I'm noticing that every discussion I've ever about Lotus Notes over the past eight years or so has read more-ore-less exactly the same: Detractors complain that it is slow, bloated, hard-to-use, and has a crazy UI. Supporters say the detractors are basing their opinions on outdated versions of the software, and things are much improved in recent releases. Kinda strange how the same complaints have the same rebuttals year after year. It's almost as if nothing has changed.
(I honestly have no idea what recent Notes is like. I haven't touched Notes since 4.something. I know it sucked rocks back then, but heck, there was a time I had to boot my PC from floppy, too. But I can't help but notice that the only thing that has changed in the fan/foe discussions since then is the version number.)
Yeah I mean if I was going to send a message to outer space it would be of a sexual nature like: "We are looking for the ultimate orgasm." or "Send us your women with the big jugs." crap.
Yah, or offers to buy a watch or refinance your house....
Holy crap! Aliens have been trying to contact me via email 50 times a day, and I never realized it before now!
As sublimely demonstrated by the parents' post, there's certainly little evidence of intelligence on this world, why should we expect to find any elsewhere?
"I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us." -- Bill Watterson (via Calvin & Hobbes)
would disagree with that. It is quite obvious when you play a game in the half-life universe that a LOT of time and effort went into it.
Where did I say otherwise?
Yes, their goal is to make money...but it's not their only goal
"primary" != "only"
Producing crap usually cuts into one's profit quite a bit (unless you're Microsoft or a phone company, ha-ha). Indeed, in a competitive free market, making the best product is often the best way to make the best profit. A great many professionals take a lot of pride in their work. That doesn't mean profit isn't the primary goal.
If the opposing force cannot field a fleet to protect the tankers, you can achive the same results with some speed boats.
All the opposing force would need would be some guns on the tankers to fight off speed boats, not a fleet.
I'd just like to point out that this exchange perfectly illustrates the concept of arms escalation.
Attack by speedboats. Guards on the tanker. Bigger guns on the speedboats. Escort craft for the tanker. Beefier attack ships to attack the escorts. Bigger escorts. Battleships. Aircraft. Anti-aircraft weapons. Submarines.
(I'm not criticizing anything or anybody; I was just amused at the process.)
If this were a free market rather than an oligopoly A) it wouldn't be such a problem, and B) it would likely not come up.
I absolutely agree that the present monopoly/oligopoly is extremely unhealthy for both the commercial and network operations aspects. However, it seems to be that the way to address that is to attack the problem. Don't try to keep coming up with new laws every time the big bells find a new way to be evil. Treat the disease, not the symptoms. There are various ways that could be done. Divestiture is one, but we've seen that didn't work too well in the long run. Structural separation seems like it might be viable and effective -- in situations where the ILECs truly couldn't interfere with the CLECs, things actually worked okay, for a little while, until the market melted down.
We can ask the government to regulate the business aspects of the monopoly providers, or we can ask the government to get involved in network operations. I think we're better off with the former.
are you sure you are not a troll ?! cause u awfully sound like a huge one!
Pretty sure. I've been involved in network operations for 15+ years. I used to run a Fido BBS, back before the the days of the commercial Internet. I used to work for a small ISP and DSL CLEC reseller. I still participate in the ISP-Planet and NANOG lists. I'm presently the IT Manager for a small manufacturing company (~120 employees, ~70 computers, two Internet connections, and OpenVPN-based remote access).
How about you, since you bring it up? How are you qualified to comment on network operations?
you are an isp? very good, i pay 5$ and you give me 5mbs/sec... and That Is All.
5 Mbit/sec *to where*? How about I give you 5 Mbit/sec for $5/month? Sound like a good deal? Okay, what if that 5MB/sec is to a DSLAM with only a 56 Kbit/sec frame line for it's connectivity to my core router? Or what if it has a 5 MBit/sec link to my core, but there are 5000 other subscribers on it, too? You seem to think the Internet exists only as the subscriber loop.
the end user already bought the bandwidth, so someone else shouldn't also have to co-buy the bandwidth
Packet-switched networks are pretty much all concentrated very close to the point of subscribe connection. You're not paying for a pipe direct to Google. You're paying for a pipe to a DSLAM or CMTS or switch. Past that point, you're in a big mesh where everybody is mixed with everybody else. The inter-connections in that mesh are not equal to the aggregate of the subscriber "last mile" links. If they were, you'd essentially have the circuit-switched PSTN all over again. Do you really want to be paying thousands of dollars per month for leased lines?
service provider should be able to deliver what is paid for by the customer and make money off of the transaction, because if they can't they either have to loose money or break the contract.
