[Reader-list] .Net / Hailstorm Initiative

[Menso Heus]

On Thu, Jul 05, 2001 at 03:29:04PM +0530, pankaj at sarai.net wrote:

<snip>

> It seems Your Experience with Linux and BSD has not been
> as good as it should have been or I am an eternal optimist.

Well, having quite 'current' hardware it's sometimes hard to find 
drivers for, say your videocard (ATI Rage 128 AGP which is now 
supported in xFree86 4)

> Look, If you had givin me this "kernel compilin'" and
> "hard to install" points a year or couple back I would have
> agreed But given the kind of installation systems like Red hat
> Corel porgeny-debian. I think this argument is lame.
> any body  who can install M$ windows 2000 can also install
> linux. 

I didn't say it was hard to install, I said that, for the average 
Joe Blow it would be hard thing to get everything working the way
(Phone being the player, phoning being the content).

> So the point comes down to support.

Correct, drivers are often not available. Blame it on the manufacturer
if you want, but that's not Joe Blow's problem. Joe Blow only sees that
it doesn't work and Joe Blow wants things to work. 

> Lets take a example of a very famous video card in *delhi*
> " SIS6326 " 
> wether you intall a box with this card on windows or linux or bsd
> u end up with no GUI or 640X480 in 16colors . 
> Now in windows you have a driver which installs the optimum 
> configurations for that card which has to be manually installed.

For most hardware you have to 'manually' install drivers. In most cases,
this means inserting a CD-ROM, clicking "ok" and "next" a couple of times
and (when using older versions of Windows) reboot. 

> In linux you have to edit some options in the /etc/X11/XF86Config
> Isn't that bad for an *experimental OS* that kids play with Is it?

That's for a videocard. I don't know how good support currently is for
Other Things Users Want but something tells me it's not yet comparible 
to that of other operating systems such as Windows 2000 or MacOS.
I am referring here to things such as soundcars, video capture cards, 
scanners, printers, and all of the latter working via USB. 

The question I was trying to raise was not whether it's an 'experimental
OS that kids play with' but whether it's suitable as a desktop OS for 
Joe Blow.

> I am telling you that MS wants to control the technology that is used
> Like MSN messenger instead of AOL messenger or yahoo messenger
> They don't care about who gives the service. as long as they make their
> format/technology the DEFAULT.

Ah, you mean AOL and Yahoo or ICQ do not in this case? When looking at evils
do not forget that there might be more than 1 lurking around.
 
> They dominate the desktop market and if they give out *free* client s/w 
> to the desktop market which uses there technology for eg a .asf player
> the people who want to deliver the content have to buy that technology.

Yes, Real pretty much does exactly the same and is, as far as I know, the 
most expensive out there. On the topic of streaming video: we had a discussion
about this for HAL, someone said "Our streaming should be opensource!" which
made a lot of people who do this stuff for a living laugh very loud.

There *is* no opensource streaming format that can compete with Windows Media
Player or even Real. This is not a question of monopoly or whatever other 
anti-payware slogan you want to use, it simply does not exist.

This technique is actually quite often used in this world, e.g. get a GSM 
subscription with company Y for 2 years and you'll get the phone for 'free'.
(Phone being the player, phoning being the content).
 
> >Some people do and the Internet has the funny thing to it that, when
> >one person does and finds something ridiculous, the rest of the Net 
> >will know in a week (e.g. it gets posted on Slashdot)
> 
> I don't know about that I still find a 100 million hotmail users
> even after the MS Passport thing!

The MS Passport thing as you call it was about the Terms of License which,
have been admitted to be faulty and have been updated as this article says:
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-5508903.html?tag=mn_hd
 
> >> And just before u know it Microsoft owns what u wrote/shared
> >> with ur friend.
> >Well, I could suspect they might want a situation like this but I don't
> >expect them to be stupid enough to actually implement this.
> 
> U know about "MS Passport" don't you.

I do, perhaps I should have written "to be stupid enough to do it again" :)
Again, see http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-5508903.html?tag=mn_hd 

> >Still don't see why I would want to connect to their server.
> 
> I am talking about being a gatekeeper to the governing technology .
> Everybody knows about XML being the next big thing! I don't know 
> anything about it and I don't care. 

Funny that you should comment on it then :)
 
> Microsoft is inserting XML into everything --> there confiugration file ie 
> the /windows directory files when you produce a html with word 2000 it 
> produces XML and Obiviously it is Incompatible with every other XML parser 
> but M$ Internet Explorer.

I'm not exactly sure what you're saying here. If you can give me some more 
details I'll try it out. When I save an HTML file in Word 2000 it gets saved
as HTML, not XML. It does however, contain some meta-data in XML format that 
looks like this:

<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
 <o:DocumentProperties>
  <o:Author>Menso Heus</o:Author>
  <o:LastAuthor>Menso Heus</o:LastAuthor>
  <o:Revision>1</o:Revision>
  <o:TotalTime>0</o:TotalTime>
  <o:Created>2001-07-06T00:23:00Z</o:Created>
  <o:LastSaved>2001-07-06T00:23:00Z</o:LastSaved>
  <o:Pages>1</o:Pages>
  <o:Company>None</o:Company>
  <o:Lines>1</o:Lines>
  <o:Paragraphs>1</o:Paragraphs>
  <o:Version>9.4119</o:Version>
 </o:DocumentProperties>
</xml><![endif]-->

It shouldn't get parsed by any other parser then mso 9 (Microsoft Office 9,
aka MS Office 2000) since that's what the if statement in the beginning 
seems to say. If you take that if statement out you'll end up with:

<xml>
 <o:DocumentProperties>
  <o:Author>Menso Heus</o:Author>
  <o:LastAuthor>Menso Heus</o:LastAuthor>
  <o:Revision>1</o:Revision>
  <o:TotalTime>0</o:TotalTime>
  <o:Created>2001-07-06T00:23:00Z</o:Created>
  <o:LastSaved>2001-07-06T00:23:00Z</o:LastSaved>
  <o:Pages>1</o:Pages>
  <o:Company>None</o:Company>
  <o:Lines>1</o:Lines>
  <o:Paragraphs>1</o:Paragraphs>
  <o:Version>9.4119</o:Version>
 </o:DocumentProperties>
</xml>

Which is, as far as I know, perfectly good XML and should be parseable by any
parser! The confusion however, kept alive by people who don't fully research 
the 'problem' or what MS wanted to do with XML, is totally different.

