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Microsoft Documentation Declared Unfit For US Consumption
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Fri Sep 26, 2008 03:38 PM
from the time-to-see-the-self-documenting-code dept.
from the time-to-see-the-self-documenting-code dept.
anomalous cohort writes "Washington DC judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly announced during the ongoing Microsoft antitrust hearings that their documentation is unfit for US consumption. This is relevant in an antitrust hearing as poor documentation on how to inter-operate with Microsoft's products is seen as an unfair barrier to entry for companies who compete with Microsoft. Others see this as yet another example of their crumbling hegemony or indolence as their empire burns."
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This is good. (Score:5, Funny)
Acknowledgment is the first step to recovery.
Re:This is good. (Score:4, Informative)
Get a grip, hippo, they dont mean your kb.ms thingie. They mean the INTEROPERABILITY docs, which you will NEVER see in a website such as your msdn.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The best non-FOSS documentation I have used lately is Oracles.
Example for the 10G starting directory [oracle.com]
Aside from the actual WORKING search functionality (which gives you a list in of "books" in which the search term occured with numbers of hits first, so that you can go to the relevant "book" when the search term is something ambiguous like "format" instead a long list of maybe or maybe not relevant links).
I never found the right thing on MSDN unless I stumble upon it via a Google search, Oracle usually
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, good one. Another good database example is PostgreSQL. Apache and its various modules also have excellent docs.
Like you said, the searchability of MSDN leaves a lot to be desired. It's complete, but hard to find anything.
Fair and balanced (Score:5, Funny)
"...Others see this as yet another example of their crumbling hegemony or indolence as their empire burns."
In this day and age of increasingly biased reporting, it is nice to see that Slashdot continues to present an objective, fair, and balanced approach to covering the issues.
Scuttlemonkey could work wonders for the Middle-East peace process!
Re:Fair and balanced (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Fair and balanced (Score:4, Insightful)
I tend to think of /. as Taco's blog instead of a trusted IT news source. That explains just about everything.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Slashdot has always been biased towards Linux. As far as I know, they've never even pretended to be a fair and balanced source of IT news. Have you noticed the borg icon that's used for MS stories?
/. is one hell of a lot more fair and balanced than pretty much anything out of M$ and their "partners" (gack) web sites. Paid marketers are the worst.
Slashdot is a software nerd website. That means closed source software, i.e. software that cannot be as easily modified, analyzed and understood, is inherently at
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Are you calling Washington DC judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly a linux hacker ?
Re:Fair and balanced (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashdot is about as unbiased and balanced as Fox News.
Microsoft has been responsible for some really enormous fuckups and wrongs in the world of computers. They have some utterly nasty business practices that really are anti-competitive. They did, at one point, have a virtual monopoly, though that is crumbling naturally due to market forces, as more and more people in the market discover just how shitty Vista is, and how good Linux and OS/X are in comparison. That's only part of their monopoly (the other part being their office products, and that will come in time).
The thing being... for all their evils and wrongs, there's been a few good things that have come from them. And while I freely admit to being an idealist, I do like to think that the evil profit-mongering is limited to the upper echelons of the company only, and that at the lower ranks, you find people who really are trying to make the best product they can for computer users.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
>for all their evils and wrongs, there's
>been a few good things that have come from them (Microsoft).
I've been keeping an eye on the shenanigans that Microsoft has been pulling for about 12 years. I would say I'm pretty current on their bad behavior, but to be honest, can you (or anyone for that matter) give me some example of "good things" to come out of Microsoft that were
a) Not hostile to Open Source Licenses, with GPL being the primary victim.
b) Didn't have strings attached, aka, can only be used
Minesweeper (Score:3, Funny)
Minesweeper. The best thing they ever did.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
No, only the Common Language Infrastructure and C# have been submitted for standarisation. The rest of it remains proprietary, including the Framework Class Library, which makes .Net actually usable.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
+5 Insightful, LOL! That's the most funny comment moderation I've seen today.
Re:Fair and balanced (Score:5, Insightful)
Or maybe, just maybe, Slashdot is fair and balanced, and Microsoft really is a nest of black-hearted villains.
"Fair and balanced" is probably never going to mean the same thing to two different people, especially your husband/wife/SO/etc.
I am not a big fan of Microsoft, all of their products had crippling bugs or limitations in them when I first started exploring there (Applesoft BASIC, PC DOS 2.0, etc.). I took a look at Microsoft Windows and OS/2 when they were first released and was unimpressed.
However, I have been impressed with Unix and its descendents since I first encountered them in college. The big Blue and Green books documenting Version 7 Unix were useful for everything Unixy at the time and I've always like the multiuser/multiprocessing aspect of the system. System V/R2 was a disaster on the order of Microsoft Windows XP (so I've read, I only used Microsoft Windows XP/SP2 for about half a year and it was only less stable than System V/R2 with patches), but it was released two decades earlier and since has all the problems worked out.
