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Incorrect. All that was required for the update he wanted to do was either (1) updating two locations, not one, or (2) removing one file. The spreadsheet file stores some extra information as an optimization to allow spreadsheets to load faster (basically, information on calculation chains).

Here is a thorough point-by-point response to Rodriguez's points.

BTW, it is interesting to note the comments when this was discussed on Brian Jones' blog. Note that he lets Rodriguez comment, even though Rodriguez is strongly against OOXML to the point of rudeness.

That's a pattern I see on most of the pro-OOXML blogs I've read. They let the other side come in and have its say. They often even link to the opposing arguments. You go read Jones' blog, for example, and the impression you get is that it is written by someone strongly in favor of OOXML, but who wants to be fair and make sure all arguments are heard. He's confident that if that happens, he'll win.

That's sure not how the anti-OOXML blogs operate. They often turn off comments completely. They don't link to opposing blogs. They mostly just attack, and the attacks are often factually incorrect. And when they do actually post a valid technical flaw in OOXML, half the time ODF has the same technical flaw, but that never seems to bother them. I sure don't get the impression from, say, Weir's blog or Sutor's blog that I'm reading the writings of someone who wants to be fair and present a winning technical argument.

Kernel data structure changes.

The problem with giving people just enough rope to hang themselves is that they want a little slack so that it's not uncomfortable when they're tying the noose and getting on the chair, and get it by taping on their own rope with duct tape.

See this for an example of this. It's a really painful thing, and really makes me feel sorry for people like Raymond Chen who has to deal with these kinds of issues for pay. (His book's kinda interesting tho)

Admittedly, a lot of the benefits to the linux driver model is that they *don't* get a lot of third party drivers, which helps eliminate a lot of this kind of problem. It still exists however. Just ask anyone who's trying to debug a kernel with the nvidia driver installed.

Remember Peter Torr? He wrote a blog post not long after Firefox hit 1.0 where he questioned why the Firefox installer was not digitally signed. What he said was completely true - so true in fact that not long after that Mozilla started signing the installer. That didn't prevent few thousand raving lunatics from descending on his blog and calling him a shill and an idiot. To paraphrase you, yes his company maybe bias in not wanting the [browser to succeed], but does that make what he says less true? The facts speak the truth.

So essentially we have situations where the source of income and ulterior motives of one person should not be questioned because the topic is unpopular and everybody knows he must be right. On the other hand we have people whose motives *must* be automatically questioned solely because of their source of income and ulterior motives.

The truth is that Weir should have recused himself from all this a long time ago. That he hasn't done that tells you a lot about him and his employers.

You might argue that Microsoft had all this coming. You might argue that OOXML is not a good standard. You might argue a lot of things, but none of them make IBM's conduct in all this (including the whole ISO thing) any less dishonest.

That was not a final release. The general public doesn't use prereleases, and so prereleases don't count.

We're talking about the Acid2 test, right? The general public does not care about which browsers pass Acid2. Only web developers care. Once all popular browsers pass Acid2, they can use the features it tests. It doesn't matter whether Safari, Opera, and Firefox passed within three days of release of the Acid2 test. Web developers would still be waiting on IE to pass so they can finally use the features that Acid2 tests are have some confidence that all browsers would render their pages correctly.

That switch has been removed, and it was the only remaining obstacle.

No, the switch was not the only remaining obstacle. IE 8 Beta 1 does not pass Acid2 according to Ian Hickson because of improper cross-domain checks, not because of the meta tag.

Firefox still lags behind on the standards that people care about

If IE tries to be compatible, not just pass one single test (Acid2), why it does so badly on Acid3?

Please try to keep up with the conversation. As has been explained many, many times in the comments here, Acid3 is deliberately constructed to highlight problems in popular browsers. All browsers do badly on Acid3, no matter how well they did with Acid2. There'd be no point in constructing an acid test that browsers did well on.

Passin a single test is not IMNSHO "delivered on".

No, it's not. The improved standards support, which you can verify for yourself, is "delivering on". The Acid2 test being passed is just an example of the improved standards support.

If you are so concerned about tests, why not try the W3C CSS test suites? Or why don't you check out the 700 new tests that Microsoft is contributing?

