Microsoft Using .MS TLD

mqudsi writes "Microsoft is using the .MS top-level domain, assigned to the Caribbean island of Montserrat, for its Web 2.0-flavored Popfly project. You can get your own .MS name if you really want to — there are no restrictions on foreign ownership — at $180 US for 2 years. As of this writing microsoft.ms is available." In an obliquely related note, TechBlorge has up a rumination on the resemblance of the Popfly logo to Tux.

Comments

OMG PONIES

[QuantumG]

Tag: SlowNewsDay

Re:OMG PONIES

[QuantumG]

If Apple were smart, and had balls, they'd make a Cocoa layer for Windows.

Re:OMG PONIES

[jamar0303]

No, it will only make the OSx86 project stronger (after all, if they've already bought iPods, they know how good it is and will try any method possible to get them working again before going out and buying another).

Re:OMG PONIES

[Anonymous Coward]

iTunes (aka SoundJam from Casady and Greene) is carbon because it was written pre OS-X.

Re:OMG PONIES

[jd]

Looks like omg.ponies.ms is free as well. There almost has to be 179 other people willing to chip in a dollar to get this for CmdrTaco.

Re:OMG PONIES

[hobo sapiens]

If I get this post on metamod.pl, I'll roast the moderator who modded this informative.

Watching drunk people can be funny. Listening to drunk people can get annoying. Reading the ramblings of drunk people is just lame. Grousing about it by posting something in response is just a waste of time.

I guess I'll stop typing now.

Re:OMG PONIES

[Anonymous Coward]

Blaming PC users for Apple making crappy programs? "The Mac community" has really fallen apart....

Re:OMG PONIES

[Rei]

Too bad www.ms is already taken. I've stumbled into that so many times when I mess up on tab completion when typing "www.msnbc.com".

If they ever open up a ".go" TLD, I am so registering www.go ("www.google.com"). Same with the TLD .goo :)

Re:OMG PONIES

[Anonymous Coward]

'underrated'.

Suck it.

Re:OMG PONIES

[Space cowboy]

Dunno about the ponies, but OpenStep (sort of) runs on Windows and gives you all the ObjC goodness you're being deprived of, and there's also The cocotron. All this can be found at the wikipedia entry which also does a half-decent job of explaining what it is that makes Cocoa so nice to use.

What the Wikipedia article misses is the simplicity of the language - it's just about right, not the "You want to shoot off your foot ? Here have a howitzer!" of C++ nor the "well, we have a penknife. It's a bit rusty" of plain old 'C'. Any C program compiles without error under ObjC because ObjC is a formal superset of 'C', but you still get all the nice messaging/objects/categories/interfaces of a proper object-orientated language. With ObjC/Cocoa, it's hard *not* to write a decently-designed (probably M-V-C) application.

It may not have a "common runtime language", but you can (try to) prise ObjC/Cocoa out of my cold dead hands. Betcha can't.

Simon.

Re:OMG PONIES

[HappyEngineer]

"slownesday" wouldn't show up. Those sorts of tags seem to be filtered out these days.

I used to eagerly read the tags to see snappy answers to posts like "duh", "no", "yes", "hell yes" and so on.

It was like having a low resolution voting system. If very few people disagreed with the article then "no" wouldn't show up.

I now see no reason at all to look at the tags. I don't know why people even bother adding them. The editor posting the article could easily add simple tags like "politics".

On the other hand, perhaps the solution would be to add a poll to every single article and then allow people to add things to the poll that were not originally included.

The poll results would say things like "yes 1370/1865" to indicate how many had voted for "yes" over the total number of people who voted in the poll while "yes" was an option.

Re:OMG PONIES

[Anonymous Coward]

Heck, they have most of one written already -- NeXT's OPENSTEP Enterprise ran just fine on top of Windows NT 4.0. It might be a bit messy moving it from DPS to DPDF, of course, but they wouldn't have to start from scratch.

(In fact, with Mac now on x86, and between the Cocoa-like OPENSTEP Enterprise system and the Carbon-like Quicktime for Windows APIs, it probably wouldn't be too hard for Apple to release a "MacOS X runtime" that would allow apps using a subset of the OS X API run natively under OS X and under the runtime on Windows boxes. Put support for targeting the hybrid platform in xcode, and you get a sort of a Java with an Apple bias.)

Re:OMG PONIES

[walruz]

Indeed. Reading "maffiaa", "bigbrother" and so on was really funny and it gave you an idea of what the article was really about. I don't know if it was because of tags filtering, i believe it's because of the heavy use the Firehose may be having (damn you firehose!). If i want to read something about politics, i'd go to http://politics.slashdot.org/ if i want science, i'd go to http://science.slashdot.org./ Please, tag this as "wewantfunnytagsback".

My useless 2 cents on this rant.

is bluescreenofdeath.ms available?

[ip_freely_2000]

I want the most active domain in the ms tld.

Re:is bluescreenofdeath.ms available?

[skribe]

proble.ms

Re:is bluescreenofdeath.ms available?

[MarkRose]

There are a surprising amount of words that end in "ms". /usr/share/dict/american-english contains almost 500. Some are interesting in that the part preceding "ms" is also a word: Ada(ms) Nazis(ms) Si(ms) balsa(ms) boo(ms) char(ms) condo(ms) e(ms) far(ms) fir(ms) for(ms) ha(ms) hare(ms) he(ms) hi(ms) is(ms) la(ms) mini(ms) mode(ms) mu(ms) nor(ms) oh(ms) pal(ms) per(ms) pro(ms) real(ms) rear(ms) sea(ms) see(ms) ski(ms) spas(ms) tea(ms) tee(ms) thru(ms) to(ms) tote(ms) war(ms) ya(ms) and zoo(ms).

Re:is bluescreenofdeath.ms available?

[Thabenksta]

Y2K called, it want's it's BSOD joke back!

Re:is bluescreenofdeath.ms available?

[Anonymous Coward]

or p.ms

Re:is bluescreenofdeath.ms available?

[welshsocialist]

Just checked the registrar's WHOIS. bluescreenofdeath.ms is available!

Re:is bluescreenofdeath.ms available?

[evilviper]

I prefer:

  aneurys.ms
  ar.ms
  bathroo.ms
  chas.ms
  clai.ms
  condo.ms
  cra.ms
  criticis.ms
  darkroo.ms
  db.ms
  doldru.ms
  doo.ms
  fanto.ms
  flimfla.ms
  ger.ms
  googleis.ms
  mosle.ms
  oh.ms
  sca.ms
  screa.ms
  scrotu.ms
  sha.ms
  slu.ms
  squir.ms
  stor.ms
  swar.ms
  syste.ms
  underperfor.ms
  v.ms
  victi.ms
  wor.ms

  and, of course: acrony.ms

Re:is bluescreenofdeath.ms available?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't believe no one has mentioned R.ms yet.

Re:is bluescreenofdeath.ms available?

[QuickFox]

Its our's no'w! W'e wont giv'e i't bac'k! H'a!

Re:is bluescreenofdeath.ms available?

[Aliriza]

These are called domain hacks and I expect them to be widely used in the future. del.icio.us is a good exaple to this.

Re:is bluescreenofdeath.ms available?

[Soruk]

A UK-based Linux-friendly ISP advertises using the URL sod.ms...

Re:is bluescreenofdeath.ms available?

[iMac Were]

I like bu.ms

Re:is bluescreenofdeath.ms available?

[freeweed]

Where's the moderation option for +1, Awesome?

Re:is bluescreenofdeath.ms available?

[StuartFreeman]

grep 'ms$' /usr/share/dict/words|sed s/..$/.ms/

Re:is bluescreenofdeath.ms available?

[iibagod]

Orgas.ms? How could you miss out on THAT one?

Oh, wait...never mind. You DID remember underperfor.ms

Now all is clear.

Re:is bluescreenofdeath.ms available?

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot R.MS

Re:is bluescreenofdeath.ms available?

[lord_sarpedon]

http://www.adamsnames.tc/whois/?domain=fuck.msfuck .ms is already taken :(

Re:is bluescreenofdeath.ms available?

[ElderKorean]

re: I like bu.ms

Not a great comment I must say - especially with the fairly heavy male readership of this site.
I'm more of a leg man myself.

Re:is bluescreenofdeath.ms available?

[msuarezalvarez]

sed -e '/ms$/!d' -e s/..$/.ms/ /usr/share/dict/words

Re:is bluescreenofdeath.ms available?

[Servo]

Oh please, how could you forget boso.ms?

Re:is bluescreenofdeath.ms available?

[desheffer]

I'd hate to be in condo sales in Montserrat...

Re:is bluescreenofdeath.ms available?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see the most interesting one:

        orgas.ms

Re:is bluescreenofdeath.ms available?

[MadJo]

Because that looks a lot like P.ms

Re:is bluescreenofdeath.ms available?

[consonant]

Erm...you missed orgas(ms)! ;)

Re:is bluescreenofdeath.ms available?

[MarkRose]

But "orgas" isn't a word.

Re:is bluescreenofdeath.ms available?

[zobier]

I can't believe ppl missed boso.ms.

Re:is bluescreenofdeath.ms available?

[consonant]

Oops you were going for words prefixing ms and ending legitimately in ms..Sorry, my bad :)

You mean DUCKS look sorta like PENGUINS?!

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd almost think they were both birds or something.

Re:You mean DUCKS look sorta like PENGUINS?!

[insertwackynamehere]

why is this a troll? I agree, the idea that the duck is a stolen idea from the penguin is stupid. not everything has to become an argument over copyrights and logo stealing just because its microsoft.

Re:You mean DUCKS look sorta like PENGUINS?!

[ricree]

I'm going to second the "why is this a troll". If I hadn't finished off my mod points earlier today, I'd definitely give it a boost.

Re:You mean DUCKS look sorta like PENGUINS?!

[Hal_Porter]

The best way to look at this argument is to imagine how slashdot would react if Microsft claimed it owned the copyright on all images of birds.

Re:You mean DUCKS look sorta like PENGUINS?!

[JCWDenton]

At first there may seem to be a similarity but when you look at the index page you'll see the idea behind it - standing out from the crowd (though the crowd is now made up of birds representing s/w products). They might as well have used a range of black cars with a radioactive green one in the middle. I'm not sure what would be M$'s gain by having the logo of one of their web products look like that of a major competitor of their Windows product. ("PHB: SHould we be migrating to Miss Suse Linux or Popfly? ) On a side note, it this not a copy of another innovative product of a competitor? Pipes of Yahoo? Something Scoble recently commented on, saying they should innovate such products?

Re:You mean DUCKS look sorta like PENGUINS?!

[jez9999]

Heh, yeah. Resemblance? The only thing it resembles is Tux on LSD...

Re:You mean DUCKS look sorta like PENGUINS?!

[BradyB]

I agree with you here, and came into this discussion to say pretty much the same thing. Here's my part:

I looked at the site comparing the two logos, and well umm, they don't really look that similar to me either. I even think that if they took the entire logo as a whole, the 4 ducks one pink, it means standing out in a crowd don't you think?

I don't necessarily think Microsoft is the most creative company out there, but this logo isn't similar to the Tux logo in most anyway, aside from them being birds.

Re:You mean DUCKS look sorta like PENGUINS?!

[ROMRIX]

why is this a troll? I agree, the idea that the duck is a stolen idea from the penguin is stupid. not everything has to become an argument over copyrights and logo stealing just because its microsoft.

Troll indeed! Did you even look at the pictures? I mean while the penguins aren't as little and beady as the ducky's, THEY BOTH HAVE TWO EYES! And didn't you even notice They both have a BEAK! and oh look, they're BOTH aquatic BIRDS! Granted the Microsoft one doesn't have any legs to stand on, THEY CAN BOTH SWIM! Jeees, I don't know how some people can miss such a blatant RIP OFF! Oh sure change the color a little and nobody will notice... right... WELL I DID BUDDY! And lots of others out here did too.

Re:You mean DUCKS look sorta like PENGUINS?!

[fatalwall]

if anyone should be mad its Blackduck as they actually use a black rubber duck.. only difference is the color Microsoft is using

Re:You mean DUCKS look sorta like PENGUINS?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Its worse than that - its the bastard offspring of Tux and Barney the Dinosaur!

Oh the Horror!

Re:You mean DUCKS look sorta like PENGUINS?!

[jc42]

Well, that "duck" looks about as much like Tux as Tux looks like a penguin.

(To start with, penguins all have narrow, dagger-like beaks. ;-)

Re:You mean DUCKS look sorta like PENGUINS?!

