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Microsoft The Internet

Microsoft Using .MS TLD 308

Posted by kdawson from the step-right-up dept.
mqudsi writes "Microsoft is using the .MS top-level domain, assigned to the Caribbean island of Montserrat, for its Web 2.0-flavored Popfly project. You can get your own .MS name if you really want to — there are no restrictions on foreign ownership — at $180 US for 2 years. As of this writing microsoft.ms is available." In an obliquely related note, TechBlorge has up a rumination on the resemblance of the Popfly logo to Tux.
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Microsoft Using .MS TLD More

Microsoft Using .MS TLD

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  • OMG PONIES (Score:5, Funny)

    by QuantumG ( 50515 ) <qg@biodome.org> on Sunday May 20, 2007 @12:05AM (#19195687) Homepage Journal
    Tag: SlowNewsDay

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by jd ( 1658 )
      Looks like omg.ponies.ms is free as well. There almost has to be 179 other people willing to chip in a dollar to get this for CmdrTaco.

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by Rei ( 128717 )
        Too bad www.ms is already taken. I've stumbled into that so many times when I mess up on tab completion when typing "www.msnbc.com".

        If they ever open up a ".go" TLD, I am so registering www.go ("www.google.com"). Same with the TLD .goo :)

    • "slownesday" wouldn't show up. Those sorts of tags seem to be filtered out these days.

      I used to eagerly read the tags to see snappy answers to posts like "duh", "no", "yes", "hell yes" and so on.

      It was like having a low resolution voting system. If very few people disagreed with the article then "no" wouldn't show up.

      I now see no reason at all to look at the tags. I don't know why people even bother adding them. The editor posting the article could easily add simple tags like "politics".

      On the other hand, p

  • is bluescreenofdeath.ms available? (Score:5, Funny)

    by ip_freely_2000 ( 577249 ) on Sunday May 20, 2007 @12:06AM (#19195693)
    I want the most active domain in the ms tld.

  • You mean DUCKS look sorta like PENGUINS?! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 20, 2007 @12:11AM (#19195711)
    You'd almost think they were both birds or something.

  • Another Good One (Score:5, Funny)

    by tehwebguy ( 860335 ) on Sunday May 20, 2007 @12:12AM (#19195715) Homepage
    Someone get ComicSans.MS

  • why not? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by WrongMonkey ( 1027334 ) on Sunday May 20, 2007 @12:13AM (#19195727)
    Why don't major corporations have their own TLDs as part of the system? It would cut back on a lot of phishing and ICANN doesn't seem to be reluctant to do whatever they can to make a buck.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by neoform ( 551705 )
      Mmm.. how about letting anyone have any tdl? honestly, why are we all rushing for .com ? Like, what the hell is "com" for a domain name anyway?

      I'd much rather type "apple" or "google" than "apple.com" and "google.com", personally I find it'd make a lot more sense.

    • Re:why not? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by jd ( 1658 ) <imipak@ y a hoo.com> on Sunday May 20, 2007 @01:43AM (#19196099) Homepage Journal
      Well, as I understand it, the theory of having the .com domain is that the corporation buys their name and puts in subdomains below it. So, you might have cornflakes.kellogs.com, for example. One corporation, one namespace. Makes things very simple. The problem with moving the corporations to top-level is that they'll do exactly the same thing they did with .com, which is pollute the namespace as much as possible. At which point, the whole system becomes totally unworkable and unusable.

      I'd personally prefer it if the .com domain was cleared of all products, individuals, trademarks and other superfluous crap. If you aren't a company, you aren't a .com. If you're an organization, you're an .org, and that's final. In fact, I'd go one further - anything that is directly off a .com, .org, .net or .gov should be international in some respect. If it's more local than that, the name should reflect that. (For example, I would exile the US Government to .gov.us, the same way most other governments do their websites. There should be no exceptions.) When something expands in scope, it can always buy the name for the next scope out.

      Wouldn't this impinge on privacy, freedom, etc? Not really. Whilst governments should be honest about location (I can dream - they're rarely honest about anything else), the only constraint I'm suggesting is that the type of name should reflect the type of scope. If you're running a website for a metropolitan area, I'd say you should have a metropolitan-level domain name. Doesn't have to be the same metro, the same country or (when NASA gets round to it) even the same planet. This gives people plenty of room for satirical/joke names, etc. It just adds a few more dots to it. Big deal.

      It'd be almost trivial to make the DNS hierarchy deeper. Most users would be unaffected as most people outside of the US already add country codes to the names and as far as US users are concerned, Slashdot is an international forum. Everything else you get to through links.

