Microsoft's Ethical Guidelines 271
hankwang writes "Did you know that Microsoft has ethical guidelines? It's good to know that 'Microsoft did not make any payments to foreign government officials' while lobbying for OOXML, and that 'Microsoft conducts its business in compliance with laws designed to promote fair competition' every time they suppressed competitors. In their Corporate Citizenship section, they discuss how the customer-focused approach creates products that work well with those of competitors and open-source solutions. So all the reverse-engineering by Samba and OpenOffice.org developers wasn't really necessary."
Re:A string of meaningless words!! (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, Exchange works just fine on any browser you want. Some features aren't supported (like sending rich-text emails), but 95% is.
But then, there's still a bunch of stuff you can't do on web-access for any browser, so this is hardly a show-stopper. Exchange was never meant to be just a web-mail server believe it or not.
Re:A string of meaningless words!! (Score:3, Informative)
Exchange was never meant to be just a web-mail server believe it or not.
So what is Microsoft's solution for users trying to access their email while travelling?
Exchange. It was designed to support web mail, but it isn't the primary purpose.
Re:A string of meaningless words!! (Score:3, Informative)
Exchange was never meant to be an Internet mail server at all - this is why it is so bad at it e.g. email outside the system is very limited in comparison with internal messages
It was designed to be (and still is) a corporate messaging and collaboration system, internet email was bolted on and is still (apparently) an afterthought
Webmail is only to be used if you cannot connect to the network and use a proper client (Outlook), it is a stopgap and is not intended to be the normal interface
Re:Ethics (Score:5, Informative)
Whats funny is that at least what is posted is not MS ethics. Those are Federal laws. They can call them ethics if they want, but not paying off foreign officials is not an ethical question. Its a legal one.
Anything to do with gaining favor from a foreign government is strictly illegal. (except for attempts to speed up what is the natural process)
Re:A string of meaningless words!! (Score:1, Informative)
3 choices... and 2 of 'em don't work.
Tried this? (Score:2, Informative)
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928233 [microsoft.com]
There's some other registry tweaks that may apply and you can google for them. The above referenced MS article makes it sound as if all those DHCP servers are implemented incorrectly but then when Vista is the only client having trouble.........
Re:Vista broke DHCP. (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, both sides are at fault in the spirit if not in the letter of the RFC.
The broadcast flag is included as a work around for a nasty catch 22 situation that some network interfaces might suffer from, namely not being able to receive unicast IP packets until they have been configured with an IP address. This means that such an interface cannot receive its own IP address in an IP packet which is what the DHCP server would normally use.
Acording to the DHCP RFC ( http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1541.html [faqs.org] )
"A client that cannot receive unicast IP datagrams until its protocol software has been configured with an IP address SHOULD set the BROADCAST bit in the 'flags' field to 1 in any DHCPDISCOVER or DHCPREQUEST messages that client sends. The BROADCAST bit will provide a hint to the DHCP server and BOOTP relay agent to broadcast any messages to the client on the client's subnet. A client that can receive unicast IP datagrams before its protocol software has been configured SHOULD clear the BROADCAST bit to 0."
So Vista is - was (because it was fixed in sp1 I believe) - morally at fault because its IP stack is capable of receiving unicast packets before the IP address has been configured. However, the word "should" rather than "must" was used so Microsoft is still in compliance with the letter of the protocol.
On the server side:
"A server or relay agent sending or relaying a DHCP message directly to a DHCP client ... SHOULD examine the BROADCAST bit in the 'flags' field. If this bit is set to 1, the DHCP message SHOULD be sent as an IP broadcast using an IP broadcast address (preferably 255.255.255.255) as the IP destination address and the link-layer broadcast address as the link-layer destination address."
Again, it says "should" instead of "must" and so the server side is also morally wrong, but still in compliance with the protocol.
The bug is actually in the RFC
A history of Microsoft's code of ethics (Score:3, Informative)
so? (Score:3, Informative)
Pretty much every big corporation has a code of ethics.
Few abide by it.
So what's the fuzz?