[johnsonjii]

From the TechBlorge article:

First of all, they obviously look similar, though of course the Popfly logo is a 3D rendered image, while the Tux logo is a drawn image.

The author of this article obviously does not have small children. My 1 year old daughter owns an exact copy of the Popfly duck. It isn't a "3d rendered image" it's a photograph of a rubber ducky that was bought from the supermarket.

The article is funny though...

Another Good One

[tehwebguy]

Someone get ComicSans.MS

Re:Another Good One

[Mousit]

Perhaps a better use of sans.. TheWorld-Sans.MS :)

why not?

[WrongMonkey]

Why don't major corporations have their own TLDs as part of the system? It would cut back on a lot of phishing and ICANN doesn't seem to be reluctant to do whatever they can to make a buck.

Re:why not?

[neoform]

Mmm.. how about letting anyone have any tdl? honestly, why are we all rushing for .com ? Like, what the hell is "com" for a domain name anyway?

I'd much rather type "apple" or "google" than "apple.com" and "google.com", personally I find it'd make a lot more sense.

Re:why not?

[BungaDunga]

You mean, like an AOL Keyword?

Re:why not?

[tekaris]

Suppose some companies do that and others don't. Disasters like this could happen:

We lost your BB&T account data. Please send your username and password to acc0unts.bb

So in this hypothetical world, did BB&T switch over or not? Assume that they have yet to do so - Grandma then unwittingly sends all your inheritance to Barbados!

Re:why not?

[jd]

Well, as I understand it, the theory of having the .com domain is that the corporation buys their name and puts in subdomains below it. So, you might have cornflakes.kellogs.com, for example. One corporation, one namespace. Makes things very simple. The problem with moving the corporations to top-level is that they'll do exactly the same thing they did with .com, which is pollute the namespace as much as possible. At which point, the whole system becomes totally unworkable and unusable.

I'd personally prefer it if the .com domain was cleared of all products, individuals, trademarks and other superfluous crap. If you aren't a company, you aren't a .com. If you're an organization, you're an .org, and that's final. In fact, I'd go one further - anything that is directly off a .com, .org, .net or .gov should be international in some respect. If it's more local than that, the name should reflect that. (For example, I would exile the US Government to .gov.us, the same way most other governments do their websites. There should be no exceptions.) When something expands in scope, it can always buy the name for the next scope out.

Wouldn't this impinge on privacy, freedom, etc? Not really. Whilst governments should be honest about location (I can dream - they're rarely honest about anything else), the only constraint I'm suggesting is that the type of name should reflect the type of scope. If you're running a website for a metropolitan area, I'd say you should have a metropolitan-level domain name. Doesn't have to be the same metro, the same country or (when NASA gets round to it) even the same planet. This gives people plenty of room for satirical/joke names, etc. It just adds a few more dots to it. Big deal.

It'd be almost trivial to make the DNS hierarchy deeper. Most users would be unaffected as most people outside of the US already add country codes to the names and as far as US users are concerned, Slashdot is an international forum. Everything else you get to through links.

This really would help for domain spoofing, because when unicode domain names start to come online, it will be possible to generate visually identical domain names that are physically different. That's been the claimed problem all along, although since browsers have a language attribute, I don't see why the browser can't just recode names for your language anyway. However, apparently that is a no-no. Given that, I can't see why you can't validate that the string uses a consistent character set AND a character set that the user has pre-approved for use with the country-code that I'm arguing should be there in most cases. In such a system, spoofing names should be impossible.

Re:why not?

[beyondkaoru]

i'm kind of wondering whether the whole tld thing is even necessary -- let people register domain names to contain whatever letters or dots they want, and rather than have the absurdly excessively busy .com nameservers, have servers do things by hash. this would result in dns getting distributed nicely.

Re:why not?

[beyondkaoru]

something that's a little weird to me: as far as i know, and i don't know too much about this topic, all the .com domains are sold by some company, and all .org domains by some other, and .net by another... it seems like they're not well designed for companies/organizations/...net's? do you know anything on this topic?

Re:why not?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not get rid of TLD's to begin with?

Just http://slashdot/ or http://microsoft/
No mess, no fuzz.

Re:why not?

[nevali]

There's an even better way. Kill .com, .net, .org, etc, and force everybody to register under ccTLDs. Have an active presence in multiple countries? No problem, register under as many ccTLDs as you like: the country's registry gets to decide the rules for each, so they can specify (if they wish) that you must have a physical address in that country in order to register, for example (I believe a few ccTLDs have this requirement as it stands).

The non-country-TLDs, with the exception of .int and .arpa, were a terrible idea from the start and should have been dropped a long time ago.

Re:why not?

[linvir]

While we're at it, let's throw out all these crappy operating systems. Times have changed, and we need a redesign from scratch to accommodate our changed needs.

Oh, and email sucks. We need a blank canvas for that as well. Let's start it over with all the protections we need.

And the web. What a mess. Let's take that down for a few days and replace it with something that enforces standards compliance a little better.

Of course, all of these changes would be almost trivial. Most of the multi-billion dollar corporations using the internet for infrastructure, public relations, and as a source of revenue, won't mind going back to 1993 while we tinker with the entire world's network configuration. It's a good thing we can count on their cooperation, as well, because if they kicked up a fuss, you can be damn sure that ICANN will listen to them before it'll listen to us!

Re:why not?

[pla]

I don't see why the browser can't just recode names for your language anyway. However, apparently that is a no-no.

Perhaps not quite what you meant, but you can force an arbitrary style for the URL bar, in UserChrome.css:

#urlbar {font-family: "Arial" !important; font-size: 8pt !important; }

I use that specific example to make as much as possible fit in the URL bar; If you changed the font to a non-unicode one (Fixedsys, perhaps?), then annoying unicode domain names should appear as garbage (and rightly so - What a stupid idea, allowing untypeable and/or lookalike characters in domain names!).

Re:why not?

[b0s0z0ku]

If you aren't a company, you aren't a .com.

What about sole proprietorships/startups. Plenty of business (at least in the US) are NOT incorporated!

-b.

Re:why not?

[petermgreen]

the problem with tightning up the rules on .com is what to do with all the existing names, if you kill them then you will leave the web in a very broken state and lots of information will probablly be rendered virtually inaccessible forever. If you grandfather them then you put newcomers at a major disadvantage.

also how do you define a company? not all commercial operations are ltd or plc and at least in the uk there is no requirement to register for sole traders or partnerships.

I don't see why the browser can't just recode names for your language anyway. However, apparently that is a no-no.
If you know a way to transliterate between arbitaty scripts thats universally accepted,highly predicatable and where arbitary multi step translations have the same effect as going in a single step please tell us about it because thats what would be needed to build a consistant system arround that idea..

I can't see why you can't validate that the string uses a consistent character set AND a character set that the user has pre-approved for use with the country-code that I'm arguing should be there in most cases.
you can! Many tlds do! verisign (controllers of .com and .net) don't most likely because they are greedy bastards that icann doesn't have the balls to control.

Re:why not?

[Blakey Rat]

The problem with the TLD system, as with everything on the Internet, is that it was designed by academics who have no clue how the world actually works.

When I wanted to register my last name a couple years ago, what was I supposed to put it under? I'm not an Organization, I'm not a Network, I'm not a Company. I ended up going with .net, which was a mistake because the next year browsers started adding the .com by default if you left the TLD off the URL.

Which, BTW, is why .com is now worth about three times more than any other domain TLD, because browsers add it automatically when guessing what you meant to type.

Re:why not?

[Rakishi]

So where would I put up my non-commercial forum, which is international almost by definition (any web-only entity is pretty much)?
-com: nope that's for commercial entities
-biz:nope, that's for businesses
-org: Misc. organizations which again doesn't fit.
-name: Well it's not a personal site so no.
-net: nope, I'm not an ISP or similar
-int: An international corporation, again nope.
-edu,gov,mil: Nope once again.
-info: Doesn't really fit.
-aero,cat,coop,jobs,mobi,museum,tel,travel: Darn, doesn't fit the intended usage of any of these.
-pro: If only I got that accounting accreditation.

Re:why not?

[rbanffy]

While I agree lookalike characters should not be allowed, what you can or cannot type is entirely dependent on your operating environment.

Re:why not?

[jZnat]

Uh, that's what .name is for. Example: cmdr.taco.name.

Re:why not?

[hackstraw]

I'd much rather type "apple" or "google" than "apple.com" and "google.com", personally I find it'd make a lot more sense.

For URLs that I don't regularly go to, and are not in my URL history of my browser, I almost always ask google for the URL of what I'm looking for, blindly typing a URL is pretty dumb, even though I still do it from time to time.

Just yesterday, I typed in oadebrothers.com. I was actually looking for oade.com. Oade is the last name of two brothers that are into sound recording. Well, oadebrothers.com actually resolved and for my convenience there was some useless information there for me. One I realized I was not at the place I wanted to be, I typed oade into my google search bar, and again for my convenience there was a popup that somehow escaped the anti-popup technology in my browser, and now a stupid wrong URL is in my history until it ages or I clear it.

I've said a number of times here on /., with little or at best mixed opinions when I say that TLDs are stupid. I'm sticking by my guns here, and increasing the ante here to say that in 2007, hostnames in general are almost worthless. At most, a "good" hostname is good for mnemonics, but I dare anyone to do something like make a typo when typing in a good and easy to remember and known URL into the address bar. I double dare you to do this with an older, unpatched and insecure browser.

TLDs and hostnames are great in theory, but in practice, they have become arbitrary and almost meaningless. Much like a telephone numbers have become. Telephone numbers used to mean something. The first three numbers were the area where the phone was located. The next three were some kind of smaller area within the above area, and then the last four digits were pretty much arbitrary. Now, the phone number almost means essentially nothing but what is behind the name in the users phone list. My friend had a "Michigan" phone number that he used when he lived in Virginia, and he still uses it now that he lives in California. I guess its nice that his number is the same, and it causes him little issues that he lives in states that do not coincide with his phone number. Its a pain for me because I don't have a phone service that can go that far.

I guess what is coming will be some kind of GUID or bigger, longer, and more apparently random identifier that will be completely beyond human memory, and then a lookup service like 411 or google or whatever to find the GUID.

Re:why not?

[freedomlinux]

AFAIK: Any ICANN-registered domain registrar can sell under the general .com .org .net TLDs.
The use of government-based TLDs is highly restricted and some registrars might not be able to sell TLDs for specific countries.

Re:why not?

[neoform]

Why is it dumb?

You're basically telling google every website you visit.. why should *that* be the smart move?

Re:why not?

[LinuxDon]

Quote: "Why don't major corporations have their own TLDs as part of the system? It would cut back on a lot of phishing and ICANN doesn't seem to be reluctant to do whatever they can to make a buck."

Because it would create a mess. Every domain holder can already use *.domain.com, so what would be the improvement?
Also, don't forget that DNS needs a hierarchical system in order to function properly.

If you'd just go handing out TLD's the entire load would move to the root servers and it could break the system.
Also, everyone (domain pirates) will start registering every TLD they can think of and the .com etc. names wouldn't be good enough anymore.
Financially there wouldn't be any benefit, now they can sell every name multiple times under a different TLD.

And lastly, if a new country would be formed somewhere, which TLD would they get when the appropriate TLD would already have been hijacked by a domain pirate?

Re:why not?

[jd]

Very close. I was thinking something more like this. Let's say the unicode font, say, is for the Cyrillic alphabet but the broser's language is set to EN and the EN language is mapped to the Arial font. The "obvious" thing to do is to display the output in Arial, as you have specified that is your language, but indicate via an icon or some other means that it was originally in Cyrillic. Entering such an address would work the same way. You'd tag it with the language it is supposed to be in, but write in your own. Problem solved.

(Well, almost. This works for browsers, but telnet, ftp and ssh don't have language parameters. You'd have to do something similar, though, precisely because they don't have language parameters and therefore entering wide characters could be problematic for them.)

Re:why not?

[Blakey Rat]

Brilliant, but .name didn't exist when I bought mine.

Re:why not?

[Fastolfe]

What a stupid idea, allowing untypeable and/or lookalike characters in domain names!).

This may come as a shock to you, but not everyone in the world types on American-style QWERTY keyboards. What is "untypeable" to you is easily typeable to others.

In addition, for those that have keyboards that limit the characters they can type, there is such a thing as an IME allowing these users to "type" complex characters.

Now, I'm not suggesting that our implementation of "international domain names" is the best and safest way of doing it, but your comment struck me as a little US-centric.

