MSFT Reaches Out To Hackers: 'Do Epic $#!+' 249
hessian writes "Microsoft isn't exactly known for its underground hacker culture, but a recent effort to give its employees more slack is generating some wild experiments. Last summer, Microsoft completed a redesign of one of its original buildings on campus — Building 4, where Bill Gates' office used to be — into a laid-back workshop where staff can tinker with things. It's open to anyone, anytime, and it's got everything from a hardware workshop to an actual working garage door. If it doesn't sound to you like something Microsoft would normally do , the Garage's motto will really shock you: 'Do epic s--t.'"
uh oh (Score:5, Funny)
If Microsoft doesn't bleep out the 'shit', but Slashdot does (in two different ways?), does this mean MSFT is "hipper" than /. now?
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I was wondering about that. If the motto is actually "Do epic shit," that's a sign that someone at Microsoft gets it. If it's "Do epic $#!+" or "Do epic s--t," they don't.
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If it's "Do epic $#!+" ... ,they don't.
You don't get it [wikipedia.org].
Re:uh oh (Score:5, Funny)
Thanks for the link, it thought it was perl code before your hint.
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I haven't used Pearl, you're saying p34r1 is $#!+?
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Indeed. From the link:
One theory is that it was developed to defeat text filters created by BBS or Internet Relay Chat system operators for message boards to discourage the discussion of forbidden topics, like cracking and hacking. ... Variants of leet have been used for censorship purposes for many years; for instance "@$$" and "$#!+" are frequently seen to make a word appear censored to the untrained eye but obvious to a person familiar with leet.
We've been able to write all kinds of Forbidden Words online for a long time now. The only reason for "leet" euphemisms nowadays is to call attention to how Daring and Naughty you are--which, frankly, is a pretty shitty reason.
Eh... forbidden words? (Score:2)
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Socially "forbidden" in terms of what's regarded as presentable, not legally forbidden.
Re:uh oh (Score:5, Funny)
The printed motto might be 'Do epic shit', but what they really mean is "Please do epic shit with Windows"
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Whatever they mean, it's a big step up from their previous motto, which was similar but missing the word 'epic'.
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Well, if they all understood it, that would explain the Windows 8 interface.
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Does that make Microsoft programmers scriptkiddies?
Sure explains Vista and Win 8...
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:uh oh (Score:5, Funny)
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...And then embed them in their linux code contributions.
Re:uh oh (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, I'm not quite sure what the deal is. I wonder if it originated with the Orthodox Jewish approach of writing "God" as "G-d", which was based on a sort of superstition against writing out the full word, even if it was obvious what the word was.
In older English texts that want to censor such things, they seem to do a better job actually censoring the words so that they're removed entirely, replaced with just a mention that there was a swear, like "the man responded with an interjection not printable in a magazine of this type". That seems like the way to go if you're truly offended by them.
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"I wonder if it originated with the Orthodox Jewish approach of writing "God" as "G-d", which was based on a sort of superstition against writing out the full word, even if it was obvious what the word was."
Hm. I thought the name of the Jewish God was YHVH, or, Jehovah. Weird.
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And quite a bizarre interpretation of it, too. I guess they don't want to accidentally violate the rule. About as weird as the idea that Sabbath means not operating an elevator, but it's OK to have someone else do it.
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Never understood why anyone censors "bad" words yet leaves enough letters there so people easily figure out what the word is.
That's because in many places they'll yank your entire post for saying "shit," so you change it to "$#!+ or $hit to get past the automated filters in MSN messageboards.
I laughed out loud last week when one of the news channels scrolled by. They had replaced "booby prize" [wikipedia.org] with "bobby prize". Can't have the word Booby [wikipedia.org] on TV now can we! Those birds are so evil!
What * looks like (Score:2)
My favourite is changing "ass" to "*ss". Exactly who thinks it's better to replace the letter "a" with a symbol that looks like an explicit, close-up view of the very anatomy you think is offensive? ( * )ss indeed.
