Slashdot Mirror

The goal is to stop user apps running as admin by default, and change the ecosystem so developers stop writing apps that require this. Requiring all users to log on as non-admin and then type in the admin password to elevate {or even log-out and log-in} would be even more painful. Restricting admin accounts by default is a better trade-off. It's not like there aren't really simple ways in the Control Panel to turn off UAC if you want to {not that I'd recommend it but you can and it's well-documented}.

I believe the programatic checks you could do in XP to see if your user token had admin rights still give the correct answer in Vista {I'd have to check to be absolutely sure}. But realistically almost no apps in XP did this - they would either do the right thing or just assume the user was an admin without checking.

There a blog post I like which describes some of the trade-offs around UAC {particularly on the question of why you can't set an app to automatically elevate, but of interest generally}:
http://blogs.msdn.com/windowsvistasecurity/archive/2007/08/09/faq-why-can-t-i-bypass-the-uac-prompt.aspx

Could you provide technical documentation to support your claim? Because from my personal experience, it's just not true.

UAC (the bit of Windows that darkens the screen and makes you click "Continue" to perform administrative actions, and which alternatively asks for a password if you aren't already running as a user who has administrative rights) is just a bit of code put between the UI and the underlying system calls. It's quite easily removable (reference here: http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/archive/2006/09/20/763275.aspx). If you remove UAC, you're left with an operating environment very similar to XP, in that administrative actions go completely unchecked by the OS, as long as you have permission to perform the action. If you don't have permission (for example, you're running as a non-administrator, or you don't have some particular token that provides the permission), then you will simply be denied access to whatever you were trying to do.

UAC was touted by Microsoft as the end-all be-all of security, and it looks like you've fallen for this hook, line, and sinker. The truth is that it's great in theory, but in practice, it's just one more dialog box for users to click through whenever they're trying to do something on their computer. In theory, UAC prevents unknown processes from subverting the system because the user will know that they didn't initiate the action that prompted UAC intervention, and they will click cancel. In practice, they'll want to get their stupid elf-bowl game working or read the e-card that a random stranger sent them, so they'll click continue so they can get back to it.

But the key, and what seemingly lead to this absurd thread, is that they are still running as administrator. It may not be the administrator username, but that's just a label. The privileges are what matter, and in Vista, they've got the privileges (barring group policies or someone intelligent setting the computer up so that they're running as an unprivileged user.) An extra click to perform administrative tasks does not mean that they aren't running as administrator. I don't understand why this is so hard to understand.

I'd love to be proven wrong. I'd love for Windows to become more secure, because simply, it would make my life easier. Please prove me wrong, but actually prove it, because the words "Technically, you are never admin under Vista," really hold no water.

To be fair, the iPaq 1945 series with an earlier version of Windows Mobile was much, much better. I believe today nobody at Microsoft or HP actually uses PocketPCs. Everything has gone over to cellphones, leaving those of us who still need a non-phone PDA for whatever reason (generally, security policies) almost high and dry. I guess they have to follow the market, but I wish they would at least not advertise and ship stuff that doesn't work.

So? First off, the IE team claims that IE7's going to be available without WGA. So part of that is no longer valid.

Also, I was responding to a claim that Microsoft witheld security updates for people who were running pirated versions of Windows. I provided a link from Microsoft that seems to indicate otherwise.

Why is this a problem? Are you saying that Microsoft is lying in their post?

That strongly implies that ClearType was not configured properly for your display. Sounds like you were using a CRT and ClearType was set for an LCD or something like that. When you have ClearType configured properly for your subpixel arrangement, things look a lot better than they do when it's off.

People still have CRTs? (jk) And no, I've tried ClearType on three different monitors, and it always looks awful to me, too. The letters are smoother, but only because they're surrounded in a grey blur. I switched to LCD displays to get away from the headaches and sore eyes that blurry CRT displays gave me - if I wanted to go back to that, I'd just take off my glasses. I much prefer the crisp, high-contrast text I have now. Here are a few other people that don't like it.

That strongly implies that ClearType was not configured properly for your display. Sounds like you were using a CRT and ClearType was set for an LCD or something like that. When you have ClearType configured properly for your subpixel arrangement, things look a lot better than they do when it's off.

