Repost: Some new articles :)
Jun 4, 2008 19:47:23 GMT
Post by CharlieChomper on Jun 4, 2008 19:47:23 GMT
Disclaimer: As the title suggests, this is a reposting of an earlier thread. The information is still relevant as is the article and was important enough to where I've chosen to repost it here.
I decided to title this post differently as I have other additions I wanted to make to the "More Articles" series (it would be the "final" thread for it and doesn't have as many articles as previous editions of it) and these articles are as "recent" as today and this past week.
After reviewing the overall length of this post, alone, I think I'll leave it at the Microsoft articles and leave the others to another post later on.
That said, the first article involved an upcoming "service" from Microsoft (currently, it's invitation-only to mostly developers, but eventually they hope to offer it to everyone). Basically, it functions as a type of "online storage" in the sense that any data, files, or "feeds" (the most common example would be RSS) that a user might have would be collected into that user's "mesh" and then shared (the user can supposedly choose which users it might want to share with or choose which users they don't want to share things with) and accessed from anywhere, with users who view another user's "mesh" being able to "tag" or comment on it and possibly share it with others. One example of how it might work would be if a user took a photo with a cell phone (which, with the current specs, would like any device which could use this, have to be running some form of Windows--with a cell phone, that would likely be the aptly-named WinCe), that photo would then possibly be uploaded to that person's "mesh" which in turn could be viewed by anyone (depending on how things are set up) and shared, just as a directory on someone's computer potentially could be--which brings me to one of the issues that has been commonly discussed with regards to this (aside from the current lack of definite information and current confusion and sense of more questions than there appears to sometimes be answers for) and that's privacy concerns as well as security. There was one comment (made sarcastically) which sums up most people's current perceptions of things: "And since it's run by Microsoft, you know you can trust it. ...".
The next article involves some recent comments made by Steve Ballmer (for those who don't know who he is, he's the unofficial number two guy at Microsoft behind Bill Gates, and currently is in charge of running the company and has done so for a number of years now as well as having been with the company since the early days of just Microsoft's existence. To put it very mildly, Ballmer remains a very controversial figure in many respects, but I won't get into any of that here) during a recent conference. Among the "highlights" were a comment he made referring to Vista as "A work in progress" as well as another round of the uncertainty as to when "Windows 7" would officially be released (the new date appears to be 2010).
This article actually comes from a site that's devoted to tech-related legal matters. To provide a bit of "back story" into the situation with this article, there was a long-standing "battle" taking place between Microsoft's own OOXML versus the open source, ODF (Open Document Format), over which would become the new "standard" for documents and with Microsoft vowing not to offer support for ODF if it won (and conversely, with OOXML, requiring competitors or open source projects (which are mainly operated on a non-profit basis with some refusing to even consider accepting donations) to either license the technology from Microsoft in order to make use of it or force them to resort to other means).
Early on, it seemed that ODF would be the one likely to prevail, however, between Microsoft's heavily promoting OOXML (despite all the findings and news reports involving problems with compatibility and especially with security, as well as not being terribly popular amongst developers because of how it was designed and being overly-complicated when it shouldn't have been as well as inflexible) and making promises to some of the countries who were eligible to vote to the W3C's (who had previously heavily pledged their support for ODF) sudden announcement and recanting their support in favor of a non-existent file format which they wanted to develop themselves (which they later on announced they were not going to do so--and prior to the current turmoil that's taking place within the organization at the moment) and then leaning on the creators of ODF to look into supporting or developing something else entirely and the turmoil that situation created and overall lack of support and anger over the split/rift it created, ODF found itself harmed by it and having a more difficult time keeping pace against OOXML.
As recently as a few weeks ago, amidst some questions into the voting process in place and whether or not there was anything improperly handled, Norway (which was one of the key votes on the issue) voted to accept OOXML (which, based upon another article published a few days ago, appeared to initially voted against the measure until a politician involved with standards having nothing to do with the issue became involved and swayed the committee into going with Microsoft's standard). Among the big "selling points" from Microsoft over OOXML was over claims it would be "inter-operable" regardless of what program or operating system a person was using to read or write something using it (which is a huge issue for the company right now, given the recent problems they've had with the EU) and would be "necessary" to make use of with Microsoft's own products.
