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

[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.

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?

[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?

[Soruk]

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

Re:is bluescreenofdeath.ms available?

[MadJo]

Because that looks a lot like P.ms

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?!

[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.

Another Good One

[tehwebguy]

Someone get ComicSans.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?

[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.

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

Registered 22 Dec 2005

[ensignyu]

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

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

[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!

how about

[AresTheImpaler]

http://i.hate.ms/

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

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.

or...

[Ariastis]

linuxsavedmefrom.ms

Could this be...

[tiffany98121]

... the absolute lamest Slashdot article ever posted?

Re:Could this be...

[carpe_noctem]

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

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?

[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?

[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?

[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)

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...

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.

Let's start a pool...

[grcumb]

How long before rectu.ms points to goatse?

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

[serialdogma]

Yes, next question.