Doubt's Log

Dare responds to Jon Udell's replace and defend complaint. The basic gist is that  one shouldn't try to cram existing standards as solutions to new problems when its not a good match. You either end up with something clunky or you "embrace and extend".

Cnet reports that Apple has seen the light with regards to security downlevel.

Marc Canter makes an observation about how Microsoft will defend against accusations of being closed:

Don is the main guy behind Microsoft's 'open' approach to inter-connecting distributed apps and services in the future. It's code-named Indigo.  It has security and support for ALL legacy kind of systems baked in, which means (and I'm sure this is not a mistake) support for ALL open standards - as well.

So in the future - if Microsoft is attacked on their 'closed' approach to ANYTHING, they'll be able to point to the MAJOR technology effort and approach and say: "Hey, we're open - too!"  Now the only question is "will Indigo and Don's team suceed?' and make it out there into the real world.

With Indigo being one of the pillars of Longhorn, and the focal point of the company's multi year bet and major strategy peice around Web Services, I can't imagine it not making it out there into the real world.

Joe Wilcox blogs about the arguements for and against Integration in Longhorn. Here is a choice quote:

All of these new integrated scenarios share one thing in common: They are, at the least, partly proprietary or tied to Windows. They also could discourage developer involvement in other platforms. I want to be clear: That discouragement isn’t necessarily through any onerous means. Based on what Microsoft showed off this week, the company has started down the path to delivering excellent tools that would let developers more easily create applications. Microsoft shouldn’t be faulted for outflanking its competitors with better tools.

That said, the tools also leverage off Microsoft’s existing Windows monopoly. Competitors don’t share that advantage and may want to plan a response now. Microsoft disclosed enough information this week so that competitors would have plenty of opportunity to respond. After all, Longhorn is as much as three years from release.

Raymond Chen  points out the Longhorn analog clock compromise. I love the way he blogs the rational behind what seems to be random design choices. I hope that at somepoint I become knowledeable enough to do the same for Windows networking, or find someone who is and get them to blog.

Just noticed a MSDN article detailing many of the security related changes going on for Windows XP SP2.

Once a year, Microsoft gets together all of it's employees heads out to a local stadium and holds a company meeting. It's a good time to see just how big Microsoft is, and to hear our top execs outline the current challenges and strategy. Much like a conference keynote, it's full of high level visions and demos of recent technology, but with a good dose of pep rally mixed in. As they talk about different buissness, that group (sitting together) cheer. During my first company meeting I worked in a technology that was pretty high visibility from the execs, and spent the meeting counting how many times they mentioned it. Also like conference keynotes, we have the humor videos that are seen in many Microsoft events. The two that were memorable this year was the "Behind the Technology" video that I've been hearing about from the PDC blogs, and a Matrix one.

Something strange this year was how late the company meeting was into the year. This was reflected in how cold we all were in the sunless stadium. We were all hudled in blankets in the colors from the windows flag logo. Instead of the usually dark earthy tones punctuated by white t-shirts filling around the islands of color cordinated groups, we had a four bright colors layered  like a picture that was pixeled and random only because you had zoomed in too far. The coffee flowed freely and many people were hoping up to get thier fifth or sixth refills.

The coldness also supressed one of my favorite company meeting activities, paper airplane contests. There is always one throw-away peice of paper in the box lunches that can be made into a paper airplane and thrown from the top rows of the stadium. The ultimate goal is to design a paper airplane that can actually reach the stage. I have yet over the past few years see a plane that has actually made, but there has been a couple that have gotten pretty far.

Following the company meeting a tech fair. There I got a chance to ride a segway. It was a fundimental shift in the way I used balance, and I think I did worse then most on it. After getting off, standing became difficult as my body tried to shift back to a normal balance mode. All and all an intresting device.

JWZ points out Murdoch's attempt to sue himself.

Joel on Software refutes the Information Week article that skewers Microsoft regarding Interop with Linux. Apparently you can order a free copy of SFU 3.0 (Services for Unix) or try it out via TS (?). There is also a beta version of SFU 3.5 available over on the main SFU website. One of the nicest features of SFU is the Interix subsystem that microsoft bought a couple years ago and continues improving. Check out this page of ports for SFU 3.5 beta.

Philip Rieck gives a better explination of Monad is. Here it is as he posts it:

get/process | sort "handles"  | out/xml

PDC go-er Tom Mertens talks about System.Search. One of the technologies that needs to be well used and implemented to make your PC as easy to search as the web. You can have a look at the System.Search APIs on Longhorn MSDN.

Jason Nadal has found one of the most exciting thing about Longhorn that nobody knows about. Monad.

CNet reports today on three locally exploitable MacOS 10.2 and below vulns found by @Stake. Apparently they have fixed them on Pather (MacOS 10.3).

You can watch the least flashy chunk of monday's PDC's keynote code demos on MSDN TV's Lap Around Longhorn. This contains some Avalon, Indigo and WinFS code written in XAML/C#.

According to the Web Standards Project, Apple, like Microsoft, appears to be going the OS only route with thier latest web browser release of Safari in Panther. 

 After a year or two, Microsoft Research has released a research paper on Xen, a .Net based programming language design to work with well with XML. Here is an simple example of what changes in the language:

public class card {
    sequence{
      string  name;
      string  title;
      string  email;
      string? phone;
      logo?   logo;
    };
  }

  public class logo {
    attribute string url;
  }

  public class Test {

      static void Main() {
        card c = <card>
                   <name>John Doe</name>
                   <title>CEO, Widget Inc.</title>
                   <email>john.doe@widget.com</email>
                   <phone>(202) 456-1414</phone>
                   <logo url="widget.gif"/>
                 </card>;
        c.*.{ Console.WriteLine(it); };
      }
  }
 

Netcraft reports about a windows 2000 IIS 5 box with a 2 year uptime.

Joe Wilcox has posted a bunch on what the problem is with unearned revenue on Microsoft recently earnings report.

Friday tends to be a good day for techinical talks at Microsoft. Today I went to two talks. The first was a dry run for a PDC talk "Visual Studio Whidbey: Advanced Debugging Techniques". Some pretty neat stuff there. The second was the technical details to a smart solution to a networking problem I've been living with for a while. The fact that the feature won't hit the world until Longhorn is sorta sad. It's days like this that I wish Microsoft had a much tighter ship schedule for it's operating systems.

This brings up a question for all three blog engine bots currently reading my site, What networking problems do you have that we can work on fixing?

Intresting points:

• MSN had it's first profitable quarter, with advertising revenues up 50%.
• Biggest P&L group growth was Mobile and Embedded Device
• Microsoft has $51 billion in cash, Cash + Investments = $65 billion
• Unearned revenue is down to $8.2 billion, which is down more then what we expected. Some of that has to do with security. Security hits the bottom line (and hence the stock price).

Today the windows networking group had it's quarterly meeting. Something in an email that I missed a month ago was the fact that appletalk inventor Gursharan Sidhu has joined networking as a Architect.

Joel points out that Amazon now searches the full text of books. It's always really cool when a company suddenly blows your expectation of what they can do. "Everyone" does community, "everyone" does reviews, "everyone" does recommendations. Nobody does full text searching of the books they sell.