Face it, Microsoft is improving interoperability and support for standards with their work on Internet Explorer. Regardless of your opinion of them, you cannot deny this.

[IE8] can't do Acid2 completely.

Yes it can. I just checked.

Flash is great for cross platform animation. So is Silverlight, but it brings a whole lot more to the party:

. choice of languages (C#, VB, IronRuby, IronPython, Javascript)
. XAML
. data binding, styling, templates
. REST, sockets for cross domain comms
. LINQ -- two lines of code to make a database query
. boatloads of controls, available under an open source license
. mobility -- Windows Mobile, Nokia platform
. managed code

If you want to do more than just graphics, or interoperate with other sites, or use a mobile platform, you should consider Silverlight.

Disclaimer: I am an Architect Evangelist at Microsoft, and it is my job to get the word out on MS technologies.

John
http://blogs.msdn.com/usisvde

Why Isn't IE8 Passing ACID2?

Basically, it fails because of XSS on the other sites.

The good new is that they have fixed this. They have now decided that the presence of a doctype will Enable the latest "Standards" Rendering mode by default. The older "Standards" modes can be requested using the HTTP header or meta-tag. "Quirks" mode will be activated in the event that no doctype is available. See the blog post http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/03/03/microsoft-s-interoperability-principles-and-ie8.aspx

My guess is that Microsoft figured out that high level of standards compliance can work fine as a default. (Since the more standards complaint browsers have few problems with the most sites.) The oldest sites will still work fine because they would use quirks mode. Newer sites can fix themselves, or use the tag. For intranet applications adding the HTTP header or meta tag can often be added easily enough that it is just not worth hurting the Internet to spare companies the effort of adding the header or tag to their broken internal apps. This leaves only unmaintained sites (which will not get fixed or updated) that claim standards compliance (via a doctype) but actually rely on IE bugs. Those will break, but on the other hand, those sites are almost certainly broken in other browsers too, so no real loss.

WRT Java, I know it is 'enterprise', but I have never even heard of a company that managed to get an enterprise Java system set up without half a dozen servers, or a mainframe running it. Enterprise Java has EJBs and the like, that doesn't make it good at all. I don't know whether its the memory usage model, or the 'lazy' programmer model that makes it suck, but it does even though it should work perfectly. (its a bit like Arnold Schwarzenegger - he's tall, strong, rich, powerful. He *should* be a babe magnet but .. somehow it doesn't pan out like that when implemented in the real world)(sorry for the mixed metaphor)

MS has gone C# in a big way over the last few years, they have concentrated on it to the exclusion of all else to drive it to market, yet the program manager for Visual Studio has said that they're done with that now and the next big push for them is unmanaged C++;
Vista for all its modernness has a tiny amount of managed code in it (and the bit that is managed - Aero - is the bit that requires 2Gig to run acceptably, its not a issue with fancy graphics, its an issue with managed-ness). Has Robert Grimes done a more up-to-date analysis of Vista's use of managed code - the last one he did showed Vista is made of only 3% managed code.

(note: to see what I mean, read the comments on here where they describe the new Office controls like the Ribbon being made available for MFC developers. Someone asks, "but will they be available for us C# devs?" and is told "we plan to make this available but we don't have a date we can announce" - ie not for some time).

This is why I think the MS-friend is right, .NET is not a tool for every job, but MS likes to hype stuff up way past a sensible level so everyone thinks you cannot program anymore unless you're using Windows Workflow Foundation to drive a Best-Practice Application Block through Windows Presentation Foundation gui all written in C#. Now they're moving on to something else, expect more hype but in a different direction.

I know this wasn't your point, but here's an interesting take on why you use the start button to shut down windows: Why do you have to click the Start button to shut down?

Microsoft actually remade a critical system call, NtCreateProcess(), explicitly because of DRM. Translated to the UNIX world, this would be like redesigning fork() from scratch just to protect VLC from being debugged.

Prior to Vista, NT had a "create process" mechanism differing in design from most other operating systems. NtCreateProcess() creates an empty process with nothing in it other than the new .exe file and ntdll.dll. No initial stack, no main thread. The parent process actually uses the debugging API to inject them into the new process. Even the the environment and current directory are injected this way.