      This really would help for domain spoofing, because when unicode domain names start to come online, it will be possible to generate visually identical domain names that are physically different. That's been the claimed problem all along, although since browsers have a language attribute, I don't see why the browser can't just recode names for your language anyway. However, apparently that is a no-no. Given that, I can't see why you can't validate that the string uses a consistent character set AND a character set that the user has pre-approved for use with the country-code that I'm arguing should be there in most cases. In such a system, spoofing names should be impossible.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by nevali ( 942731 )
        There's an even better way. Kill .com, .net, .org, etc, and force everybody to register under ccTLDs. Have an active presence in multiple countries? No problem, register under as many ccTLDs as you like: the country's registry gets to decide the rules for each, so they can specify (if they wish) that you must have a physical address in that country in order to register, for example (I believe a few ccTLDs have this requirement as it stands).

        The non-country-TLDs, with the exception of .int and .arpa, were a

  • Hmm, that was fast (Score:4, Informative)

    by AsmCoder8088 ( 745645 ) on Sunday May 20, 2007 @12:13AM (#19195729)
    I just checked on whois.net and it appears microsoft.ms is now registered....

    [whois.adamsnames.tc]
    Yes
    microsoft.ms is registered.

    Domain Name: microsoft.ms

    Registrant
    Domain Registrant
    id domain privacy network (iddp.net), 588 sutter st. #129, 94102-1102 san francisco, ca
    United States
    E-mail: tlds@rrpproxy.net
    Phone: +1.4154408001
    Fax: +1.4154408001

  • That'll make you cringe (Score:3, Insightful)

    by robot_lords_of_tokyo ( 911299 ) on Sunday May 20, 2007 @12:18AM (#19195749)
    We're a hip crazy cool start up [popfly.ms]
    it's bad enough when people mean it when they write it... it's so much better when it's forced by some guy upstairs.

    • Re:That'll make you cringe (Score:4, Funny)

      by hobo sapiens ( 893427 ) on Sunday May 20, 2007 @12:36AM (#19195809) Journal
      Hey, did you laugh at the pictures like I did?

      One was the obligatory girl. She probably did design work. Not that she couldn't code circles around the guys and all, but you know, gotta keep up appearances.

      There were three guys on there, I swear, I saw them on NBC's To Catch A Predator getting arrested. It's good microsoft hires ex-cons. Keeps em off the streets.

      Sloth from Goonies evidently works there now. Good for him. I'll bet he eats a LOT of Baby Ruths.

      There were plenty of forgettable, dorky white guys who, together, probably own every D&D and Warhammer piece ever made.

      Finally, the project lead was surely the guy on top (of the pyramid, you perverts!). I guess I have worked on enough projects to know.

      *Sigh*

      Well, what do you know? popfly.ms IS good for something! It amused me for ten minutes.

      • Re:That'll make you cringe (Score:5, Interesting)

        by pasamio ( 737659 ) on Sunday May 20, 2007 @03:03AM (#19196371) Homepage
        Now what I loved was all of the managers:
        1x Group Program Manager
        5x Program Manager (one of which is the token female)
        1x Product Manager
        1x Product Unit Manager
        1x Engineering Manager
        1x Test Developer
        5x Developers

        Or to reduce it to developers and managers: 5x Developers vs 10x Managers - I wonder who the three people missing are? No wonder Microsoft have issues shipping product, 1:2 dev to manager ratio is insane!

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Zantetsuken ( 935350 )
      So is it supposed to be the new way to create a myspace page or something? Is this MS admitting that their "LIVE" campaign is failing?
    • Great cross-platform browser support, guys... I'm seeing mostly-grey-on-white ranging to totally-white-on-white, using Konqueror.

      Anyone else seeing strange things on non-IE browsers?

  • how about (Score:5, Funny)

    by AresTheImpaler ( 570208 ) on Sunday May 20, 2007 @12:19AM (#19195753)
    http://i.hate.ms/ [i.hate.ms]

    That way it really looks Web 2.0!! yay..

  • resemblance? (Score:5, Funny)

    by crossmr ( 957846 ) on Sunday May 20, 2007 @12:22AM (#19195761) Journal
    They're cute birds... wow..anyone who has a cute bird as a logo is ripping off linux?

    First of all, they obviously look similar
    really? huh.. you know you're right. If someone hadn't pointed out it was the popfly website, I would have swore I was at a linux site.
    The resemblance is damn near perfect. I like the way the pink really brings out the black and white....
    this is beyond slow news day.

    • Adium (Score:2, Informative)

      by SpeedyDX ( 1014595 )
      Adium [adiumx.com] has a cute duck logo. If anything, Popfly's logo, being a duck, should be compared to Adium's.

