____/ Rex Ballard on Thursday 03 January 2008 23:18 : \____
> On Jan 3, 10:44 am, Roy Schestowitz <newsgro...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> wrote:
>> First Look: Popfly
>> Popfly for Silverlight: a beta glimpse.
>> ,----[ Quote ]
>> | Linux Left Out
>> | The animations are equal to those of Flash in terms of quality. However,
>> | Popfly does have one flaw, which is no Linux support.
>
> In an article in Redmond Developer, promoting Microsoft's proprietary
> platforms, touts Popfly as "way better than Flash" - but has to
> mention that there is no support for Silverlight (the engine used in
> the Popfly application).
>
> Back in 1997, Microsoft could convince web publishers to use ActiveX
> controls, which could only be run on Internet Explorer, because those
> who warned of security flaws, extremely high security and virus risks
> were ignored. They even provided working examples of how to do
> everything from suck every file out of a computer, to completely
> shredding a hard drive to the point where it can't even be
> reformatted, were ignored. They were even slapped with court ordered
> injunctions to cease and desist publishing this information, because
> it "damaged the Microsoft Brand".
I think you may wish to see fragments of this letter to the DoJ:
_________________________________________________________________
[...]
I am submitting to you this document in accordance with the
U.S. District Court's request for public commentary in the matter of
the proposed settlement in U.S. v. Microsoft, Civil Action
No. 98-1232, and New York v. Microsoft, Civil Action No. 98-1233.
I am currently a computer book author and private computing
consultant, and until very recently, was employed with CMP Media,
Inc. as a Senior Editor for the Planet IT Web site--one of the recent
victims of the "dot-com fallout." I have been a published author,
editor, and correspondent in the field of computing for over 17 years,
several of those years having been spent as one of Computer Shopper
magazine's original contributors. Under the pseudonym "D. F. Scott," I
am the author of 13 books, nine of which are on the subject of
Microsoft Visual Basic, one of that company's most prominent
programming languages. I am currently working on my fourteenth title,
on the subject of the Microsoft Access 2002 database. As an author,
programmer, and private consultant, I am intimately familiar with
Microsoft's products, applications architecture, and corporate
history. I have developed software using Microsoft products for 23
years.
I know Microsoft, and I know my industry. I thoroughly comprehend how
Microsoft's products, agendas, and conduct have shaped and defined
computing as we know it today. I have friends and colleagues who work
at Microsoft, and I have others who work with its current partners,
its former partners, and its direct competitors. Having read Judge
Thomas Penfield Jackson's Findings of Fact in the civil matter as
rendered 5 November 1999, and having shared my opinions at length with
others directly affected by those Findings since that time, I can
state without hesitation that there is nothing in those Findings to
which I take exception, or about which I personally can find any
reason to disagree. I call your attention to the fact that these
Findings of Fact were given deference by the Court of Appeals, despite
that certain elements were called into question, and despite the
disqualification of the judge. The Appeals Court's thorough study of
the Findings of Fact, as well as the other evidence in the case before
the District Court, uphold a quintessential truth whose importance
transcends any scrutiny of judicial misconduct: Microsoft's conduct as
a corporation and a manufacturer of computing products, is predicated
upon an internal policy of deception, which includes deceiving
customers, deceiving competitors, deceiving partners, deceiving its
own vendors, and at some level, deceiving its own staff.
[....]
The part of this story that Judge Jackson didn't touch on, and that
was not introduced as evidence, concerns Microsoft's efforts during
1996-1999 to promote a cloudy but potentially promising future system
called ActiveX as an alternative to Java for developers, and an
alternative to Netscape for Windows users. Just exactly what ActiveX
was, is, or was supposed to be, isn't entirely clear. I understand
this fact better than most people alive. In 1996 and `97, I wrote a
book on ActiveX technology for developers, with the full cooperation
of a major worldwide publisher. For the better part of two years, I
wrote seven complete drafts of this book, overhauling the content each
time in order to keep up with Microsoft's mind-boggling changes in its
definition of the product/concept/marketing scheme.
