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No, at least that's not what Brian Jones says (btw. there's more info on the Ecma thing too there). A while ago he wrote that MS will make updates available back to (IIRC) Office 97 to enable these versions to rw the new formats.

I'll second that. As well as the regular cleanups advocated elsewhere on this story (defrag (inc registry), prune startup crap with autoruns) you will accumulate a lot less crap if you run as non-admin.

I ripped this quote from somewhere...
        START
              Q. Why is Windows so insecure?
              A. Because everyone runs as Administrator.

              Q. Why does everyone run as Administrator (even when they know better)?
              A. Because they don't understand security and are afraid they will be prevented from doing things.

              Q. Why don't they understand security?
              A. Because they run as Administrator, bypassing all security.
        LOOP TO START

This microsoftie blog has lots of good info about running as non-admin. It can be painful to switch, but once you do, you won't regret it.

According to one Microsoft guy, Microsoft is removing the royalty-free license requirment and instead is issuing an irrevocable commitment not to suethat says they won't ever sue you.

http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2005/11/ 21/495466.aspx

According to this post by a Microsoft employee, the format is free to use. In his next post, Brian points out that the license is perpetual; that is, it cannot be changed once granted. He cites the license itself, which says, that the license is perpetual for everyone, and is only terminable if the individual sues Microsoft over patent infringement claims relating to reading or writing of Office Schemas.

According to this post by a Microsoft employee, the format is free to use. In his next post, Brian points out that the license is perpetual; that is, it cannot be changed once granted. He cites the license itself, which says, that the license is perpetual for everyone, and is only terminable if the individual sues Microsoft over patent infringement claims relating to reading or writing of Office Schemas.

If "older" means more than five years ago, yeah.

Microsoft Office 2000, XP, and 2003 will be given the ability to read them.

Actually, they haven't increased the size at all. It's the exact same size as the three menu bars that Office includes by default. It also has a mode to hide the bar. Check out this blog post:

http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2005/09/15/4 67956.aspx
http://www.sunflowerhead.com/msimages/SizeCompare- 9-15-2005.png

That could be because there is no binary key.

http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2005/10/ 17/481983.aspx

And, as far as patent encumbrances, MS has issued a non-discrimatory, royalty free license.

That's just a rumor -- it's not true at all. See The Myth of the Binary Key in Brian Jones's MSN blog.

Now, I don't fully agree with his conclusions, because if you take the argument to it's logical conclusion, it's never safe to overwrite a file on the system without a reboot. Microsoft decided to be conservative in their approach to files in-use to protect the user from himself. In the Linux world, the ability to replace files that are in-use does cause some problems. Replacing glibc and/or PAM can cause authentication problems without a restart of certain services. Replacing mozilla products cause some of the problems I mentioned above. Replacing certain Gnome/KDE desktop components can occasionally cause failures to communicate between the old and new version. For every one of these that cause problems, there are dozens more that don't. Letting you replace files for most services (Apache, MySQL, Samba, etc) means you can limit your downtime to seconds rather than tens of minutes. Most desktop apps will continue to run the old version until you actually restart the programs in question.

Raymond Chen's blog is probably one of the best sources of information on why some things are done the way they are in Windows, especially when they seem completely illogical. He talks about why Windows uses Ctrl-Z to end files, complaints about people wanting more ways to hide files, etc. He has some interesting tales to tell, and if you deal with Windows on a regular basis, it can also be quite revealing.

Now, I don't fully agree with his conclusions, because if you take the argument to it's logical conclusion, it's never safe to overwrite a file on the system without a reboot. Microsoft decided to be conservative in their approach to files in-use to protect the user from himself. In the Linux world, the ability to replace files that are in-use does cause some problems. Replacing glibc and/or PAM can cause authentication problems without a restart of certain services. Replacing mozilla products cause some of the problems I mentioned above. Replacing certain Gnome/KDE desktop components can occasionally cause failures to communicate between the old and new version. For every one of these that cause problems, there are dozens more that don't. Letting you replace files for most services (Apache, MySQL, Samba, etc) means you can limit your downtime to seconds rather than tens of minutes. Most desktop apps will continue to run the old version until you actually restart the programs in question.