      But uh ... yeah, all of that resemblence thing is just flaimbait.

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by coolGuyZak ( 844482 )

        Ah, but now we stumble upon the true way that Microsoft is ripping off of open source. Obviously they combined both logos as a way to drive linux and Adium off of the market. And you know what's also a bird? Pidgins. Could it really be such a coincidence that Tux is a bird, a duck is a bird (twice, once for MS, once for Adium), and that a pidgin is a bird? OH, LORD. WHAT IS THE WORLD COMING TO.

        But uh ... yeah, all of that resemblence thing is just flaimbait

        I wouldn't even call it flamebait. I would, howeve

        • Read the comments on the blog entry, they're hilarious:

          linuxBob:
          May 19th, 2007 at 8:41 pm

          John, you're an idiot.

          urbanriot:
          May 19th, 2007 at 11:31 pm

          I have these in my bathroom... I'm going to sue Microsoft.
          In my experience, Tech.Blorge is generally a POS.

  • or... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Ariastis ( 797888 ) on Sunday May 20, 2007 @12:24AM (#19195767)
    linuxsavedmefrom.ms

  • Could this be... (Score:5, Informative)

    by tiffany98121 ( 1094419 ) on Sunday May 20, 2007 @12:24AM (#19195773)
    ... the absolute lamest Slashdot article ever posted?

  • tux? no... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by larry bagina ( 561269 ) on Sunday May 20, 2007 @12:24AM (#19195775) Journal
    but if they changed the font it would look like something from Apple.

  • Popfly? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by hobo sapiens ( 893427 ) on Sunday May 20, 2007 @12:26AM (#19195783) Journal
    Anyone check out the popfly site?

    I get a kick out of when a large corporation tries to make itself look all independent and hip and stuff with a so-called irreverent site.

    Did you look at the About Us page? "the team hustles for resources every day and is innovative, scrappy, and fun" Good night, does anyone really believe that within Microsoft there are real innovative ideas that don't simply involve entrenching the Microsoft brand? Not that there aren't smart people there, it's just that I have not seen many good ideas coming from there as of late (IE7, Vista, Zune, Media Player, Silverlight...need I go on?) And if this team does exist, then surely their ideas are too innovative and rogue for stodgy old Microsoft and outside of some pseudo-web2.0 site won't see the light of day.

    Case in point, the only way to log into the site is with a Microsoft passport. Therefore, I don't know what else is there, but from the looks of things, not much. And isn't "web 2.0" supposed to be made with valid markup? Grumble grumble...

    • Yeah, they must have only been skimming "Web 2.0 for Dummies" and missed the warning box on page 2:

      [!] If your logo is a pink rubber duckie, YOU ARE TRYING TOO HARD.

    • Re:Popfly? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by karmaflux ( 148909 ) on Sunday May 20, 2007 @12:46AM (#19195873)
      Also from the About Us page:

      From left to right: John Montgomery (Group Program Manager), Andy Sterland (Program Manager), Alpesh Gaglani (Developer), Tim Rice (Developer), Suzanne Hansen (Program Manager), Steven Wilssens (Program Manager), Vinay Deo (Engineering Manager), Michael Leonard (Test Developer), Jianchun Xu (Developer), Dan Fernandez (Product Manager), Adam Nathan (Developer), Wes Hutchins (Program Manager), Aaron Brethorst (Program Manager), Paramesh Vaidyanathan (Product Unit Manager), and Murali Potluri (Developer).
      That's nine managers and six developers. No wonder the team "hustles for resources." They're probably going broke paying management wages to sixty percent of the staff. It says three more people aren't pictured -- we can bet that two of them are more managers.

      This team sounds like a developer's nightmare.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by mr_man ( 141914 )
        At Microsoft, Program Managers are not "Managers" in the traditional sense. Instead these people spec out the different features a product will have.

        In Microspeak they are individual contributors and not managment, they don't have reports.

        Having a strong team of program managers is a good thing for a developer. You get to spend more time focusing on the techncial implementation.

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by Osty ( 16825 )

        That's nine managers and six developers. No wonder the team "hustles for resources." They're probably going broke paying management wages to sixty percent of the staff. It says three more people aren't pictured -- we can bet that two of them are more managers.

        You're obviously not familiar with Microsoft position nomenclature. Of the names listed, there are three real managers -- the GPM, the PUM, and the Engineering Manager. You're confusing "Program Manager" and "Product Manager" as actual managers.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by QuantumG ( 50515 )
          Hehehe.. you've been in corporate land too long. Go visit a startup. There, they have: developers (the guys who write code), sales (the guys who find customers) and managers (the guys who do everything else). These dudes are managers. Perhaps "suits" would be a better term.