Re:uh oh (Score:5, Funny)
If Microsoft doesn't bleep out the 'shit', but Slashdot does (in two different ways?), does this mean MSFT is "hipper" than /. now?
Indeed, they are; I've even heard that they are actually seriously considering a change of name from "Microsoft" to "Micros#%t" as part of becoming even hipper.
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You misspelled /\/\1cr050f+. "Micros#%t" is a $#1++y way to spell it.
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It means that the disease of being 'overly casual' has continued its spread upward, and that the dignity of the middle class will be defeated from within.
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The middle class, hoist on its own middle finger?
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Thanks for your analysis of how many folks with a 3-digit UID are left! Clearly we are among the few...
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thanks for your analysis of how many folks with a 3-digit UID are left! Clearly we are among the few...
Now that Malda's gone, 998.
What you are showing is how many are tedious wankers who post merely to show off their UID.
Re:uh oh (Score:4, Funny)
If Microsoft doesn't bleep out the 'shit'
Or vagina
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Maynard won't be there, unfortunately - he's stuck on some uncharted desert isle.
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Am I the only one that has trouble associating gams with legs? I always think dentures when I hear it. I have no idea why.
They forgot the second part (Score:5, Insightful)
"...as long as it doesn't threaten our bottom line."
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"...as long as it doesn't threaten our bottom line."
That's kind of a given, though. Fat lot of good "epic shit" will do if it bankrupts the company...
Re:They forgot the second part (Score:5, Funny)
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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As with all shit, people will pretend it's gold. Look at Gnome3. It is so far away from a traditional desktop, and there people which like it. I'm not saying that it is bad, it's just not what many people want.
The same will happen with Windows 8...while many people will take a step backwards, there will be some which go "Look, I can now unlock the login screen when I swipe with my mouse! This is awesome!" - "Yeah...previously I just typed my username..." on us...and you can bet that it will find it's way in
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Yeah Win8's gonna bomb harder than ME or Vista, and it will really damage MS' reputation this time. It's too bad there's no noob-ready Linux distro to accept the refugees like there was when Vista came out since Canonical is doing the exact same thing. [slashdot.org]
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Save yourself some time, and just hit Win key (or CTRL+Esc), and type a few letters of the program's name and hit Enter. Use "All programs" when you forget the program's name. Windows 8 supports that same search shortcut in an entirely different UI, but that will at least make it bearable.
Re:They forgot the second part (Score:5, Insightful)
Like Microsoft Research, this will be a patent farm where ideas that threaten Microsoft's platform go to die.
Maybe, just maybe, someone in marketing will decide they can make a product out of something from this new Microsoft lab. It may even be awesome. But you never know until after the research.
It seems that whenever someone in management lets marketing smoke enough weed to even think about visiting the engineers we get something like Bob or ME or Vista or Metro.
I wish them good luck. Changing corporate culture is very hard when 'those other guys in that other building' are easy to let go when the stock price tumbles for reasons known only to the Random Number God(s).
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It seems that whenever someone in management lets marketing smoke enough weed to even think about visiting the engineers we get something like Bob or ME or Vista or Metro.
I don't think Vista belongs in that category. It seems to me that the driving force behind Vista was always from the engineers - they just weren't very good.
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They are trying to artificially regenerate creativity in a company that has become bogged down in corporate politics sociopathic stoginess, where everyone is ready to stab everyone else in the back to get ahead. Problem is this area becomes political in and off itself, with two results happening. Employees either drop by to stick in a crap idea to become politically visible, high risk or it becomes a place to kill your career as those that don't take the risk target those that do (the more politically awar
metal shop is all the rage in tech right now (Score:2)
And MS is still following Google in a way. Google didn't build on-campus but they signed up with Tech Shop a while back.
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Google didn't build on-campus but they signed up with Tech Shop a while back.
Google does have an on-campus shop for employees. [pressherald.com] They're not doing much at TechShop. They've done team-building events at the Menlo Park TechShop, and downloaded and cut out a model of a bridge on the plasma cutter. One or two Google employees go there now and then. But it's not a big thing.