However, that has proven not to be the case and there have been other problems that have arisen with it as well. Microsoft's own Office 2007 (which they claimed would fully support it) also appears to suffer from no fewer than 122,000 errors with that particular format, which is a huge number for any format but much worse when you factor in that Microsoft, themselves, developed both the format and (obviously) Office 2007.
Also, for anyone "dying" to install Service Pack 3 for XP, it appears that it's just been released into the manufacturing and updates cycle. However, it won't become available to users to download until sometime this summer. At the present time, it's limited to subscribed developers only. Among some of the things which were addressed were mainly security issues, an additional network protocol, the ability to turn off routers which "drop packets" or remain "silent", IE7 (which users will no longer have a choice as to whether or not they want it or would prefer to remain with IE6), and possibly the infamous WGA "patch" (which Microsoft used to "check" whether or not even legal copies of Windows were actually legitimate or not as well as to verify serial codes). I'm still reading through the release notes, but if I see anything else (other than the numerous security fixes...), I'll edit this thread accordingly.
For the final article related to just Microsoft, this is an update of sorts to the lawsuit involving Vista and its numerous problems. It appears that the company has lost its appeal to overturn an earlier ruling allowing the lawsuit in the US to proceed against them. It also likely means that we'll be seeing more memos, letters, emails, etc. regarding this issue coming out from the company and the different vendors (both those who build systems to sell as well as components manufacturers) regarding Vista as things proceed.
Related to this, is a timeline of sorts of a few key internal emails within Microsoft (some of which involve Vista as well as commentaries from Microsoft executives regarding the company). Out of just the Vista emails, this is literally a drop in the proverbial bucket as there were literally so many internal emails from just within Microsoft since this lawsuit was brought about (there have since been many more emails released from Dell and nVidia among other vendors related to Vista between Microsoft and them) and, as mentioned above, it appears likely that more emails will likewise be surfacing as well.
I decided to title this post differently as I have other additions I wanted to make to the "More Articles" series (it would be the "final" thread for it and doesn't have as many articles as previous editions of it) and these articles are as "recent" as today and this past week.
After reviewing the overall length of this post, alone, I think I'll leave it at the Microsoft articles and leave the others to another post later on.That said, the first article involved an upcoming "service" from Microsoft (currently, it's invitation-only to mostly developers, but eventually they hope to offer it to everyone). Basically, it functions as a type of "online storage" in the sense that any data, files, or "feeds" (the most common example would be RSS) that a user might have would be collected into that user's "mesh" and then shared (the user can supposedly choose which users it might want to share with or choose which users they don't want to share things with) and accessed from anywhere, with users who view another user's "mesh" being able to "tag" or comment on it and possibly share it with others. One example of how it might work would be if a user took a photo with a cell phone (which, with the current specs, would like any device which could use this, have to be running some form of Windows--with a cell phone, that would likely be the aptly-named WinCe), that photo would then possibly be uploaded to that person's "mesh" which in turn could be viewed by anyone (depending on how things are set up) and shared, just as a directory on someone's computer potentially could be--which brings me to one of the issues that has been commonly discussed with regards to this (aside from the current lack of definite information and current confusion and sense of more questions than there appears to sometimes be answers for) and that's privacy concerns as well as security. There was one comment (made sarcastically) which sums up most people's current perceptions of things: "And since it's run by Microsoft, you know you can trust it. ...".
The next article involves some recent comments made by Steve Ballmer (for those who don't know who he is, he's the unofficial number two guy at Microsoft behind Bill Gates, and currently is in charge of running the company and has done so for a number of years now as well as having been with the company since the early days of just Microsoft's existence. To put it very mildly, Ballmer remains a very controversial figure in many respects, but I won't get into any of that here) during a recent conference. Among the "highlights" were a comment he made referring to Vista as "A work in progress" as well as another round of the uncertainty as to when "Windows 7" would officially be released (the new date appears to be 2010).