In an early document for developers such as myself, dated 18 June
1996, Microsoft defined ActiveX in this way: ActiveX is a set of open
technologies that bring the power of the personal computer to the
ubiquitous connectivity of the Internet. ActiveX takes the Internet
beyond static text and picture documents to provide users with a new
generation of more active, exciting, and useful experiences. For
intranet developers (intranets are private Web sites published on
internal, corporate networks), ActiveX provides core functionality for
building robust enterprise-wide applications that offer enhanced
functionality and productivity beyond basic HTML document sharing.
So in June, at least, ActiveX was a multimedia standard for Web
sites. The very next month, Microsoft announced it was turning over
stewardship of ActiveX to an independent body. In its press release,
Microsoft quoted an independent industry analyst as stating the
following: COM and DCOM - the foundation for ActiveX - constitute the
most widely used object framework, but as technologies owned and
controlled exclusively by Microsoft, they were not vendor-independent
solutions. In the hands of a neutral standards body, ActiveX can
become a vendor-independent solution, enabling interoperability while
allowing both developers and customers to take full advantage of their
existing investments in OLE and DCOM technologies.
"COM and DCOM" are, respectively, the Component Object Model and the
Distributed Component Object Model. These are legitimate architectures
which, in my view, represent some of the best ideas Microsoft has ever
put forward. COM enabled source code from diverse and varied
applications and program components to address one another
dynamically, using a common framework and an amendable object
language. This way, old programs could conceivably determine the
capabilities of newer programs when they shared the same system, under
a multitasking framework such as Windows 95. DCOM extended these
principles to program components over a network, so server-based
components could communicate with client-based components and provide
them with requested resources. These were delicately intricate
systems, but they were constructed with the best of intentions, and
their creators deserve respect.
But it was apparently never the intention of Microsoft's executives to
exploit the full potential of COM and DCOM. Instead, they deployed
ActiveX as a marketing tool to befuddle the market as to Microsoft's
intentions, and to repeat the company's successful strategy against
DRI and Novell, this time to kick Netscape and Sun Microsystems into
the death spiral.
Developers such as myself were given a myriad of mixed and often
self-contradictory messages. In the summer of 1996, we were told that
ActiveX was a system that would be deployed on Microsoft's Internet
Explorer Web browser, to enable online applications from Windows
servers to utilize controls--buttons, menus, lists, and common "user
interface" elements--whose programs were deployed on the client side,
thus freeing bandwidth and relieving much of the burden on the
server. This was--and still is--a good idea. We were told that ActiveX
controls would make use of a Windows feature called Object Linking and
Embedding (OLE, pronounced "olay") to enable their code to be called
up on the server side by container programs on the client side--again,
a good idea. This utilization of resources would free the controls
programs from the constraints of the client-side architecture called
Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC)--the architecture upon which
Microsoft's Office applications are based. (Microsoft's developers are
indeed capable of creating good ideas, and executing good plans based
on them.) In the fall of 1996, the FUD began. Microsoft offered
developers a free, limited edition of its Visual Basic development
environment, geared exclusively toward the creation of ActiveX
controls. These controls, we were told, leveraged the power of MFC to
make them more fully integrated with Windows. This went against the
company's original design strategy, for reasons we couldn't yet
fathom.
While the newly-formed "ActiveX Working Group," assigned stewardship
of the ActiveX standard, did establish a Web site for a brief period,
the group only held a few token meetings, and even then with a subset
of its membership. Many members listed on the Web site were surprised
to find they were members at all. As soon as January of 1997, the
Working Group had become a non-entity.