This worked well until Vista. In Vista, their DRM system had a problem: they didn't want anyone to be able to debug audiodg.exe, but the parent process had to be able to debug it in order to start it. The solution? Redesign the entire process creation system such that the kernel does all the initial process creation procedures so that the parent does not have control over the child if it is a "protected process". Hence, NtCreateUserProcess() was born.

For those that don't believe that this change was for DRM, I offer proof in the form of a Microsoft kernel developer on video explaining it.

It looks like it will indeed be installable on XP.

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/03/03/microsoft-s-interoperability-principles-and-ie8.aspx

I love how Slashdot decides to run what is effectively a (pointless) smear campaign article against the 360, and choose to ignore stories about Microsoft's announcement that people can now self-publish games on the 360. Come on editors. At least show some semblance of non-bias.

Actually, it will. It is Word 2 format (and earlier) that is blocked by default. The DOC file format changed dramatically between version 2 and version 6, so it makes sense for to draw the line at that version. The link above shows that you can still open old formats if you want to. I doubt many people still be able to find any documents from that long ago anyway. The Word docs that I still have from back then are from the Unix version of Word, which I presume used the same format at Word for DOS.

As for VBA, reports that they were dropping it from Office were wrong. They did remove VBA from the Mac version, which I think was a mistake. Sure they should support Applescript, but they should have kept VBA for backwards compatibility.

No, but Microsoft does. Not only does DreamSpark offer college students free software, Microsoft gives it away like candy at their promotional events.

On extended attributes, you are going to have the same problem as you have with Emacs with *any* program that tries to copy a file and does not know about the attributes.

Copying a file shouldn't have to know about the attributes... systems should just issue the "copy" system call. It's only if they open the file, read the contents, then write the contents out that you have a problem. And if you copy command is doing that, I would say it's broken. Both because of the attribute thing but also because it deprives the file system the ability to optimize a lot. For instance, the file system may want to implement copy on write. Or maybe you have a networked file system, and it can issue a remote copy command and avoid transferring all that data.

As for the extended attributes problem, I did indeed get things wrong on the emacs point; it is also broken on Windows. That said, there are other programs that will be broken on Unix but not windows. The problem (which I consider a severe bug) is that when you save "foo.txt" in Emacs, it issues a "rename foo.txt foo.txt~" command, a "open O_CREAT foo.txt" command, and then several writes to the new foo.txt. In other words, foo.txt is a new file.

Now, Windows has a capability they call file system tunneling, which I thought I had tested and found that it would keep extended attributes, but I guess I'm wrong, because it doesn't.

Now I'm just even more annoyed at Emacs. ;-)

I would prefer to see a system where the attributes are embedded into the single stream of text that is in the file, so they are always copied and can be stored on any device.

But then every program would have to be modified to know about these. Want to add metadata to your photo? Oops, you broke the file format.

You need either something external to the file (extended attributes), to change a large portion of current code so that it doesn't break, or not use a unified way of storing the information. (Comments for source code, EXIF comments for photos, ...)

Also, I don't really WANT to see all the metadata when I'm editing, say, a text file, tough I guess this could be added as a editor feature to turn it off.

Biggest problem I see with Windows is the use of "wide characters" in the filenames. They need to replace this with utf-8 asap and remove all the triplicated interfaces (old, a, and w) that it has now.

As someone who has only recently been reading about Unicode and text encodings and such, what are the problems with wide characters? The only one I know of is wasted space for western alphabets, but utf-8 wastes space for east Asian alphabets.

And I don't think it's terribly fair to say that there are three interfaces when the old interface is just a thin layer on top of one of the two others.

And start using forward slash and make "/A/" mean the same as "A:/".

I do like this idea. (Actually, I would make /A:/ mean the same thing, which would probably ease porting quite a bit. And people who start deliberately using the new root would probably not use directory names like /A/, /D/, etc. anyway.)

(or just glance below):

1. Firefox 3 Nightly (PGO Optimized): 7263.8ms
2. Firefox 3 Nightly (02/25/2008 build): 8219.4ms
3. Opera 9.5.9807 Beta: 10824.0ms
4. Firefox 3 Beta 3: 16080.6ms
5. Safari 3.0.4 Beta: 18012.6ms
6. Firefox 2.0.0.12: 29376.4ms
7. Internet Explorer 7: 72375.0ms
The results are generated by using the Sunspider JS benchmark suite.