People still have CRTs? (jk) And no, I've tried ClearType on three different monitors, and it always looks awful to me, too. The letters are smoother, but only because they're surrounded in a grey blur. I switched to LCD displays to get away from the headaches and sore eyes that blurry CRT displays gave me - if I wanted to go back to that, I'd just take off my glasses. I much prefer the crisp, high-contrast text I have now. Here are a few other people that don't like it.

Really good command line? They're working on PowerShell

No I am NOT an MS fanboy. I'm posting this so that bash will be better than this by the time it rolls out (well you can download it for vista, but since I'll never run Vista I can't tell you first hand if it's any good.

Have you seen the the new equation editor in Word 2007?

It might be using your default temp directory (C:\Documents and Settings\User\Local Settings\Temp\).

If you haven't changed it, there are instructions here: http://blogs.msdn.com/astebner/archive/2006/01/15/513134.aspx/

It may not work, but it's worth a shot.

Umm...no. Your interpretation, while literal, doesn't parse because applications have neither traditions nor opinions on safety, nor do they write themselves. When you expand the original sentence's subject appropriately, it reads like this:

And when you expand my sentence appropriately, you get:

It's pretty clear from context that the implication is other applications [' developers] consider those prefixes as "traditionally safe", and not that [the average] Microsoft [developer] does.

At that point, it reads more like this: "The application developers I know traditionally consider the protocols mailto: and http: to be "safe", and therefore don't need to bother sanitizing the URIs before foisting the heavy lifting off on ShellExecute()." In that context it's clearly the blind presumption of safety on the part of the developers that's the real problem.

More like "the application developers we have experience in dealing with - having expended massive amounts of our resources over the last 2+ decades to rectify or work around their mistakes - traditionally consider the protocols mailto: and http: to be "safe" and therefore don't need to bother sanitizing the URIs before foisting the heavy lifting off on ShellExecute(). These are the same idiots who do thing like try and store runtime data in system directories." This is especially true when you consider that "Chen" probably refers to Raymond Chen, who's been helping Windows work around developer stupidity for a very long time.

More insight into how Microsoft thinks about these things at Larry Osterman's blog.

Personally I'd point the finger at the idea of using ShellExecute on inadequately filtered data from the Internet.

IBM didn't fiight that hard for their _own_ OS2 and got their asses whipped and you expect them to do it with RedHat?

Microsoft has _2x_ the market cap as IBM and makes it 3x faster. http://blogs.msdn.com/heatherleigh/archive/2007/05/03/because-the-numbers-don-t-lie.aspx /okScrewEm>

From my understanding, the major difference is that what's swapped to ReadyBoost is also written to HDD; it can be paged back in from ReadyBoost faster than in from HDD. (A page isn't considered swapped out until it's written to both devices.)

The theory being is that if the memory stick is pulled out, you don't have a system crash on your hands (just falls back to paging in from conventional disc).

(Other major difference is that it's encrypted. There's no need for a key managment system 'cause the randomly generated key is merely kept in real RAM. Yes, I realise Linux can do encrypted swap; but not by default. )

http://blogs.msdn.com/tomarcher/archive/2006/06/02/615199.aspx

Hey, wait your saying that Microsoft is not only fixing their own problems, but are also fixing crappy products other companies make?

MS doing this the main reason for a lot of Windows's problems.

They have so much crap to deal with from crummy programs that it'd blow your mind. And for the most part, they all still work, right down to most old DOS programs.

Raymond Chen talks about this a lot in his blog. Example. Or did you know that Windows 95 -- what should have been 4.0 -- reported it was 3.95, because saying 4.0 would have broken hundreds of programs?

MS is no stranger to fixing other people's broken code... in fact, they are probably the best in the business at it. It's only unfortunate that they are less good at fixing their own.

Hey, wait your saying that Microsoft is not only fixing their own problems, but are also fixing crappy products other companies make?

MS doing this the main reason for a lot of Windows's problems.

They have so much crap to deal with from crummy programs that it'd blow your mind. And for the most part, they all still work, right down to most old DOS programs.

Raymond Chen talks about this a lot in his blog. Example. Or did you know that Windows 95 -- what should have been 4.0 -- reported it was 3.95, because saying 4.0 would have broken hundreds of programs?

