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Microsoft Port 25 interviews Miguel de Icaza
Ben Galliart writes "Microsoft's Port 25 blog, the voice of MS Linux Labs and a spin-off from the MS Channel 9 blog, has an interview with Miguel de Icaza where they discuss the Gnome and Mono projects. It is a nice change of pace to see Microsoft go from attacking Novell and Linux to interviewing a Novell employee about a Linux desktop system. Port 25 has come under some fire since they can not always be trusted. Port 25 has on occasion put out FUD such as claiming Microsoft is doing more to improve security than any other vendor and a security guide attacking Red Hat for not providing security updates for Red Hat v9 despite that Red Hat ended support back in 2004. They have also released a password synchronization daemon for Red Hat, AIX, HPUX and Solaris that must run as root and makes several calls to strcpy() (which violates Microsoft's guidelines for doing secure coding)."
What the fuck kind of insane summary is that? Even for Slashdot, that steps over the line.
Maybe there is some validity in saying they (Port 25) are untrusted, but what excuse is it that Redhat ceased updates for v9 in 2004, a mere year after the product was released (March 31 2003). Seriously, is a single year of updates good enough? I think they actually have a valid point on that one at least, a year isnt long enough to even be considered stable server software in my book.
From the article:
Port 25 has on occasion put out FUD such as claiming Microsoft is doing more to improve security than any other vendor
I'd be curious to hear what vendor the article author thinks is doing more to improve security than Microsoft if this statement is to be decried as FUD, and what kind of metrics/data support this. Amount of exploits patched? Amount of money spent on security?
I mean, even if you think Windows is one giant yawning security hole, that really only says that they have the most room for improvement. I'd be surprised if they're not patching the most holes, affecting the largest number of users, and spending the most money on security -- even if the results are often sad.
In contrast, I have had to re-install Windows on various machines about 5 times in the past year due to viruses, spyware, etc. (two college daughters...) and each time it was a full day marathon of install, patch, drivers, application install, patch, firewall, anti-virus, etc. with many reboots... PITA!
I don't know what you are doing that you need to wrestle Linux but it certainly sounds like you could use some help from "clippy".
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Please let us know, in the summary, when an interview is a video file. Some of us don't have time at work to watch videos (today, actually, I've been busy watching specific videos for work, and trying to clean them up so they don't look like crap, at which I have failed) and would like to know before we have to click down into them - especially when you can't just click the link, and have to visit the site, because the primary article link is malformed.
This is one of the crappiest story submissions I've seen in a long time.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
And he takes abuse from MS too:
http://linux.sys-con.com/read/124218.htm
Interesting bit of history there. It really disturbs me that Miguel is leading a column of FOSS enthusiasts into the maw of MS patent enforcement, especially when he could have used his talent on something unencumbered like Parrot.
1 and 2. Of course Linux has a clipboard. Why would you think it doesn't? .wmf to .jpg, and watch it still be opened as a .wmf to trash your computer
.zip. It can't even read E-Mail without expensive add-on software!
3. WSH would be nice if it actually worked. Luckily, Cygwin can be installed to avoid Microsoft's shortcomings
4. Rename a virus-ridden
5. It's very needed complexity for everybody out there that uses more than one window at a time. The only reason OS X doesn't have them is they couldn't make them pretty enough in time for 10.4 (they're in 10.5)
6. Postscript and PDF are standards. MP3 and DVD are de-facto standards. Windows can't even read those out of the box, and even with extra Microsoft tools installed can't read OpenDocument files or vector graphics.
7. The registry is required for the desktop to run, and is thus part of the desktop.
Furthermore, Windows is unable to do many useful things like thumbnailing movies, store files larger than 2 gigabytes, read any archive format other than
Port 25 has on occasion put out FUD such as claiming Microsoft is doing more to improve security than any other vendor and...
I'm sorry, how does this qualify as "fear", "uncertainty" or "doubt?" Maybe FUD means something else to you? That sounds more like CCS, "calming", "certainty", and "surety" than FUD. I'm not saying their statements are true, simply that it's not FUD.
Considering his track record, that's actually an improvement. C#/.NET is at least somewhat standardized and thought out. GNOME is a complete mess. Had that effort gone into GNUStep (which is standardized and thought out), OS X users would be envious of Linux.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
The MSFT-employee-wannabe that you speak of is the father of the GNOME desktop. Without GNOME, QT might not have been open sourced in the first place. Without a man like Miguel to give GNOME a forward direction, we might still be using Motif. When your contributions to the open source movement become a tenth of what Miguel has done then your rant might have more merit.
.NET framework. If there is one man who has the objectivity to look beyond the zealotry to see technologies for their merits is Miguel. MONO is an excellent development environment for Linux. It bridges the gap between high performance but difficult to use languages like C++ and low performance high RAD languages like Python.
If there is one Microsoft technology that deserves admiration is the
By "funky double wide hyphen character" you mean industry standard UTF-8 representation of em-dash?
"It even helps them"... Yes it does since apparently a growing number of morons out there delude themselves into thinking that they can go cross-platform with mono. --- mono is a disease - Java is the cure.
My favorite thing to bash Linux bigots with:
OLE Automation.
(Or whatever they're calling it these days; I think it was absorbed into the ActiveX branding.)
Just about every Unix vendor had this dream of turning their entire desktop environment into a sea of programmable objects.[1] The one I got to laugh at was Sun, with DOE, although you formerly-MacOS-bigots got to see it replayed in AppleScript and OpenDoc.[2]
Well, Microsoft delivered. I can write a script (in my choice of languages) that opens up a Word document, finds any bold text at the start of paragraphs and then HTTP POSTs it to a URL. And if I feel really annoying, I'll increase the volume level on the sound device, and read it to you. In a page of code.
It's really amazing what you can script this way. OK, yes, there's a reason I'm typing this on a Linux box, and why I have cygwin installed on any Win32 box I care about. But through marketing muscle and a desire to create opportunities for small VARs, Microsoft let little software authors poke around inside big applications. And created some nice tools for those little authors to write code with.
Shame it breaks in such obscure ways.
[1]: ARexx doesn't count. That's just DDE.
[2]: Obligatory joke about whether "the" is optional at some point in hypercard syntax here. Apple has been getting better, though.
You mean, the fault of the idiot web developer who didn't mark the page as being encoded in windows-125x.
There's nothing inherantly wrong with the Windows character sets, they're just an encoding!