Re:why not?

[Fastolfe]

I think you may be confused about what Unicode is. The Unicode Character Set (UCS) has nothing to do with languages. It's there to standardize on characters. Plenty of languages can use the same characters (like many Western European languages do with Latin characters, or East Asian languages do through Han unification). "Unicode fonts" are simply fonts that are capable of containing glyphs covering at least portions of the UCS. These fonts are "language-specific" only in the sense that they might only cover certain scripts used by certain languages.

Further, you seem to suggest that the software automatically "convert" characters from one "language" to another. If you're talking about translation, you must realize that machine translation (a) doesn't work all that well, and (b) will have difficulty guaranteeing a 1:1 concept mapping between two languages. (Some languages might have two concepts that are only represented by a single word in another language.) If you're talking about transliteration, many languages and scripts do not have absolute rules about this, and much like the translation case, the rules sometimes aren't always perfectly symmetrical.

Finally, not all DNS labels are in a particular "language" to begin with. Many are proper nouns, for example.

Please consider the possibility that a lot of very smart people have already thought about this problem. If you really think this is "problem solved", perhaps you should talk to them directly instead of posting on Slashdot.

Re:why not?

[Fastolfe]

The "academics" of whom you speak had an excellent "clue" about the problem they were attempting to solve at the time, and how well that solution solved it.

The "problem" isn't with stupid academics, it's with the unguided evolution of the same technology to a commercialized system. What works well on a privately controlled, academic environment doesn't always work well in a commercialized setting. No one could have predicted that DNS would be abused in the manner that it's abused today. This isn't the fault of the designers of DNS, it's the fault of the entities pushing for commercialization without reworking some of the standards to better fit commercial and international goals.

Re:why not?

[jd]

No, this would not be translation, it would be character-by-character transliteration (not even word-by-word). Besides which, translation defeats the objective, which is to purposely break spoofed names. Translation (which can't be perfectly bi-directional and so wouldn't work) can't be guaranteed to break spoofing by fonts.

Unicode maps character sets, but the advantage of unicode over other such schemes is the manner in which character numbers are picked. They're not random, but are designed to produce a level of consistency across all character sets. Ergo, mapping one unicode font onto another unicode font should always work.

The language thing is very simple. The browser identifies what language it is currently using and what font is used for that language. The font is the important part, because that allows the software to map one character to another. The language is merely the mechanism by which you guarantee that the resulting characters are readable by you AND that the characters you type in are translated back to the correct unicode encoding. The system has to work both ways to be useful. (Nobody can remember a large enough set of 24-bit unicode numbers to do this directly. Names are the only practical method.)

Yes, yes, I know, multiple languages use the same character set. So what. It's not the language that I'm concerned with, that's just a key field that happens to be useful. The font is the only thing that matters, and there is absolutely no issue with the French or Italians using the same font as the English or Welsh. I'm concerned with spoofing via fonts, so the language is quite unimportant. What is important is ensuring that the font you get breaks foreign character sets that use the same symbols, and that is what this system does. End of story.

Writing to the people working on this is about as effective as writing to the President of the United States or the CEO of Microsoft. Individual contributions, even if they were 100% perfect, flawless and utterly beyond question, will be utterly ignored. Individuals, in a modern society, are nobodies and nothings. It is nothing more than delusion to imagine otherwise. The only effective action is collective action, but there simply aren't enough socialist ITers to be effective. Many are libertarian - which is a wonderful system for individuals, but is completely ineffective at bringing about change on a large scale.

So is posting on Slashdot any better? Not really. True, sometimes important, key people do read Slashdot. It does happen. It happens often enough for Intel to have set up a Q&A section on it, but not often enough for Slashdotters to have any real impact on attitudes or society. So why post here? Because at least it isn't going out into the void. I don't expect anything I write here to have any widespread impact, but I do hope that once in a while someone will take something I post and use the idea in some way. Doesn't matter how. But even if one post in ten thousand triggers a chain of thought in even a single individual that leads to action, I'll have done more towards providing positive contributions to life than 90% of the world's population.

Without IT unions, ideas have no value until tens of millions (never mind tens of thousands) share them passionately enough to apply pressure. That's not going to happen. Not when I post, not when you post, not when anybody posts. There's nobody on Slashdot who has that much power. The best I can ever hope for is to very occasionally throw out an idea that is ever so slightly useful or interesting to someone.

Re:why not?

[Fastolfe]

The font is the important part, because that allows the software to map one character to another.

That's the problem, though. Fonts do not map characters to characters, they map characters to glyphs. You're never guaranteed to be able to associate a font with a particular language, because the glyphs contained within the font will map to characters that could be used by multiple languages. Any association you intend to make is going to be arbitrary and subjective. When you type a character into a text field, a logical character is entered into the field, not a glyph from a font. If the renderer can't render that character with the available fonts, you get a replacement character (like boxes or question marks), but the character is still there.

What is important is ensuring that the font you get breaks foreign character sets that use the same symbols

You're still making the erroneous assumption that fonts will only contain glyphs for one specific language (script). It is very common for fonts to contain glyphs for multiple scripts covering many languages. The stock Arial font that you've mentioned in your posts contains, in XP at least, glyphs for Latin (Western European), Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew, on top of what you normally see in fonts.

If your goal here is to de-internationalize applications (or at least the Location field of the browser) so that it only shows you glyphs from scripts that you're familiar with, you might be able to accomplish this by instructing the renderer (or the application, before it sends its text to the renderer) to ignore/replace characters outside of a certain range (such as Latin-1 for English and other Western European languages). I don't think messing with font selection, or crippling fonts by restricting them to a certain subset of Unicode characters is the answer. The general direction here is to move toward more complete Unicode-aware fonts, not away.

How would you bookmark these pages? How would you copy/paste the URL to give to someone else? How would the system know that the URL you just typed in should be transliterated to some other script? Do you have to remember the language tag associated with each URL? What happens when languages are mixed in the URL, such as a TLD in English and a second-level domain in Japanese? What if the URL path was in Russian?

Re:why not?

[jd]

Bookmarks, URLs, etc, would need to contain unicode information, whether the Unicode is implicit or explicit as far as the user is concerned. All I'd do is move it from choosing which set of glyphs to use to being something entered as a name by the user. It could be as trivial as having a pseudo domain level that stores a short name which identifies the unicode encoding and level. It could be a modification to the way you write URLs - in the same way that you have : for port, @ for username, etc, you could have something that signified encoding. You've now eliminated the need to display multiple languages, without eliminating the range of names.

Is this necessary? Well, yes. You can't get ASCII network tools (such as lynx) to talk to a unicode domain name unless you can explicitly state the encoding in ASCII, with no need for wide characters. So such a system must be invented anyway, or you'll break a lot of software that's out there.

If this mechanism exists, it can exist for any network tool and can therefore serve to distinguish between sites that cannot be distinguished if displayed in the stated encodings. Thus, I'm not restricting domain names, I'm not suggesting that everyone stick to the latin character set, I'm not limiting people wanting to spell things in their native language and character set, all I am doing is ensuring that nobody can use similar glyphs in other character sets to deceive them. Anything that's non-native is expanded out. It's still bookmarkable and the bookmarks will work anywhere.

(eg: Slashdot might have a URL of http://slashdot.orglatin1/ in countries in which LATIN1 was not in use. If that same URL was used in England, where LATIN1 is used everywhere other than Civil Service documents, the browser would identify that the specified encoding is your current encoding and do nothing with that extra information.)

Re:why not?

[Fastolfe]

I don't mean any disrespect here, but you continue to use terms like "encoding" and "unicode" in ways that suggest you don't actually know this topic very well. Again, I don't intend this as an insult. We all have our great ideas on how to make the world a better place when we start dipping into new subjects. Please consider doing some more reading on what Unicode actually is, what a character set is, what an encoding is (and how it is different from a character set), how font (glyph) mappings work, how transliteration works, how IRIs work and how Unicode characters are embedded into them today, Punycode, etc.

I suspect you're going to find that some of your assumptions here are faulty.

Finally, consider the impact of your change. People aren't going to like having to stick a new identifier onto the end of their existing hostnames, and hostnames using the old syntax are going to have to continue to work. Every application that uses hostnames would seem to require changes to understand and properly filter characters. It also seems to be a partial solution in cases where the scripts are not similar to Latin1, since you have to identify the character set in ASCII, right?

I think a better solution is to advocate using URIs (IRIs) as things you use to locate resources, not as things you use to authenticate resources. I should never be tempted to glance up at the URL in the Location field of my browser and, from a visual inspection alone, "authenticate" the site I'm at as Paypal, or my bank. TLS/SSL certificates are quite capable of identifying a site using a real-world identity that can be vouched for by an authority qualified to do so. Perhaps the information in these certificates needs to be presented to the user as prominently as the URL? Sounds like a bug report I opened against Firefox nearly 5 years ago.

Hmm, that was fast

[AsmCoder8088]

I just checked on whois.net and it appears microsoft.ms is now registered....

[whois.adamsnames.tc]
Yes
microsoft.ms is registered.

Domain Name: microsoft.ms

Registrant
Domain Registrant
id domain privacy network (iddp.net), 588 sutter st. #129, 94102-1102 san francisco, ca
United States
E-mail: tlds@rrpproxy.net
Phone: +1.4154408001
Fax: +1.4154408001

Re:Hmm, that was fast

[Anonymous Coward]

But look at this (more from whois):

Billing Contact
    Key Systems GmbH
    Prager Ring 4-12, 66482 Zweibruken
    Germany
    E-mail: tlds@rrpproxy.net
    Phone: +49 6332 79 18 50
    Fax: +49 6332 79 18 51

Must be an international conspiracy. Rubber duckies of the world unite!

Microsoft.ms is obviously *not* available

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because it doesn't have a webserver up and running, doesn't mean it isn't registered.

Registered 22 Dec 2005

[ensignyu]

Whoever wrote the linked blog apparently doesn't know how to do whois lookups.

Re:Registered 22 Dec 2005

[ensignyu]

Correction: whoever submitted the Slashdot article doesn't know how to do a whois lookup. That makes more sense.

Re:Registered 22 Dec 2005

[vinlud]

It's just the time it takes to get to the frontpage of /. !

That'll make you cringe

[robot_lords_of_tokyo]

We're a hip crazy cool start up
it's bad enough when people mean it when they write it... it's so much better when it's forced by some guy upstairs.

Re:That'll make you cringe

[hobo sapiens]

Hey, did you laugh at the pictures like I did?

One was the obligatory girl. She probably did design work. Not that she couldn't code circles around the guys and all, but you know, gotta keep up appearances.

There were three guys on there, I swear, I saw them on NBC's To Catch A Predator getting arrested. It's good microsoft hires ex-cons. Keeps em off the streets.

Sloth from Goonies evidently works there now. Good for him. I'll bet he eats a LOT of Baby Ruths.

There were plenty of forgettable, dorky white guys who, together, probably own every D&D and Warhammer piece ever made.

Finally, the project lead was surely the guy on top (of the pyramid, you perverts!). I guess I have worked on enough projects to know.

*Sigh*

Well, what do you know? popfly.ms IS good for something! It amused me for ten minutes.

Re:That'll make you cringe

[larry bagina]

looks more like a middle aged diversity bowling league than a startup. I wonder if token girl and striped shirt homo share blowjob tips.

Re:That'll make you cringe

[larry bagina]

dorky white guys? fuck, half their team is h1b status.

Re:That'll make you cringe

[etnu]

They have more program manager than they have developers. That speaks volumes. Microsoft wouldn't know how to form a web startup if a $50 billion market depended on it. Because it does.

Re:That'll make you cringe

[Zantetsuken]

So is it supposed to be the new way to create a myspace page or something? Is this MS admitting that their "LIVE" campaign is failing?

Re:That'll make you cringe

[pasamio]

Now what I loved was all of the managers:
1x Group Program Manager
5x Program Manager (one of which is the token female)
1x Product Manager
1x Product Unit Manager
1x Engineering Manager
1x Test Developer
5x Developers

Or to reduce it to developers and managers: 5x Developers vs 10x Managers - I wonder who the three people missing are? No wonder Microsoft have issues shipping product, 1:2 dev to manager ratio is insane!

Re:That'll make you cringe

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a tip for the Popfly team: get rid of the TM and (R) and (C) and all that. Honestly. There are few other "cool Web 2.0 experiences" that flaunt their trademark logo like a penis in a cheap porn flick. It's typically something that only oversized dinosaur companies would do.
 
