I would bash Google's actions as well... if I'd seen them do anything conspicuous. The only security issues we know of were in their beta services. The only privacy issues have been over what they could do, not any particular actions.
Microsoft, however, has shown a consistent disregard for privacy and security. When Google goes down the same path I'll bash them too.
No, I don't trust them either. But I can understand if others would trust Google. So far they haven't proven untrustworthy (that I know of).
I use a Yahoo email account for junk and hosted email for everything else. Since my hosting provider doesn't work with advertisers they have little reason to cull information from me.
The difference is that Google has a very good reputation (so far). Microsoft's proven themselves untrustworthy (backdoor deals, simple security holes, etc.). That's enough reason for me to bash MS and not Google.
That is personal information. There's nothing stopping them from giving advertisers personally identifiable info. They just say they will not. I wouldn't trust Microsoft Passport, so why would I trust this?
When they weren't even trying to share personal information people have been able to get into their systems and take it (e.g. using a simple URL to get into any Passport account). Now that they want to intentionally share some of it we should trust them? No thanks. Don't come crying to/. when you see bogus charges showing up on your credit card.
When the rules are there, you play by them. That's just what Microsoft is doing.
In the US the rules state that you will not be granted a patent if there is prior art or if the invention is obvious. The USPTO is not properly enforcing the rules, but the law still stands. Microsoft is taking advantage of the fact that the rules aren't being enforced. Even though they would lose many court cases over these patents they apply for them anyway, knowing that they will almost never be overturned because smaller players can't afford the fight. That's not playing by the rules, that's circumventing them.
You can drive on the wrong side of the road when a cop's not around. That doesn't make it right.
The majority of Americans elected Bush, therefore the majority of Americans agree to his politics
60% of eligable voters voted. 50% of those voted for Bush. Therefore it's better stated that about 30% of Americans voted for Bush.
So do the other 70% deserve Bush? Probably, since more could have voted themselves. But also realize more people voted for Kerry than JFK or Clinton, two of the most popular US presidents of all time. I'm happy to say I'm from NYC where 86% voted against Bush. (Side note: If the place hit hardest by terrorism in recent years voted so strongly against Bush then how good a job can he be doing?)
Personally I think most of the other 40% of the electorate was sick of so much meaningless banter, lack of ideas, and boring speeches. We need someone with more passion and dedication to a core set of ideas instead of someone who only listens to a room full of advisors and corporate sponsors.
And let's not forget their wishlist was created BEFORE 9/11. The Justice Dept was asking for these drastically expanded powers since at least the 1990s. These weren't powers specifically requested to fight terrorism. Only when the opportunity presented itself were the powers granted in the name of anti-terrorism. So it's no wonder these powers are being used for a variety of reasons and not just to fight terrorism.
Sounds nice, but home-owners rarely sell high, then buy low. For those looking for a first home a dip would be great. For those already owning a home a drop means they have to either stay where they are till the market picks up again (so they can sell their current place at a good price) or buy another place of equal value. No one sells their house when the market is high to move into a cheaper home. People sell a house and buy another when it's a step up, unless they're in financial trouble and need to step down.
So a big market drop for your average home owner will be a bad thing.
There's an entire industry built completely around the US federal and state tax codes. Not only are the codes complex, they change every year. To turn tax code into computer code every year takes a team of tax experts. So the only way I could imagine seeing an OSS tax software package would be for an accounting firm to release software for filing simple tax returns hoping those who hit the limits of the software come in for consultation. But a complete package is almost out of the question.
Many people can file a 1040 and be done with it. For those returns the paper is easy enough. If it's worth using software it's because it's a more complex return. That means software that's very expensive to write.
I left 10 years of developing on Windows for the financial industry and switched to a web development company that relies completely on open source. While we're developing custom solutions for clients we can contribute back to the projects on which we rely. For example, while I'm using a new feature of PHP I'm figuring out enhancements and bug fixes which I can contribute back to the project. We also have some generic software we've built to help multiple clients. When it's polished we can later publish it as open source.
Good point. Add to that the people who've had to download it numerous times because of re-installs. They're counting me at least 5 times over. Plus I'm sure they're adding v1.0 and 1.1 downloads (everyone who upgraded is counted twice), and possibly beta downloaders.
