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Microsoft Documentation Declared Unfit For US Consumption
anomalous cohort writes "Washington DC judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly announced during the ongoing Microsoft antitrust hearings that their documentation is unfit for US consumption. This is relevant in an antitrust hearing as poor documentation on how to inter-operate with Microsoft's products is seen as an unfair barrier to entry for companies who compete with Microsoft. Others see this as yet another example of their crumbling hegemony or indolence as their empire burns."
Acknowledgment is the first step to recovery.
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
"...Others see this as yet another example of their crumbling hegemony or indolence as their empire burns."
In this day and age of increasingly biased reporting, it is nice to see that Slashdot continues to present an objective, fair, and balanced approach to covering the issues.
Scuttlemonkey could work wonders for the Middle-East peace process!
Documentation unfit. Awesome.
Now what about the software?
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
Why not just use their own internal protocol specification? Rewriting the same specification is a recipie for disaster. One wrong /. and you can't send a meeting request.
is anyones documentation fit for human comsumption?
I thought Consumptions was a disease of the lungs.
Regardless, does that mean I can feed the documentation to my pigs and they'll get fat?
In my other life, I eat cats.
When will this unjustified persecution of undocumenting coders be stopped!? If I can understand 15 layers of recursion with pointers to 8 dimensional arrays and no documentation, you should be able to as well!
For coders, at least. Documentation is for auditors.
Hegemonies of indolence should be met with hegemonies of insolence! Or something like that.
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
Others see this as yet another example of their crumbling hegemony or indolence as their empire burns.
One only knows how to reach complete happiness in computer software when they have felt the power of the source. Use the source Steve! ...gg..GAHH!! *dodges chair*
And still others realize their documentation is probably no crappier than anyone else's.
Those linked blogs say nothing about "yet another example of [Microsoft's] crumbling hegemony or indolence as their empire burns."
Drill baby drill - on Mars
There is a certain irony that the legal system decides someone else has poor documentation. The documentation of the law requires a graduate degree to use.
I'm no fan of Microsoft, but their documentation is ironclad compared to the law. Witness this case, it is only after the fact that it becomes vaguely clear that having poor documentation is wrong (even for a monopoly).
t
Scary thing is, I've always found their doc decent... relative to other companies. This judge needs to attempt to assemble some of the more ornate IKEA offerings - she'll have a new appreciation for MSDN/Technet...
She told Cheney the same thing
Not only is it unfit for US consumption, it's likely unfit for M$ consumption and is the official documentation that M$ developers have to use to interoperate with other M$ products.
Did Judge Kollar-Kotelly actually utter the phrase "unfit for US consumption"? I think not. After TFA and TFALRFTOA (= Linked, Recursively, from the Original Article), all I see is that she scolded Microsoft for claiming that they had provided the documentation -- a condition of the Consent Decree -- and urged them to finish the job.
What would that phrase mean anyway? I don't "consume" documentation, do you? I use it as a tool in the development process, not a repast. And does "US consumption" imply that the documentation is fit for European consumption? Asian consumption? This article title is not worth of Ars or Slashdot, IMO.
Why is it Microsoft's responsibility to make it easier for other companies to compete with them?
But Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who is overseeing the consent decree, ruled that Microsoft still hadn't sufficiently documented some protocols, despite those documents having been due in 2003.
Five years to produce a document? Is it normal to allow a company such lattitude in the courts? If a rank and file citizen were to take that long, I think they'd have been slapped with a contempt of court charge, or they would have been ruled against, long ago. Why the leniency?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Don't eat it, then!
Or did they mean it's not good for tuberculosis?
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
this is the actual article - http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080925-judge-microsoft-documentation-unfit-for-us-consumption.html
ROFL... I hope she never read the docs for the Apache config file!
I love it when you have network issues, and they refer you to a website...
Hell, even microsoft's own support site is utter crap compared to other vendors.
I've read lots of MS Documentation over the years -- white papers, APIs, and just general guidelines for things.
It's damned good documentation. It may not go to the border of 'special olympics' readers for Apple users, but for the majority of developers that are working on 'interoperability' the documentation is quite good. Not amazing, but the irony is still lost on me that a lawyer decided somebody else's documentation was bad.
Have you ever read the way bills are introduced into law? Jeez.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
I particularly liked:
"Others see this as yet another example of their crumbling hegemony or indolence as their empire burns."
Here's an interesting concept the editors may wish to take a look at some time
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/objectivity
All joking aside this kind of childish rant isn't very good for slashdot. Does slashdot aspire to be "News for nerds" or "old stories for trolls to bitch about"?