Raymond Chen's blog is probably one of the best sources of information on why some things are done the way they are in Windows, especially when they seem completely illogical. He talks about why Windows uses Ctrl-Z to end files, complaints about people wanting more ways to hide files, etc. He has some interesting tales to tell, and if you deal with Windows on a regular basis, it can also be quite revealing.

Now, I don't fully agree with his conclusions, because if you take the argument to it's logical conclusion, it's never safe to overwrite a file on the system without a reboot. Microsoft decided to be conservative in their approach to files in-use to protect the user from himself. In the Linux world, the ability to replace files that are in-use does cause some problems. Replacing glibc and/or PAM can cause authentication problems without a restart of certain services. Replacing mozilla products cause some of the problems I mentioned above. Replacing certain Gnome/KDE desktop components can occasionally cause failures to communicate between the old and new version. For every one of these that cause problems, there are dozens more that don't. Letting you replace files for most services (Apache, MySQL, Samba, etc) means you can limit your downtime to seconds rather than tens of minutes. Most desktop apps will continue to run the old version until you actually restart the programs in question.

Raymond Chen's blog is probably one of the best sources of information on why some things are done the way they are in Windows, especially when they seem completely illogical. He talks about why Windows uses Ctrl-Z to end files, complaints about people wanting more ways to hide files, etc. He has some interesting tales to tell, and if you deal with Windows on a regular basis, it can also be quite revealing.

Ummm... Actually, if you go read so MS employee blogs, or go read some VS2005 articles, you'll find that a great many customers are unhappy with the state of the product at lunch, and those "won't fix" bugs were the reason MS announced a service pack at the same time.

Go take a look:
http://minimsft.blogspot.com/

http://blogs.msdn.com/scottwil/archive/2005/11/07/ 490007.aspx

It might take a techie to set up Aaron's system, but even non-techies can run with it once it's set up.

If you have time, this is a pretty interesting video of two of the inventors of Singularity. They go into some detail on their motivations for doing the work, what they're learning from the prototype etc.

http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=6830 2

The real question is which timezone they put Kashmir in. Windows 95 had a click-able map for picking timezones, but they removed it because of protests by the Pakistani government, because they had put Kashmir in the India timezone.

Debunked, but still a common misconception.

Internet Explorer 7 will include a native XMLHttpRequest object so instantiating it will be the same as every other browser.

Linux is actually much better at this than windows - you can see what the kernel does. Microsoft's test suite means nothing, as explained by a (great) microsoft programmer: http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2004/03/ 05/84469.aspx

"In a comment to one of my earlier entries, someone mentioned a driver that bluescreened under normal conditions, but once you enabled the Driver Verifier (to try to catch the driver doing whatever bad thing it was doing), the problem went away. Another commenter bemoaned that WHQL certification didn't seem to improve the quality of the drivers.

Video drivers will do anything to outdo their competition. Everybody knows that they cheat benchmarks, for example. I remember one driver that ran the DirectX "3D Tunnel" demonstration program extremely fast, demonstrating how totally awesome their video card is. Except that if you renamed TUNNEL.EXE to FUNNEL.EXE, it ran slow again.

There was another one that checked if you were printing a specific string used by a popular benchmark program. If so, then it only drew the string a quarter of the time and merely returned without doing anything the other three quarters of the time. Bingo! Their benchmark numbers just quadrupled.

Anyway, similar shenanigans are not unheard of when submitting a driver to WHQL for certification. Some unscrupulous drivers will detect that they are being run by WHQL and disable various features so they pass certification. Of course, they also run dog slow in the WHQL lab, but that's okay, because WHQL is interested in whether the driver contains any bugs, not whether the driver has the fastest triangle fill rate in the industry.

The most common cheat I've seen is drivers which check for a secret "Enable Dubious Optimizations" switch in the registry or some other place external to the driver itself. They take the driver and put it in an installer which does not turn the switch on and submit it to WHQL. When WHQL runs the driver through all its tests, the driver is running in "safe but slow" mode and passes certification with flying colors.

The vendor then takes that driver (now with the WHQL stamp of approval) and puts it inside an installer that enables the secret "Enable Dubious Optimizations" switch. Now the driver sees the switch enabled and performs all sorts of dubious optimizations, none of which were tested by WHQL.