MS is no stranger to fixing other people's broken code... in fact, they are probably the best in the business at it. It's only unfortunate that they are less good at fixing their own.

Is there a better way to handle multiple IEs on one PC?

Yes.

The only downside is that the virtual machine image is time-bombed to expire in December 2007. They usually release a new version of the image a month or so before it expires, each image lasting around 6-8 months. Since you only use this for testing it shouldn't be a big deal.

The alternative is to use one of several methods that allow you to have both IE6 and IE7 installed on the same machine, but this rarely works 100%. The most common problems are user agent strings and conditional comments. These settings are stored in the registry and all versions of IE access the same set of values. This means that IE6 will use the IE7 conditional comments and user-agent giving you inaccurate results.

Here's your answer:
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2007/08/20/ie6-and-ie7-vpc-refresh-available.aspx

The sooner IE6 goes offline, the better.

BitLocker certainly does not have a deliberate backdoor. See the story about how the government tried to get Microsoft to create one:

http://blogs.msdn.com/si_team/archive/2006/03/02/542590.aspx

I'd have to agree. For example, one of the constant Charlie Foxtrots never really fixed has been the whole url encoding/decoding nightmare:

http://blogs.msdn.com/yangxind/archive/2006/11/09/don-t-use-net-system-uri-unescapedatastring-in-url-decoding.aspx

Add to it the multiple different ways to encode/decode text using different classes and writers, and the brainscrew is complete. Things that could be made a whole lot better, but never were.

Don't even get me started on the 256 character limit on the path info/arg part of urls in ASP.NET.

With that said, I don't hate .NET. But 'open' this is not. Open is about people finding problems like above and rolling in better solutions.

The real problem is the total lack of communication from anyone on Apple's side to these kinds of problems. Bluetooth problems have been an ongoing issue since I started using Tiger (10.4.4), with everything from the aforementioned "Bluetooth unavailable", to problems with using DUN via Bluetooth (dial up too often via DUN and it just mysteriously dies), to issues where Bluetooth PAN simply disables itself. Now after a good 2 years this kind of stuff gets really tiring but no one at Apple says a word which adds an extra layer of frustration to the whole process. Are they even aware of the problems from their aluminium tower?

Now compare that with Microsoft who also had Bluetooth problems with their phones, and you can actually get some kind of interactivity with the developers. Your end users might end up being a bit nasty to you on the forum, but it's far less than the ill-feelings your brand generates if you just clam up.

Accountability you say. Maybe you'd like to know that this is actually the guy who fessed up to being responsible for the Speech Recognition bug that was so widely reported just before Vista's release.

If there is one person that's actually very trustworty inside Microsoft it's this guy. I highly suggest you read his blog.

No, it's still a rendering bug. The occasions that it appears to calculate further using the faulty value is actually when it still triggers the rendering bug.

From http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/:

Of the 9.214*10^18 different floating point numbers that Excel 2007 can store, there are 6 floating point numbers (using binary representation) between 65534.99999999995 and 65535, and 6 between 65535.99999999995 and 65536 that cause this problem. You can't actually enter these numbers into Excel directly (since Excel will round to 15 digits on entry), but any calculation returning one of those results will display this issue if the results of the calculation are displayed in a cell.

Everything you said is correct, but you are still wrong on one point. Microsoft doesn't give a shit about developers following the rules. If they did, they would just fucking fix the problems and a million applications would stop working tomorrow. Instead, they view backward compatibility as the single most important feature of Windows. Microsoft spends a ridiculous amount of time, money, and effort on ensuring application compatibility, going so far as to write little shims that fix memory leaks and other bugs in 3rd party applications. Read Raymond Chen's blog entries about compatibility to get an idea of why Microsoft has the problems it does. If Microsoft were willing to ditch backward compatibility they could put out a great product. Instead, we have to have little hacks to ensure Lotus 1-2-3 still runs correctly under Windows 2045.

Bullshit. Office 2007 does not use significantly more real estate than other versions of office:

    http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/04/17/577485.aspx

The problem is your company. Locking down screen resolutions is retarded. Quit and find or start a company that doesn't do that.