The PC shipment number can of course be tracked. But how in the world can they know that over 2.5 million developers are targeting managed code? Has anyone seen a very thorough (scientific) survey? If it's based on responses to things on their web sites I'm sure it's totally off. If they only got that number from asking their biggest customers they're also way off. Upper management doesn't know what managed code is and in many places they don't count exactly how many people are using each tool.
So you're ignoring the fact that.NET isn't compatible between versions 1.0 and 1.1? In their very first upgrade they broke backwards and forwards compatibility (i.e. APIs changed).
And if you think the solution of supporting every set of APIs (every specific version number) is good you'll learn the hard way it's not. The best reason for upgrading a platform is often bug and security fixes. When you're locked into one very specific version and Microsoft keeps breaking compatibility (as they have so far) your platform version is basically unsupported. As soon as users need bug fixes you'll need to recompile for a new version of.NET, which changes every time, leaving you with more work.
it will completely render to industry standards on the front end, just like ASP.NET
Haven't used ASP.NET much? It's output is only "standard" to Internet Explorer or Netscape 3, your choice. Both, however, don't conform to actual W3C standards.
And if they wanted to conform to standards with XAML, why didn't they embrace XUL instead of recreate it? XUL could have been submitted as a standard and they could have used it. But instead they make their own implementation. Sounds just like Microsoft Java in the 90's.
And what do you mean by XAML rendering to industry standards? It's XML transmitted to a client. What GUI standard is it using?
All other differences aside, yes, it is better to be a standard. I just get annoyed when people confuse "standard" for "open". Some people mistakenly think freedom or cooperation when they hear standard. In this particular case it was only standardized for marketing purposes.
MS released the source code for a version of the runtime written in their research department. Better than Sun, but it's still not the actual runtime everyone is using.
If you believe ASP.NET is very solid technology I doubt you've tried to use it to build anything relatively big. To me part of the definition of "solid" is stable when scaled. Not only is performance horrible when trying to scale.NET to anything of reasonable size for a big business, but its flaws often bring it to a screaching halt.
One of the great benefits of.NET is supposed to be no more buffer overflows, right? Well they've simply replaced them with massive memory leaks and poor COM interrop. And the tighter integration to SQL Server to bring you those nice paging abilities means your users are more than screwed when the primary database goes down. I've never seen a DBA create an elegant failover in large scale.NET+SQL Server systems. Plus SQL Server is more likely to hang or freeze its connections than return errors for your app to handle.
ASP.NET sounds solid. But I have yet to see it act as such in real life situations (of course YMMV, I'm just speaking from what I've seen in the financial industry).
There's a VERY big difference between.NET being a wrapper for Win32 and backwards compatibility. Doing everything within.NET's runtime for client apps means calling Win32 functions. Their bugs and flakiness show through. The added layer also brings a huge performance drop.
Calling COM and Win32 function directly, however, is another whole story. The interrop sucks. And it doesn't just suck, it sucks badly. The could have written.NET from scratch instead of a layer on Win32 and still have interrop. Being on top of Win32 the interrop should actually be quite good.
The backwards compatibility can only come from the interrop to older code. It has nothing at all to do with COM and Win32 ugliness showing through in.NET.
Java is not open. C# and the CLR are. They are ECMA standards.
I'm getting tired of correcting people about this, but I can't help myself. C# and the CLR ARE NOT OPEN. An organization has embraced them in their list of standards. That does not mean they can be changed by anyone and still be a standard. They are not documented any better or worse then Java and their implementations do not have to be open.
The only difference between these things being standards is that Microsoft can't change the interfaces and say they comply with the standard. Meanwhile Java can be changed at any time by Sun.
And if you still want to call the CLR open then don't forget many parts are patented. So having it as an "open" standard is irrelevant when you can easily be sued by its creator for using it.
I don't see any other postings with a story similar to mine, so...
I was a developer in the financial industry for 10 years. All I ever developed on professionally was Windows and MS tools. I tried for years to get management to look at open source, or even anything non-MS, but with no success. Attempts to get jobs not using Windows were impossible without experience. I started to contribute a few modules to an open source project. Two months later and I'm now in an all open-source development company.
Point of the story: I was locked into one development platform professionally until I volunteered time to contribute open source. 10 years of proprietary development and I can't show anyone my work. 2 months of open source development and anyone can see the quality of my work.
It absolutely makes you more marketable to people who are interested in F/OSS or at least open-minded to it. From now on those are the only employers I'll be sending my resume to.