(IOW: it doesn't guarantee stability or quality at all. It's just a false sense of "stability")

For an OS which is continually evolving and was not designed with a lot many future developments in mind, it is very natural to say no to the stable binary API/ABI concept for drivers. But as it matures and there is no longer a need to fix interfaces to support some out-of-world functionality, the driver interfaces are automatically going to be stabilized. (Unless kernel folks decide they get bored with having one function name for more than a year or that they want to keep driver writers continuosly on their toes - all of which is unlikely.)

API/ABI compatibility obviously has it's own pros and cons - some times it's impossible to break things, take Windows for example. The world is going with LP64 model for 64 bit machines but Windows developers had to stick with LLP64 just because they made some design mistakes and now they cannot break the tons of applications. (See http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/01/ 31/363790.aspx).

Linux on the other hand can afford to break and fix things until the time where binary and out-of-tree drivers grow to out number the in-tree stuff. By that time I guess there will be a very less need to break things such as driver interfaces and the like.

And I think the mad rush to put everything in the official kernel tree is not a good idea from maintenance and complexity stand point. So if and when the Linux ABI/API stabilizes that will be a good thing for out-of-tree kernel drivers and Linux itself.

Debugging the Development Process by Steve Maguire has some interesting insight (mostly as asides or side-bars) into the cross-platform nature of Office, in particular Excel, because Maguire was one of the driving forces between getting the core functionality to be cross-platform. Before that there was a constant disparity in features between the Mac and Windows versions.

And here is another quite interesting history of Word, in case you think it's a latecomer to Windows.

The main bits of the story
Also, there is a link to this video
http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=6830 2

---

"...it is impossible to predict how a singularity will affect objects in its causal future." - NCSA Cyberia Glossary
What's New?!

We recently released an extensive Technical Report describing the current state of the Singularity Project in great detail.
Overview

Singularity is a research project focused on the construction of dependable systems through innovation in the areas of systems, languages, and tools. We are building a research operating system prototype (called Singularity), extending programming languages, and developing new techniques and tools for specifying and verifying program behavior.

Advances in languages, compilers, and tools open the possibility of significantly improving software. For example, Singularity uses type-safe languages and an abstract instruction set to enable what we call Software Isolated Processes (SIPs). SIPs provide the strong isolation guarantees of OS processes (isolated object space, separate GCs, separate runtimes) without the overhead of hardware-enforced protection domains. In the current Singularity prototype SIPs are extremely cheap; they run in ring 0 in the kernel's address space.

Singularity uses these advances to build more reliable systems and applications. For example, because SIPs are so cheap to create and enforce, Singularity runs each program, device driver, or system extension in its own SIP. SIPs are not allowed to share memory or modify their own code. As a result, we can make strong reliability guarantees about the code running in a SIP. We can verify much broader properties about a SIP at compile or install time than can be done for code running in traditional OS processes. Boarder application of static verification is critical to predicting system behavior and providing users with strong guarantees about reliability.

There's an interview with the two project leads up on Channel 9. You never know they might respond to a Slashdot questionaire.

There's an interview with the two project leads up on Channel 9. You never know they might respond to a Slashdot questionaire.

Did Windows have this disclaimer when it launched? Or ... yesterday?

"Again, this is a prototype research OS, not a full fledged OS that can run the typical applications you've come to expect of an OS"
(from http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=6830 2)

here's jim larus and galen hunt talking about their project.

Dude, Atleast you are told about the FireFox. A Safari user gets a complete blackout or shall I say a bad ride in Safari ;-) Or it could be the death of MSN Butterfly Let the butterfly rest in peace. Santy

One of the things one should consider when evaluation Microsoft's true openness is the company's willingness to support their own technologies on competing plattforms. More than often - virtuall allways in the public debate, Microsoft seem to forget that they actually do supply products for another operating system: Mac OS X, and one metric for testing their willingness to share their own technologies outside of Windows is to take a closer look at their Mac products. For instance both Microsoft Messenger and Microsoft Windows Media Player significantly lacks in functionality and features compared to their Window versions.

Microsoft states in their response letter to MA:

...Microsoft has been deeply committed to supporting XML within Microsoft Office for a number of years and continues to work hard with many governments around the world toward these goals.