Later that same month, Microsoft announced its intention to deploy a
network communications system then called Microsoft Transaction Server
(MTS), and to market that system under the ActiveX collective
umbrella. MTS would be the hub of a system that processed DCOM
transactions over networks and over the Internet, between Microsoft
servers and client systems that were running ActiveX controls. What
confused us at first was the fact that DCOM was not OLE, so the
ActiveX controls we had now appeared not to be the ActiveX controls we
were supposed to build for later. Furthermore, the new controls--to be
created using that free edition of Visual Basic--could only operate
within the confines of a single, designated container program--which,
not coincidentally, was part of Internet Explorer 3.0. So it appeared
that the capability of Netscape Navigator to be adaptable, through a
third-party product, to display and use ActiveX controls, was due for
extinction.
By the spring of 1997, Microsoft had announced the replacement of its
core database transaction protocol with something called ActiveX Data
Objects (ADO). This protocol would be used by Microsoft Office
applications, and would be licensed for free to developers making
their own programs for data transactions. For ADO to be deployed in a
network environment, it appeared, the server would need to run MTS. So
if everyday applications wanted to take advantage of Web deployment
capabilities, Netscape was appearing to be less and less of an
option. ADO objects were not controls--what's more, they weren't COM
objects or DCOM objects either. So the umbrella seemed to be reaching
further. Almost every Windows protocol had something to do with
ActiveX--and thus, by association, something to do with future
deployment over the Internet.
[...]
This fuzziness extends to the present moment. As I write, the entire
ActiveX marketing scenario is in the final stages of being disbanded,
in favor of a program architecture that replaces it entirely: the .NET
(pronounced "dot-net") architecture. The basic principle of .NET is
that Windows may be enhanced to include a just-in-time compiler (JIT)
whose job is to execute programs in the Windows environment. The role
of the JIT is analogous to that of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM),
although Microsoft's implementation will have no cross-platform
capabilities. Conceivably, as developers are compelled to switch their
program architectures from the now-obsolete COM to the new .NET, the
architectural model of the Windows application may be redrawn in such
a way that "apps" become satellites of a sort--small, shared
components designed to interoperate and, in so doing, produce a
collective, de facto application on behalf of the user. In such an
architectural model, middleware by one definition would not exist. The
reason is because the functionality of a collective .NET application
would not have to be "exposed" like the opening of a telephone
directory--and as the PFJ expects--but is instead derived as a result
of an independent assessment by Windows of the collective capabilities
of the .NET component programs. Imagine telephones that could
publicize their own phone numbers, and you get a glimpse of the idea.
[...]
"Get me into that," Bill Gates is quoted as saying, "and goddam, we'll
make so much money!" The free flow of transportation was engineered by
geniuses--Henry Ford, John A. Roebling, Norman Bel Geddes--and
championed by presidents--Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight
Eisenhower. The free flow of ideas is one of the basic principles
upheld by the United States Constitution. Up to now, all successful
freedom has been constructed and established on solid principles. Are
we truly prepared to draw up a statement that speaks for all of us as
a people and a nation, that serves as a catalyst for the surrender of
the free flow of information not to an institution defined by
principles, but a corporation defined by deception?
We are a smarter people than that. We know, for a fact, that all
information, all knowledge, all wisdom is truly free, and that all
people are entitled to fair and equal access. This principle will be
demonstrated, clearly and unequivocally, either in the relative peace
of today or in the turmoil of the future. You may spare the people a
great ordeal now, against a powerful yet unprincipled force, by
putting a stop to the death spiral. The way you do this is the way you
deal with a wayward adolescent: Stop making deals. Take away its
power. Spell out the law. And don't get kicked in yourself.
Yours sincerely,
Scott M. Fulton, III
Senior Partner, Ingenus
--
~~ Best of wishes
Roy S. Schestowitz | Wintendo O/S gets malware on its tail
http://Schestowitz.com | GNU/Linux | PGP-Key: 0x74572E8E
Mem: 515500k total, 443932k used, 71568k free, 8348k buffers
http://iuron.com - next generation of search paradigms
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