This article actually comes from a site that's devoted to tech-related legal matters. To provide a bit of "back story" into the situation with this article, there was a long-standing "battle" taking place between Microsoft's own OOXML versus the open source, ODF (Open Document Format), over which would become the new "standard" for documents and with Microsoft vowing not to offer support for ODF if it won (and conversely, with OOXML, requiring competitors or open source projects (which are mainly operated on a non-profit basis with some refusing to even consider accepting donations) to either license the technology from Microsoft in order to make use of it or force them to resort to other means).
Early on, it seemed that ODF would be the one likely to prevail, however, between Microsoft's heavily promoting OOXML (despite all the findings and news reports involving problems with compatibility and especially with security, as well as not being terribly popular amongst developers because of how it was designed and being overly-complicated when it shouldn't have been as well as inflexible) and making promises to some of the countries who were eligible to vote to the W3C's (who had previously heavily pledged their support for ODF) sudden announcement and recanting their support in favor of a non-existent file format which they wanted to develop themselves (which they later on announced they were not going to do so--and prior to the current turmoil that's taking place within the organization at the moment) and then leaning on the creators of ODF to look into supporting or developing something else entirely and the turmoil that situation created and overall lack of support and anger over the split/rift it created, ODF found itself harmed by it and having a more difficult time keeping pace against OOXML.
As recently as a few weeks ago, amidst some questions into the voting process in place and whether or not there was anything improperly handled, Norway (which was one of the key votes on the issue) voted to accept OOXML (which, based upon another article published a few days ago, appeared to initially voted against the measure until a politician involved with standards having nothing to do with the issue became involved and swayed the committee into going with Microsoft's standard). Among the big "selling points" from Microsoft over OOXML was over claims it would be "inter-operable" regardless of what program or operating system a person was using to read or write something using it (which is a huge issue for the company right now, given the recent problems they've had with the EU) and would be "necessary" to make use of with Microsoft's own products.
However, that has proven not to be the case and there have been other problems that have arisen with it as well. Microsoft's own Office 2007 (which they claimed would fully support it) also appears to suffer from no fewer than 122,000 errors with that particular format, which is a huge number for any format but much worse when you factor in that Microsoft, themselves, developed both the format and (obviously) Office 2007.
Also, for anyone "dying" to install Service Pack 3 for XP, it appears that it's just been released into the manufacturing and updates cycle. However, it won't become available to users to download until sometime this summer. At the present time, it's limited to subscribed developers only. Among some of the things which were addressed were mainly security issues, an additional network protocol, the ability to turn off routers which "drop packets" or remain "silent", IE7 (which users will no longer have a choice as to whether or not they want it or would prefer to remain with IE6), and possibly the infamous WGA "patch" (which Microsoft used to "check" whether or not even legal copies of Windows were actually legitimate or not as well as to verify serial codes). I'm still reading through the release notes, but if I see anything else (other than the numerous security fixes...), I'll edit this thread accordingly.
For the final article related to just Microsoft, this is an update of sorts to the lawsuit involving Vista and its numerous problems. It appears that the company has lost its appeal to overturn an earlier ruling allowing the lawsuit in the US to proceed against them. It also likely means that we'll be seeing more memos, letters, emails, etc. regarding this issue coming out from the company and the different vendors (both those who build systems to sell as well as components manufacturers) regarding Vista as things proceed.
Related to this, is a timeline of sorts of a few key internal emails within Microsoft (some of which involve Vista as well as commentaries from Microsoft executives regarding the company). Out of just the Vista emails, this is literally a drop in the proverbial bucket as there were literally so many internal emails from just within Microsoft since this lawsuit was brought about (there have since been many more emails released from Dell and nVidia among other vendors related to Vista between Microsoft and them) and, as mentioned above, it appears likely that more emails will likewise be surfacing as well.