Oh, and that browser discrimination script you've got going at the front page? It's the most ridiculous thing ever. I'm not allowed in because your designers were too lazy to make an extensive list of sites that are "officially supported" (again, that's something only the brain damaged or dinosaur companies would do). Yet I do run a modern browser, as proven by the fact that if I go to one of the pages further in the site directly, I'm able to use everything flawlessly (gracias for only putting that discrimination script at the home page).

Re:That'll make you cringe

[pchan-]

They have more program manager than they have developers.
Haha, yes, this is what I noticed, too.

They have NINE managers and SIX developers. They probably sit in meetings all day just like the rest of Microsoft. Actually, I found the whole page hilarious, due to its forced-sounding attempt at being cool. Sounds like it was written by the same people that did the Zune marketing. Notice the contradiction between the two sentences of being right in the center of Microsoft while being a "startup".

The team is a small band of folks with a passion for democratizing development, housed within Microsoft's Developer Division based in Redmond, Washington. Like most startup ventures, the team hustles for resources every day and is innovative, scrappy, and fun. Oh, and we also dream big.

Re:That'll make you cringe

[Anonymous Coward]

Because, you know, there are NO US-born citizens that aren't white, is that right you fucking asshole racist? Fuck you.

Re:That'll make you cringe

[Anonymous Coward]

At least they didn't use "Where do you want to pop your flies today?"

Re:That'll make you cringe

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting that RMS worshippers would make fun of photos of others, given RMS's ridiculous appearance.

Re:That'll make you cringe

[Turn-X Alphonse]

Not to be a complete bitch and rape your point.

Why can't a start up evolve inside a larger company and be fighting for resources? If someone said "We started in google and had to fight for resources, we're a start up based inside Google" people would go "oh wow! Google is so awesome!" and not question it what so ever.

I am not supporting MS but I have to question why it's not possible for Nill to go "fuck it, lets give these muppets a chance to see how Googles style works".

Or could just be marketing :P

Re:That'll make you cringe

[leerpm]

At Microsoft, the functional role of a lot of these managers, particularly Program & Product Managers, is closer to what would be called a Business Analyst in other companies. There is no one with a solid line reporting relationship to them, they simply 'manage' a specific subset of the overall product features.

Re:That'll make you cringe

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know what was funnier - the fact that the guy in the middle of the first photo that everybody wants to shoot is making himself an easy target, or the bald dude on the left of the last photo who looks like he's about to cry.

Re:That'll make you cringe

[WilliamSChips]

But he has a katana. Microsoft employees tend to be lacking in the katana department...

Re:That'll make you cringe

[WilliamSChips]

Well, actually from what I've heard there's very little competition for resources in Google and most of the cool startup-like stuff happens during the 20% time.

Re:That'll make you cringe

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure what "katana" is, but I bet the Microsoft people bathe, unlike RMS.

Re:That'll make you cringe

[larry bagina]

Because Microsoft is the 6th largest user of H1B employees.

Re:That'll make you cringe

[Sax Maniac]

You should look at a newspaper or magazine sometime. Everybody is an editor, and nobody is a writer! Who writes the words if everyone just edits them?! Do they just cut and paste stuff of Wikipedia and Reuters? My suspicion is "editor" really means "writer" and "SuperImpressiveWhizzyTerm Editor" is an actual editor. It's probably title inflation.

Re:That'll make you cringe

[zippthorne]

You think the candy-striper was the project lead? You need to use the scroll wheel more. Third from the right in the final picture: Aaron Brethorst (Program Manager).

But there are only 6 non-managers* in the picture, and Aaron is apparently in good company with the other 4 program managers. "The girl" btw, is also a program manager.

*Unless "developer" is also a code-word for manager...

These guys must be doing great with all that managing going on ou' dere. I'm gonna go out on a limb here and guess they're probably "well managed" in the same sense as a steak can be "well done."

Re:That'll make you cringe

[esmrg]

Gross misuse of the word 'ecosystem'. Marketdrones leeching off the positive feeling of words they haven't ruined yet.

Re:That'll make you cringe

[sjelkjd]

At Microsoft, the Program Manager position is not a management position. Instead, it is the role of an engineer responsible for defining the features of a product. You can read more here, if you're interested: http://members.microsoft.com/careers/careerpath/te chnical/programmanagement.mspx

Of that list, the Group program manager, product unit manager, and engineering manager are people managers, while the rest are most likely individual contributors.

Re:That'll make you cringe

[AaronBrethorst]

Finally, the project lead was surely the guy on top (of the pyramid, you perverts!). I guess I have worked on enough projects to know.

I'm not the project lead. That would be John Montgomery.

Cheers,
Aaron
(the guy on top of the pyramid)

Re:That'll make you cringe

[AaronBrethorst]

lol :) Are you referring to the pattern on my shirt? Also, I should mention that I spend most of my time on Popfly either designing new features, implementing them, or fixing bugs. I may have the word "manager" in my title, but I also have a computer science degree.

Cheers,
Aaron

Re:That'll make you cringe

[ACE209]

You know all the bathtubs and showers are proprietary?
Unless there is free and open bathroom equipment - no chance.
And heck - there is only one suplier of water at my homeplace - you know about the dangers of vendor lock in?

Think about theese points before posting such accusations!


Oh and don't take me too serious on this one.

how about

[AresTheImpaler]

http://i.hate.ms/

That way it really looks Web 2.0!! yay..

Re:how about

[Richard Lamont]

It's been done.

http://sod.ms/

resemblance?

[crossmr]

They're cute birds... wow..anyone who has a cute bird as a logo is ripping off linux?

First of all, they obviously look similar
really? huh.. you know you're right. If someone hadn't pointed out it was the popfly website, I would have swore I was at a linux site.
The resemblance is damn near perfect. I like the way the pink really brings out the black and white....
this is beyond slow news day.

ZOMFG

[Anonymous Coward]

Look at all this content derived from tux i found on google. Quick, get the torches and pitchforks!

or...

[Ariastis]

linuxsavedmefrom.ms

Could this be...

[tiffany98121]

... the absolute lamest Slashdot article ever posted?

Re:Could this be...

[Timesprout]

Well the tech.blorge link is certainly one of the lamest attempts I have seen to have a dig at MS. I mean seriously with all the ammunition they provide the best this loser can come up with is 'conceptual similarities' between a fucking dayglo pink duck and a penguin.

Re:Could this be...

[figleaf]

The neosmart guy just cares about getting hits to his site. So he posts his microsoft -ve blogs to slashdot.
He also posts on http://neowin.net/ but nobody gives a damn on that site.

Re:Could this be...

[HeroreV]

I would vote yes in a poll.

Re:Could this be...

[carpe_noctem]

No, but the dupe of this article next week will be...

Re:Could this be...

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know what's lamer... the post or the fact that you bothered to read *and* reply to this post.

Oh, wait..... crap.

Re:Could this be...

[Anonymous Coward]

You must be new here...

Re:Could this be...

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing compared to the "if you use file compression, you - basically - save disk space" story. Or the "put this magic hologram sticker thing on a cell phone battery to increase battery life".

tux? no...

[larry bagina]

but if they changed the font it would look like something from Apple.

Popfly?

[hobo sapiens]

Anyone check out the popfly site?

I get a kick out of when a large corporation tries to make itself look all independent and hip and stuff with a so-called irreverent site.

Did you look at the About Us page? "the team hustles for resources every day and is innovative, scrappy, and fun" Good night, does anyone really believe that within Microsoft there are real innovative ideas that don't simply involve entrenching the Microsoft brand? Not that there aren't smart people there, it's just that I have not seen many good ideas coming from there as of late (IE7, Vista, Zune, Media Player, Silverlight...need I go on?) And if this team does exist, then surely their ideas are too innovative and rogue for stodgy old Microsoft and outside of some pseudo-web2.0 site won't see the light of day.

Case in point, the only way to log into the site is with a Microsoft passport. Therefore, I don't know what else is there, but from the looks of things, not much. And isn't "web 2.0" supposed to be made with valid markup? Grumble grumble...

Re:Popfly?

[MSFTVet]

I'm not on the Popfly team but I can assure you that they're super small, "lightly funded" by any standard and definately outside of the bounds of the traditional MSFT brand. Maybe once you have the chance to use the site you'll have a more informed opinion on whether the app is cool or not, huh?

Re:Popfly?

[mrchaotica]

Yeah, they must have only been skimming "Web 2.0 for Dummies" and missed the warning box on page 2:

[!] If your logo is a pink rubber duckie, YOU ARE TRYING TOO HARD.

Re:Popfly?

[MSFTVet]

It's not the logo. It's just a silly picture of ducks. You're taking this way too seriously.

Re:Popfly?

[hobo sapiens]

"Maybe once you have the chance to use the site you'll have a more informed opinion on whether the app is cool or not, huh?"

Maybe. One of the few Microsoft products I like is Visual Studio, so they do seem to get IDEs right.

Or not.

From the looks of thing, based on what I see on the Overview page, its the next-gen frontpage all gussied up for the web2.0 (which would have been trendy -- two years ago).

I write loads of web code using jEdit and Firefox. Works great for me. I can write better code than a program, anyhow, at least when it comes web markup, javascript, css, ajax calls, etc. It probably writes code that locks in IE anyhow.

On the positive, the site itself worked with Firefox. On the downside it did not work with Opera. If a company is selling you a tool that lets you write web code, and their site doesn't adhere to web standards (because it would work with Opera if it did), then that's not a great ad for their product.

That in itself created a bad impression. Not trying to be negative, just being honest.

Re:Popfly?

[karmaflux]

Also from the About Us page:

From left to right: John Montgomery (Group Program Manager), Andy Sterland (Program Manager), Alpesh Gaglani (Developer), Tim Rice (Developer), Suzanne Hansen (Program Manager), Steven Wilssens (Program Manager), Vinay Deo (Engineering Manager), Michael Leonard (Test Developer), Jianchun Xu (Developer), Dan Fernandez (Product Manager), Adam Nathan (Developer), Wes Hutchins (Program Manager), Aaron Brethorst (Program Manager), Paramesh Vaidyanathan (Product Unit Manager), and Murali Potluri (Developer).

That's nine managers and six developers. No wonder the team "hustles for resources." They're probably going broke paying management wages to sixty percent of the staff. It says three more people aren't pictured -- we can bet that two of them are more managers.

This team sounds like a developer's nightmare.

Re:Popfly?

[mrchaotica]

Whatever. It's stupid either way.

Re:Popfly?

[MSFTVet]

Fair enough. To be clear, the site is not for Pro devs although some may go up and create what they call "application blocks" - essentially little components that others (non developers) can hook together to create mash-ups. I think their target is more non-developers who want to create little apps/mash-ups/gadgets and share them with friends. Imagine the users of MySpace or FaceBook who might want to use this kind of thing to trick out their sites. People like that "borrow" code all the time and make small modifications and re-use it. I think the "vision" is pretty cool - shouldn't anyone be able to build applications by dragging and dropping components onto a surface and hooking them together in ways that they find interseting? It's the future of software development in the long term... You'll always need the hardcore coders to write the core code but most apps will just be made up of pre-existing code put together in ways that users want.

Re:Popfly?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're the one replying to every single critical post on this story. Who's taking this too seriously?

Popfly is nothing more than a masturbatory web-2.0 buzzword festival and it will be gone by the end of the year.

Re:Popfly?

[mr_man]

At Microsoft, Program Managers are not "Managers" in the traditional sense. Instead these people spec out the different features a product will have.

In Microspeak they are individual contributors and not managment, they don't have reports.

Having a strong team of program managers is a good thing for a developer. You get to spend more time focusing on the techncial implementation.

Re:Popfly?

[Osty]

That's nine managers and six developers. No wonder the team "hustles for resources." They're probably going broke paying management wages to sixty percent of the staff. It says three more people aren't pictured -- we can bet that two of them are more managers.

You're obviously not familiar with Microsoft position nomenclature. Of the names listed, there are three real managers -- the GPM, the PUM, and the Engineering Manager. You're confusing "Program Manager" and "Product Manager" as actual managers. They aren't.

Program managers "manage the program", not people -- they write specs, interface with customers, etc.

Product managers "manage the product", and are purely marketing. Again, they don't necessarily manage people.

Program managers and product managers are roughly on par with developers and test developers. They don't make the same big bucks as GPMs or PUMS.

Re:Popfly?

[notaprguy]

Can't resist. And why is it that you're uniquely qualified to identify popfly as a "masturbatory web-2.0 buzzword festival..."? You've used the site?

Re:Popfly?