Second, learn the fucking keys. Press Alt, release it and they are documented on the damn screen. Jeez.

    http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/02/14/531801.aspx
    http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/02/23/537860.aspx

Bullshit. Office 2007 does not use significantly more real estate than other versions of office:

    http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/04/17/577485.aspx

The problem is your company. Locking down screen resolutions is retarded. Quit and find or start a company that doesn't do that.

Second, learn the fucking keys. Press Alt, release it and they are documented on the damn screen. Jeez.

    http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/02/14/531801.aspx
    http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/02/23/537860.aspx

Bullshit. Office 2007 does not use significantly more real estate than other versions of office:

    http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/04/17/577485.aspx

The problem is your company. Locking down screen resolutions is retarded. Quit and find or start a company that doesn't do that.

Second, learn the fucking keys. Press Alt, release it and they are documented on the damn screen. Jeez.

    http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/02/14/531801.aspx
    http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/02/23/537860.aspx

What, no Bash shell??? No Firefox installed by default??? Where's python??? Where's xchat??? Where's apt-get... I don't want to sit around clicking on installers all day!!?!? ARGHGHGH.

Um, what? Why would they include any of those things in the first place? If that's your frustration with Windows, well, its a pretty poor reason to be frustrated.

Anywho, if you want a good cmd shell, get powershell for Vista. Vista also comes with IE; you may not like it, but complaining it doesn't come with FF would be like complaining linux doesn't come with Opera or Safari.

If you really want to do python, you should check out IronPython. Supposedly its faster than many of the other Phython implementations out there.

Disagree.

Come back when the default permissions on any sane *nix allows a normal user to write to /usr/local "because that's where the app is installed."

Never mind that allowing apps to write to their own folder can break both security models and file system quotas. See: http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2004/11/22/267890.aspx

This blog post from a few years back explains how/why one might run a system like this: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/08/31/458663.aspx (blogs.msdn.com)

I agree completely. However, MS is now moving the other way:

(1) The person who has managed the MS Office releases has now taken over Windows and the first thing (that I've heard of) he did was to eliminate the goofy code names like "Longhorn".

(2) The "My" prefix has been removed from the Vista icons.

On a side note, the Office 2007 UI is great once you've used it for a few weeks. It was a pretty bug change, so perhaps substantial Windows UI improvements will be forthcoming? (This guy didn't do the design work, but the lady who was in charge of the UI has also come over to the Windows group to work for this new manager.)

PS.

If you are developer interested in UI work, the Office 2007 UI blog is a fascinating read: http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/11/10/the-office-2007-ui-bible.aspx

The changes were not just "off the cuff" as many on /. seem to think. They used data from the customer experience program to figure out what people really used, which is why it is amusing to see people complain in the comments -- there is data to back it up: http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2005/10/31/487247.aspx

Here's a quote from that article:
"""
How much data have we collected?

        * About 1.3 billion sessions since we shipped Office 2003 (each session contains all the data points over a certain fixed time period.)

        * Over 352 million command bar clicks in Word over the last 90 days.
"""

I agree completely. However, MS is now moving the other way:

(1) The person who has managed the MS Office releases has now taken over Windows and the first thing (that I've heard of) he did was to eliminate the goofy code names like "Longhorn".

(2) The "My" prefix has been removed from the Vista icons.

On a side note, the Office 2007 UI is great once you've used it for a few weeks. It was a pretty bug change, so perhaps substantial Windows UI improvements will be forthcoming? (This guy didn't do the design work, but the lady who was in charge of the UI has also come over to the Windows group to work for this new manager.)

PS.

If you are developer interested in UI work, the Office 2007 UI blog is a fascinating read: http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/11/10/the-office-2007-ui-bible.aspx

The changes were not just "off the cuff" as many on /. seem to think. They used data from the customer experience program to figure out what people really used, which is why it is amusing to see people complain in the comments -- there is data to back it up: http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2005/10/31/487247.aspx

Here's a quote from that article:
"""
How much data have we collected?

        * About 1.3 billion sessions since we shipped Office 2003 (each session contains all the data points over a certain fixed time period.)