For some reason people started saying Office 2k would be XML compliant, I didn't ever
see MS make this claim. They use a new XML like structure for all their office 2k
documents so that they are easily interchangeable with other office 2k programs
(e.g. from word to excell to powerpoint without losing anything). 
Thus, their goal was not to make an XML compliant application (whether or not 
they should have done so is not the debate) but to make it easier for themselves to
interchange data and to make it possible for people to save any Office 2k file to
HTML without losing all the nice things.
I just saved an Excel file to HTML, the source code looks weird but it opens in 
Netscape 4.0 and looks good.

Thus, they never claimed that the output of Office 2k programs would be things 
compatible to the XML standard and anybody saying "when you produce a html with 
word 2000 it produces XML" are obviously no up to date on the facts.
If they continue with "and Obiviously it is Incompatible with every other XML
parser" they are right, since it's *not* XML and nobody ever claimed it was.

You can read more about this on:
http://www.intranetjournal.com/features/o2k_and_xml.shtml and here:
http://www.projectcool.com/developer/xmlz/xmlref/xml-and-office.html


> When Microsoft creates or should I say steels a technology they absolutly 

Microsoft didn't 'steal' the XML technology, *they used it* to do what it 
was created for as you can read on the webpages I mentioned earlier. The 
fact that some people might be dissappointed that they did this instead of
creating apps that generate XML compliant output is not the is not the 
issue. They adapted XML and built their own framework for internal use in 
their own software, they didn't want to, nor said they would, use XML in 
any other way than that.
The fact that people might be dissappointed by this is understandable, yet
doesn't give them any right to distort the facts and claim MS isn't doing
stuff they claimed they would when this is obviously not the case. 
They even mention that not even their own XML parsers will be able to manage
the format used in office.

It's a bit like a Volkswagon Beetle, I believe you can put some model of 
Porsche engine in one. The fact that the Volkswagon Beetle might use a 
Porsche engine does not mean it turns into a Porsche

> make sure that It dosen't work with anything else but M$ .

In this case, you're obviously wrong. As far as I know Yahoo Messenger, 
ICQ and AOL all use their own little format for messagin: they do not use
some RFC compliant (if there is an RFC out there for this :) system, neither
does MS but it gets bashed for it. 

Microsoft never claimed Office 2k would use pure XML and allow users to create
XML standard compliant output, when it does not, users get pissed. 
This, to me, seems like buying a Siemens phone and after doing so saying "Hey!
This isn't a Nokia!" while you could have known so before you bought it.

> Thats what .Net is about.

As far as I know .Net is Microsofts approach to building XML solutions for
problems. The opensource movement has different systems for this, such as 
Cocoon for example, which is what I'm working with at the moment. 

Also, I believe the .Net stuff is actually XML standard compliant, we have
already concluded that you assumption that it is not based on the 'XML' 
office uses is a faulty one, if you can find serious proof .Net is not I'd
love to hear it from you.

> -- 
> ... Where was Stac Electronics when Microsoft invented Doublespace? Where
> were Xerox and Apple when Microsoft invented the GUI?  Where was Apple's
> QuickTime when Microsoft invented Video for Windows?  Where was Spyglass
> Inc.'s Mosaic when Microsoft invented Internet Explorer? Where was Sun
> when Microsoft invented Java?

Please, the fact that a company does things other companies do or buys
technology other companies created is common practice, as you could conclude 
by looking around you at companies such as McDonalds or Burger King (same
stuff) or opening an electronic device and finding out that your Siemens 
phone probably has some Motorola chipset, your sony vcr might have some 
panasonic conducters, etc. 

In fact, all applications that use technology bought from other companies
actually quite nicely mention this in the about box, here is an example 
from Internet Explorer's:

--
Based on NCSA Mosaic. NCSA Mosaic(TM); was developed at the National Center 
for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at 
Urbana-Champaign.

Distributed under a licensing agreement with Spyglass, Inc.

Contains security software licensed from RSA Data Security Inc.

Portions of this software are based in part on the work of the Independent 
JPEG Group.

Contains SOCKS client software licensed from Hummingbird Communications Ltd.

Contains ASN.1 software licensed from Open Systems Solutions, Inc.

Multimedia software components, including Indeo(R); video, Indeo(R) audio, 
and Web Design Effects are provided by Intel Corp.

Unix version contains software licensed from Mainsoft Corporation. 
Copyright (c) 1998-1999 Mainsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. 
Mainsoft is a trademark of Mainsoft Corporation.
--

As you can see, it's all nicely listed and they do not claim to have 
built all this by themselves. Look at some of your credit pages with 
your opensource software, this will also have "Based on" or "Part X
taken from" etc parts in it.

If you're going to complain about Microsoft that's fine with me, but 
please, next time you do so make sure you've got your facts straight.

Menso

-- 
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Anyway, the :// part is an 'emoticon' representing a man with a strip 
of sticky tape across his mouth.   -R. Douglas, alt.sysadmin.recovery
---------------------------------------------------------------------