In the case of XML support in Microsoft Office:mac 2004, only Excel supports the MS XML format, where support for XML formatted Word 2003 documents produced on Windows are completely lacking. It is also not possible to write XML documents from Word on the Mac. I blogged an article earlier this fall that explains in more detail how Microsoft's XML support is only Windows deep and what they have stated on this in relation to Office 12 for Mac OS X. Repeated questions to Microsoft on the fact that this "openness" is only Windows deep remains unanswered.

I have also posted a question to Microsoft's latest blog on the ability to save as XPS format in the upcoming Office 12 for Mac -- a question that remains unanswered.

Microsoft has been very active on Norwegian discussion boards lately where Microsoft employees have been operating under nicks posing to be normal discussion partipants rallying against the OpenDocument formats and promoting the openness of the MS XML formats well knowing that the country in Europe closest to follow follow Massachussetts is Norway. This following a public hearing where the government wants to standardize on open document formats in all communication with, and within the public sector, in addition to promote the use of open source code. Microsoft's response to this has been surprisingly vague compared to the response to the Commonwealth of Massachussetts.

http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=6830 2

The above is a very large (168 Mb)* video interview with the team.

*Could someone transcode this down to a more reasonable size?

But, in 1.0 and 1.1 there was no build/make tool, and no resources compiler (like resgen) so even though you had the VB/C# compiler, you still needed to download the SDK or install Visual Studio to build managed projects. Really, the reason those compilers were in the .NET Framework at all (as I understand it) was for ASP.NET servers to use.

This is fixed in 2.0 (Whidbey). There's now a build tool (MSBuild, see http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/MSBuild .HomePage) and it includes that missing ability to compile resources. That means you can build VB/C# projects on Windows boxes without installing the SDK, even Visual Studio VB/C# projects.

Or he could use VS.NET 2005 and have edit and continue for VB:
http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2004/10/15 /242853.aspx

Oh, there's no way google took their eye off the ball with this one. Imagine the possibilities if you started using Google to store some or all of your data. Not only do you have your files available from anywhere on the planet but you can search all of it, from anywhere, with the best search engine around. Integrate that with Windows (WinFS anyone) and the potential is huge.

Plus the more structured information we can give Google, the more their search engine can learn. The more it learns the more relevant the results can be. And giving google a planet wide database of structured information is going to make a huge difference to what they can teach that engine. Anybody else wondering how long it will be before the google search engine becomes this planet's first AI?

Ok, getting back to reality, not only are you now getting google's response to your search, you're getting back details from your own notes and files too, and potentially info from other people if google take it that far. Imagine, you search for 'Restaurants in Paris' and get back a google map of the restaurants with the numbers, your own contacts numbers and notes from your address book, other people's ratings of the food and the photos you took last time you were on holiday there... It's all possible, it's just a case of how much information we feed google and how well they can integrate it.

Go take a look at some of the demos Microsoft are putting out for WinFS. It's impressive stuff and that's just for your own computer. Imagine a technology like that, in the hands of a company like google, linked to the whole planet...

WinFS: http://blogs.msdn.com/winfs/
PDC Demo: http://blogs.msdn.com/winfs/archive/2005/10/05/477 436.aspx
Channel 9 Video (long): http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=1063 56

Oh, there's no way google took their eye off the ball with this one. Imagine the possibilities if you started using Google to store some or all of your data. Not only do you have your files available from anywhere on the planet but you can search all of it, from anywhere, with the best search engine around. Integrate that with Windows (WinFS anyone) and the potential is huge.

Plus the more structured information we can give Google, the more their search engine can learn. The more it learns the more relevant the results can be. And giving google a planet wide database of structured information is going to make a huge difference to what they can teach that engine. Anybody else wondering how long it will be before the google search engine becomes this planet's first AI?

Ok, getting back to reality, not only are you now getting google's response to your search, you're getting back details from your own notes and files too, and potentially info from other people if google take it that far. Imagine, you search for 'Restaurants in Paris' and get back a google map of the restaurants with the numbers, your own contacts numbers and notes from your address book, other people's ratings of the food and the photos you took last time you were on holiday there... It's all possible, it's just a case of how much information we feed google and how well they can integrate it.