If you want to talk contracts, go check your Terms of Service. Most ISP TOS's don't obligate them to do a damn thing. You're sure as hell not paying them to provide access to any particular destination.
What the network operators want to do that net neutrality is fighting is artificially reduce YouTube's bandwidth unless they pay.
Define "artificial". I assume you're thinking of a rate limit in a router somewhere. Okay. But what if I, as the evil operator, just put a low-capacity link on the router to YouTube or whoever. Is that "artificial"? If not, why wouldn't the evil operators just do that to get around the rule? If it *is* artificial, who is going to pay for the bigger transit tubes I need to buy?
YouTube actually gets a smaller proportion of the network bandwidth than the proportion of data that's requested from them
Um, that's not how most IP networks work. You don't request bandwidth. I have routers, and I have transit links. Since it's a packet-switched network, traffic to or from YouTube makes its way across my mesh using whatever it can.
Imagine if YouTube's ISP tried to bill you for accessing YouTube. YouTube paid for the bandwidth. The ISP has peering agreements to pass the data along to other network operators closer to you. Your ISP has peering agreements so the data can get to it. And you already paid to download the data.
Is that what's being proposed? Wouldn't that situation self-correct, as YouTube would quickly stop paying their ISP, the evil ISP goes out of business, and some less-evil ISP gets YouTube's business instead. Right?
So if AT&T wants to charge Google for data that AT&T's users request, the users have already paid for service.
That really depends on what the users are paying for. Most of the time, they're paying to connect their PCs to AT&T's network. The idea is that AT&T's network is connected to other things the users want to access, but none of that is really spelled out. In the case of AT&T, it's *already* the case that other ISPs and hosting centers are paying AT&T for bandwidth. AT&T is a "tier 1" or "backbone" network operator. Everybody pays for the privilege of connecting to their network. So what you're describing is already happening, and has been since the 'net stopped being a government research project and went commercial.
Now, AT&T will have peering agreements with other tier 1 providers. AT&T needs to connect to MCI, and MCI needs to connect to AT&T. If the traffic exchange between the two is roughly equal, they will often decide to just connect each other for free, rather than paying each other equal amounts of money. It saves paperwork. But as soon as either party thinks they're not getting a good deal, they'll drop the peering agreement in a heartbeat.
I have no idea if AT&T is peering with Google or not, but if not, why shouldn't they be able to charge Google to connect to their network?
There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch, but There's Such A Thing As A Lunch That Has Already Been Paid For, and lunches that were paid for don't need to be paid for again by the lunch meat company.
The Internet is not a sandwich, a taxi, an airplane, or any other bad analogy. The Internet is a group of inter-connected, autonomous networks. Please address that. If the only thing you can do is offer up bad analogies, then I'm afraid you're not going to convince me.
I suppose part of the confusion is, "What are you paying for when you pay your ISP?" You see, you can't really pay for "the Internet". The Internet doesn't exist as a tangible thing. It's an abstract concept. You can't route packets through an abstract concept. So how can we look at this? Are you paying for your ISP to connect to their network, with the hope/understanding that they have other customers/peers you happen to want to talk to? If so, those customers/peers still have to pay. Or maybe you're paying your ISP to deliver packets to a given destination (or as close as they can get them). Okay, but in that case, the other end has to pay to deliver their packets back to you. And you can't argue that you're paying for both directions, because believe me, Google's feeds are not free.
The obvious thing here is that you need to be able to deliver the services you're selling in the first place. It's not youtube's, or yahoo's, or the customer's fault.
It's not anyone's *fault*. Where the heck did you get that?
You can't magic transit out of thin air. Somebody has to pay for it. The cost must be covered. This is a law of nature.
Let's turn it around: Say Google or Microsoft or even freaking Wikipedia comes to me and says, "Hey, we'd like to connect our fat pipe right into your core infrastructure, to give our end-users a better experience". They're essentially offering to pay me to give them better access. (They're paying in bandwidth, but it's the same scenario I originally proposed, just from the other direction. Just barter instead of cash.) Is that Net Neutral?
I sympathize with where you're coming from -- that the Internet should be this utopia, where access and information are free, and everyone is equal, and censorship is interpreted as damage, and so on. But we don't live in that world. Infrastructure is freaking expensive. Somebody's got to pay for it. Somebody always has, too. Back in the bad old days, Internet access was rare. You generally had to be associated with a university or other think-tank, and commercial use was prohibited. This is not a new idea.
