Tag: Microsoft

What About A Frontier Free Friday?

Can you imagine the flames that would issue forth from Dave Winer if some executive at Microsoft suggested a Frontier Free Friday to protest Winer’s constant abuse of his customers and innocent bystanders? You know, something like:

What if every Friday were a Frontier-free day for the Web? You can use Frontier any day but Friday. To give something back to the Web, if you want to use my browser you would have to use Apache, Vignette, etc. — anything but Userland’s software. One day a week.

The more I read Scripting News the more I become convinced that “The Two Way Web” is every bit as much an empty marketing slogan as anything Microsoft ever comes up with.

The Smart Tag Debate, Part II

As I mentioned over the weekend, Dave Winer and others are freaking out over Microsoft’s Smart Tag feature with Winer writing,

I told a reporter yesterday that I would support Smart Tags if they allowed me to hack my links into Microsoft.Com, instead of the other way around.

Well, gee Dave — Microsoft has an entire web site devoted to helping third party developers create their own Smart Tags. See OfficeSmartTags.Com.

Which of course doesn’t solve the main problem with the feature. I don’t want to have to rely on developers to provide me with their Smart Tags, I want to be able to define my own personal set easily and on the fly.

For example, suppose I’m doing research on a topic such as musket rifles. Why not, for example, allow me to highlight a word or phrase, right click, and then select an “Add Smart Tag” option. Selecting this would bring a dialogue box allowing me to quickly specify where I want this Smart Tag to take me.

I should also be able to create simple generic rules or templates for Smart Tags. I’d probably route most of the Smart Tags to Google searches on the terms, so why not allow me to create a generic Google search rule and then simply create a Smart Tag that would submit the word or phrase to Google with just a couple clicks?

Now that would be interesting.

Winer Spreads Misinformation

As much as I dislike Microsoft’s Smart Tags idea, you’d think that with all the discussion about it that David Winer would be able to avoid making this nonsensical statement about the technology,

I told a reporter yesterday that I would support Smart Tags if they allowed me to hack my links into Microsoft.Com, instead of the other way around. If you think this feature would gain support from independent Web developers, think again. (What a humiliating idea, for the Web, to even be talking about our independence from Microsoft.)

In fact, Winer will have the ability to make his own Smart Tags that will work with IE and could be used so that visitors to Microsoft.Com would be routed to his site via Smart Tags. Microsoft has been very clear that outside developers would be able to develop Smart Tags and that web masters will be able to include a meta tag header field in web pages to disable the feature (though realistically, whose going to download and install third party Smart Tag files?)

Microsoft’s idea still stinks in my mind, but they’ve addressed the concerns of web masters a lot better than the many other companies who came out with similar services that overlayed their own content on top of web pages.

How about a corporate death penalty for developers who make statements that are contradicted by the very articles they link to? Oy.

MS Train Simulator Goes Gold

I hate model trains and do not understand what the attraction is there, but nonetheless am highly anticipating Microsoft Train Simulator which recently went gold and should be on the shelves sometime next month. You have to love a game that Union Pacific was dissing a couple weeks ago as being too realistic (they were apparently afraid of people using the game to figure out how to steal trains which actually turns out to be a serious problem in some parts of the country).

Microsoft Dreamin’

Dave Winer posted part of an e-mail that Charles Fitzgerald, a marketing director with Microsoft, sent him in reply to a query about the security model behind the .Net initiative.

The security system is a key part of protecting privacy of data. We think we have a very good and compartmentalized one that mortals can actually use (the weakest link in any security system is humans). And while theoretical browser holes and such make the headlines, the reality is we know how to run secure systems. We have some minor nits in the past (and hopefully we have learned from them), but the reality is we are probably the most attacked set of sites on the Internet. We get attacked tens of thousands of times a month – no better proof.

Minor nits? As a computer science professor I know puts it, Microsoft’s business is selling security holes disguised as applications.

Microsoft Out to Kill MP3?

A ZDNET article outlines Microsoft’s attempts to kill the MP3 format. Apparently Microsoft is shipping an MP3 encoder with Windows XP but limits the encoding to just 56kb/s. OTOH you can encode music in Microsoft’s proprietary format with all the quality you want, but then the user has to deal with digital rights management bugs.

According to ZDNET, most of the people they talked to expect MP3 to be around for a long time to come but,

Still, experts said Microsoft’s increasingly aggressive efforts to popularize its proprietary audio format–along with legal difficulties facing Napster–could stem MP3’s popularity. They cite Microsoft’s vast resources and the broad reach of its Windows operating system. Microsoft, for example, has been giving away free licenses to other companies to use its audio technology, which now is supported–along with MP3–by major hand-held music players.

Here’s what I think: most digitial rights management schemes are horrible simply from an end user experience. Sure DRM is being built into some handhelds, but even computer savvy reviewers are finding the almost impossible to use and slower than molasses (Sony and Pioneer, for example, both have DRM-enabled players where the time required to encode an MP3 song into a DRM version and then transfer that song onto the player often exceeds the playing length of the song — which just won’t cut it).

If electronics manufacturers ever get together and come up with a single, easy to use, fast, unbreakable DRM system then we’re in trouble, but I just don’t see that happening — these are the same folks, after all, who can’t even agree on standards for the next generation of CD/DVD audio.