Go take a look at some of the demos Microsoft are putting out for WinFS. It's impressive stuff and that's just for your own computer. Imagine a technology like that, in the hands of a company like google, linked to the whole planet...

WinFS: http://blogs.msdn.com/winfs/
PDC Demo: http://blogs.msdn.com/winfs/archive/2005/10/05/477 436.aspx
Channel 9 Video (long): http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=1063 56

Oh, there's no way google took their eye off the ball with this one. Imagine the possibilities if you started using Google to store some or all of your data. Not only do you have your files available from anywhere on the planet but you can search all of it, from anywhere, with the best search engine around. Integrate that with Windows (WinFS anyone) and the potential is huge.

Plus the more structured information we can give Google, the more their search engine can learn. The more it learns the more relevant the results can be. And giving google a planet wide database of structured information is going to make a huge difference to what they can teach that engine. Anybody else wondering how long it will be before the google search engine becomes this planet's first AI?

Ok, getting back to reality, not only are you now getting google's response to your search, you're getting back details from your own notes and files too, and potentially info from other people if google take it that far. Imagine, you search for 'Restaurants in Paris' and get back a google map of the restaurants with the numbers, your own contacts numbers and notes from your address book, other people's ratings of the food and the photos you took last time you were on holiday there... It's all possible, it's just a case of how much information we feed google and how well they can integrate it.

Go take a look at some of the demos Microsoft are putting out for WinFS. It's impressive stuff and that's just for your own computer. Imagine a technology like that, in the hands of a company like google, linked to the whole planet...

WinFS: http://blogs.msdn.com/winfs/
PDC Demo: http://blogs.msdn.com/winfs/archive/2005/10/05/477 436.aspx
Channel 9 Video (long): http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=1063 56

Yes, since skinning became all the rage consistency has taken a back seat. However you overstate the case for Windows: most Windows apps look different because they WANT to look different (think Winamp's/Quicktime's/WMP's skinned controls). That said, the Office/Windows/IE widget sets (yes IE has its own widget set for web pages) are largely consistent and have very cosmetic differences -- most users can easily live with those.

The problem in Linux is that an app written for one desktop looks like crap on another. Take Ubuntu (I'm still on Hoary Hedgehog so I'm not sure if Badger fixes these): My Gnome desktop looks great until I start Konquerer (and I _need_ Konq because ^#*&ing Nautilus crashes hard on my SSL-ed WebDAV share). If I start up with KDE then Gaim and Firefox looks even crappier (horried fonts, tiny text). This is completely ridiculous and a great example of how the distro war costs Linux on the desktop.

Microsoft never supported PDF. Why is it so prevalent?

They do now: http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2005/10/ 01/476067.aspx

So your fiance is not a native in an African country? And last time I checked, West Africa is not a country in Africa. You reveal your ignorance of the divergence within Africa. Oh, and statistically, AIDS is a much bigger issue than anything within MS's domain...and they are doing their part to do research and work towards an HIV vaccine.

My brother spent part of his summer at a medical mission compound in northern Kenya (not far from the Sudanese border), and one thing he has noticed is that they don't like to be lumped into one big "African" umbrella. He has been able to differentiate between the Somalis, the local Kenyan tribespeople, and the Sudanese. He did have an always-on Internet connection at the compound as they rely much on Western support/contacts, while many local people came weekly to get water from the well on the compound. They used a generator quite a bit, apparently, so it's really a different way of life.

My dad spent a week in Zambia, which is unique in its own right. The one strange thing he found was that there was only a max of 2 hours of electricity per day (oftentimes less). And while many people around him had next to nothing, they were much more hospitable than many from the West.

I must beg to differ with your thought that Microsoft has "the power to make Africa a developing nation" (Africa != a nation) and to make the world a better place. If you think that throwing money...or software... at Africa will make it a better place, then you have a very simplistic view of the continent that is Africa. Throwing software at a 20-year civil war in Sudan won't make it disappear, just as throwing software at parts of Kenya won't make the roads turn into tarmac. I appreciate your zeal and interest in the betterment of Africa as a whole, but unless you have lived there and understood the culture in any specific country there, you do not begin to understand the problems that exist in the "country of Africa."