[karmaflux]

Imagine the users of MySpace or FaceBook who might want to use this kind of thing to trick out their sites.

The fact that you don't find this idea terrifying is evidence that you're not qualified to make judgments on these matters. Also, people have been talking about this "the user as the application developer" crap since BASIC came out, and it's just not going to happen, even if you use the word "mashup." Regardless, even this specific idea has already been done -- and in open source, no less. From http://sprog.sourceforge.net/:

Sprog is a graphical tool that anyone can use to build programs by plugging parts together. In Sprog jargon, the parts are known as 'gears' and they are assembled to make a 'machine'. Gears are selected from a palette and dragged onto the Sprog workbench, where they can be connected together. Options can be set using a properties dialog on each gear. When assembly is complete, the machine can be run, reconfigured, or re-run.

Or are you going to try to tell me it's COMPLETELY DIFFERENT because Popfly calls them "blocks" instead of "gears" and it's on the web? Face it: Popfly is a mildly interesting idea, but it won't take off for two reasons. The first reason: nobody wants it. The second reason: Silverlight is ActiveX for Web 2.0, and nobody sure as hell wants that, either.

Re:Popfly?

[QuantumG]

Hehehe.. you've been in corporate land too long. Go visit a startup. There, they have: developers (the guys who write code), sales (the guys who find customers) and managers (the guys who do everything else). These dudes are managers. Perhaps "suits" would be a better term.

Re:Popfly?

[notaprguy]

Silverlight ActiveX for Web 2.0? Uhh...no. Silverlight runs on Mac (Firefox and Safari) and Windows. No activex. Nobody wants it? No again. Developers who actually want to write applications instead of only making annoying Flash-y animations will like Silverlight. Wait for a year and see.

Re:Popfly?

[Anonymous Coward]

Silverlight runs on Mac (Firefox and Safari) and Windows. No activex.

I think it was a metaphor, genius.

Developers who actually want to write applications instead of only making annoying Flash-y animations will like Silverlight. People said the same shit about ActiveX. THIS IS GOING TO REVOLUTIONIZE WEB-ENABLED COMPUTING! What did we get out of it? ASF video files. Great. Eagerly awaiting the quickly-obsolesced niche garbage that Silverlight latches on it.

Re:Popfly?

[Oswald]

Props for having the stones to use a name like MSFTVet on /. but come on:

The team is a small band of folks with a passion for democratizing development, housed within Microsoft's Developer Division based in Redmond, Washington. Like most startup ventures, the team hustles for resources every day and is innovative, scrappy, and fun. Oh, and we also dream big.

That's just sad. Women, men, motorcycles, music, sports, dogs, horses, science fiction (back when it was worth a shit), Smalltalk, dancing...these are just a few of the things people can be passionate about. Democratizing development, whateverthefuckthatmeans, is not on the list. Smells like marketing to me.

White boys should not try to talk like they grew up in the hood, lesbians should not piss standing up, and corporations with US$50 thousand million in the bank should not try to act "scrappy". All of these acts display a combination of confusion, dishonesty, and poor taste. It's no sin to be bigger than God; just don't try to act like you're too cool to suffer the ill effects.

This is not a criticism of the people on the team because I can't possibly know anything about the people on the team (well, I know that Aaron Brethorst turned his last name into a verb, which is pretty creepy, but we'll let that slide). I'm criticizing Microsoft management for thinking they can pull this off. They're off to a great start, with 9 managers and 6 developers.

It doesn't matter if Popfly [isn't a popfly usually an out in baseball, btw?]is a cool app or not, because it will go away. If it's cool now, then it will be exploited by MS in some off-putting way as soon as it gets remotely popular, and if it's not cool then having a rich daddy won't help it.

On a positive note, the website makes pretty nice use of color.

Re:Popfly?

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems to work for Apple, why not...

Re:Popfly?

[notaprguy]

Nah, I don't think it was a metaphor. I was either just ignorance, annoying flame-bait or possibly wishful thinking.

Re:Popfly?

[notaprguy]

I agree with most of what you said. It's like trying to be cool when you're not or, even if you are cool, you can't say you are or...you're not cool. What I don't really agree with is the criticism of them saying they want to democratize development. Maybe "democratize" wasn't the best choice of words but I think there's something cool about trying to make computing and development more accessible. I think one of the reasons the uber eggheads have such a hard time with Microsoft (beyond some bad behavior a few years back) is that they feel threatened by them. MSFT created VB because they wanted to make it easier to write apps for Windows than using C. Sure, C is a more elegante' and powerful way to write apps but VB was easy enough that anybody would put together a decent Windows app. Despite what some may think, Microsoft has generally forced prices of computing down, making it more accessible to everyone. Sure, today you can get good software for nothing but overall Microsoft software is and has always been cheaper than most commercial alternatives. But I digress. Popfly seems to be about making it easy for anyone to make simple little Web apps. It's a step in the right direction as far as I'm concerned. Even if it does make nervous the people who like to feel superior to everyone else b/c they have more technical knowledge.

Re:Popfly?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you really not see the conceptual similarities between Java (in the form of applets), Flash, ActiveX, and Silverlight?

Talk about ignorance.

Re:Popfly?

[MikeMLP]

http://popfly.ms/Overview/ - click on "watch the popfly screencast"
If you want, watch the video. I have to admit the concept is kinda cool. The way you can edit block code and share it... It seems to me that MS is trying to leverage a community which openly shares code modifications. The problem is that it is all based on a closed-source platform, and I'm sure the best hackers would rather work on an open platform, instead of one which could change or become obsolete without notice.

The funniest part is if you skip to 9:50 when there is a demonstration of a digg reader. The first listed article mentions the exclusive MS / Lenovo deal, but, even better, the second is "Hackers use Windows Update to download..."

Despite Silverlight looking quite polished in the demo, MS still cannot avoid bad press on a free-information internet, and thus, still cannot be cool.

Re:Popfly?

[bmo]

"That's nine managers and six developers. No wonder the team "hustles for resources." They're probably going broke paying management wages to sixty percent of the staff. It says three more people aren't pictured -- we can bet that two of them are more managers."

Three lions escape from the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle.

They decide to split up, to improve the chances that they won't all be caught all at once, and agree to meet three months later to compare notes.

So three months pass by and they all meet. Two of the lions are all skin and bone. One is shaking, he says "I ate one kid at a school and they chased me into the woods. I had to live on voles, shrews, and the occasional mountain biker...stringy, they are." The second lion, also skinny, said "I ate a cop, and they chased me 'round the city and I wound up having to climb up Mt. Ranier and all I could find to eat was squirrels."

So the two look at the third lion and ask why he's so fat and happy:

"I hid in the bushes next to Microsoft's main entrance. I ate a manager a day and nobody noticed."

--
BMO

(joke shamelessly stolen and adapted from IBM to Microsoft)

Re:Popfly?

[Daltorak]

Actually, no, it's not a nightmare -- it's a good thing for developers. The problem is that Microsoft has a naming issue... (you don't say!)

In Microsoft parlance, a "Program Manager" isn't a person who works in the "management" sense of the business or people. They have other people for that. Program Managers are responsible for writing technical specifications, co-ordinating development activities (e.g. who works on what piece), and making sure the developers are clear of distractions to get their job done. They're the ones that have to deal with finding out what the business requirements are and translating that into development activity.

Let's take a step back from the Microsoft thing for a bit, and think about how you would approach building a team of, say, eight people to develop a piece of software. Would you want eight developers and nothing else? Of course not... you'd want at least one person in there who will run interference between the developers and the people who want the job done, be it the people bankrolling the development, or the customers you're writing the software for. Right? You'd probably want another person focused on writing test cases and documentation, the code that the developers are pushing out is of high quality. You'd probably want one person who takes responsibility for architecture, including researching into options that are available for libraries, database backends, and that sort of thing. They could then distill and filter things down so that the people writing the code don't have to do all that research and architecture work themselves. They could write code, but maybe it'd only be prototypes. Maybe you have one person whose sole responsibility is getting graphical assets and localization together so you can produce the product in ten languages. One person might be tasked full-time to user interface development (e.g. the person who writes all the HTML and CSS).

See how this works yet?

Our team of eight people is already down to three developers. But the cool part is that those three developers will be able to do what they are best at: writing code. They won't be constantly distracted from this to deal with boring ancilliary issues like whether the Spanish translation is accurate, or whether the business requirements are being met.

Sounds like a developer's dream job, doesn't it?

Re:Popfly?

[Anonymous Coward]

You have no freaking idea who a PM (program manager) is... so stop throwing bullshit around..

PM is a person who is as technical and in almost the same level as a developer. She just gets to be more creative and writing out features and specs.

Oh wait, this is Slashdot isn't it. why the fuck am I even trying?

Re:Popfly?

[Anonymous Coward]

The only people who like Visual Studio, are those who have never used anything else.

The Smalltalk browser from 1980 runs rings around it.

Re:Popfly?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ugh. What reason do we have to believe they have millions of $$ in the bank? Who's to say that PopFly's not a poorly funded subsidiary of MS structured as a start-up with equity incentives to drive the group's progress? I'm sick of hearing that this is a poor marketing scheme devised by MS as a way of participating in web 2.0 bullshit. And who can honestly lay the claim that MS has not been innovative? I'm quite the fan of open source tech, but I mean come on let's give credit where it's due... And yes, this is an anonymous post because I don't want to hurt my karma just because a few anti-ms /.'ers have mod points.

Re:Popfly?

[slack_prad]

Yeah yeah. Half of them are no good H1B employees. All idiotic coders. Sloppy software. Microsoft sucks!!!! Mod me insightful please.

Re:Popfly?

[pyrbrand]

Actually, I can attest to the fact that they hustle for resources every day. Or at least hustle. You see I'm on the Visual C++ team and yesterday this guy (the one with the spikey hair from the picture) was walking down our hall telling people to go to popfly. And guess what? It's actually really cool. Basically they have these "building block" wrappers around "web 2.0" sites like flickr etc that have their own apis. I don't know, but last time I checked, Flickr was not an MS site so I don't really see how this is entrenching the MS brand - wouldn't they have picked Live Spaces or something like that? Then you can graphically hook up the inputs and outputs of the sites without writing code.

Also, I'm going to have to take issue with the Silverlight comment - it's actually really cool to, at least from a developer's perspective. I don't know about in terms of a Flash replacement, but I love the XAML/WPF programming paradigm and putting that into a 1 minute installable runtime that runs in the browser is pretty hot. Don't knock it 'til you try it - that's all I'm sayin'. (See, I'm hip and irreverent too!)

Re:Popfly?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

The company that wins is not always, and is probably rarely the one that first introduces the idea. First-mover advantage really doesn't seem to exist. The advantage goes to who is the most ruthless in getting it to market.

Re:Popfly?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're stupid.

Re:Popfly?

[QuickFox]

just because a few anti-ms /.'ers have mod points. A few? You must be new here.

Re:Popfly?

[pandrijeczko]

When does your parole come up?

Re:Popfly?

[TheNetAvenger]

I'm criticizing Microsoft management for thinking they can pull this off. They're off to a great start, with 9 managers and 6 developers.

Strange concept here...

Managers on my teams are also developers. So if people have a managing title, they are no longer able to create, think, develop, or code?

I think your definition of Manager is based on someone working at McDonalds a bit too long.

Re:Popfly?

[Tony Hoyle]

'interface with customers'?

Talking gone out of fashion now... we have to write SOAP plugins?

Re:Popfly?

[Tony Hoyle]

In Microsoft parlance, a "Program Manager" isn't a person who works in the "management" sense of the business or people. They have other people for that. Program Managers are responsible for writing technical specifications, co-ordinating development activities (e.g. who works on what piece), and making sure the developers are clear of distractions to get their job done. They're the ones that have to deal with finding out what the business requirements are and translating that into development activity.

In other words, they're managers.

The worst kind too.. the kind that tell the developers what to do instead of letting them get on with their damned jobs. It sounds like MS have basically degraded the developers job to that of a menial code monkey.

Re:Popfly?

[Tony Hoyle]

Different tasks.

Managers manage. They run the company, talk to other managers in other companies to get some idea of specs, balance the books, negotiate with the developers to set deadlines (ideally.. the bad ones just set deadlines). They in general know nothing about IT and have business degrees. You can spot a manager because they're always in a suit and say things like 'paradigm'.

Developers design the product, work out technical specifications and implement them. Being creative they're often in jeans and T shirts, have flexible (well, random) working hours.

Then there's marketing. Nobody knows what they're for but they get paid a lot, wear loud suits and drive expensive cars.