We can also turn the money argument around. If I can afford it, why *shouldn't* I be able to pay extra to have my packets delivered first? Shall we outlaw FedEx, since it means big business can afford to have their mail delivered sooner?
The situation isn't as cut-and-dry as the propaganda would like us to believe.
What Net Neutrality is about is making sure that traffic to YouTube is not throttled solely because they aren't Yahoo and that YouTube can buy more bandwidth at the same rate as Yahoo.
Okay, so, in that case, "net neutrality" really means "universal pricing", i.e., legislative prohibition against first-degree price discrimination. That I can support with little reservation. However, I've seen quite a few different claims for what NN is (see other replies to my post), and not all of those claims match yours. I suspect it is a problem for NN that everyone has a different definition. It's hard to get behind a cause when nobody knows what it is.
Then Joe Schmoe (a USC grad) starts a website with The Next New Thing. Joe is strapped for cash, so he can't pay you for the same fat pipes that the other websites can, so his website crawls along. Your ISP customers who try to visit Joe's site can't, because it takes 25 seconds to load.
So I, as a network operator, am required to subsidize Joe Schmoe, by paying for fast pipes to his servers?
(I'm using definitions which suit my purposes a bit there, of course, but so are you with the "The forces of market competition have given way..." bit. (In a true laissez-faire free market, competition is all about survival of the richest. Which is why a pure free market is a bad idea. But I digress.))
Point being: TANSTAAFL. If a given site is pulling more traffic, someone has to pay for that. It can be subscribers directly. That means that nifty cable, DSL, or FiOS feed gets more expensive. Maybe it's $90/month now instead of $30 or whatever. Or the cost can be pushed on to the sites that are pulling the traffic. Google, Microsoft, et. al. have deep pockets and are willing to pay for fast pipes. Why should I, as an operator, be forced to turn them away? Is it just to protect the noble idea of the little guy in a big world?
Don't get me wrong, I've got nothing against the little guy. He often deserves to be protected. And depending on who you ask, one of the jobs of government is to protect those who cannot protect themselves. So maybe the government should be protecting Joe Schmoe for that reason. But let's call a spade a spade: This isn't about "neutrality", then, it's about market controls intended to keep big money from smothering the little guy. Right?
Let's drop all the bad analogies for a minute (pretend I'm new here) and actually look at the situation.
Net Neutrality is an issue I'm concerned with. However, the only information I get from the Net Neutrality camp seems to be "the-sky-is-falling" sensationalist propaganda. So while I want to support NN, my rational mind says "Hold the phone. This is just an ad-hominem rant, not a rational argument."
Say I'm a network operator. (I am, actually. I have more than one PC at home. And quite a few I'm in charge of at work. But let's also say I'm in the business of renting access to my network -- an "ISP" as we all say.) So I've got a bunch of subscribers paying me a fee for a connection my network. I've also got connections to other operators. Some of those are transit I pay for, some are peering agreements. My customers use those connections indirectly, of course.
Now let's say I'm looking at my traffic logs, and I see that a ton of traffic is going to and from YouTube. So much so that I have to buy more transit to operators connected closer to YouTube. So now I have a bigger bill. And that cost has to be covered (TANSTAAFL).
I could raise rates for my subscribers. Or I could say to YouTube, "Hey, guys, you're a hot ticket. If you give me some more money, I'll buy a faster pipe to you guys. If not, well, you're going to be stuck on an overloaded transit line."
While I do have concerns with the above scenario, it does not make me want to take to the streets with a torch and pitchfork. Can someone explain what is so evil in the above?
If you want to propose scenarios that involve abuse, censorship, wire-tapping, giant insect overlords, etc., that's fine, but please also address plain old business scenarios like the above.
An SSD ought to have speeds comparable to RAM, in the Gbps range, and until one does, the rest are just useless ripoffs. But, of course, that's just my opinion^H^H^H^H^H^H^H desire with no basis in what's actually technologically feasible.
Not everything can be addressed through technology. This is such a case.
Indeed. This was a people problem, through and through.
I note that, in their list of things SalesForce.com says they are doing to make sure it doesn't happen again, conspicuously absent is anything to do with people.
"There are seldom good technological solutions to behavioral problems." -- Ed Crowley
They added XMLHttpRequest to the browser so outlook web access would work more like a desktop app.
