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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."
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
Understanding complex code depends on how it was written and yes I can still understand complex code that might use random variable and method names that make no sense but it will take me longer just as having to sift through someone's code will probably take longer than reading documentation.
There is a difference between people flat out not being able to understand something and wasting their time because you couldn't be fucked to document things as you should and there is absolutely no reason for a company with a software monopoly and shit loads of cash not to provide documentation when "small fries" do it.
+5 Insightful, LOL! That's the most funny comment moderation I've seen today.
-- Cheers!
Get a grip, hippo, they dont mean your kb.ms thingie. They mean the INTEROPERABILITY docs, which you will NEVER see in a website such as your msdn.
NO SIG
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.)
I have spent so many hours in the MSDN, despaired of undocumented function-parameters, undocumented functions, missing cross-references, horrible code examples, etc. etc. etc. - In the end I trashed ALL projects, that I needed WinAPI documentation for...
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
No, only the Common Language Infrastructure and C# have been submitted for standarisation. The rest of it remains proprietary, including the Framework Class Library, which makes .Net actually usable.
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)
So are you saying Open Specifications http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc203350.aspx dont count? That link has content on 1.Windows Protocols 2.Microsoft Office Protocols 3.Microsoft Office File Formats 4.SharePoint Products and Technologies Protocols 5.Exchange Server Protocols 6. Microsoft SQL Server Protocols 7.Microsoft Computer Languages