A manager trying to develop is a recipe for disaster.. I've seen it in some companies - some overpaid suit thinks he's gods gift to IT and 3-4 real developers having to work full time to sort out the mess. Leave them to their business lunches and foreign trips.. keeps them out of the way.

Re:Popfly?

[theonetruekeebler]

lesbians should not piss standing up There's a porn site about that. It's at www.pissing-lesbian-orgas.ms

Re:Popfly?

[heinousjay]

Do you not see the conceptual similarities between Windows and Linux? Does that mean I can equate them?

Re:Popfly?

[Orp]

White boys should not try to talk like they grew up in the hood, lesbians should not piss standing up, and corporations with US$50 thousand million in the bank should not try to act "scrappy".

That's .sig gold!

Re:Popfly?

[leerpm]

In most companies, they call that a Business Analyst. Understanding the requirements and translating them into specifications that developers use to build the actual product. Although the role of assigning development activities is usually left up to a Project Manager who has responsibility for resource co-ordination, AND overall schedule & budget.

Re:Popfly?

[Dan Berlin]

Running interference?
Full time writing specs?
Localization teams that don't work across products?

I see how this works - They have no idea how to actually get real work done, so every project has to assign people to:
1. Keep other people out of their way
2. Do things larger cross-product teams could take care of for them (localization, help with UI and branding).

Re:Popfly?

[Mattintosh]

I checked the Popfly site. Here's what I got:

Sorry, Microsoft Popfly doesn't support your browser at this time

Please use Internet Explorer 6.0 or newer, or Firefox 2.0 or newer to access Popfly.

Typical Microsoft. Don't make it work in every browser by using standard markup, just make sure that it works in IE and that-other-browser-that's-kicking-IE's-ass. Just keep ignoring Safari users, MS. See how far it gets you in the "hip and trendy" market. Oh, did I mention that Apple holds the patent on "cool"?

Re:Popfly?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hehehe.. you've been in corporate land too long.

No kidding. He actually used the phrase "interface with customers" in a non-ironic way.

Re:Popfly?

[WilliamSChips]

The smalltalk browser runs rings around just about anything.

Re:Popfly?

[WilliamSChips]

If it's not the logo, why is it on top of every page on the popfly website?

Re:Popfly?

[Oswald]

Well, I guess it's to be expected that a post I wrote at 2:00am is so easily misunderstood. I never said anything one way or the other about their goal of creating a system for non-programmers to use for...whatever it is they want to use it for. I'm fine with that.

I'm accusing the whole operation of being created and managed (at the higher levels) by poseurs who think their target audience can't smell bullshit when it's thrown at them. The site reeks of marketing. It smells phony. It reads like it's not written by the people it claims wrote it. And that's a very bad start to a relationship, so people whose antennae are sensitive to stuff like that will stay away.

That's what I meant to say.

Re:Popfly?

[Oswald]

At least McDonald's knows what the term "manager" means. Look it up. But I would be willing to bet that the title isn't as far off the mark as you would like to pretend it is. I've heard it said that the role of many "managers" at MS is to run interference so the developers can work unimpeded. What I haven't heard is commentary [derision] about what must be wrong with a company that needs 9 people clearing red tape so 6 people can get some work done. I can only imagine how much fun that is.

Re:Popfly?

[hobo sapiens]

"The site reeks of marketing. It smells phony. It reads like it's not written by the people it claims wrote it."

Mowing the astroturf, eh?

Re:Popfly?

[hobo sapiens]

I honestly just don't care for many MS products (exceptions: XP is decent, Visual Studio is good, SQL Server is a nice "toy" DB, though not better than Oracle, Office is good but overpriced). I may not care for your company, but I think your team does great work.

Believe me, I can understand that they might have to hustle for resources. I work for a company that is so large it could swallow Microsoft (>350K employees last time I checked) up and not even notice. I worked with a team of about 6 which was very grassroots, and we hustled for resources and made do with what we had, which wasn't much. We had a great product that really caught on, and now our product is established, entrenched, now we have nearly 30 people, etc. As a sidebar, I enjoyed being the rogues, the underdogs much more than being the establishment. Being the establishment sucks the fun out of things. But I digress. I can definitely see how even in a large company who throws tons of money around there can exist sort of a skunkworks team. I have been there. I simply take issue with the astroturf website. MS is not a grassroots startup and ultimately, everyone there works for MS. They should just have a page at microsoft.com and call it what it is.

As for entrenching the MS brand, you can't restrict mashups to one company's sites (I guess you *could* if you wanted to re-engineer them all and then severely hamstring the tool). What I mean is that it probably has hooks to IE or some MS service. That or the resulting markup is optimized for IE. I don't know, just speculating based on what I have to deal with every day dealing with writing web code for IE.

As for silverlight, got one word for you: Flex. I have not used Silverlight, but I am sure in time I'll get acquainted. From what I've read, it's a direct competitor with Flex. Me thinks that's what's wrong with Microsoft: you cannot compete with every area of the business that seems to be profitable. You're better off sticking with what you do well than trying to do everything. When you try to do everything then you come out with ridiculous products like Zune. Will Silverlight be a Visual studio or will it be a Zune? We'll see, I guess.

Re:Popfly?

[poopdeville]

Of course I do. Depends on the context.

Silverlight is Microsoft's newest sandboxed runtime environment, performing the same functions as ActiveX. They might not share a codebase, but it is their second attempt at an ActiveX-like technology. Only a child or an autistic person would take "Silverlight is Microsoft's new ActiveX" literally, especially once told the usage was metaphorical.

Re:Popfly?

[dedazo]

That's just sad.

I'll tell you what's sad - if the parent post had been talking about some RoR website or some free software project, you'd be modded down faster than you can say "double standard". But because this is someone who works at Microsoft and is passionate about what he's doing, your "oh I feel pity for you" commentary is at +5 instead, and someone modded him down as flamebait.

Re:Popfly?

[Oswald]

And yet we stay.

I'm not responsible for either moderation (certainly wouldn't have responded to something that I considered flamebait), and I don't consider karma when I post. If I did, I would have given up calling Steve Jobs a narcissistic, posturing ass years ago.

Did I imply that I feel pity for the OP? As I've admitted elsewhere, it wasn't my most coherent post ever, being written at 2:00am with a nasty cold, but I don't find condescension when I read it. It would be pretty ironic if a guy who has worked for the federal government for 23 years pitied someone for being associated with Microsoft.

Re:Popfly?

[AaronBrethorst]

This is not a criticism of the people on the team because I can't possibly know anything about the people on the team (well, I know that Aaron Brethorst turned his last name into a verb, which is pretty creepy, but we'll let that slide).

brethorst.com was taken :)

Re:Popfly?

[dedazo]

Fair enough then, my criticism was really aimed more at the mods than at you. I read your clarification later and I found it refreshing to say the least.

Cheers.

Re:Popfly?

[hobo sapiens]

Looking at your comment history / bio / journal I perceive that you work for MSFT, of course I could be way wrong about that.

But, I've gotta ask...I have been seeing a lot of MSFT guys on here with high /. IDs. Enough for me to take notice. Did Microsoft tell you all to sign up on /. to see what the word on the street is?

No seriously, not trying to be sarcastic. I have seen enough posts from different users (who at least purport to be MSFT guys) with IDs in the 900000's to make me ask. Maybe it's just the posts I happened to notice. Maybe it's just a statistical anomaly. Maybe I am imagining things. Which is it?

Re:Popfly?

[shutdown -p now]

C is a more elegante' and powerful way to write apps but VB was easy enough that anybody would put together a decent Windows app.

Sorry, but no. VB was easy enough hthat anybody could put together a crappy Windows app. A lot did.

Writing quality applications in VB, on the other hand, is quite possible, but in some aspects harder than in C, precisely because the language is geared towards the quick'n'dirty approach.

Re:Popfly?

[TheNetAvenger]

Wow, you are right.

I will immediately have all my team managers working on projects stop doing anything but managing others. How stupid was I that a manager should be able to do the job of his/her employees?

Strangely my parents were small business management consultants for over 30 years, and they would fire an idiot like you in about 10 secs.

You can't manage people if you can't understand or do the work the people under you are doing. PERIOD. (Unless you are really bad manager.)

No wonder so many companies are going to shit.

Think bottom up, not top down management... K?

Even as big as MS is, there are small projects like PopFly that run like a small business, and roles are not clearly defined by title or prior title to entering the project.

Re:Popfly?

[hobo sapiens]

"Mod me insightful please."

Say something insightful and you might be. Stop complaining about moderation. It makes you look like you have nothing better to say.

Re:Popfly?

[slack_prad]

Apparently my post wasn't sarcastic enough.

Paranoid much?

[MSFTVet]

I can assure you that not only is the duck imagery NOT the logo for Popfly but that any resemblance to "Tux" is completely coincidental. Me thinks the Tux fans are a bit paranoid. The duck image is just a photo that the team thought was a fun way to illustrate how people can express themselves by doing whatever they want with Popfly...get it? The one duck has a style unique among the others? It's just a ducky picture! Me thinks the Tux fans are perhaps a bit paranoid.

Re:Paranoid much?

[hobo sapiens]

You must be new here...wait, you ARE new here!

For the first time ever, the "you must be new here" meme has been used against...someone new!

Of course Tux fans are paranoid. And don't try to change that, you!, with all your common sense and all. I run a tinfoil haberdashery and make quite a good living at it.

Re:Paranoid much?

[QuickFox]

Me thinks the Tux fans are a bit paranoid. Make that that one Tux fan. He's getting quite a bashing from everybody else.

Re:Paranoid much?

[WilliamSChips]

The "Tux" thing is ridiculously stupid(and everyone but the article submitter agrees to that) but that pink duck is on every single page on the website. A logo is

a graphic representation or symbol of a company name, trademark, abbreviation, etc., often uniquely designed for ready recognition. It appears to me to be a graphic representation or symbol of the company, and also uniquely designed for ready recognition, which makes it a logo for Popfly.

They should move to Bermuda

[Anonymous Coward]

microsoft.bm
dotnetlock-in.bm
15yearsofdoslock-inwhilemac-amiga-sun-cheated.bm
cutoffmy-msdn-o2.bm
thinkevil.bm
curing-disease-in-africa-wont-save-your-soul.bm
what-jerk-would-waste-life-rewriting-windows-gui-a nd-call-it-kde.bm

was too spooked to login

[Anonymous Coward]

I was going to try that popfly service this morning and when the passport login showed it was going to route to a weird .ms ccTLD, I thought, no way, this has to be some kind of scam, someone has hacked passport to send them passwords...

who cares about microsoft.ms?

[someone1234]

>As of this writing microsoft.ms is available

I'm more curious if fucking.ms and the likes are already taken.

Re:who cares about microsoft.ms?

[MichaelSmith]

smithm@nicholas:~$ whois fucking.ms
Yes
fucking.ms is registered.

Domain Name: fucking.ms

Registrant, Technical Contact, Billing Contact, Admin. Contact
    AdamsNames Reserved Domains (p)
    These domains are not available for registration
    United Kingdom
    E-mail: person@adamsnames.com

Resource Records (1):
                                                      txt put to sleep on tue oct 10 14

Re:who cares about microsoft.ms?

[Anonymous Coward]

"I'm more curious if fucking.ms and the likes are already taken...."

I haven't checked, but I'm sure RMS & Linus have already gotten to that one, and made it freely available for use by the general public, as the expression is used every day by so many people.

A modest request when using a wierd country code

[Animats]

When you use some country domain that's not really the country you're in, put the real country name after the postal mailing addresses on your web site. Wrong country domains screw up systems that are trying to locate your business for local search purposes. If your domain is under ".WS" (Western Samoa) or ".TO" (Tonga), you may be mapped into the middle of the Pacific Ocean. (There are Tongan web sites in ".TO". Admittedly, ".TV" is unlikely to lead to a real web site in Tuvalu, and does tend to be handled as a special case.)

Misread

[Ariastis]

Thought it was a .ms STD

I'm calling dibs on..

[katterjohn]

nudewebca.ms

Kind of shows the pointlessness

[nebaz]

of 2 Letter country code TLD's, if major corporations get them, and the US doesn't use the .us domain. Too bad it's too late for a whole TLD overhaul.

Re:Kind of shows the pointlessness

[evilviper]

Kind of shows the pointlessness of 2 Letter country code TLD's, if major corporations get them, and the US doesn't use the .us domain.

