStyleRules/>
</w:compat>
</w:docPr>
<w:body>
<wx:sect>
<w:p>
<w:r>
<w:t>This is a </w:t>
</w:r>
<w:r>
<w:rPr>
<w:b/>
</w:rPr>
<w:t>test</w:t>
</w:r>
<w:r>
<w:t> of </w:t>
</w:r>
<w:r>
<w:rPr>
<w:rFonts w:ascii="Verdana" w:h-ansi="Verdana"/>
<wx:font wx:val="Verdana"/>
<w:b/>
<w:i/>
<w:sz w:val="52"/>
<w:sz-cs w:val="52"/>
</w:rPr>
<w:t>XML</w:t>
</w:r>
<w:r>
<w:t>.</w:t>
</w:r>
</w:p>
<w:sectPr>
<w:pgSz w:w="12240" w:h="15840"/>
<w:pgMar w:top="1440" w:right="1800" w:bottom="1440" w:le
"Sufferin' succotash."
It's Basic.
It saves typing.
Will I retire or break 10K?
if I do go as far as changing every non-core API call in my app, I'm hardly going to care much if the bytecode is different - I have to maintain and generate two versions anyway.
Not if Gtk# is available on both sides.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Though while they're at it, they should also clone Steve Jobs and "upgrade" the current version to include the willingness to actually put a version of MacOS X on the market for x86... Though I suspect if that actually happened the sun would have a divide by zero error and implode into a very dark spot with alot of gravity...
Haven't you heard the news?
Apple will release the x86 version of OS X the day after Gates makes Windows open source.
It was in ALL the papers... you CAN'T have missed it!
Thanks for the clarification; I thought they needed to point to valid URL's, since they used the format of URL's.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
- Embrace the standard
- Hijack the standard
- Crush the competition
Good ol Microsuck!``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
Thanks for the analysis. And to you and the other guy commenting, I thought the purpose of the schema URI's were exactly to provide places where the respective schemas could be retrieved, but I guess I was wrong about that. It was never meant as an attack just because it's an XML document generated by Microsoft software, I just found it... funny. :-)
:-S Sounds illogical. If they were just made to uniquely represent schemas, why on earth make them follow the URL syntax with "http://" and everything?? What's supposed to be transferred with the Hypertext Transfer Protocol again? Something like "schema://blahblah" would look more logical to me.
But that makes me wonder why they're made to look like URL's when they don't actually represent valid ones.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
With this kind of BS why isn't he on the ballet for governor of Washington, or even president? Isn't that the greatest prerequisite of a politician?
--"Sorry for the inconvience." Gods Last Words to his Creation
DNA, So Long and Thanks for all the Fish
Bait and switch? I see an opportunity to switch, but no forced switch. I clicked through your dotgnu link and ended up at a wiki page giving the status of System.Windows.Forms support in DotGNU.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Capitalism: An economic system in which the means of production and distribution are privately or corporately owned and development is proportionate to the accumulation and reinvestment of profits gained in a free market.
Um, yea. Didn't you read my post?
I guess you have the "everything said on Slashdot must be anti-microsoft" blinders and were confused. Sorry about that.
Geez, at least one person found it funny...
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
Here's some:
1. Web Objects
2. Open Directory
3. Article on Support for Web Standards (HTML, XHTML, etc.)
Enough for now - I have better things to do. Next time, feel free to search Google for this stuff on your own. Takes about 5 minutes to grab the basics. In each and every instance above, it talks about partial/complete implementation and the things they built on to extend the original standard. Which is the point. Enjoy.
hell freezes over
How sleepless is the egg, knowing that which throws the stone forsees the bone.
No, when I responded I was astounded both by someone who knew the details, AND by the fact that, probably for the first time in history, Microsoft seems to have chosen the high road, not just the road to more wallets. :>
There are some things Microsoft does and does well...but leading the industry in the right direction isn't one of them. They're normally guided by ROI, not making life easier.
I don't think Slashdot == The Onion, it's generally more balanced and more skeptical. That's why I read it several times a day.