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I must be missing something here, but writting software to run on windows is as easy as it gets. If you want to integrate with non-windows machines just use webservies which are fully documented by MS and various other sources since SOAP and http are both standard protocols. I refuse to pay attention to any Anti-trust investigations into MS unless Apple is put to the same scrutiny. Besides being more sucessfuly at it, what does MS do that Apple doesn't do when it comes to making your OS the dominate platform? Maybe Apple should try selling it's OS to hundreds of diffrent PC manufacturers instead of hoarding all the hardware sales to themselves.
The Microsoft people are making fools of her and the court system and she hardly even knows it. If she did, she'd have ripped them a new hole long ago and imposed sanctions on them instead of letting this drag out year after year.
Isn't it getting to the point of irrelevant in this year of late 2008? After all, interoperability is more of a threat to their business than any court Justice and they know this and spend billions annually protecting that. IMO.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Have they seen IBM documentation? *shudder*
crazy dynamite monkey
Funny that the goverment cannot even get there documentation straight in the constitution for 221 years and everyone still argues over that to be made clear. Of course a quote from Family guy to make my point. "You think the language in the second amendment is clear enough you know about the right to bear arms. Of course it's clear; Every American has the right to hang a pair of bear arms on their wall. How can that be misconstrued?"
Three people are in a helicopter, when a fog suddenly rolls in and makes visibility less than fifty feet. The pilot is lost, but after flying in ever widening circles, spots a building. He flies up to it, and motions for a person to open his window.
The pilot yells at the top of his lungs: "WHERE ARE WE?"
The man in the building replies: "YOU'RE IN A HELICOPTER!"
So the pilot turns due east, flies 1.5 miles and lands at the airport. After which, one of the passengers asks incredulously "How did you do that?"
The pilot replies: "Well, the response was perfectly true and accurate, and also completely useless, so I knew we had to be at the Microsoft headquarters."
Ummm... Since when have they been suffering a decline in trade and increased barbarian raids?
*** crumbling hegemony or indolence as their empire burns ***
Woo - Slashdot FUD.
Funny - I don't see anything burning. I think that stagnant smell you are sniffing is Linux on the Desktop ;)
Article submitter:
anomalous cohort (http://www.dynamicalsoftware.com/)
From the marketing "blog" linked in the summary (http://www.dynamicalsoftware.com/cgi-bin/ViewBlogEntry.pl?id=14)
writing and maintaining developer documentation is an important part of any software development project [...] Another reason for documentation is compliance management [...] our collaborative software development project lifecycle management product Code Roller supports compliance management [...]
Nice try!
Let my new 7-digit UID be a lesson to all - write down your passwords.
...and not back-slashdot.
It's only a matter of time before the Micro$oft FUD machine muscles a retraction on this issue. I say we start a pool to pick the day!
Skype has a huge portion of the VOIP market, their protocol is not just undocumented it seems to have deliberate obfuscation in it to stop reverse engineer attempts. However: since I suspect that govt secret services have back doors into it I don't expect that they will be forced to document in the courts.
> Now what about the software?
It's also unfit, but that hasn't been news to anyone for a very long time :-)
It's not just biased reporting, it's very bad editing both by the submitter and by Slashdot.
This whole story is just link spamming by the submitter. I did think that if the submitter was linking to two of their own websites, they might at least link to something related to the text of the link they provided in the story. In other words, it might have been an "example" of "crumbling hegemony or indolence as [the Microsoft] empire burns".
The first linked blog entry written by some guy called 'Glenn'. That blog entry immediately links to the other blog entry that's already referenced in the Slashdot submission, using text indicating that the same person wrote both. Furthermore, the second blog entry resides on a website for a company founded by a guy called 'Glenn'.
To top it off, neither blog entry really talks about anything like this being an "example" of a "crumbling hegemony or indolence as [the Microsoft] empire burns". The second entry is only a comment about Extreme Programming, with a loose non-descriptive reference half way down to something about Microsoft documentation. That link leads to a "WARNING: You're about to leave our website" page, which then links to the very same ars technica article that the Slashdot submission already links to directly.
It's not only leading people around in circles (via the submitters' websites), it's also failing to back up the submission's assertion that "some people see this as an example of [etc]", given that neither link really does that and they're both very likely to be from the same person anyway. (Okay, we can't tell for sure that the submitter is this 'Glenn' person, but at the very least it's someone who wants to promote his websites and blogs.)