Tiny countries get money out of it. Large corporations get "clever" and unique new domain names to use. What's the problem? .us is certainly a strange case, that hasn't entirely been worked out... Other countries put universities, government, etc. basically everything under their country TLD, but the US has .edu .mil and really, .com as well. It's only non-federal government sites, non-university schools, etc. that use it. So, it actually has quite a bit of use, but it's very localized, and not to many globally-significant high-traffic sites. It's not as widely used as other large country TLDs, and they only fairly recently allowed free-form, commercial registration of them.

Re:Kind of shows the pointlessness

[Myopic]

TLDs are fairly decentralized. If a community of people wanted to start their own parallel TLD system, they could. In fact, people HAVE done this with varying degrees of success, mostly very slight. All you have to do is come up with a TLD system which is compelling and people will support it.

How would you overhaul it?

Re:Kind of shows the pointlessness

[1u3hr]

I find it rather annoying, and insulting, when corporations and registrars try to pretend a CCTLD is really a descriptive TLD. Eg, .tv, Tuvalu, is presented as "television"; .fm (Federated States of Micronesia) for radio, .md (Moldova) as a medical domain. And I've seen .la (Laos) sold as both Los Angeles and Latin America.

People who use these are trying to present themselves as offically sanctioned in some way. But in reality, most if not all these domain registrars will sell them to anyone with the cash. And the stated purpose of CCTLDs, having a link to the country or region in question, is lost.

Since these CCTLDs are ultimately owned by sovereign states, they can (especailly if there is a change of government) arbitrarily change their conditions and fees, leaving anyone who depended on these sites to twist in the wind. Personally, I wouldn't have any sympathy for those affected.

Re:Kind of shows the pointlessness

[linhux]

I don't agree - in practically every European country (hey, probably almost every country except the U.S.) the local TLD's are in very extensive use, and people are used to getting to a company's _local_ website by going to, say, www.company.fi instead of www.company.com (which would take you to a global, english-language site instead). This goes for both multinational corporations and local companies. Apart from that, a number of very small island countries re-sell their TLDs because they have funny meanings in other parts of the world, but that's really a minority of all the two-letter TLD's currently in use.

I'd say it pretty much works as designed.

I'll jump that bandwagon

[xrayspx]

IONLYUSEWINDOWSINV.MS

Only $180? Bah

[davidwr]

Micro$oft has enough petty cash to buy the whole country. Maybe King Bill can crack down on the phone-scammers.

oh, great, another rub duck

[sectionboy]

Is this a subtle compliment to sony's Super Rub-a-Dub?, which, btw, has a score of 2.9/10.

Let's start a pool...

[grcumb]

How long before rectu.ms points to goatse?

Re:Let's start a pool...

[u235meltdown]

actually, I just bought rectu.ms
what should I put on it? Ahahaha

Re:Let's start a pool...

[TheaterAtHome]

as soon as p.ms is pointing to microsoft.ms !

Re:Let's start a pool...

[Esion Modnar]

How long before rectu.ms points to goatse?

Rectu.ms? Damn near killede.ms!

There are now somewhat effective treatments for MS

[stox]

Maybe soon. there will be a cure.

We can only hope.

OMG SILVERLIGHT

[llamaxing]

this is very off-topic, but I wanted to bring it up anyway. for those of you who actually tried getting Popfly, did any of you click the Whack-a-mole link? It leads directly to a web page requiring you to install Silverlight (if you haven't done so already). And to bite MS in the butt, the install page says if you have Firefox or Safari to restart the browser, but if you go to the System Requirements page, only the IE and Firefox browsers are mentioned. way to go, Microsoft. as for the actual topic, why does it matter if Microsoft registered its project's site under a Caribbean island's domain? oops, did I just restate the summary in a bland paraphrase? my bad.

Re:OMG SILVERLIGHT

[fishyfool]

interesting. do Safari and Konquerer still use a common codebase?

Re:OMG SILVERLIGHT

[WilliamSChips]

God used to be my co-pilot. Unfortunatly we crashed into a mountain and I had to eat him. Unfortunately, you only had crackers to go with that wine, and no cheese.

Re:OMG SILVERLIGHT

[jZnat]

Yes, but they've diverged a bit and the project to merge them back together didn't work so well (Unity).

no doubt ms will claim

[timmarhy]

everything under MS is misleading the consumer into beliveing it's associated with microsfot al la lindows

Re:no doubt ms will claim

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I bet you're right. I'm sure that Micro$oft is going to sue everyone in that domain.

Please just fucking kill yourself now and do everyone a huge favor.

Adium

[SpeedyDX]

Adium has a cute duck logo. If anything, Popfly's logo, being a duck, should be compared to Adium's.

But uh ... yeah, all of that resemblence thing is just flaimbait.

Re:Adium

[coolGuyZak]

Ah, but now we stumble upon the true way that Microsoft is ripping off of open source. Obviously they combined both logos as a way to drive linux and Adium off of the market. And you know what's also a bird? Pidgins. Could it really be such a coincidence that Tux is a bird, a duck is a bird (twice, once for MS, once for Adium), and that a pidgin is a bird? OH, LORD. WHAT IS THE WORLD COMING TO.

But uh ... yeah, all of that resemblence thing is just flaimbait

I wouldn't even call it flamebait. I would, however, call the blogger an idiot.

Re:Adium

[Fred Ferrigno]

Read the comments on the blog entry, they're hilarious:

linuxBob:
May 19th, 2007 at 8:41 pm

John, you're an idiot.

urbanriot:
May 19th, 2007 at 11:31 pm

I have these in my bathroom... I'm going to sue Microsoft. In my experience, Tech.Blorge is generally a POS.

Obvious a Tux ripoff!

[Lavene]

But it's not only Microsoft doing it. Take a look HERE, HERE and HERE!
It's an epidemic! Someone need to sue someone... now!

M$ TLD

[istewart]

When will this much more important TLD be open for registrations?

White on white

[SanityInAnarchy]

Great cross-platform browser support, guys... I'm seeing mostly-grey-on-white ranging to totally-white-on-white, using Konqueror.

Anyone else seeing strange things on non-IE browsers?

Re:White on white

[Anonymous Coward]

> Anyone else seeing strange things on non-IE browsers?

Sure, I'm using firefox with a white on black desktop theme. I highlight text when I come across a page designed by incompetents that don't understand accessibility. In fairness the vast majority of commercial designers are clueless, the apple site (for example) also ends up with white on white.

I can easily override it with userContent.css but I guess I derive pleasure from the complete lack of knowledge these overpaid and underskilled people have about the field they're working in.

Per Industry TLD's

[mechsoph]

It might make more sense to have per industry TLD's or subdomains of com. in the same way companies in different industries can trademark the same name, ie previously Apple Records vs. Apple Computers becomes apple.mus.com and apple.comp.com or something like that.

Re:Per Industry TLD's

[beyondkaoru]

they could be applecomputers and applerecords and things would be fine...

Re:Per Industry TLD's

[matts-reign]

somehow apple.mus.com and apple.comp.com remind me of usenet newsgroups...... Are we moving forwards or backwards here? Which way should we be moving? Did usenet have a better idea than the web, in organizational terms?

Re:Per Industry TLD's

[neoform]

or companies can stop naming themselves after generic words..

Re:Per Industry TLD's

[mechsoph]

There's also Remy the auto parts manufacturer and Remy the cognac producer, if you want another example. Both companies were named after a couple of the Remy brothers several generations ago. Should we just use made-up words to name companies? Seems like that could get impractical and ridiculous pretty quickly.

Re:Per Industry TLD's

[serialdogma]

Yes, next question.

Re:Per Industry TLD's

[mechsoph]

Don't confuse DNS with the Web.

Both DNS and Usenet have a hierarchal organization. My point was that the granularity of namespaces provided by DNS is less than the granularity provided by trademarks.

Also, Usenet is neither behind nor in front of the Web. They are different applications, and both are still quite useful.

Re:Per Industry TLD's

[neoform]

A whole lot of companies do make up words..

but that's besides the point, since right now almost all companies are in a mad dash to get their company name as a .com.. and only 1 company can have that .com (e.g remy.com is only owned by one of the two companies).

So having anyone be able to get a tld of their own will not change that, but it will make domain names look a whole lot nicer..

Re:Per Industry TLD's

[Caffeinate]

A whole lot of companies do make up words.. For examples of this, see any Web 2.0 company . . .

Re:Per Industry TLD's

[LinuxDon]

So why couldn't they be applecomputers.com and applerecords.com?

Your suggestion only moves the problem to a higher level, since they'd then both want 'apple' instead of 'apple.com'.

Re:Per Industry TLD's

[beyondkaoru]

my point is that if everyone crowds into .com, then there isn't a reason for tld's anymore.

Re:Per Industry TLD's

[sasdrtx]

No. TLDs are a bad idea, and creating fixed 2nd-level domains compounds the problem.

Hmmm...

[Z00L00K]

A lot of chatting around i.hate.ms and so on, but will Montserrat get any money back from the use of the domain .ms? Considering that they have had a hard time with their volcano they should get something at least to support the community. The effect of the volcano they have had could be considered as bad as if 40 to 50% of the US had to be evacuated.

But on the other hand - the volcano may be good for tourism - and now they have a modern airport too.

Anyway, this volcano has caused some devastation and a few deaths. On the positive side - the deaths has been very few, but there are other volcanos that are known to behave in the same way that are more likely to be the cause of a higher death toll. One such volcano is Vesuvius in Italy. It has been dormant since the 1940's and considering that it has had regular outbreaks about every 70 years it is not unlikely that it will have an outbreak during our lifetime. The question is - will there be any warning before the eruption, or will it be an explosive eruption with short notice? Pompeii and Herculaneum are two rather important warning signs. Pyroclastic flows are about the worst things that can occur from a volcano since they are unpredictable and very fast. Flying rocks are fast and dangerous too, but they aren't having the same blanketing effect as the pyroclastic flows. Lava, which most of us associate with volcanos is bad, but it's liquid and often rather slow, so it's predictable and can be avoided but it will destroy anything in it's path.

registration

[senatorpjt]

Does the .ms registrar allow obscenity in domain names?

Re:registration

[Slashcrap]

Does the .ms registrar allow obscenity in domain names?

Well, they've already allowed Microsoft to subvert their TLD. I'd say that ranks at least 3 MegaGoatses on the obscenity scale.

Gaah When do we get to 'edit' ...

[Space cowboy]

For 'Openstep', I meant Gnustep of course...

Simon.

Does this mean?

[mpe]

Does this mean that we can look forward to most of Microsoft disappearing under a volcanic erruption sometime soon?

Re:Does this mean?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, don't start with the Scientology jokes now. Xenu is watching.

What about Linux TLD?

[cpghost]

Apparently .li is open for everyone. Are ubuntu.li, gentoo.li etc... taken?

Popfly?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the dumbest fucking idea I've heard since I've been at Microsoft.

Re:You mean DUCKS look sorta like PENGUINS????????

[Anonymous Coward]

How dare you. That must be /. most misleading link ever. Tux is not an ugly bastard, in fact he is quite the handsome devil!

Yours sincerely,

Albert Josephson

In other news....

[MarkByers]

In other news, Montserrat has been renamed to Mont$errat.

Re:In other news....

[Anonymous Coward]

bling

Pretty!

[Anonymous Coward]

http://popfly.ms/Static/CodeOfConduct.aspx

Logo comparison...

[CptPicard]

The popfly logo is to Tux as a cheap, brightly-colored blow up sex doll is to a real woman...

Re:Logo comparison...

[Anonymous Coward]

I would agree with you

but I do not know what a real woman is.

Yours.,

Albert Josephson

check out the TLD root servers

[allanak]

Is it ironic that one of the nameservers for ms TLD is william.org?

Authoritative answers can be found from:
sec1.dns.uk.psi.net internet address = 154.32.105.34
sec2.dns.uk.psi.net internet address = 154.32.107.34
ns-ms.ripe.net internet address = 193.0.12.148
auth02.ns.uu.net internet address = 198.6.1.82
euterpe.william.org internet address = 195.153.6.27

Re:check out the TLD root servers

[s7uar7]

No, it's not ironic. Appropriate maybe, coincidental, yes, but not ironic. You're as bad as Alanis Morissette.

wepopfly@nospam.microsoft.com

[Anonymous Coward]

They need a better spam filter:
http://popfly.ms/Overview/Ecosystem.aspx

Haha

[Anonymous Coward]

I was thinking on similar lines.