From what I've read, XMLHttpRequest was originally just a COM object implementing HTTP that the MS XML library team whipped up as part of building that library. (Hence the "XML" in the name; everything in that library begins with XML.) It got added to the browser because it was built by Microsoft. Any class library is exposed to the web in MSIE if it is flagged as safe for the web, and the mindset is to expose everything (and set the kill bit later when people start exploiting it).
I haven't seen anything substantial that says it was created for OWA. Not saying it wasn't, just that I haven't seen it.
I think I could salvage some of that hardware. It still looks useable and I bet I could install Linux on it.
I think there's a new geek test here. If you watched the video/looked at the pics, and your first thought was, "Damn, I could have used that equipment", you're a geek. I know I certainly felt an urge to shout "Noooo!" for some of it.
We have WSUS 2.0 running on Win 2000 Server. We have WSUS set to auto-approve critical/security updates and hold everything else for manual approval/decline. I find "Windows Desktop Search 3.01 for Windows XP (KB917013)" listed, released two days ago (23 Oct), and set to "Declined". I don't remember manually declining it (but I may have manually declined a prior release of WDS). No reports of it being installed on our 70 or so computers.
All Win XP/2000, no Vista, so Vista stuff is not set to even synchronize. Maybe that's the difference? Since WDS comes with Vista, maybe the Vista update is triggering an install for every platform?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm noticing that every discussion I've ever about Lotus Notes over the past eight years or so has read more-ore-less exactly the same: Detractors complain that it is slow, bloated, hard-to-use, and has a crazy UI. Supporters say the detractors are basing their opinions on outdated versions of the software, and things are much improved in recent releases. Kinda strange how the same complaints have the same rebuttals year after year. It's almost as if nothing has changed.
(I honestly have no idea what recent Notes is like. I haven't touched Notes since 4.something. I know it sucked rocks back then, but heck, there was a time I had to boot my PC from floppy, too. But I can't help but notice that the only thing that has changed in the fan/foe discussions since then is the version number.)
Yah, or offers to buy a watch or refinance your house....
Holy crap! Aliens have been trying to contact me via email 50 times a day, and I never realized it before now!
"I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us." -- Bill Watterson (via Calvin & Hobbes)
Where did I say otherwise?
"primary" != "only"
Producing crap usually cuts into one's profit quite a bit (unless you're Microsoft or a phone company, ha-ha). Indeed, in a competitive free market, making the best product is often the best way to make the best profit. A great many professionals take a lot of pride in their work. That doesn't mean profit isn't the primary goal.
"It's not the verbing that weirds language, it's the renounification." -- Unknown
I'm pretty sure profit is the primary reason. It almost always is. Any additional benefits would be secondary.
Valve is a for-profit company. If they did anything else, they would be failing in their mission.
I'd just like to point out that this exchange perfectly illustrates the concept of arms escalation.
Attack by speedboats. Guards on the tanker. Bigger guns on the speedboats. Escort craft for the tanker. Beefier attack ships to attack the escorts. Bigger escorts. Battleships. Aircraft. Anti-aircraft weapons. Submarines.
(I'm not criticizing anything or anybody; I was just amused at the process.)
I absolutely agree that the present monopoly/oligopoly is extremely unhealthy for both the commercial and network operations aspects. However, it seems to be that the way to address that is to attack the problem. Don't try to keep coming up with new laws every time the big bells find a new way to be evil. Treat the disease, not the symptoms. There are various ways that could be done. Divestiture is one, but we've seen that didn't work too well in the long run. Structural separation seems like it might be viable and effective -- in situations where the ILECs truly couldn't interfere with the CLECs, things actually worked okay, for a little while, until the market melted down.
We can ask the government to regulate the business aspects of the monopoly providers, or we can ask the government to get involved in network operations. I think we're better off with the former.
Pretty sure. I've been involved in network operations for 15+ years. I used to run a Fido BBS, back before the the days of the commercial Internet. I used to work for a small ISP and DSL CLEC reseller. I still participate in the ISP-Planet and NANOG lists. I'm presently the IT Manager for a small manufacturing company (~120 employees, ~70 computers, two Internet connections, and OpenVPN-based remote access).
How about you, since you bring it up? How are you qualified to comment on network operations?
5 Mbit/sec *to where*? How about I give you 5 Mbit/sec for $5/month? Sound like a good deal? Okay, what if that 5MB/sec is to a DSLAM with only a 56 Kbit/sec frame line for it's connectivity to my core router? Or what if it has a 5 MBit/sec link to my core, but there are 5000 other subscribers on it, too? You seem to think the Internet exists only as the subscriber loop.