      • Re:Popfly? (Score:5, Funny)

        by bmo ( 77928 ) on Sunday May 20, 2007 @02:01AM (#19196167)
        "That's nine managers and six developers. No wonder the team "hustles for resources." They're probably going broke paying management wages to sixty percent of the staff. It says three more people aren't pictured -- we can bet that two of them are more managers."

        Three lions escape from the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle.

        They decide to split up, to improve the chances that they won't all be caught all at once, and agree to meet three months later to compare notes.

        So three months pass by and they all meet. Two of the lions are all skin and bone. One is shaking, he says "I ate one kid at a school and they chased me into the woods. I had to live on voles, shrews, and the occasional mountain biker...stringy, they are." The second lion, also skinny, said "I ate a cop, and they chased me 'round the city and I wound up having to climb up Mt. Ranier and all I could find to eat was squirrels."

        So the two look at the third lion and ask why he's so fat and happy:

        "I hid in the bushes next to Microsoft's main entrance. I ate a manager a day and nobody noticed."

        --
        BMO

        (joke shamelessly stolen and adapted from IBM to Microsoft)
      • Actually, no, it's not a nightmare -- it's a good thing for developers. The problem is that Microsoft has a naming issue... (you don't say!)

        In Microsoft parlance, a "Program Manager" isn't a person who works in the "management" sense of the business or people. They have other people for that. Program Managers are responsible for writing technical specifications, co-ordinating development activities (e.g. who works on what piece), and making sure the developers are clear of distractions to get their job d

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by MikeMLP ( 1085367 )
      http://popfly.ms/Overview/ [popfly.ms] - click on "watch the popfly screencast"
      If you want, watch the video. I have to admit the concept is kinda cool. The way you can edit block code and share it... It seems to me that MS is trying to leverage a community which openly shares code modifications. The problem is that it is all based on a closed-source platform, and I'm sure the best hackers would rather work on an open platform, instead of one which could change or become obsolete without notice.

      The funniest part is i
    • The company that wins is not always, and is probably rarely the one that first introduces the idea. First-mover advantage really doesn't seem to exist. The advantage goes to who is the most ruthless in getting it to market.

  • Paranoid much? (Score:2, Informative)

    by MSFTVet ( 1039178 )
    I can assure you that not only is the duck imagery NOT the logo for Popfly but that any resemblance to "Tux" is completely coincidental. Me thinks the Tux fans are a bit paranoid. The duck image is just a photo that the team thought was a fun way to illustrate how people can express themselves by doing whatever they want with Popfly...get it? The one duck has a style unique among the others? It's just a ducky picture! Me thinks the Tux fans are perhaps a bit paranoid.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by hobo sapiens ( 893427 )
      You must be new here...wait, you ARE new here!

      For the first time ever, the "you must be new here" meme has been used against...someone new!

      Of course Tux fans are paranoid. And don't try to change that, you!, with all your common sense and all. I run a tinfoil haberdashery and make quite a good living at it.

    • Me thinks the Tux fans are a bit paranoid.
      Make that that one Tux fan. He's getting quite a bashing from everybody else.

  • was too spooked to login (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 20, 2007 @12:33AM (#19195801)
    I was going to try that popfly service this morning and when the passport login showed it was going to route to a weird .ms ccTLD, I thought, no way, this has to be some kind of scam, someone has hacked passport to send them passwords...

  • >As of this writing microsoft.ms is available

    I'm more curious if fucking.ms and the likes are already taken.
    • smithm@nicholas:~$ whois fucking.ms
      Yes
      fucking.ms is registered.

      Domain Name: fucking.ms

      Registrant, Technical Contact, Billing Contact, Admin. Contact
      AdamsNames Reserved Domains (p)
      These domains are not available for registration
      United Kingdom
      E-mail: person@adamsnames.com

      Resource Records (1):

  • A modest request when using a wierd country code (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Sunday May 20, 2007 @12:39AM (#19195845) Homepage

    When you use some country domain that's not really the country you're in, put the real country name after the postal mailing addresses on your web site. Wrong country domains screw up systems that are trying to locate your business for local search purposes. If your domain is under ".WS" (Western Samoa) or ".TO" (Tonga), you may be mapped into the middle of the Pacific Ocean. (There are Tongan web sites [www.tcc.to] in ".TO". Admittedly, ".TV" is unlikely to lead to a real web site in Tuvalu, and does tend to be handled as a special case.)