Epic? (Score:3, Insightful)
Epic $#!+ can't come out of sitting in "Building 4, where Bill Gates' office used to be ..." and pretending it's hacker's garage.
you need a real garage, with real hackers in it, don't think Microsoft's engineers will do the trick.
They've got real hackers (Score:3, Funny)
Angelina "Acid Burn" Jolie and Matthew "Cereal Killer" Lillard will be stopping by.
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Many of their engineers still have a heart and haven't had it burnt out yet by the corporate grind.
But it will take a lot more than this to bring them out. They need an entire corporate culture change, not just a 'play room' down the hall with a cute sign and a big door.
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One option to foster that kind of environment within a large company is to actually set up a physically separate reporting structure, a sort of startup within a large company. That can fail too, but it's sometimes worked. Microsoft themselves had some success doing that with the original Windows NT team.
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This is exactly what I was thinking. You don't fix corporate culture through interior design.
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Some rumors say in Building 4 there's an epic toilet...
"$#!+" ? "s--t" ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Are we really so prude and puritan as a culture that we can't even bring ourselves to write "SHIT" ?
This goes beyond political correctness - it's frankly ridiculous.
Filter error: Please use fewer 'junk' characters. (Score:2)
I think its totally appropriate. It shows the PR campaign is completely watered down and most likely so is the actual project, assuming there is any project other than the PR campaign.
Now if it were real, instead of a PR stunt, then it would be inappropriate.
CNN Censored it. (Score:5, Informative)
It's not censored in the pictures of the slogan that neowin has [neowin.net] or SCM Magazine [scmagazine.com.au].
It wasn't that hard to search for either. However it was probably harder than the knee jerk reaction shown above.
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but in a way both your links prove OP's point: CNN is blurring the oh so evil word, only an Australien outfit and some site with the slogan "Where unprofessional journalism looks better" displaying it unaltered
"$#!+" ? "s--t" ? (Score:2)
I'd rather avoid epic shits anyway. Epic blurs sound interesting though.
DeeDeeDee filter editor! (Score:2)
If anybody involved in writing the article or submitting it to slashdot actually cared about "keeping those evil, satanic cursewords from the eyes of the children" they would have simply written it to not include them in the first place.
Also, retarded lameness filte
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Also, retarded lameness filter is retarded. Here's sme more random crap to make this post go through...
I wish I had mod points, I had the same damned problem trying to explain that $#!+ was actually the word "shit". Took me 15 minutes to figure out that the subject was what was being lamely filtered.
HEY EDITORS: When I quote the fucking headline and the lame-ass filter is encountered, what does that say about your lame-ass headline?
That "lameness filter" is just fucking lame. PLEASE get rid of it, OK? Or at
s--t (Score:4, Funny)
"Do Epic Salt" could be religious in nature, if only they had the light to go with it.
"Do Epic Scat" could be, well, crappy.
"Do Epic Scot" could be a hint that Sean Connery will play Ballmer in an upcoming movie about Steve Jobs
"Do Epic Seat" could be a hint that they're working on a special chair to offset the major pain in the ass NotMetro is expected to be
"Do Epic Sect" could be a skunkworks project to recruit fanboys
"Do Epic Shat" could be a retrospective on the history of Windows... uh, narrated by William Shatner
"Do Epic Skit" could be a code for the rehearsal to train people to look excited at their store openings, and hide the fact that hired DJs are using iTunes
"Do Epic Slit" could be... nahhh...
"Do Epic Slut" or "Do Epic Smut" could be an indication that MSFT wants to enter the lucrative smut scene and cut off Heffner's air supply
"Do Epic Snot" or "Do Epic Spit" No. Just no.
Personally, I think what they're really saying is they plan to "do shit" to the Electronic Privacy Information Center [epic.org].
Re: lameness filter encountered (Score:2)
*sigh* I've been trying to explain it for fifteen minutes, but slashdot's lame filter won't let me. The dollar sign is an s, the hash is an h, the exclamation mark is an i, the plus sign is a T.