This looks great, but everyone should notice a couple of things that may not be obvious.

1) Sunspider JS benchmark is designed by Apple developers and they use it to show the world how much faster Safari is, however Opera seems to outpace the Safari developers even with their own tests. However, yes some of the benchmarks used are 'picked' to favor Safari, and some are 'extended' to hurt IE.

2) Sunspider over does the tests of the Append String performance problem to make IE look worse than it really is. IE's JScript is coded as JScript was designed, and because of this, it doesn't optimize string append operations by using newer code. So by using this text extra, it artificially make IE look horribly slow. IE8 and possible additional IE7 releases are spending time optimizing the base JSCript code from the original implementations/specifications.

http://blogs.msdn.com/jscript/archive/2007/10/17/performance-issues-with-string-concatenation-in-jscript.aspx

3) If you remove the 'string' routine from the test, IE7, consistently outperforms Firefox 2.0, and is very close to even Safari for with the results were cherry picked.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001023.html

4) Some of the numbers are quite questionable as to the validity. For example IE7 is given 72375 in this article, and yet the slowest machine our tech lab has ever benchmarked is 2x the speed, and this is on a very old AMD 1ghz machine that barely runs Vista in which the test yeilded the horrible results. So where did they get the 72375 number from? A Pentium 200?

Again reference this link so see that even this person's results are no where near the 75K ms time reported for IE.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001023.html

So it is quite questionable and inaccurate to try to portray IE7 as 10x slower, when without the 'emphasized' string append slowdown in IE7, it is faster than FireFox 2.0 and within a few 'ms' of even Safari and the new FireFox 3.0 results.

Good job to the FireFox team, btw.. Also does anyone have benchmarks of the new FireFox using a non-Apple test suite?

A GUI-less Windows.. Isn't that called DOS?? Or have I missed something..

Um, maybe Windows NT?

Hell, the connections between Windows 9x and DOS are often overstated:
"Among other things those drivers did [during the loading of Win95] was 'suck the brains out of MS-DOS,' transfer all that state to the 32-bit file system manager, and then shut off MS-DOS."

Windows Server 2008 will call itself SP1 from the get-go [1] [2]. That may provide one reason to wait for SP2 or SP3.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080218-windows-server-2008-will-ship-with-sp1-installed.html
[2] http://blogs.msdn.com/iainmcdonald/archive/2008/02/15/windows-server-2008-is-called-sp1-adventures-in-doing-things-right.aspx

Yoy might be thinking of Raymond Chen's The Old New Thing blog. The shims that keep popular old programs with dubious behavior going are party why Windows is so popular. Here's an article about a decoy control panel window...

Yoy might be thinking of Raymond Chen's The Old New Thing blog. The shims that keep popular old programs with dubious behavior going are party why Windows is so popular. Here's an article about a decoy control panel window...

From: http://blogs.msdn.com/rruggeri/archive/2007/11/04/designing-healthvault-s-data-model.aspx "Wherever possible, we are using existing standards both for interchange in and out of HealthVault as well as within it. Many of our data types draw directly from standards such as the ASTM CCR, the IndivoHealth project and soon the HL7 CDA/CCD." quoted from Sean Nolan, Chief Architect for HealthVault

Hmm, need to have registered an email address with Microsoft LiveID. Nah, just make me a new one. More spam fodder.

Verify my school against the list here. No go, just the big universities listed. Oh, but there's another way!

So, purchase a free item from JourneyEd, and we'll get an email with authorization to download. Sure, click-click.

Oh, look. "VeriClick - The easiest way to provide proof of your academic status." For the low price of $2.95, we'll look into our master database of registered students from 1,500 colleges and see if you're in there. Or I can email or fax proof for free. I'm sure the verification process will take at least a week or so.

New account with JourneyEd, usual account information. Skipped the payment step, that's good.

Apparently, nobody told JourneyEd about this, their webserver is full of molasses. I can't go any farther right now.