Well it's a lot less of a factor these days. They're no longer a growth company, so can't rely on their stock price continually skyrocketing and splitting. Notice the removal of unreported stock options and dividend payouts. If they got enough bad press they would have ended up just like Enron. The only difference between Microsoft's financials and Enron's were the shell companies Enron produced. Microsoft now has enough cash flow where they're very unlikely to simply collapse. But it's only because of these terrible business practices of their past that they have so much money now.
They may be doing less questionable financial tricks today, but they have no shame at all and would still be doing it today if it would serve their wants. I give them no credit for cleaning up their act a little.
Profit for shareholders of a growth company only means that people bought a stock which later others are willing to pay more for. The billions go into Microsoft's coffers more from stock purchases than pure profit (at least historically). For all the details on how they were unprofitable during the 80s and 90s read this. If you can read all of the facts and quotes from people who were involved and still think they were profitable by product sales alone then you're choosing to be blind.
From MS Versus: "According to an ABC News 1/22/99 article by Michael Martinez, Microsoft's own internal auditor, a respected 30 year veteran and former partner of Deloitte and Touche, was fired in 1996 after informing management that their earnings manipulations were illegal and violations of the SEC and FASB laws. He was given the option to resign or be fired and later settled for $4 million after suing under the Federal Whistle Blowers Act."
"The single most lucrative product Microsoft sells is its own stock. Microsoft receives almost as much cash inflow from the stock market as it does by selling goods and services... Basically, Microsoft receives cash by issuing employee stock options, after which the company then receives billions of dollars in tax deductions from the IRS for doing so. Add in the warrants it sells on its own stock, and the company made over $5 billion off the stock market [for the] fiscal year end[ing] July 1999, tax-free. For comparison, its after-tax net income was only $7.8 billion. Microsoft may not be much in the programming department, but its accountants are impressive." (Landley, Rob. "Why Microsoft's Stock Options Scare Me." The Motley Fool 17 Feb 2000)
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I would bash Google's actions as well... if I'd seen them do anything conspicuous. The only security issues we know of were in their beta services. The only privacy issues have been over what they could do, not any particular actions.
Microsoft, however, has shown a consistent disregard for privacy and security. When Google goes down the same path I'll bash them too.
The security holes were found in the BETA version of gmail. Use beta systems at your own risk.
The privacy complaint was a concern over what they COULD do with the info they have. There were not allegations they did anything wrong.
No, I don't trust them either. But I can understand if others would trust Google. So far they haven't proven untrustworthy (that I know of).
I use a Yahoo email account for junk and hosted email for everything else. Since my hosting provider doesn't work with advertisers they have little reason to cull information from me.
You're supporting it by reading and responding to it.
The difference is that Google has a very good reputation (so far). Microsoft's proven themselves untrustworthy (backdoor deals, simple security holes, etc.). That's enough reason for me to bash MS and not Google.
That is personal information. There's nothing stopping them from giving advertisers personally identifiable info. They just say they will not. I wouldn't trust Microsoft Passport, so why would I trust this?
/. when you see bogus charges showing up on your credit card.
When they weren't even trying to share personal information people have been able to get into their systems and take it (e.g. using a simple URL to get into any Passport account). Now that they want to intentionally share some of it we should trust them? No thanks. Don't come crying to
When the rules are there, you play by them. That's just what Microsoft is doing.
In the US the rules state that you will not be granted a patent if there is prior art or if the invention is obvious. The USPTO is not properly enforcing the rules, but the law still stands. Microsoft is taking advantage of the fact that the rules aren't being enforced. Even though they would lose many court cases over these patents they apply for them anyway, knowing that they will almost never be overturned because smaller players can't afford the fight. That's not playing by the rules, that's circumventing them.
You can drive on the wrong side of the road when a cop's not around. That doesn't make it right.
The majority of Americans elected Bush, therefore the majority of Americans agree to his politics
60% of eligable voters voted. 50% of those voted for Bush. Therefore it's better stated that about 30% of Americans voted for Bush.
So do the other 70% deserve Bush? Probably, since more could have voted themselves. But also realize more people voted for Kerry than JFK or Clinton, two of the most popular US presidents of all time. I'm happy to say I'm from NYC where 86% voted against Bush. (Side note: If the place hit hardest by terrorism in recent years voted so strongly against Bush then how good a job can he be doing?)