And I'm still getting the lameness filter, must be tha subject line. I wonder why I keep getting it, and how you managed to post?
A tiny fraction of what's needed (Score:4, Insightful)
First, there needs to be a company culture in which people dare to take time to play in a facility like that.
Second, there needs to be an outside chance that the epic "s--t" will actually see the light of day and not be stomped on by Steve Ballmer because it doesn't run Windows.
Third, there needs to be infrastructure. One MS manager I know tried to order a bookshelf to store technical references for the group's use. The request was denied because the bookshelf wasn't a standard item. What happens when a hacker orders something random?
Fourth, for people who aren't pure hackers but have some self-interest, there needs to be some believable financial benefit to developing something cool
Without all that, this idea is sheer cargo cult.
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...this idea is sheer cargo cult.
Out of the mouths of anonymous cowards...
It's all... (Score:4, Insightful)
...too late.
what !@#$% is the point??? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is not that MSFT employees don't have good ideas; the problem is that management kills them (the ideas that is).
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:what !@#$% is the point??? (Score:4, Informative)
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I'm a dev at MS (DevDiv), and I work regular 40-hour work weeks. Yes, really.
I'm not saying it's all rainbows and unicorns, and I'm kinda jealous of that 20% "do epic shit" (hah!) time that Googlers - well, some of them, at least - get. But MS is not a sweatshop in any meaningful sense. In fact, it has fewer "crunches" than what I've seen in software development shops on average in my past experience.
At least not where I'm sitting. It's a big company, and, from talking to people, various divisions seem to d
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It's coincidentally called "Microsoft Research" - and every cool thing that everybody from Microsoft's own OS engineers to *nix and BSD people think are a good ideas, which their management promptly kills, because "it doesn't push MS Office or Internet Explorer (basically insert other MS product here)" onto corporate IT and home users more.
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... because "it doesn't push MS Office or Internet Explorer" onto corporate IT and home users more.
Fixed that for you.
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doo doo epic shit
Obliged.
"make mobile payments with just their bodies" ...? (Score:5, Funny)
I liked the line in the original article:
one Microsoft Office developer is currently working in the Garage on a tool allowing people to make mobile payments with just their bodies.
I think this already goes on all over the world.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/housewife-charged-in-sexforsecurity-scam,1773/ [theonion.com]
Cute office space != Culture transplant (Score:5, Interesting)
Have to post anonymously for this one, as it's about my current workplace...
I work for an IT service provider that services a very staid, boring, stick-in-the-mud industry. The company has been around since the 50s, is multinational, and has a very management-heavy, bureaucracy-laden culture. Our engineering teams (including the one I'm on) are pretty much allowed to operate around this whole mess because we build their products and services. And the industry we serve is concerned with reliable, always-on service ONLY, nothing else. As Engineering, we give that to them with a minimum of fuss, often completely end-running the layers of bureaucracy to make sure things stay alive.
All of a sudden last year, the company brought in the usual suspects from the management consultant universe, who suggested a radical culture shift. One of the other division offices (not ours)got gutted and turned into a clone of the Google office pictures that have leaked to the web. All the fun happy stuff from the Hipster Twentysomething Web 2.0 Culture Checklist is there -- no offices, hot desking, open floor plan, beanbag chairs, large common areas, and a cutesy color scheme and design pattern reflecting our company's core customers' business.
The problem is that nothing else has changed. People are still stuck in the same mindset, but now they're sitting in beanbag chairs doing it or trying to be heard over the noise of their colleagues in one of these open-area offices. I'm actually one of those people who prefers a private office or cube with enough quiet to be able to work, so I'm glad our office didn't get transformed (yet.)
So, Microsoft can change anything they want, but it won't bring back the hacker culture and 90s startup feel unless they start actively cultivating that mindset. As far as I can tell, it's too late for that -- there's way too much at stake to make radical changes. I'm betting that SP1 of Windows 8 will let businesses remove the Metro (or whatever it is now) interface, just to keep the status quo going.