Packet-switched networks are pretty much all concentrated very close to the point of subscribe connection. You're not paying for a pipe direct to Google. You're paying for a pipe to a DSLAM or CMTS or switch. Past that point, you're in a big mesh where everybody is mixed with everybody else. The inter-connections in that mesh are not equal to the aggregate of the subscriber "last mile" links. If they were, you'd essentially have the circuit-switched PSTN all over again. Do you really want to be paying thousands of dollars per month for leased lines?
If you want to talk contracts, go check your Terms of Service. Most ISP TOS's don't obligate them to do a damn thing. You're sure as hell not paying them to provide access to any particular destination.
Define "artificial". I assume you're thinking of a rate limit in a router somewhere. Okay. But what if I, as the evil operator, just put a low-capacity link on the router to YouTube or whoever. Is that "artificial"? If not, why wouldn't the evil operators just do that to get around the rule? If it *is* artificial, who is going to pay for the bigger transit tubes I need to buy?
Um, that's not how most IP networks work. You don't request bandwidth. I have routers, and I have transit links. Since it's a packet-switched network, traffic to or from YouTube makes its way across my mesh using whatever it can.
Is that what's being proposed? Wouldn't that situation self-correct, as YouTube would quickly stop paying their ISP, the evil ISP goes out of business, and some less-evil ISP gets YouTube's business instead. Right?
That really depends on what the users are paying for. Most of the time, they're paying to connect their PCs to AT&T's network. The idea is that AT&T's network is connected to other things the users want to access, but none of that is really spelled out. In the case of AT&T, it's *already* the case that other ISPs and hosting centers are paying AT&T for bandwidth. AT&T is a "tier 1" or "backbone" network operator. Everybody pays for the privilege of connecting to their network. So what you're describing is already happening, and has been since the 'net stopped being a government research project and went commercial.
Now, AT&T will have peering agreements with other tier 1 providers. AT&T needs to connect to MCI, and MCI needs to connect to AT&T. If the traffic exchange between the two is roughly equal, they will often decide to just connect each other for free, rather than paying each other equal amounts of money. It saves paperwork. But as soon as either party thinks they're not getting a good deal, they'll drop the peering agreement in a heartbeat.
I have no idea if AT&T is peering with Google or not, but if not, why shouldn't they be able to charge Google to connect to their network?
The Internet is not a sandwich, a taxi, an airplane, or any other bad analogy. The Internet is a group of inter-connected, autonomous networks. Please address that. If the only thing you can do is offer up bad analogies, then I'm afraid you're not going to convince me.
I suppose part of the confusion is, "What are you paying for when you pay your ISP?" You see, you can't really pay for "the Internet". The Internet doesn't exist as a tangible thing. It's an abstract concept. You can't route packets through an abstract concept. So how can we look at this? Are you paying for your ISP to connect to their network, with the hope/understanding that they have other customers/peers you happen to want to talk to? If so, those customers/peers still have to pay. Or maybe you're paying your ISP to deliver packets to a given destination (or as close as they can get them). Okay, but in that case, the other end has to pay to deliver their packets back to you. And you can't argue that you're paying for both directions, because believe me, Google's feeds are not free.
It's not anyone's *fault*. Where the heck did you get that?
You can't magic transit out of thin air. Somebody has to pay for it. The cost must be covered. This is a law of nature.
Let's turn it around: Say Google or Microsoft or even freaking Wikipedia comes to me and says, "Hey, we'd like to connect our fat pipe right into your core infrastructure, to give our end-users a better experience". They're essentially offering to pay me to give them better access. (They're paying in bandwidth, but it's the same scenario I originally proposed, just from the other direction. Just barter instead of cash.) Is that Net Neutral?
I sympathize with where you're coming from -- that the Internet should be this utopia, where access and information are free, and everyone is equal, and censorship is interpreted as damage, and so on. But we don't live in that world. Infrastructure is freaking expensive. Somebody's got to pay for it. Somebody always has, too. Back in the bad old days, Internet access was rare. You generally had to be associated with a university or other think-tank, and commercial use was prohibited. This is not a new idea.
We can also turn the money argument around. If I can afford it, why *shouldn't* I be able to pay extra to have my packets delivered first? Shall we outlaw FedEx, since it means big business can afford to have their mail delivered sooner?
The situation isn't as cut-and-dry as the propaganda would like us to believe.
Okay, so, in that case, "net neutrality" really means "universal pricing", i.e., legislative prohibition against first-degree price discrimination. That I can support with little reservation. However, I've seen quite a few different claims for what NN is (see other replies to my post), and not all of those claims match yours. I suspect it is a problem for NN that everyone has a different definition. It's hard to get behind a cause when nobody knows what it is.