The Unix model, as first designed by Ken Thompson and Dennis Richie has withstood the test of time as no other software project ever has. They killed the proprietary O/S model on minis and mainframes. They killed the idea of non-portable OSes, though Microsoft has resurrected that idea. They so excited the minds and hearts of programmers that dozens of reimplemented spinoffs were done ... and survive to this day.
On the other hand, Billg spent more on his two recent TV ads for an O/S that few want to buy than Thompson and Richie made in their lifetimes. Sigh.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
It's search engine spamming for the submitter (Score:3, Informative)
It's not just biased reporting, it's very bad editing both by the submitter and by Slashdot.
This whole story is just link spamming by the submitter. I did think that if the submitter was linking to two of their own websites, they might at least link to something related to the text of the link they provided in the story. In other words, it might have been an "example" of "crumbling hegemony or indolence as [the Microsoft] empire burns".
The first linked blog entry written by some guy called 'Glenn'. Th
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
the Middle-East peace process
Middle-East WHAT?!
I think he meant the Middle-East piece process.
It's a step... (Score:4, Funny)
Documentation unfit. Awesome.
Now what about the software?
Man... (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
There is a difference between people flat out not being able to understand something and wasting their time because you couldn't be fucked to document things as you should and there is absolutely no reason for a com
All code is self-documenting... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:All code is self-documenting... (Score:5, Insightful)
For coders, at least.
If that would only be true. Documentation usually lists _intended_ behavior, not actual behavior. When code is self-documenting it is documenting the actual behavior, or at least, partially.
Parent
indolence (Score:2)
Oblig. Lucas reference (Score:2, Funny)
Others see this as yet another example of their crumbling hegemony or indolence as their empire burns.
One only knows how to reach complete happiness in computer software when they have felt the power of the source. Use the source Steve! ...gg..GAHH!! *dodges chair*
Sure (Score:5, Insightful)
And still others realize their documentation is probably no crappier than anyone else's.
Re:Sure (Score:5, Insightful)
Programmers are always completely oblivious as to what will not be so obvious to someone else or themselves several months down the line. At the time you;re writing it, it's quite clear that the routine will do exactly what you want it to do at that moment.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, they do.. However, most have not explicitly been told by a Judge to write the documentation so that it is fit for purpose, on pain of some very nasty sanctions due to anti-trust litigation.
Being blase about that really isn't a very good tactic, and either reeks of rank stupidity, or sheer insolence. And I don't happen to believe for a moment that Microsoft, as an entity, is stupid.
Bad summary (Score:5, Informative)
Those linked blogs say nothing about "yet another example of [Microsoft's] crumbling hegemony or indolence as their empire burns."
Irony (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a certain irony that the legal system decides someone else has poor documentation. The documentation of the law requires a graduate degree to use.
I'm no fan of Microsoft, but their documentation is ironclad compared to the law. Witness this case, it is only after the fact that it becomes vaguely clear that having poor documentation is wrong (even for a monopoly).
Re:Irony (Score:4, Interesting)
IANAL, because I have two more semesters of law school to complete. Before that, I was a computer science major.
Your mistake is that you are comparing legal code to software documentation. However, the more apt comparison is to compare legal code to software source code, at which point your analogy fails. While they aren't widely advertised, there are plenty of secondary sources (such as legal encyclopedias) out there that make law accessible to a layman.
Parent
In the land of the blind... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:In the land of the blind... (Score:5, Insightful)
As the article says, Microsoft documents the things they want you to know very well (more software for Windows == good), so it's not like they have a corporate culture of crap documentation. What they don't do is document things they don't want you to know, like formats and protocols, because that would allow you to use non-Microsoft software somewhere (== bad).
Since their documentation is obviously biased, they're in trouble again.
Parent
3 cheers for Colleen Kollar-Kotelly (Score:2)
Irony (Score:2)
Not only is it unfit for US consumption, it's likely unfit for M$ consumption and is the official documentation that M$ developers have to use to interoperate with other M$ products.
badarticletitle? (Score:3, Insightful)
Did Judge Kollar-Kotelly actually utter the phrase "unfit for US consumption"? I think not. After TFA and TFALRFTOA (= Linked, Recursively, from the Original Article), all I see is that she scolded Microsoft for claiming that they had provided the documentation -- a condition of the Consent Decree -- and urged them to finish the job.
What would that phrase mean anyway? I don't "consume" documentation, do you? I use it as a tool in the development process, not a repast. And does "US consumption" imply that the documentation is fit for European consumption? Asian consumption? This article title is not worth of Ars or Slashdot, IMO.