Personally I think most of the other 40% of the electorate was sick of so much meaningless banter, lack of ideas, and boring speeches. We need someone with more passion and dedication to a core set of ideas instead of someone who only listens to a room full of advisors and corporate sponsors.
And let's not forget their wishlist was created BEFORE 9/11. The Justice Dept was asking for these drastically expanded powers since at least the 1990s. These weren't powers specifically requested to fight terrorism. Only when the opportunity presented itself were the powers granted in the name of anti-terrorism. So it's no wonder these powers are being used for a variety of reasons and not just to fight terrorism.
Sounds nice, but home-owners rarely sell high, then buy low. For those looking for a first home a dip would be great. For those already owning a home a drop means they have to either stay where they are till the market picks up again (so they can sell their current place at a good price) or buy another place of equal value. No one sells their house when the market is high to move into a cheaper home. People sell a house and buy another when it's a step up, unless they're in financial trouble and need to step down.
So a big market drop for your average home owner will be a bad thing.
There's an entire industry built completely around the US federal and state tax codes. Not only are the codes complex, they change every year. To turn tax code into computer code every year takes a team of tax experts. So the only way I could imagine seeing an OSS tax software package would be for an accounting firm to release software for filing simple tax returns hoping those who hit the limits of the software come in for consultation. But a complete package is almost out of the question.
Many people can file a 1040 and be done with it. For those returns the paper is easy enough. If it's worth using software it's because it's a more complex return. That means software that's very expensive to write.
I left 10 years of developing on Windows for the financial industry and switched to a web development company that relies completely on open source. While we're developing custom solutions for clients we can contribute back to the projects on which we rely. For example, while I'm using a new feature of PHP I'm figuring out enhancements and bug fixes which I can contribute back to the project. We also have some generic software we've built to help multiple clients. When it's polished we can later publish it as open source.
Good point. Add to that the people who've had to download it numerous times because of re-installs. They're counting me at least 5 times over. Plus I'm sure they're adding v1.0 and 1.1 downloads (everyone who upgraded is counted twice), and possibly beta downloaders.
The PC shipment number can of course be tracked. But how in the world can they know that over 2.5 million developers are targeting managed code? Has anyone seen a very thorough (scientific) survey? If it's based on responses to things on their web sites I'm sure it's totally off. If they only got that number from asking their biggest customers they're also way off. Upper management doesn't know what managed code is and in many places they don't count exactly how many people are using each tool.
So you're ignoring the fact that .NET isn't compatible between versions 1.0 and 1.1? In their very first upgrade they broke backwards and forwards compatibility (i.e. APIs changed).
.NET, which changes every time, leaving you with more work.
And if you think the solution of supporting every set of APIs (every specific version number) is good you'll learn the hard way it's not. The best reason for upgrading a platform is often bug and security fixes. When you're locked into one very specific version and Microsoft keeps breaking compatibility (as they have so far) your platform version is basically unsupported. As soon as users need bug fixes you'll need to recompile for a new version of
it will completely render to industry standards on the front end, just like ASP.NET
Haven't used ASP.NET much? It's output is only "standard" to Internet Explorer or Netscape 3, your choice. Both, however, don't conform to actual W3C standards.
And if they wanted to conform to standards with XAML, why didn't they embrace XUL instead of recreate it? XUL could have been submitted as a standard and they could have used it. But instead they make their own implementation. Sounds just like Microsoft Java in the 90's.
And what do you mean by XAML rendering to industry standards? It's XML transmitted to a client. What GUI standard is it using?
All other differences aside, yes, it is better to be a standard. I just get annoyed when people confuse "standard" for "open". Some people mistakenly think freedom or cooperation when they hear standard. In this particular case it was only standardized for marketing purposes.
MS released the source code for a version of the runtime written in their research department. Better than Sun, but it's still not the actual runtime everyone is using.
If you believe ASP.NET is very solid technology I doubt you've tried to use it to build anything relatively big. To me part of the definition of "solid" is stable when scaled. Not only is performance horrible when trying to scale .NET to anything of reasonable size for a big business, but its flaws often bring it to a screaching halt.
.NET is supposed to be no more buffer overflows, right? Well they've simply replaced them with massive memory leaks and poor COM interrop. And the tighter integration to SQL Server to bring you those nice paging abilities means your users are more than screwed when the primary database goes down. I've never seen a DBA create an elegant failover in large scale .NET+SQL Server systems. Plus SQL Server is more likely to hang or freeze its connections than return errors for your app to handle.