Well, there's always the MSDNAA (It looks like a troll), where for the low fee of $799 we'll send you discs for the campus (or $499 for download only). Still have to get keys from MSDN web server.

This is not looking free in time or money.

Also - this is not open to any student in the countries listed. There is a list of about 42 schools in the US that are plugged into their student verification system. In Belgium it is 2 schools, China 3 schools, etc.

If you read their fine print in the FAQ for administrators:
https://downloads.channel8.msdn.com/FAQ/UniversityAdministrators.aspx

it looks like the school needs to register their student list/database etc. with Microsoft.
The FAQ seems to imply that this requires Microsoft's software to interact with the student database on campus.
This may or may not be a violation of Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), but I know that if I were still a student, I would not be comfortable with the school sharing my enrollment information with companies without my knowledge and approval (Microsoft or other).

"Also - this is not open to any student in the countries listed. There is a list of about 42 schools in the US that are plugged into their student verification system. In Belgium it is 2 schools, China 3 schools, etc."

From the downloads page "Now remember these are professional tools. This means they are pretty big files so make sure you have the bandwidth and space to bring them to your machine."

That kind of cracked me up. Remember kids, professional tools take up lots of storage space. If it's not big, it's not 'professional'.

Also - this is not open to any student in the countries listed. There is a list of about 42 schools in the US that are plugged into their student verification system. In Belgium it is 2 schools, China 3 schools, etc.

Run windows as non-admin (hey, thats how you run linux, right?), and have a scheduled (instead of on-access) virus scanner. Alongside regular backups, this pretty much covers the bases, without the performance penalty of an on-access virus scanner. But wait. Running non-admin on say, XP, is a royal pain, right? Yes, it can be, because runas is pretty crumby, but this http://www.stefan-kuhr.de/supsu/main.php3 , and this http://blogs.msdn.com/aaron_margosis/archive/2004/07/24/193721.aspx take away 99% of the pain. (The latter is pretty cool, as it elevates a single console window to administrator rights, while still running within the current users profile. Makes installing poorly designed software a breeze.)

Actually, Windows (at least XP) ships with two versions of comctl32.dll. Programs get version 5.82 (the classic Windows controls) unless they have a manifest file that says its OK to use version 6 common controls (Windows XP style controls).

That's not even counting the WinForms (.NET) controls. I don't know if all the WinForms controls are different than comctl32, but I know the menu bar control looks like the Office 2003 version.

comctl32.dll is not currently part of the Visual Studio Redistributable package, as the file is largely OS version dependant, to the point of requiring the platform SDK if you want to test a version for a version of Windows that you are not running.

As for Office itself, I'm not sure that calling its controls Common Controls is accurate. I'm just assuming the controls it uses are in one of the many dlls in the C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OfficeX\ directory, where X is the version number: 10 for 2002/XP, 11 for 2003, and 12 for 2007.

Because M$ is soooo very good at normal updates:

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2007/12/18/post-install-issues-with-ms07-069-ie6-on-xpsp2.aspx

(Among others) That they'll be a perfect candidate to create this type.

For that matter, I'd really like to know how someone/people who might do this, would get around that whole illegal thing.

In your example, the Bus Factor is 1. Dangerous.

Unimplementable? Right you are: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ooxml#Adoption

Require full implementation? ISO approved ODF 1.0 doesn't have a single full implementation - all current implementations extend ODF 1.0 and most have compatibility problems: http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2008/02/01/is-it-jetlag.aspx#7465908

If they really tried to bribe the standards body, they're really bad at it...

http://blogs.msdn.com/jasonmatusow/archive/2007/08/29/open-xml-the-vote-in-sweden.aspx

WTF is it with Microsoft and shift-click doing something useful?

Ever want an image of an Excel chart? For a long time, I would do it by hitting printscreen, pasting it into Paint, then cropping it. But there is a better way: select the chart, shift-click the edit menu, then choose the option "Copy Picture." I'm not sure I know what exactly the options do in the dialog that pops up, but that's a minor inconvenience compared to the old way.

Shift-delete immediately deletes a file instead of sending it to the recycle bin. In Vista, shift-right-click apparently adds a "command prompt here" option to the context menu.