  • I'm calling dibs on.. (Score:3, Funny)

    by katterjohn ( 726348 ) on Sunday May 20, 2007 @12:45AM (#19195869)
    nudewebca.ms

  • Kind of shows the pointlessness (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nebaz ( 453974 ) * on Sunday May 20, 2007 @12:56AM (#19195919)
    of 2 Letter country code TLD's, if major corporations get them, and the US doesn't use the .us domain. Too bad it's too late for a whole TLD overhaul.

    • Kind of shows the pointlessness of 2 Letter country code TLD's, if major corporations get them, and the US doesn't use the .us domain.

      Tiny countries get money out of it. Large corporations get "clever" and unique new domain names to use. What's the problem? .us is certainly a strange case, that hasn't entirely been worked out... Other countries put universities, government, etc. basically everything under their country TLD, but the US has .edu .mil and really, .com as well. It's only non-federal governm

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Myopic ( 18616 )
      TLDs are fairly decentralized. If a community of people wanted to start their own parallel TLD system, they could. In fact, people HAVE done this with varying degrees of success, mostly very slight. All you have to do is come up with a TLD system which is compelling and people will support it.

      How would you overhaul it?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by 1u3hr ( 530656 )
      I find it rather annoying, and insulting, when corporations and registrars try to pretend a CCTLD is really a descriptive TLD. Eg, .tv, Tuvalu, is presented as "television"; .fm (Federated States of Micronesia) for radio, .md (Moldova) as a medical domain. And I've seen .la (Laos) sold as both Los Angeles and Latin America.

      People who use these are trying to present themselves as offically sanctioned in some way. But in reality, most if not all these domain registrars will sell them to anyone with the ca

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by linhux ( 104645 )
      I don't agree - in practically every European country (hey, probably almost every country except the U.S.) the local TLD's are in very extensive use, and people are used to getting to a company's _local_ website by going to, say, www.company.fi instead of www.company.com (which would take you to a global, english-language site instead). This goes for both multinational corporations and local companies. Apart from that, a number of very small island countries re-sell their TLDs because they have funny meanin

  • I'll jump that bandwagon (Score:3, Funny)

    by xrayspx ( 13127 ) on Sunday May 20, 2007 @12:58AM (#19195925) Homepage
    IONLYUSEWINDOWSINV.MS

  • Maybe soon. there will be a cure.

    We can only hope.
  • When will this much more important TLD be open for registrations?
  • A lot of chatting around i.hate.ms and so on, but will Montserrat get any money back from the use of the domain .ms? Considering that they have had a hard time with their volcano [www.mvo.ms] they should get something at least to support the community. The effect of the volcano they have had could be considered as bad as if 40 to 50% of the US had to be evacuated.

    But on the other hand - the volcano may be good for tourism - and now they have a modern airport too.

    Anyway, this volcano has caused some devastation and a

  • Does the .ms registrar allow obscenity in domain names?

  • Does this mean? (Score:3, Funny)

    by mpe ( 36238 ) on Sunday May 20, 2007 @03:23AM (#19196423)
    Does this mean that we can look forward to most of Microsoft disappearing under a volcanic erruption sometime soon?

  • Apparently .li is open for everyone [wikipedia.org]. Are ubuntu.li, gentoo.li etc... taken?

  • In other news, Montserrat has been renamed to Mont$errat.
  • The popfly logo is to Tux as a cheap, brightly-colored blow up sex doll is to a real woman...
  • When I try to view the blog for Popfly guy John Montgomery, it prompted me to install Silverlight, which I did. So I re-launched Firefox and re-visited his blog, which was trying to mash Virtual Earth and Twitter. It crashes the browser each time. May not be Silverlight of course, but just interested to know if this happens to anyone else. Either way, I am still wanting to know what all this mashing malarky is about. I just want solutions, not things that require management and customization. Else, we're ba

  • The screencast is interesting - sort of (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Qbertino ( 265505 ) <moiraNO@SPAMmodparlor.com> on Sunday May 20, 2007 @09:18AM (#19197733)
    The screencast [microsoft.com] shows live object/entity linking through a bloated RIA interface that probably needs a 3 GHz CPU and a 400$ GFX card to render properly. Let alone an MS operating system and their bloated, insecure, barely beta and closed-source proprietary silverthingie stuff.
    The rotating entitiy cubes are pointless, anoying and distracting and are probably just there to hide the fact that we are basically looking at a RIA case tool with a restricted featureset. Everybody knows that things are going this way, but I doubt MS will get all things right to capture a larger audience and developer base.
    Meanwhile I'm sticking with Laszlo [openlaszlo.org] for true cross-plattform RIA developement. After all even Adobe Flex is scrambling to catch up with them. And Laszlo went completely open source way before anybody else.

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