So I, as a network operator, am required to subsidize Joe Schmoe, by paying for fast pipes to his servers?
(I'm using definitions which suit my purposes a bit there, of course, but so are you with the "The forces of market competition have given way..." bit. (In a true laissez-faire free market, competition is all about survival of the richest. Which is why a pure free market is a bad idea. But I digress.))
Point being: TANSTAAFL. If a given site is pulling more traffic, someone has to pay for that. It can be subscribers directly. That means that nifty cable, DSL, or FiOS feed gets more expensive. Maybe it's $90/month now instead of $30 or whatever. Or the cost can be pushed on to the sites that are pulling the traffic. Google, Microsoft, et. al. have deep pockets and are willing to pay for fast pipes. Why should I, as an operator, be forced to turn them away? Is it just to protect the noble idea of the little guy in a big world?
Don't get me wrong, I've got nothing against the little guy. He often deserves to be protected. And depending on who you ask, one of the jobs of government is to protect those who cannot protect themselves. So maybe the government should be protecting Joe Schmoe for that reason. But let's call a spade a spade: This isn't about "neutrality", then, it's about market controls intended to keep big money from smothering the little guy. Right?
Let's drop all the bad analogies for a minute (pretend I'm new here) and actually look at the situation.
Net Neutrality is an issue I'm concerned with. However, the only information I get from the Net Neutrality camp seems to be "the-sky-is-falling" sensationalist propaganda. So while I want to support NN, my rational mind says "Hold the phone. This is just an ad-hominem rant, not a rational argument."
Say I'm a network operator. (I am, actually. I have more than one PC at home. And quite a few I'm in charge of at work. But let's also say I'm in the business of renting access to my network -- an "ISP" as we all say.) So I've got a bunch of subscribers paying me a fee for a connection my network. I've also got connections to other operators. Some of those are transit I pay for, some are peering agreements. My customers use those connections indirectly, of course.
Now let's say I'm looking at my traffic logs, and I see that a ton of traffic is going to and from YouTube. So much so that I have to buy more transit to operators connected closer to YouTube. So now I have a bigger bill. And that cost has to be covered (TANSTAAFL).
I could raise rates for my subscribers. Or I could say to YouTube, "Hey, guys, you're a hot ticket. If you give me some more money, I'll buy a faster pipe to you guys. If not, well, you're going to be stuck on an overloaded transit line."
While I do have concerns with the above scenario, it does not make me want to take to the streets with a torch and pitchfork. Can someone explain what is so evil in the above?
If you want to propose scenarios that involve abuse, censorship, wire-tapping, giant insect overlords, etc., that's fine, but please also address plain old business scenarios like the above.
Fixed that for you.
Indeed. This was a people problem, through and through.
I note that, in their list of things SalesForce.com says they are doing to make sure it doesn't happen again, conspicuously absent is anything to do with people.
"There are seldom good technological solutions to behavioral problems." -- Ed Crowley
From what I've read, XMLHttpRequest was originally just a COM object implementing HTTP that the MS XML library team whipped up as part of building that library. (Hence the "XML" in the name; everything in that library begins with XML.) It got added to the browser because it was built by Microsoft. Any class library is exposed to the web in MSIE if it is flagged as safe for the web, and the mindset is to expose everything (and set the kill bit later when people start exploiting it).
I haven't seen anything substantial that says it was created for OWA. Not saying it wasn't, just that I haven't seen it.
I think there's a new geek test here. If you watched the video/looked at the pics, and your first thought was, "Damn, I could have used that equipment", you're a geek. I know I certainly felt an urge to shout "Noooo!" for some of it.
YHBT. YHL. HAND.
You must be new here.
/obligatory
//not fark
Well, just goes to show, even an idiot like Dan Lyons is right now and again.
We have WSUS 2.0 running on Win 2000 Server. We have WSUS set to auto-approve critical/security updates and hold everything else for manual approval/decline. I find "Windows Desktop Search 3.01 for Windows XP (KB917013)" listed, released two days ago (23 Oct), and set to "Declined". I don't remember manually declining it (but I may have manually declined a prior release of WDS). No reports of it being installed on our 70 or so computers.
All Win XP/2000, no Vista, so Vista stuff is not set to even synchronize. Maybe that's the difference? Since WDS comes with Vista, maybe the Vista update is triggering an install for every platform?
Link, please.
;-)