        * Over 352 million command bar clicks in Word over the last 90 days.
"""

I'd argue the hobbyist community for DirectX is bigger and better (more current, anyways). Besides NeHe, there are a few tutorials here and there for OpenGL (most of them rehashes of the same thing), but the communities for Managed DirectX recently have been popping up all over. Check out Riemers XNA Tutorial, The Hazy Mind, Coding4Fun, the ZBuffer, and those are just the ones I remember off the top of my head from a year ago when I was dabbling with it. Each of those sites will take you from square one to the creation of a simple game (or toolkit). I used to use OpenGL for simulation visualization (both directly and indirectly through OpenSceneGraph, an open-source scene graph toolkit) as well. My personal opinion is that DirectX is more polished and consistent, but I grew up on c++ and object-oriented programming methods.

> No one outside of the core development team at Microsoft can claim any competence on the DRM implementation

And yet, even when they reply you won't believe it. Gutmann's sensationalism makes much better headlines.

http://blogs.msdn.com/larryosterman/archive/2007/08/28/windows-vista-sound-causes-network-throughput-slowdowns.aspx

Straight from a senior developer at MS who worked mostly on the audio system in Vista.

Summary version: they ARE fixing it, because it IS a bug and NOT an intentional hack.

Sorry, it was a busy day today and I got confused

AndyC is right in his interpretation.

USE WITH VIRTUALIZATION TECHNOLOGIES. You may not use the software installed on the licensed device within a virtual (or otherwise emulated) hardware system.

The key part is installed on the licensed device. This means that you cannot install your copy of Home/Home Premium in a virtual machine that is running on your already installed copy of Home/Home Premium. For all intents and purposes, you are installing the OS twice, on two different hardware platforms.

What a totally retarded comment. If you had even .01% knowledge of how games are developed you would have not said that.
100% of all the games have clever optimizations and hacks to improve performance on the then-lowest-common-denominator of System configurations. As a game developer myself I know that some(depends on how desperate the gamedev is) of these hacks are based on undocumented WinAPI behavior. Some of those APIs were not meant to be used outside of Windows "internals", but they are used; as getting the game to run 10fps faster (just as an e.g.) is more important than following WinAPI standards.

I don't really give a damn about MS, but one such instance is documented here. Our studio usually does not use such dirty hacks, unless we really have to. (No, I mean *really* *really* :) )

http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2003/12/24/45779.aspx

Would like to remain anonymous for now :)

I wouldn't call BT a rich client app

No but it is the widest known example (use rtorrent myself), there's also skencil and a multitrack recording app using gstreamer. I should also add that Microsoft seem to agree we'll be seeing more of these apps if their work on the DLR is anything to go by.

You have a really good point about advertising though. Microsoft have a scorched earth style ad campaign for their dev tools. They even worked to counter the possibility that windows devs would be exposed to open source tools by creating their own me-too shared/open source community sites. I'm not at all sure how the Microsoft advertising spend could be countered in a way that'd appeal to the Microsoft faithful.

As usual, Raymond Chen has an answer to that question.

I just recently ran across a problem with a shareware program I was evaluating. This may help you determine whether or not to use this particular method.

First, some brief back story. I set up my laptop with 3 user accounts, one for me, one for my wife, and an administrator account. I had my privs set to power user, and hers set to non admin. She kept trying to open the system clock for the calendar functionality - and was getting denied. She finally came to me in disgust and said fix it. I was lazy, made her a power user, and went on with my day instead of doing the right fix.

About two weeks ago I installed CMud, which has a 31 day trial period. Two days ago, I noticed that the system clock time was changed, inappropriately, to January 17th 2008 or something like that. I changed it back, and now can no longer open the program because the system clock has been updated during the evalution period. No work around available - I can't just decide I liked the software and purchase it even. This last part boggles the mind - if I liked the software enough to try and bypass the copy protection, wouldn't you still want me to be able to purchase the software?

The answer: Uninstall CMud + go back to zmud. (zmud is good enough for me, once upon a time it was so good that I bought two copies of it - one for me, one for a friend).

IF(TODAY()=39013, "Due Today!", "Not Due Today!")

I was really going to watch the Colbert Report, but a quick post:

You got the history of ODF and microsoft pulling out of Oasis wrong, they were developing their own for a while:

http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2007/01/25/office-xml-formats-1998-2006.aspx

Anyways, my fellow freedom fighters as a "Colbert Nation Hero", I have a duty to fulfill tonight by watching the Colbert Report and I must recuse myself for the night.