Look at the 2 asian dudes on the end of the bottom photo, they don't look too down with that stripy shit-eater to me. The asian dude left of center in that pic, the guy with glasses and mustache obviously thinks he's scored. Unfortunately for him, the object of his desire is just happy that her cameltoe won't be all over the intarwebs.

Next game, spot the managers.

Silverlight crashes Firefox on my Mac...

[Wonderkid]

When I try to view the blog for Popfly guy John Montgomery, it prompted me to install Silverlight, which I did. So I re-launched Firefox and re-visited his blog, which was trying to mash Virtual Earth and Twitter. It crashes the browser each time. May not be Silverlight of course, but just interested to know if this happens to anyone else. Either way, I am still wanting to know what all this mashing malarky is about. I just want solutions, not things that require management and customization. Else, we're back to square one!

(Am running OSX 10.4.9, 2GB RAM, 2GHz MacBook)

[Wonderkid]

Comment for you Mr. Automated posting checker bot! (Or are you a Slashdot fembot?)

Should have paid more attention

[DynaSoar]

Ernie explained it quite clearly:

Rubber duckie you're the one,
you make bath time lots of fun
rubber duckie I'm awfully fond of you
A rub a dub dubbie.

Had you paid attention at the time you'd have no trouble telling a duckie from a pengy.

And yes, a zebra is prettier than a pony. Don't try to ride the zebra.

YEA baby!

[suv4x4]

$180 for two years [...] As of this writing microsoft.ms is available.

All right, a trademark infringement suit from Microsoft for just $180! Who'd miss the opportunity!

myjuicyplu.ms

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, this is a story?

Good for Montserrat, or the people who run the registry, a nice earner there if you can get a decent number of buyers.

But .ms - you can't do much with that apart from lots of porn domains ... lucy-cu.ms, shania-cu.ms, bigdick-cu.ms, and so on. What else? sexwithbu.ms. fighting-bu.ms. hairy-cla.ms. tasty-ja.ms. studding-ra.ms. for.ms. car-alar.ms. argh ..

Yeah, but how much managing do they do?

[jimicus]

I'll bet most of them are called managers as a sort of alternative to giving them a payrise.

I've noticed this in some US companies. One example I can think of is about 50 people and it has a CEO, Vice President, Junior Vice President, Vice President in charge of Multimedia (whose job has nothing to do with multimedia), Managing Director and a whole bunch of others in a similar vein.

If you believe the job titles, they don't employ a single person who does any work.

Re:Yeah, but how much managing do they do?

[tomhath]

You've obviously never worked in an organization chart like that. That many managers can spend their entire week planning meetings, preparing for meetings, meeting, trying to find someone to delegate action items from meetings, tracking status of actions items from meetings, planning meetings to track action items from meetings, ad infinitum. They're so busy they soon need subordinate managers to delegate their work to.

Trust me, it really happens. In my previous job we started with two project managers; they were so busy they talked their manager into hiring another PM. So the senior of the two originals became the Project Engineering Manager and spent full time monitoring the status tracking of the other two.

Re:Yeah, but how much managing do they do?

[Anonymous Coward]

Trust me, it really happens. In my previous job we started with two project managers; they were so busy they talked their manager into hiring another PM. So the senior of the two originals became the Project Engineering Manager and spent full time monitoring the status tracking of the other two.

Be honest: By "the senior of the two originals", you mean yourself, and by "full time monitoring the status tracking of the other two", you mean "reading Slashdot", don't you?

They're both birds. So?

[Artifex]

I think the bigger concern with their image is in comparing it to this.

IPCB

[Bizzeh]

wouldnt the IPCB or ICANN just take the microsoft.ms domain off you if you bought it?

Speaking of the ms domain, check out www.biteme.ms

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft has always been and will always be the follower!

Microsofts Vision of Web 2.0

[Qbertino]

I admit they and the /. article actually had me curious for about 7 seconds.

Sorry, Microsoft Popfly doesn't support your browser at this time ...

Maybe someone ought to explain the concept of Web 2.0 to them again?
A key attrribute of which is hassle free plattform indendence.
Uhhmmm ... never mind.

Re:Microsofts Vision of Web 2.0

[AlgorithMan]

they're going back to web 0.2 in hopes to kill the competition like they did with netscape in the "good old days"...

Re:Microsofts Vision of Web 2.0

[mackyrae]

What browser was that? Since it suggests IE or FF, does that mean KHTML (Konqueror, Safari) isn't supported? Lynx definitely isn't (just tried, same error).

Tux, cute?! WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

Third, both logos are unbearably cute, which is a defining characteristic of the Linux Tux logo.

I'm sorry, and I don't mean to troll here, but Tux looks more like a psycho serial killer than a cute bird.

Seriously, look at his eyes. He's got that "empty stare" look. Scary.

one word

[wikinerd]

linux.killed.ms

The screencast is interesting - sort of

[Qbertino]

The screencast shows live object/entity linking through a bloated RIA interface that probably needs a 3 GHz CPU and a 400$ GFX card to render properly. Let alone an MS operating system and their bloated, insecure, barely beta and closed-source proprietary silverthingie stuff.
The rotating entitiy cubes are pointless, anoying and distracting and are probably just there to hide the fact that we are basically looking at a RIA case tool with a restricted featureset. Everybody knows that things are going this way, but I doubt MS will get all things right to capture a larger audience and developer base.
Meanwhile I'm sticking with Laszlo for true cross-plattform RIA developement. After all even Adobe Flex is scrambling to catch up with them. And Laszlo went completely open source way before anybody else.

It's intentional.

[Erris]

The Non-Professional tools team builds software to enable new, hobbyist, and other non-professional programmers - as well as complete non-programmers - to build and share their work.

Because working with anything but IE would be, you know, Professional.

Re:You mean DUCKS look sorta like PENGUINS????????

[gEvil (beta)]

Tux is not an ugly bastard, in fact he is quite the handsome devil!

Wrong mascot. You're thinking of Beastie...

So Limited. Par for the course.

[Erris]

Pretending to be a start up is bad, but it must feel dirty to work on a tool with the usual M$ predetermined limits:

The Non-Professional tools team builds software to enable new, hobbyist, and other non-professional programmers - as well as complete non-programmers - to build and share their work. Our team's vision is to democratize development by making it approachable to an entire class of people that want to "create" without necessarily having to write code. We believe that if you can send an email, you should be able to build and personalize your own website, mashup, social networking site, or blog.

They said the same sorts of things about Basic and many other of their tools. What it means is they have no respect for your work. In the Basic case, they made so many work breaking changes that it was easier to learn C and the Windoze API.

The whole thing just drips with clueless arrogance. "Non-Professional", "hobbyist", "mashup, social networking site, or blog." It just sort of says, "thanks for the content, kid." Reasonable sites don't set limits like that and offer you a cut of advertising revenue, regardless of programming skills. The web is just another tool. Sites that come with limits like this are defective by design. In a world with many reasonable alternatives, Popfly is going to do as well as Zune.

Support

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.popfly.ms/Overview/

Availability: Private Alpha, sign up for the waitlist

Cost: Free (bet RMS likes that one)

Storage Limit: 25MB per user

System Requirements: Microsoft Silverlight 1.0 Beta

Browser Support: Mozilla Firefox 2.0, Internet Explorer 6.0 or higher

Content Supported: JavaScript, AJAX libraries, HTML, XHTML, CSS, WMV, WMA, MP3, Visual Studio Express projects, JPG, PNG, GIF, and EXEs

The resemblance

[Erris]

If someone hadn't pointed out it was the popfly website, I would have swore I was at a linux site.

I thought I was a trailer park, I mean MySpaces. Complete with this cool pink duck. No, MySpaces is nicer than that grey on white nightmare.

Talk about Fake.

[Erris]

I love it when M$ people post on Slashdot, pretending to be normal computer people. Does your boss still think Linux is a "cancer"?

Re:Talk about Fake.

[Macthorpe]

I thought the MS employees hunted you down, Twit?

What's up? Not enough attention? You seem to have to stooped to poking at them so you can start claiming they stalk you again.

microsoft.ms...

[TemporalBeing]

Well..if it is still available, then some Linux guys should get together and purchase microsoft.ms and point it to kernel.org, or may be linux.com...hehehe..

first domain that came to mind...

[pohl]

Damn...taken: orgas.ms. Oh well.

Popfly == out

[plawsy]

Most pop flies are caught and result in the batter being out. In fact, when the Infield Fly Rule is invoked, it's an automatic out. Fitting.

Almost off topic on the obliquely related note...

[Anonymous Coward]

So what's with weird color scheme of the Popfly logo? Is this some kind of half-assed attempt to hide its rubber ducky origins?

Also, does anyone know how this thing looks to the estimated 10% of male humans who have some degree of red-green color blindness? I have learned to stay away from color schemes like this one.

Re:A modest request when using a wierd country cod

[FormOfActionBanana]

Admittedly, you're just being wrong and pedantic.

The precedent for breaking that rule was set years ago.

There are good ideas at Microsoft...

[argent]

Good night, does anyone really believe that within Microsoft there are real innovative ideas that don't simply involve entrenching the Microsoft brand?

Sure. Microsoft Research comes up with all kinds of great stuff.

That gets mined for patents and buried.

Re:So Limited. Par for the course.

[Anonymous Coward]

It reeks of everything that is wrong with MS. They identify emerging market segments and release their "me-too" version, even down to trying to emulate the cool factor of the startups.

It's pathetic and every user they get works to deprive the real innovators of revenue, that's probably the real goal.

microsoft-rectu.ms

[Anonymous Coward]

microsoft-owns-your-rectu.ms
microsoft-up-your-rectu.ms
microsoft-is-software-for-your-rectu.ms
microsoft-lick-our-rectu.ms
microsoft-sticks-it-up-our-rectu.ms ...et nausia...

Re:microsoft-rectu.ms

[Ernesto Alvarez]

microsoft-owns-your-rectu.ms
microsoft-up-your-rectu.ms

You're not the first. Have you ever searched whois for "microsoft.com"?

In the case of email...

[jd]

I could be wrong, but I think X.400 was dominant in Europe prior to SMTP. And I certainly know that Europe used X.25 extensively before mass-migrating over to TCP/IP. One big reason IPv6 hasn't taken off is that there's been no cutover date. Why do today what you can put off till tomorrow?

Having said that, yes, I know damn well that my idea is simply not going to happen. The level of political and economic inertia is far too great, even if ICANT decided that it was something worth doing. As a speculation on what will happen, it is patently absurd. As an addendum which adds an important analysis of growing problems (namespace pollution, performance, reliability), it's far from absurd and no discussion on DNS could be complete if it didn't examine these problems.

microsoft.ms is available?

[freezin fat guy]

Somebody should tell Mike Rowe

p.ms

[Poromenos1]

Same with p.ms!

Truth in naming

[BillGatesLoveChild]

> Web 2.0-flavored Popfly project.

I believe the correct spelling is Poopfly.

ihate.ms available?

[syousef]

I know Ms is different to Miss but with a bit of license.
yes.ms
no.ms
threebagsfull.ms
swiss.ms
little.ms
ifyoupeeinthedarkyou.ms

activationsuxat.ms
ihate.ms

Re:So Limited. Par for the course.

[The Bungi]

What it means is they have no respect for your work.

What it means is they're giving people a tool that doesn't have a steep learning curve. I suppose it's insulting to you that a non-PhD might actually create something useful?

Popfly is going to do as well as Zune.

And as Vista and everything else you "hate" that Microsoft does (or doesn't). How does it feel to be so desperately angry and resentful? It must really suck to be you.

Talk about fucked

[The Bungi]

[insult] Does your boss still think Linux is a "cancer"?

Since Microsoft has 60,000+ employees and you picked to one that happened to post on Slashdot today to vent and insult them because the CEO said something you don't approve of, I must conclude you suffer from some level of retardation.

Oh, wait. It's "erris", a sickpuppet of twitter, who is known to write things like these. Never mind.

6 Developers, 8 managers.. wow!

[TheCeltic]

Counting the numbers from the pictures at the site... I guess at Microsoft, they need a 1-1 Developer/"Manager" ratio. Crazy.

Re:6 Developers, 8 managers.. wow!

[sweetandy]

Look at the ratio in the Free Software community... I think it approaches infinity.

Resemblance?

[zantolak]

It is a rubber ducky. There is no similarity here. This guy is really reaching.

So? I have my own TLD also.

[aqk]

Hey- I been using TK for years!

  - A.Q. (Tony) King www.tonyking.tk

Re:Logo comparison... real women?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, this is /. What would we know about real women.

    Please wash your hands, go back to your parents' basement and think this one over