I think that once a company gets established, there's no easy way to bring it back to startup mode. I'm not even sure that's the right thing to do. For example. I'm older now (late 30s) and lack the desire to work 90-hour weeks for a company, just because I have a life -- married with children and all that. Almost everyone else my age who is still in the startup, 90-hour, gotta-do-this-for-the-team crowd is divorced, headed that way or permanently single, and has nothing going on outside of work. I work hard, but something really has to be on fire that no one else can fix if any employer expects tons of extra work. I work hard already keeping my skills sharp outside of work so I don't end up unemployed... The problem is companies don't understand that people who aren't just out of school have a lot of good experience, so I don't know if the relentless focus on startup culture is a good solution.
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I see nothing in AC's post that implied, much less stated, a "hatred for Microsoft". All he said was that you can't create a maker-culture by corporate fiat, unless you change the whole company, and that managers (and marketing consultants) tend to forget that.
You seem to be the one projecting, not him/her/it.
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Epic Hacking? Microsoft? (Score:2)
Really. How about this:
http://www.securelist.com/en/weblog?calendar=2007-04%5D [securelist.com]
An epic freakin butterfly?? (Score:3)
A giant mech warrior that throws chairs and can rip cars in half would be epic. A stress indicator butterfly? Not so much.
OTOH it might help protect the microsofties from Ballmer if they could get him to wear one.
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This is Microsoft's version of epic...
You have got to be s***ting me (Score:2)
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For Microsoft programmers it is.
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I don't know, I think there's other interpretations of that same wording that would mean what you want it to mean. You know, like feces of epic proportions.
Re:f--k that motto (Score:5, Informative)
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Whoah! Microsoft! You baddasses really gone hack up the future!
I foresee an AWESOME sea change coming!
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Would you rather see Microsoft Songsmith on actual retail shelves, and being used to make actual towel advertisements?
Isn't it a little bit too late ? (Score:3, Interesting)
Microsoft used to be a swell company
I know, because I spent sometime there
And then the suits took over, and a lot of us left
Isn't it a little bit too late?
Re:Will M$'$ next product be a (Score:4, Funny)
It's policy to never imply ownership in the event of a dildo.
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Yet people here still say "pwn" far too frequently.
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Quite often that's a legitimate typo. The O is right next to the P on a qwerty keyboard. About the only time I ever see it (or write it) is when trying to be funny.
That would be fine and dandy... (Score:4, Informative)
...if they were actually using leetspeak. Hint: the motto is "Do epic shit.", not "Do epic $#!+"
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"I wanna hook it up to my wireless Metro phone and open and close it and turn on the lights!"
"We must let the lawyers give it the once over."
(eight months later)
"Our lawyers have decided the risk is too great for you to even try it. Also, we no longer produce Metro OS for phones. If you mention your idea, you will be in violation of our NDA."
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The only problem with Ribbon was that they didn't go far enough. Tabbed toolbars is cute and all, but tabbed work-spaces would have been better.
Ie, if each tab changed not just the available tools, but changes the entire way the whole document is displayed and worked on. A "Design" tab should use visual metaphors for the structure of the document. A "Write" tab would focus on... well, getting out of the way. While a "File" tab should pull back to the meta level of the document as an object.
The problem wasn'
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Excellent comment! I never seem to have any Mod Points lying around when I need them. It looked to me like Courier was the device Microsoft could have used to turn around Apple's dominance of the market.
What a pity they sucked out!
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I wonder if they put real actors in there to look like hackers or if they use animatronics XD
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Do you really think their problem with security is a lack of trying or even a lack of success? It's a big game of leapfrog. Computers now are expect to handle attacks that weren't even physically possible on the hardware of yesterday. It results in more bloat and slower operation. If you were able to design an OS from the ground up today, and assume that there would be no malicious users or malicious attacks, then you'd create a system that runs circles around Windows. We don't have a perfect world, an