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
The little I know of XML:
1. Was created with the ultimate goal of ease of information exchange between different applications (which obviously fails, based on the fact that nobody other than the creators is able to read MSWord of OO documents in this format).
2. Was supposed to be readable by humans without the need of a parser.
Is XML heading the way RTF went?
My other OS is the MCP!
I call Bull Shit!
what?
denial -- Linux isn't a threat
anger -- they are and we're gonna squash them
bargaining -- we'll interoperate with them
and yet to come...
depression & acceptance
It's a joke.. laugh :-)
Welcome to the net of 1000 lies. Upgrades are scheduled soon that should bring us to the 10,000 lies mark.
1. Web Objects
This looks like your best example. I'm not familiar enough with WebObjects to know if there are significant "extentions" that interfere with porting Java server applications to other application servers.
2. Open Directory
This looks like an Apple brand name slapped on their implementation of LDAP. That's not really the same thing as embrace and extend. Apple does it all the time, with ZeroConf and FireWire for example. Speaking of those two, they are good examples of created and adopted standards.
3. Article on Support for Web Standards
Writing in HTML4.0.1 Transitional is hardly embracing & extending.
Apple uses IETF standards for iCal
WebDAV is used for iDisk. There were some security issues in 10.1, fixed in 10.2, not "extended".
There's a solid version of JRE 1.4.1 on every mac that downloaded it from Software update.
SSH, Kerberos, OpenGL, XML preferences, 802.11g in the new Airport base stations, etc.
"Apple is, and also have been, the least standards compliant computing platform of all desktop computers." - javelinco
Sounds like you're a bit off base.
Move along, no sig to see here.
I'm not entirely sure people would feel secure sending their (possibly confidential) files to Sun or IBM.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
I understand. But...
;)
With your statement of (..)I hate zealots(..) you've contradicted yourself in terms, namely: with your headline "Whatever you hippe zealots"(thereby showing disregard for peeps with an inclination for working in unison, instead of the "healthy" way of exploiting one another) and the use of a strong word such as "hate". I'm a devout zealot myself, with warm feelings for Linux as well as the GPL; and with an equal amount of feeling refuse to work with any products created by Micro-soft. Does this automatically make me an insane nutter(tautology), seeing how the job-market, although rather cramped, for the most part offers MS-related work? I believe not, I have the peculiar idea of being a man with principles; I can't silently stand behind or on the side-line watching that ugly beast called "corporatism" roaring its head within our society. And the archetypal vision of this beast, IMHO is Micro-soft.
Ranting aside, I commend you for using Linux as well as being lucid enough to stick to a more moderate ontology. I, on the other hand, will continue to be a zealot in my simple, but focused manner. And that summarieses my point of view: focus and motivation is way easier if you're a zealot, albeit I'll probably miss out on a number of Good Things(TM) in the MS-dimension. Ah, to heck with it!
Next week, I'll pop off and find a job in constructions or hauling garbage while continuing to learn and preach Linux - my final intent to ride off the storm...
"The only clear view is from atop the mountain of our dead selves." - Peter Carroll
Embracing a standard means that you are touting your interoperability, etc. with a standard. "Extending", as defined in these conversations, means that you have added proprietary features to the products that are using these standards. All three items fall under these categories. Before you reply again, how about you DO spend some time reading the information I posted. If you disagree with my definitions, fine, we've nothing more to discuss. But if you agree, and feel that these three examples don't match up, well then, fire your guns... but please, research first, so we aren't just throwing mud. Facts are more fun! As for the "least standards compliant", I have to admit - I was also talking about their hardware, which is much worse than their software for tweaking with standards.
As for your counter examples - really doesn't matter, since we aren't saying that Apple doesn't use any standards, or that they aren't fully compliant in anyway - just that they are as bad, if not worse, then any other software vendor out there (and as I already said - hardware vendor too).
I was looking for an April 1st dateline on this one..
Weapons of Mass Analysis
Usually followed by Extending and Extinguishing. Must be a slow news day.