She should spend some time on the phone with Neelie Kroes (sp?)
The problem is that the upper echelons steer the company. You're arguing that some of the storm troopers on the Death Star were Bo-and-Luke-Duke good drinking buddies, and I have no doubt that they were. The problem is that those good old boys are not the ones deciding where to point the planet-killing death ray.
Does substituting the Empire for Nazi Germany get me around Godwin's Law? :-)
If you want to integrate with non-windows machines just use webservies which are fully documented by MS and various other sources since SOAP and http are both standard protocols.
And if you want to integrate with Windows machines, and you're writing code on the non-Windows side, what do you do?
I refuse to pay attention to any Anti-trust investigations into MS unless Apple is put to the same scrutiny.
Microsoft: you can see the code that implements these dusty proprietary protocols if you sign an NDA.
Apple: We use these standard protocols, and here's a free implementation of this standard protocol that we happen to be the first to get to market, and it builds on Linux with no changes, and here's the source code to our file system and the remaining legacy network protocols we're still using...
what does MS do that Apple doesn't do when it comes to making your OS the dominate platform?
Let's see, Apple doesn't require people who try to interoperate with them to implement extensions to standard protocols that they don't document, and they don't give their own software privileged access to secret kernel APIs... in fact they give away the source to most of them... even most of the ones that they don't need to.
Lord knows Apple has problems - the way they're handling the iPhone is made of frustration - but compared to Microsoft they're angels.
They're FIVE years past the deadline. Fortunately, the judge is going to give them another year.
"Unfortunately, the company has consistently had trouble with producing complete and useful documentation. As noted above, the company struggled to satisfy EU authorities that it was complying with the agreementâ"that was 2006. By 2008, documentation was rearing its ugly head in the US court system. Microsoft's consent decree with the federal and state attorneys general was set to expire, and most of the conditions were allowed to. But Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who is overseeing the consent decree, ruled that Microsoft still hadn't sufficiently documented some protocols, despite those documents having been due in 2003. As a result, the consent decree will remain in place at least until November of 2009. "
Can you imagine what would happen if you were say, five years late filing your taxes? Do you think they judge would decide to pick this issue up again next year? At what point do actual penalties come into play?
So have you looked at their SMB documentation, or their X500 (Active Directory) documentation, or their Kerberos documentation? I can go on...
However, I have to agree that it is not so much indecent, as completely missing.
If the Microsoft empire is burning it's because they're burning all that extra cash they have lying around. They're not hurting.
Compliance is a very very very difficult problem. This is particularly true when you have more than one compliance specification that you must work with, don't have engineering resources from the team that produced the product that is out of compliance, and are working on a short deadline while trying to deliver documentation for other projects. I have posted a longer response to this on my work blog. Feel free to share the pain...
http://gclassy.com/
.: 2+2 = PI SQRT(1+N)
"Let them eat adequate documentation!"
Minesweeper. The best thing they ever did.
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
Well said. The people steering the company have vastly more power and vastly more responsibility for their actions. This is why it is not wrong to focus somewhat more on them. At the same time the rank and file troopers are complicit too.
Who is to consume this documentation? Developers or Grandma?
I'd be interested in seeing an example of it.
Nothing could be worse than IBM manuals in the old days. Even man pages are revelations in clarity compared to those.
Let's call a spade a spade. His name is B. Hussein, not Billy.
Is this judge by any chance a moogle?
billionaires are ALL making their money off off the 1970's copyright act
No, Carlos Slim, a Mexican who edged out Bill Gates to be the world's second richest person didn't make his wealth from copyrights. His fortune is based on telephones, both landline and cellphones. Warren Buffet, the world's richest person, didn't make his wealth in copyright either. Only a few of the World's richest people got there by copyright.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
While the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has been doing some good things, I see one criticism missing from wiki. The foundation is a big investor in Eni, an Italian petroleum giant. Eni has been accused of having bad environmental and health records.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
... this would be a non-issue of they operated on some kind of Open Source model. There's no documentation as good as the code itself.
Actually, you're completely wrong.
When it comes to computer software, absolutely nothing beats having it installed on a machine in front of you, with maybe a manual or two and an Internet connection so you can use Google for a few searches - and I'm a techie in UNIX & Windows environments, there's no difference and it's the best way to learn.
Sure, it's nice to have good documentation but not having it isn't a showstopper. The fact is, there are far too many people these days (usually youngsters) who don't have the attention span to sit and work a computer problem out yet still want to call themselves "computer engineers".
Oh, and decent computer engineers can get their point across without abuse.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.