Contempt Charges? (Score:5, Insightful)
Five years to produce a document? Is it normal to allow a company such lattitude in the courts? If a rank and file citizen were to take that long, I think they'd have been slapped with a contempt of court charge, or they would have been ruled against, long ago. Why the leniency?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
> Five years to produce a document? Is it normal to allow a company such lattitude in the courts?
The problem is Microsoft does not work from design or specification documents for interfaces or protocols. Microsoft makes the code work, then well it works so they don't need documentation. The documents simply don't exist and are very difficult to make correctly after the fact.
Both these protocol documents and the Microsoft Documentation OOXML standard are effectively reverse engineered from the code. This
Unfit for consumpution? (Score:2, Funny)
Don't eat it, then!
Or did they mean it's not good for tuberculosis?
poor poster - wrong article (Score:2)
this is the actual article - http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080925-judge-microsoft-documentation-unfit-for-us-consumption.html [arstechnica.com]
Seriously? (Score:5, Funny)
I've read lots of MS Documentation over the years -- white papers, APIs, and just general guidelines for things.
It's damned good documentation. It may not go to the border of 'special olympics' readers for Apple users, but for the majority of developers that are working on 'interoperability' the documentation is quite good. Not amazing, but the irony is still lost on me that a lawyer decided somebody else's documentation was bad.
Have you ever read the way bills are introduced into law? Jeez.
Re:Seriously? (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
she had/has no clue who she is up against (Score:5, Insightful)
The Microsoft people are making fools of her and the court system and she hardly even knows it. If she did, she'd have ripped them a new hole long ago and imposed sanctions on them instead of letting this drag out year after year.
Isn't it getting to the point of irrelevant in this year of late 2008? After all, interoperability is more of a threat to their business than any court Justice and they know this and spend billions annually protecting that. IMO.
LoB
Slashvertisement (Score:5, Interesting)
Article submitter:
anomalous cohort (http://www.dynamicalsoftware.com/)
From the marketing "blog" linked in the summary (http://www.dynamicalsoftware.com/cgi-bin/ViewBlogEntry.pl?id=14)
writing and maintaining developer documentation is an important part of any software development project [...] Another reason for documentation is compliance management [...] our collaborative software development project lifecycle management product Code Roller supports compliance management [...]
Nice try!
Re: (Score:2)
Why not just use their own internal protocol specification?
This assumes that they have an internal specification, rather than just telling n00bs to RTFCode.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
This assumes that they have an internal specification, rather than just telling n00bs to RTFCode.
In many cases this is better than reading the specification if other developers haven't done exactly what the specification says and deviated just a teensy weensy bit for the sake of (performance | expedience | being a n00b themself etc.) . Of course, if lots of people that can read the code do so and care about the specification, this may not be a problem (and is one of the strengths of open source development).
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Why is it Microsoft's responsibility to make it easier for other companies to compete with them?
This is the point of anti-trust litigation. If Microsoft is considered to have a monopoly in their market sector(which they are), they must be prevented from blocking out competitors from their market. If everyone uses their software, and no one can make software to interact well with it, it's impossible to compete with their software, since you must be able to have compatibility with the dominant software standard in order to be able to compete with it. No one will use your word processing software if you
It's a two way street. (Score:4, Insightful)
If you want to integrate with non-windows machines just use webservies which are fully documented by MS and various other sources since SOAP and http are both standard protocols.
And if you want to integrate with Windows machines, and you're writing code on the non-Windows side, what do you do?
I refuse to pay attention to any Anti-trust investigations into MS unless Apple is put to the same scrutiny.
Microsoft: you can see the code that implements these dusty proprietary protocols if you sign an NDA.
Apple: We use these standard protocols, and here's a free implementation of this standard protocol that we happen to be the first to get to market, and it builds on Linux with no changes, and here's the source code to our file system and the remaining legacy network protocols we're still using...
what does MS do that Apple doesn't do when it comes to making your OS the dominate platform?
Let's see, Apple doesn't require people who try to interoperate with them to implement extensions to standard protocols that they don't document, and they don't give their own software privileged access to secret kernel APIs... in fact they give away the source to most of them... even most of the ones that they don't need to.
Lord knows Apple has problems - the way they're handling the iPhone is made of frustration - but compared to Microsoft they're angels.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I can understand and appreciate constructive criticism but are you seriously calling the KB and MSDN "crap compared to other vendors?" The vendors with good support/documentation are few and far between, among them Microsoft seems to be doing quite well. Unfortunately that's not the documentation in question but I suppose you just wanted to bash Microsoft.
Meh... Who am I to stop you? Bash away but, well, the only spot on Microsoft's support site that I find lacking is their inability to actually help people