Miguel

Interesting, but wrong. When your cousin wrote the arithmetic engine, he used the standard IEEE floating point library. That was rewritten from scratch for Windows XP to use an arbitrary-precision arithmetic library. Apparently, "this was done after people kept writing ha-ha articles about how Calc couldn't do decimal arithmetic correctly, that for example computing 10.21 - 10.2 resulted in 0.0100000000000016". (source)

Not true - a 32 bit Windows application using 32 bit DLLs can run on 64 bit Windows.

http://blogs.msdn.com/craigmcmurtry/archive/2004/1 2/14/301155.aspx

There's a layer called WOW64 that does the API translation.

You've just rewritten the news. MS did not laugh; indeed they were the first to report that one of their employees had gone out of bounds with email promises. Literally within hours they contacted the two partners who had been sent the improper emails, saying basically 'disregared that, it's wrong'. If the Evil MS Borg had these companies so completely enthralled as some have suggested, it would have ended there and no one would be the wiser. But no ... it was Microsoft who contacted the Swedish Institute of Standards to explain that an impropriety had occurred. SIS then abstained from the vote.

Through MS's own, conscious actions, they ended up losing Sweden's vote. Hardly something to laugh openly about.

Can you show an example?

Some examples are given here.

If the servers are down, why don't you just assume the systems are genuine?
We do. It's important to clarify that this event was not an outage. Our system is designed to default to genuine if the service is disrupted or unavailable. In other words, we designed WGA to give the benefit of the doubt to our customers. If our servers are down, your system will pass validation every time. This event was not the same as an outage because in this case the trusted source of validations itself responded incorrectly.

Yes, there's an extension which supports Python.

(Oops -- you mean VS supports extensions? But TFA says that's unique to Eclipse!)

The latest chapter in the Open XML standardization story is focused on Sweden. There are accusations flying, emails floating around, and no shortage of theories about what has been happening there. As you can image I have been following up with a number of people and here are the issues and what I have found out so far.

Microsoft encouraged partners to participate in Sweden:

An employee in Sweden sent an email to 2 partners that was inconsistent with company policy. When he realized what he had done, he did the right thing by immediately reaching out to the two partners to address the situation. He contacted them by phone and email letting them know that they should disregard the mail. Here is what I know about this situation so far:

* 2 partners were sent an email making a request to participate in the Swedish process, telling them that they would be responsible for paying the membership fee if they did, but also making a related reference to marketing activities and extra support.
* Within hours both partners were contacted by the same MS employee who initiated the mail to notify them that the information in the email was incorrect and that they should disregard it.
* When the Microsoft Sweden management team became aware of the situation they proactively notified SIS, the national standards body, of this situation and shared the communications with them. There was no impact on the vote due to this situation.
* It is important to note that instructions from corporate to our regional teams around the world throughout this process have been to completely adhere to the rules of the national standards bodies, and that any party wishing to take part in the national standards body is directly responsible for paying any related fees. This means partners must decide whether to participate and vote based on their own determination as to the importance of this standard to their business. To say it more directly, offers to pay standards participation fees are totally inconsistent with our internal policy.

Organizations joining the committee late in the process:

Yes, many organizations joined the committee very late in the process. There were parties both for and against the vote that joined late. The local team did reach out to partners and encouraged them to join the process. Many of the partners had been called by IBM as well, encouraging them to join the process and to vote against the proposed standard. Many of these companies are business partners for both IBM and Microsoft and have business interests related to office automation technologies - thus, they were contacted by both firms. It is critical to note that the addition of voting members at that time was completely within the rules of the national standards body. While there are many arguments to be had over the relative merits of this rule...it is a rule nonetheless. If you are looking for other situations to think about - look at the late addition of Red Hat (and many others...I know) to Committee V1 in the United States. Their presence was simply to vote no - not based on deep technical review - but because it is in their business interests have Open XML fail to achieve ISO/IEC standardization. Google joining the SIS late is the same thing. So - for both sides, seeking to have participation of organizations with interests is within the boundaries of the rules.

The issue with the email is extremely unfortunate as it casts a pall over the hard work of so many, and the process as a whole. The S