99 items tagged “microsoft”
2009
Let’s try to imagine what a Google Silverlight would have been. It would have been a fully open source product from Google, with a very liberal open source license (BSD or Apache). It would have all the technical specifications published openly. They would pledge to have the Silverlight VM interoperate with Javascript and HTML5. And a company like Zoho would have a ton of developers working on Google Silverlight based applications by now—as opposed to having exactly ZERO developers working on Microsoft Silverlight.
— Sridhar Vembu # 7th June 2009, 11:32 am
Imminent Death of the Net Predicted. Well, maybe not, but the way Windows Vista deals with round-robin DNS A records (using a new IPv6 algorithm from RFC3484 backported to IPv4) means that domains that serve up multiple A records to load balance between data centres will find that the IP nearest to the 192.168.* range will get the vast majority of Vista traffic. # 5th March 2009, 9:50 am
2008
Microsoft: Big Security Hole in All IE Versions. Looks like a 0-day that’s being actively exploited. # 16th December 2008, 8:26 pm
Windows Live Adds Support For OpenID. I hope they include the option to log in to the provider using CardSpace, to address phishing. # 27th October 2008, 9:34 pm
The greatest coup Microsoft pulled with Internet Explorer was putting the word “Internet” in its name. It sits there, on the desktop of every new Windows computer, and it says “Internet”. So you click it. [...] What better way to beat a browser with the word “Internet” in its name—a browser that seemingly can’t be beat no matter how hard we try—than the Internet Company itself making a browser?
— Tom Armitage # 3rd September 2008, 10:19 am
Unfortunately, we’re not cool enough to run on your OS yet. We really wish we had a version of Photosynth that worked cross platform, but for now it only runs on Windows.
— Install Photosynth page # 21st August 2008, 10:07 am
Why I can’t put Tibet in my Hotmail address. Apparently it’s because “TIB” is name of a bank in Florida, and Microsoft are trying to prevent phishers from creating e-mail addresses that include the names of financial institutions. # 10th August 2008, 10:41 pm
IE8 Security Part IV: The XSS Filter (via) IE8 will include an XSS filter to identify and neutralise “reflected” XSS attacks (where malicious code in a query string is rendered to the page), turned on by default. Sounds like a good idea to me, and site authors can disable it using Yet Another Custom HTTP header (X-XSS-Protection: 0). # 3rd July 2008, 9:37 am
Bill Gates has pulled off one of the greatest hacks in technology and business history, by turning Microsoft’s success into a force for social responsibility. Imagine imposing a tax on every corporation in the developed world, collecting $100 per white-collar worker per year, and then directing one third of the proceeds to curing AIDS and malaria.
— Anil Dash # 26th June 2008, 5:17 pm
The point of “Open” in OpenID
TechCrunch report that Microsoft are accepting OpenID for their new HealthVault site, but with a catch: you can only use OpenIDs from two providers: Trustbearer (who offer two-factor authentication using a hardware token) and Verisign. "Whatever happened to the Open in OpenID?", asks TechCrunch’s Jason Kincaid.