2. Extend
3. Extinguish
4. Profit!
Fun times ahead!
My patience is infinite, my time is not.
Other companies "Embrace and Extend and then PUBLISH" when they work with open standards.
Microsoft's policy is to cut the sentence somewhat shorter than that, or at least change the last word out out with some secret internal Scino-speak word meaning "capture and extort the foolish prey user base".
Oh wait, I rememember their secretly redefined word, its "innovate".
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
It promotes interoperability when its platforms are not the dominant players in a field.
They did this with CSS support in web browsers too. Pushed for W3C standards when Netscape was ahead. Then, when IE pulled ahead, MS seriously lagged on updating CSS support and invented Windows-only web standards.
- Scot
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Plague of painful sores
Seas, rivers, and springs turn to blood
Plague of darkness
Plague of Locusts
Great Earthquake
The four Horsemen
I think that was Creeping Death, and not The Four Horsemen. Different albums, you know...
Put identity in the browser.
"Extending", as defined in these conversations, means that you have added proprietary features to the products that are using these standards" - javelinco
Actually, your definition of 'extend' is only half true with regard to Microsoft. When Microsoft 'extends' java by elimentating a major chunk of standard libraries, and then puts their own proprietary implementations (ActiveX support for example) in its place - and says "we have the right to define what the standard is for our implementation of java - and furthermore, we don't recognize Sun's standard", I think it is plain what their agenda is.
I can't think of any other company that has methodically broken more standards to pull market share away from competitors. Extending a standard is alright - as long as you are backwards compatible with the standard, which is the key point to my argument. Don't whitewash Microsoft's evil by misstating the true situation - unless you have some reason you can't or won't face the truth...
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
I like Microsoft as much as the next guy - their screwups are my paycheck. Regardless of the padding of my pocketbook however, they have clearly sucked the life out of the software industry, when it comes to innovation. But my opinion of Microsoft here really doesn't matter.
First of all, as I said in the post you quoted, but didn't read - if you disagree with the definitions, then we are discussing an issue with no foundation, and that's pretty darn useless. So I repeat what I've said every post. Read what I posted, THEN respond. Oh wait, maybe it is because I forgot to mention you should try to understand it also?
I haven't been bashing Apple OVER Microsoft, just bashing at Apple, since people seem to see them as some sort of White Knight, which is a bunch of bung. But if you want to talk about Microsoft's Java, fine - one quick comment. Microsoft's Java implementation, which I wasn't a big fan of, worked fine with the Java standards that it was advertised to work with. There wasn't any "breaking of backwards compatibility". I'm guessing that you didn't do any work in Java on a Microsoft platform, and this is why you are spouting this nonsense. They certainly added to the specs, and put in a lot of garbage, and I'd say it didn't run well, but if you took an applet that was designed under the same base version from a Sun machine, it would work under Windows.
Fact checker! Aisle 1 - please escort Mr. Lodragandraoidh to some actual, factual resources. Thanks!
Okay, damn, just realized that I frickin' let you get me in a position where I'm defending Microsoft, etc. Good job - you got me headed in the wrong direction.
Let me make something clear. I'm not going to respond further to people who don't bother reading the damn thread, and who don't attempt some level of understanding. If you read my first post, you'd see that I agree completely that Microsoft is a big crapper when it comes to these activities. If you had read my post that you responded to, you'd see that we obviously aren't defining terms the same way.
If you are looking for an arguement over nothing, go look somewhere else. As for your Microsoft fixation, I suggest therapy. There are other problems out there, even in that same industry. Take a good hard look at Sun and Oracle, and their business practices. Take a look at the printer manufacturers. Yes, Microsoft sucks. We all agree. Can you please move on? I mean, feel free to add some additional insight, or if you've got some GOOD ideas on how to resolve the situation - please share. But this "Microsoft is Evil" thing is just so obvious, and has been repeated so many times - well, you get the point. If you don't, then while I feel really sorry for you, I'm not interested in helping you further. Have a good one.