...buying a Steak Egg and Cheese Bagel, then buying another one in a few months and realizing they added unwanted mayonnaise.* I also hope the W3C, etc. do have upcoming Recommendations/standards/wtf-they-call-'em, they check over them to prevent any errata that could give Microsoft (further) implementation legroom ("IE6 and IE7 reserve white space for [an] empty legend tag. The HTML 4.01 spec does not specify what should happen in this case."). (said HTML 4.01 spec)

*Disclaimer: This actually happened to me; remind me not to get another #7 for breakfast.**

**Disclaimer disclaimer: I love their other artery-blockers so much, and have so little hard feelings about said bagel, that I just linked to them with a nice word.

The styles are not locked away with a binary key. According to the XML schemata (ZIP file), they're stored in XML just like the document text itself.

An XML document's visual presentation is stored by semantically defining styles in CSS or by translating XML into any other desired format using an XSLT document.

No.

Microsoft Office Word "12" will write .docx files, which are ZIP-compressed XML files. These XML files are in plain text; the only thing binary about them is binary attachments (such as PNG files) that are referenced in the document itself.

Please read this blog, by a real Microsoft software engineer who actually accepts and responds to questions from concerned citizens like yourself. .docx files are not blobs wrapped in XML tags; they are actual bundles of human-readable files just like OpenOffice.org files.

And if you still want to play lawyer, here are some posts that you can visit and leave comments on or even TrackBack to your own blog. You can USENET-style-reply to this comment, but if you want your questions answered then take them to a Microsoft software engineer.

The myth of the Binary Key, a myth which you still believe as fact

Comments from some dude about OpenDocument

Some background on the reasons why Microsoft chose an XML format, and information on how their choices predate and differ from OpenDocument

License wankery

License wankery, part 2

Follow-up on comments regarding license wankery

No.

Microsoft Office Word "12" will write .docx files, which are ZIP-compressed XML files. These XML files are in plain text; the only thing binary about them is binary attachments (such as PNG files) that are referenced in the document itself.

Please read this blog, by a real Microsoft software engineer who actually accepts and responds to questions from concerned citizens like yourself. .docx files are not blobs wrapped in XML tags; they are actual bundles of human-readable files just like OpenOffice.org files.

And if you still want to play lawyer, here are some posts that you can visit and leave comments on or even TrackBack to your own blog. You can USENET-style-reply to this comment, but if you want your questions answered then take them to a Microsoft software engineer.

The myth of the Binary Key, a myth which you still believe as fact

Comments from some dude about OpenDocument

Some background on the reasons why Microsoft chose an XML format, and information on how their choices predate and differ from OpenDocument

License wankery

License wankery, part 2

Follow-up on comments regarding license wankery

No.

Microsoft Office Word "12" will write .docx files, which are ZIP-compressed XML files. These XML files are in plain text; the only thing binary about them is binary attachments (such as PNG files) that are referenced in the document itself.

Please read this blog, by a real Microsoft software engineer who actually accepts and responds to questions from concerned citizens like yourself. .docx files are not blobs wrapped in XML tags; they are actual bundles of human-readable files just like OpenOffice.org files.

And if you still want to play lawyer, here are some posts that you can visit and leave comments on or even TrackBack to your own blog. You can USENET-style-reply to this comment, but if you want your questions answered then take them to a Microsoft software engineer.

The myth of the Binary Key, a myth which you still believe as fact

Comments from some dude about OpenDocument

Some background on the reasons why Microsoft chose an XML format, and information on how their choices predate and differ from OpenDocument

License wankery

License wankery, part 2

Follow-up on comments regarding license wankery

No.

Microsoft Office Word "12" will write .docx files, which are ZIP-compressed XML files. These XML files are in plain text; the only thing binary about them is binary attachments (such as PNG files) that are referenced in the document itself.

Please read this blog, by a real Microsoft software engineer who actually accepts and responds to questions from concerned citizens like yourself. .docx files are not blobs wrapped in XML tags; they are actual bundles of human-readable files just like OpenOffice.org files.

And if you still want to play lawyer, here are some posts that you can visit and leave comments on or even TrackBack to your own blog. You can USENET-style-reply to this comment, but if you want your questions answered then take them to a Microsoft software engineer.