[... 451 words]Velocity: A Distributed In-Memory Cache from Microsoft. I’d been wondering what Microsoft ecosystem developers were using in the absence of memcached. Is Velocity the first Windows platform implementation of this idea? # 6th June 2008, 9:52 pm
The Machine That Changed the World: The Paperback Computer. This third episode (the second has also been published) is awesome—Sketchpad (the first GUI), NLS, Xerox PARC, the Homebrew Computer Club, Apple and the Macintosh, Lotus 123, Microsoft, and Virtual Reality presented as the “future” of computing. Worth investing an hour to watch it. # 6th June 2008, 8:18 pm
CSS Compatibility and Internet Explorer (via) Official Microsoft guide to which CSS properties are supported by which versions of IE. This is the kind of documentation browser vendors should be providing as a matter of course. # 2nd April 2008, 8:05 pm
IronPython, MS SQL, and PEP 249. How Dino Viehland got Django’s ORM to talk to the .NET database layer. # 19th March 2008, 9:46 am
Django on IronPython. Dino Viehland demonstrated Django running on IronPython and SQL Server at PyCon. # 17th March 2008, 4:05 pm
Windows Live ID Delegated Authentication. Would make life a lot simpler if they just supported OAuth, but at least they include sample code in Python, Ruby and PHP. # 8th March 2008, 3:19 pm
Windows Live Contacts API (via) I didn’t realise Microsoft already have a contacts API for Live (which presumably covers hotmail as well). # 7th March 2008, 5:57 pm
Introducing the Google Contacts Data API. Brilliant! (and about time)—now there’s no excuse for asking your users for their Gmail username and password so you can import contacts from their address book. Yahoo! and Microsoft need to catch up on this one fast. # 6th March 2008, 11:29 pm
Principles and Legality. Eric Meyer notes that language about legality in Microsoft’s recent IE announcement suggests that Opera’s much criticised EU threat may have helped positively influence the result. # 4th March 2008, 7:45 pm
In a recent [ASP.NET] MVC design meeting someone said something like “we’ll need a Repeater control” and a powerful and very technical boss-type said: “We’ve got a repeater control, it’s called a foreach loop.”
— Scott Hanselman # 25th January 2008, 6:59 am
.aspx considered harmful. Jon Udell: “I guess I’m extra-sensitive to the .aspx thing now that I work for Microsoft, because I know that to folks outside the Microsoft ecosystem it screams: We don’t get the web.”—he goes on to mention that smart URL rewriting is thankfully built in to the upcoming ASP.NET MVC framework. # 17th January 2008, 6:01 pm
Schools and colleges should make pupils, teachers and parents aware of the range of free-to-use products (such as office productivity suites) that are available, and how to use them.
— Becta # 12th January 2008, 10:35 am
From my perspective, it is crucial for Linux to have good support for Silverlight because I do not want Linux on the desktop to become a second class citizen ever again. [...] The core of the debate is whether Microsoft will succeed in establishing Silverlight as a RIA platform or not. You believe that without Moonlight they would not have a chance of success, and I believe that they would have regardless of us.
— Miguel de Icaza # 4th January 2008, 12:42 pm
The Dark Side Of The Moon (via) Robert O’Callahan believes that Moonlight is a strategic mistake, because it gives credibility to Microsoft’s entry to a new market which they will use to “keep the competition on a treadmill”; Moonlight can also never be entirely free due to the need for a proprietary codec (VC-1) available only as a binary blob. # 4th January 2008, 12:41 pm
The strain due to the fact that most business desktops are locked into the Microsoft platform, at a time when both the Apple and GNU/Linux alternatives are qualitatively safer, better, and cheaper to operate, will start to become impossible to ignore.
— Tim Bray # 3rd January 2008, 1:08 pm
Everyone applauds when Google goes after Microsoft’s Office monopoly [...] but when they start to go after web non-profits like Wikipedia, you see where the ineluctible logic leads. As Google’s growth slows, as inevitably it will, it will need to consume more and more of the web ecosystem, trading against its former suppliers, rather than distributing attention to them.
— Tim O'Reilly # 1st January 2008, 11:29 am
2007
EU: Microsoft’s Last Stand Against Google’s Acquisition of DoubleClick. Notable for some truly incomprehensible chartjunk from Microsoft. # 27th December 2007, 12:26 pm
The companies that couldn’t beat Microsoft have all died, and evolution has resulted in three very different types of companies that are each immune to Microsoft’s strategies in their own way. Yet all are still vulnerable to the same thing: a better product. For the end users, this is a good position for the industry to be in.
— Ian Hickson # 6th December 2007, 3:43 pm
Conversation with Bill Gates about IE8 and Microsoft Transparency. Molly asks the tough questions about IE8—it looks like there should be a lot of IE8 material at MIX08 next year. # 6th December 2007, 11:47 am
A Little Laptop With Big Ambitions. I hadn’t realised how much competition OLPC faced from Microsoft and Intel’s Classmate. It would be amazing to see a generation grow up understanding that computers are open tools that they can control themselves rather than closed black boxes. # 24th November 2007, 10:47 pm