WTF is it with Microsoft and shift-click doing something useful?

Ever want an image of an Excel chart? For a long time, I would do it by hitting printscreen, pasting it into Paint, then cropping it. But there is a better way: select the chart, shift-click the edit menu, then choose the option "Copy Picture." I'm not sure I know what exactly the options do in the dialog that pops up, but that's a minor inconvenience compared to the old way.

Shift-delete immediately deletes a file instead of sending it to the recycle bin. In Vista, shift-right-click apparently adds a "command prompt here" option to the context menu.

People don't care *why* things don't work. They don't care who you blame. They only care that it says "Ubuntu" on the box, and their wireless doesn't work. That's it, period.

Harry Truman was famous for having a plaque on his desk that read: "The Buck Stops Here." Linux is engaged in playing a endless, circular, blame game where every flaw in their distributions is to blame on somebody else: Linux can't play DVDs legally because the DVD forum won't give out free licenses. You can't use Linspire's licensed DVD player because it's proprietary!

Linux needs someone to just get in there and take care of the damned problem. Microsoft is successful because of people like Raymond Chen ( http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/ ) who is willing, able, and even eager to drill a problem down to the source, the machine code, to fix the bug and deliver a quality product. Linux doesn't have people like that, and it doesn't seem to know how to motivate them, so instead of someone saying "hey, look, I figured out this wireless driver thing once and for all" all you get is "it's Broadcom's fault! It's Apple's fault!"

Don't assume that all MS devs are coder monkeys. There are some very sharp people over there, particularly so in Microsoft Research. A cursory glance at MSDN blogs will clearly show this if you know the keywords to look. For a single sample, consider this guy from the C# compiler dev team.

The IE team is all over this one. To fix Vista, Microsoft simply needs to introduce a new meta tag at the operating system level similar that proposed for IE8. Without the tag, Vista and all future Microsoft operating systems would default to be XP, anyone wanting the full Vista experience could simply add the tag and viola, Windows Vista, 7, etc.

1. "Standard mode" remains the same as Windows XP, and compatible with current content.
2. If you really want the best experience Vista can give, you can get it by inserting a simple <meta> element

Errr, your research leaves something to be desired.

Microsoft reported the Sweden situation themselves. And they did so within hours of the so-called 'vote promise' email.

As for your EFFI corruption link, correlation != causation. From your linked page:

One should be careful in interpreting the result, though. For example, the statistical test does not naturally tell anything about the reason of the relation between corruption level and voting behaviour of a country; in any case, whatever the reason for the correlation, also some quite uncorrupted countries voted for the approval. And although the trend is interesting and the results informative, the [above] conclusion is still not particularly strong due to a relatively small number of voting countries

Besides a passing reference to 'what happened in Sweden', I didn't see any reference to 'buying votes' in that link, either.

Both IBM and MS encouraged members to join the various ISO committees in different countries.

http://www.vistaheads.com/forums/security-news/1689-microsoft-convicted-fine-1-52-billion.html

http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/48409524/m/3850972554

http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=361048

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/03/19/why_microsofts_eu_concession/

http://search.zdnet.com/index.php?t=4&s=0&o=0&q=screwed

http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/visualbasic/dotnet/archives/infoq-fire-and-motion-what-openxml-means-to-ibm-and-lotus-notes-14187

I don't know, man, do a little Google search - it's not hard to track down.
As head honcho, the responsibility for corporate crime rests on the CEO's shoulders, even if current legal practice doesn't actually make them pay for their surrogate criminality.

Yes. In fact, that is exactly what is happening at the moment. At least the vocal majority is in utter opposition. See the IE Blog.

Also:

• Eric Meyer's follow up post
• WaSP response
• Discussion which includes a disclaim of official endorsement by Andy Clarke, co-lead of WaSP

I am calling on the development community for solid alternative proposals:

Alternatives NOW!

Yes. In fact, that is exactly what is happening at the moment. At least the vocal majority is in utter opposition. See the IE Blog.

Also:

• Eric Meyer's follow up post
• WaSP response
• Discussion which includes a disclaim of official endorsement by Andy Clarke, co-lead of WaSP

I am calling on the development community for solid alternative proposals:

Alternatives NOW!