The myth of the Binary Key, a myth which you still believe as fact

Comments from some dude about OpenDocument

Some background on the reasons why Microsoft chose an XML format, and information on how their choices predate and differ from OpenDocument

License wankery

License wankery, part 2

Follow-up on comments regarding license wankery

No.

Microsoft Office Word "12" will write .docx files, which are ZIP-compressed XML files. These XML files are in plain text; the only thing binary about them is binary attachments (such as PNG files) that are referenced in the document itself.

Please read this blog, by a real Microsoft software engineer who actually accepts and responds to questions from concerned citizens like yourself. .docx files are not blobs wrapped in XML tags; they are actual bundles of human-readable files just like OpenOffice.org files.

And if you still want to play lawyer, here are some posts that you can visit and leave comments on or even TrackBack to your own blog. You can USENET-style-reply to this comment, but if you want your questions answered then take them to a Microsoft software engineer.

The myth of the Binary Key, a myth which you still believe as fact

Comments from some dude about OpenDocument

Some background on the reasons why Microsoft chose an XML format, and information on how their choices predate and differ from OpenDocument

License wankery

License wankery, part 2

Follow-up on comments regarding license wankery

No.

Microsoft Office Word "12" will write .docx files, which are ZIP-compressed XML files. These XML files are in plain text; the only thing binary about them is binary attachments (such as PNG files) that are referenced in the document itself.

Please read this blog, by a real Microsoft software engineer who actually accepts and responds to questions from concerned citizens like yourself. .docx files are not blobs wrapped in XML tags; they are actual bundles of human-readable files just like OpenOffice.org files.

And if you still want to play lawyer, here are some posts that you can visit and leave comments on or even TrackBack to your own blog. You can USENET-style-reply to this comment, but if you want your questions answered then take them to a Microsoft software engineer.

The myth of the Binary Key, a myth which you still believe as fact

Comments from some dude about OpenDocument

Some background on the reasons why Microsoft chose an XML format, and information on how their choices predate and differ from OpenDocument

License wankery

License wankery, part 2

Follow-up on comments regarding license wankery

No.

Microsoft Office Word "12" will write .docx files, which are ZIP-compressed XML files. These XML files are in plain text; the only thing binary about them is binary attachments (such as PNG files) that are referenced in the document itself.

Please read this blog, by a real Microsoft software engineer who actually accepts and responds to questions from concerned citizens like yourself. .docx files are not blobs wrapped in XML tags; they are actual bundles of human-readable files just like OpenOffice.org files.

And if you still want to play lawyer, here are some posts that you can visit and leave comments on or even TrackBack to your own blog. You can USENET-style-reply to this comment, but if you want your questions answered then take them to a Microsoft software engineer.

The myth of the Binary Key, a myth which you still believe as fact

Comments from some dude about OpenDocument

Some background on the reasons why Microsoft chose an XML format, and information on how their choices predate and differ from OpenDocument

License wankery

License wankery, part 2

Follow-up on comments regarding license wankery

Okay, I Googled, and the most interesting thing I found was a comment by a reader after this MSDN blog entry:

Why do some process stay in Task Manager after they've been killed?
by oldnewthing
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2004/07/ 23/192531.aspx

Comments, by Michael Hoffman: Run the command "at TIME /interactive taskmgr" where TIME is one minute from now. At that time a Task Manager with SYSTEM privileges instead of your privileges will run. Then you can do all sorts of ill-advised things like change the priority of CSRSS.

Is there some other method?

Wrong, Office new document format is OPEN. OPEN . Microsoft CAN'T "lock-in" nobody with their new document. They've opened it, anyone can write a office suite supporting them cleanly

So, if Office supports a open document format (new office format) why on earth wouldn't they add support to ANOTHER open format like opendocument? Why wouldn't they, in fact, add support for PDF (as they've say they will do)? They're all open, microsoft is trying to "lock-in" customer with other things, the time for closed formats has gone.

Office 12 will not write .doc by default, but rather an XML-based format called .docx. More information is available at the Microsoft Office XML Formats blog.

Office 12 will not write .doc by default, but rather an XML-based format called .docx. More information is available at the Microsoft Office XML Formats blog.