One of the great benefits of
ASP.NET sounds solid. But I have yet to see it act as such in real life situations (of course YMMV, I'm just speaking from what I've seen in the financial industry).
There's a VERY big difference between .NET being a wrapper for Win32 and backwards compatibility. Doing everything within .NET's runtime for client apps means calling Win32 functions. Their bugs and flakiness show through. The added layer also brings a huge performance drop.
.NET from scratch instead of a layer on Win32 and still have interrop. Being on top of Win32 the interrop should actually be quite good.
.NET.
Calling COM and Win32 function directly, however, is another whole story. The interrop sucks. And it doesn't just suck, it sucks badly. The could have written
The backwards compatibility can only come from the interrop to older code. It has nothing at all to do with COM and Win32 ugliness showing through in
C# is built "on top of" .NET. The rhetoric is .NET is the platform and C# is one choice for programming on that platform.
/. ;)
C# was written specifically to be able to use almost every feature of the CLR. Every other language on the platform is more limited in its abilities.
Sorry to nit-pick but that's what we're supposed to do here on
Java is not open. C# and the CLR are. They are ECMA standards.
I'm getting tired of correcting people about this, but I can't help myself. C# and the CLR ARE NOT OPEN. An organization has embraced them in their list of standards. That does not mean they can be changed by anyone and still be a standard. They are not documented any better or worse then Java and their implementations do not have to be open.
The only difference between these things being standards is that Microsoft can't change the interfaces and say they comply with the standard. Meanwhile Java can be changed at any time by Sun.
And if you still want to call the CLR open then don't forget many parts are patented. So having it as an "open" standard is irrelevant when you can easily be sued by its creator for using it.
I don't see any other postings with a story similar to mine, so...
I was a developer in the financial industry for 10 years. All I ever developed on professionally was Windows and MS tools. I tried for years to get management to look at open source, or even anything non-MS, but with no success. Attempts to get jobs not using Windows were impossible without experience. I started to contribute a few modules to an open source project. Two months later and I'm now in an all open-source development company.
Point of the story: I was locked into one development platform professionally until I volunteered time to contribute open source. 10 years of proprietary development and I can't show anyone my work. 2 months of open source development and anyone can see the quality of my work.
It absolutely makes you more marketable to people who are interested in F/OSS or at least open-minded to it. From now on those are the only employers I'll be sending my resume to.
Well it's a lot less of a factor these days. They're no longer a growth company, so can't rely on their stock price continually skyrocketing and splitting. Notice the removal of unreported stock options and dividend payouts. If they got enough bad press they would have ended up just like Enron. The only difference between Microsoft's financials and Enron's were the shell companies Enron produced. Microsoft now has enough cash flow where they're very unlikely to simply collapse. But it's only because of these terrible business practices of their past that they have so much money now.
They may be doing less questionable financial tricks today, but they have no shame at all and would still be doing it today if it would serve their wants. I give them no credit for cleaning up their act a little.
Profit for shareholders of a growth company only means that people bought a stock which later others are willing to pay more for. The billions go into Microsoft's coffers more from stock purchases than pure profit (at least historically). For all the details on how they were unprofitable during the 80s and 90s read this. If you can read all of the facts and quotes from people who were involved and still think they were profitable by product sales alone then you're choosing to be blind.
Software doesn't wear out. Trucks do.
From MS Versus:
"According to an ABC News 1/22/99 article by Michael Martinez, Microsoft's own internal auditor, a respected 30 year veteran and former partner of Deloitte and Touche, was fired in 1996 after informing management that their earnings manipulations were illegal and violations of the SEC and FASB laws. He was given the option to resign or be fired and later settled for $4 million after suing under the Federal Whistle Blowers Act."
"The single most lucrative product Microsoft sells is its own stock. Microsoft receives almost as much cash inflow from the stock market as it does by selling goods and services... Basically, Microsoft receives cash by issuing employee stock options, after which the company then receives billions of dollars in tax deductions from the IRS for doing so. Add in the warrants it sells on its own stock, and the company made over $5 billion off the stock market [for the] fiscal year end[ing] July 1999, tax-free. For comparison, its after-tax net income was only $7.8 billion. Microsoft may not be much in the programming department, but its accountants are impressive." (Landley, Rob. "Why Microsoft's Stock Options Scare Me." The Motley Fool 17 Feb 2000)