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MS Office v.X Gets Service Release
techwolf writes "Microsoft put out a patch to Office v.X that touts more than 1000 performance improvements. In other words, 1000 ways they could have written the code better the first time."
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Wow, we got 'em again! Sometimes I pity—yes, pity—Windblowz users. For all of their zealotry and blind worship of Master Gates, for all of their outlandish licensing fees, for all of their virus-proofing and fire-wallowing, they still have to put up with a product that's about 1000 sandwiches short of a picnic.
* shakes head in dumb disbelief *
This just goes to show how antiquated the closed source methedology is. While M$ customers struggle trying to get version after version to function at all without destroying their hard drives entirely, Linux users sit back smugly, and relax.
It is just more testimony to the effectiveness of open source (the bazaar rather than the cathedral) that Linux users have never felt it necessary to install a service patch for the hypothetical Linux office suite.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
I do _not_ own a mac, nor run Office, (or looked into this) but the sad thing is, this patch probably adds another 100Mb to the size. why do they allways do this? arghh. What I'd really like to see are patches that are more efficent and smaller than the original code.
oh well.
HURD - Hurd's Under Research & Development
In other words, 1000 ways they could have written the code better the first time.
Come on, this is totally unfair. Office v.X is widely considered to be a better office suite than its Windows counterpart (it really is excellent work), there's no forced registration with Microsoft, and without an office suite, OS X would have had very, very little going for it for a long time. It was rushed out the door so Microsoft could showcase the new Office X for OS X, show that it wasn't a monopoly by providing products and compatibility across platforms, and to help launch OS X.
That being said, who gets everything right on the first try? The Linux kernel? Slashcode? Apache? XFree?
Yes, it could have been written better the first time, but no one gets it right the first time. They had the benefit of real-world profiling, of testing on OS X, X.1, and probably X.2 at this point, they can see where things can be improved, they can see real-world issues with OS X, or new features/code/libraries that can be used and abused, and they released a patch. This sounds exactly like what any other software company would do, except other software companies don't have this much code behind them.
I'm all about bashing MS, but come on people, don't be unfair about it.
--Dan
Crap, why am I defending MS?
1000 ways they could have written the code
better the first time.
Oh come on, are you complaining because MS had bugs in their program? All programs have bugs.
How many bugs were fixed on the way to Gnome 2.0 or Mozilla 1.0 ? Thousands! Are you accusing the developers of those products for not doing it right the first time?
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
Posting anonymously for obvious reasons.
This service update appears to disable all known pirated Office v. X serial numbers. If you're using a "borrowed" serial number, this service update will render Office v. X unusable for you.
Not that anybody on Slashdot would ever do something like that....
Who write perfect code the first time around please raise your hands?
(counts hands)
Ok, will all those whose perfect code consists of a 'Hello World' application please put their hands down?
Why, look. No more hands up.
"1000 ways they could have written the code better the first time"
What happened to release early, release often?
It's a good thing we never had to upgrade beyond linux kernel 1.0... and undoubtably we'll all be using Mozilla 1.0 in 10 years, once it comes out..because Open Source developers always write the code correctly the first time..unlike those pesky Microsoft losers....
Its a painful thing to listen to, this marketing twist. 1000 performance improvements indeed.
What does it mean? Do you list every thing that could possibly "improve" things and count that as a performance improvement? Most companies wouldn't use this line. Its a meaningless marketing statement that deserves a bit of slamming.
What this means to me is they didn't have anything they could point out as an improvement on a bulletted list.
The new 2003 Honda Accord, with 2000 performace improvements over the 2002 model.
Kind of like the difference between Mac OS X and 10.1? Before you Mac users slam something, be reminded of your humble beginings as well.
"In all we've made more than 1,000 performance improvements, updates, and fixes across the whole Officev.X suite. As a result, you'll find that Officev.X is faster, more stable, and more efficient."
Blah, blah... generic... It's new! improved! New package, same great taste!
What did we think? As a result of the fixes, Office would be slower, crash more and be less efficient?
OK, the announcement is not TOTALLY content-free, but one of the things I detest about Microsoft is the absence of any well-structured bug lists that would enable you to tell whether the specific issue that affects you has been fixed. "Previously, there were problems typing accented characters in certain fonts while the Formatting Palette was displayed. These problems have been fixed." What problems WERE they?
Where's the numbered list of 1000?
How do we know it's really 1,000 and not just some marketer's hyperbole for "lots and lots?"
And another thing I hate is Microsoft's continuing pigheaded refusal to call them "bugs."
OK, I feel better now.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Granted, I'd rather be using ICQ or IRC, but everyone I know uses MSN. Bleh.
The complexity of Linux pales compared to the complexity of a full office suite.
How come each Linux kernel release article doesn't end as the above did?
Looks like M$ is trying to weed out the pirated copies of Office X by killing all known pirated serial numbers when you install this update. Either that or there are some serious bugs with the installer. See some complaints here.
At work we have 5 legit office x copies and non work after the update with our serial numbers. At least 2 of the numbers have never seen the light of day either, so M$ fuxored up again.
In other words, 1000 ways they could have written the code better the first time
Mac os 6, 7, 8.1, 8.5, 8.6, 9, 9.1, 10, 10.0.1, 10.1... what's that, a trillion ways to have "written the code better the first time"?
And how about linux? or apache? Every bug fix is now a "way to write the code better the first time"? What a fucking stupid douchebag dumbass.
If you take a look at the release notes, under the Quartz text smoothing heading, you'll notice that you need 10.1.5 in order to to have Quartz work.
Seems like the new version update is finally around the corner.
AnamanFan - Trying to find the Truth, one post at a time.
In other words, 1000 ways they could have written the code better the first time.
Damn straight.
In my day, we wrote programs to include everything we would ever need. Before we needed it.
Why, I even finished a program before I started it and it wasn't buggy.
And the code conformed to standards, before the standards were written. And I say programmers are sissies these days. I don't care what "Intel" or "IBM" says, I'm using the instruction set I had 25 years ago, nothing more, nothing less. Vector processing, I spit in your face. ptoo!
*everything* is Orwellian to cats.
Oh yeah... just get a Windows CE handheld!
I'm running 10.1.4 with a non pirated version of Office X and I've had no problems with the SR after using it for 30 minutes. But I have yet to try anything difficult...like add clip art for instance.
I heard on Slashdot that Linux is bug-free and never crashes.. er, I mean I heard that Linux 2.6 will be bug-free and never crash.
cpeterso
In other words, 1000 ways they could have written the code better the first time.
?
In other news... thousands of developers are asked to stop contributing to free software, leaving each project with only one person to admin it. With fewer new features, it's believed that they will get it right the first time too.
A call was made to drop every instance of "Alpha", "Beta" and "RC" from the project names.
The market predicts a flood of new forks upon this incredible improvement about how people deal with software.
"I finally can leave my Bahama's house", said Guido Van Russell, now the only Python developer left to make Monty Python jokes on the project's mailing list.
Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, said: "I have an update to make. 1000 ought to be enough for anybody. I will make it only one and improve your Microsoft experience".
Also, a quick last note: Reports of monkey suicides have arisen over the last couple hours.
Oh my.
Buy a Nintendo DS Lite
"In other words, 1000 ways they could have written the code better the first time."
that's right. stick it to the man. if only they could have written it perfectly the first time like the cross-platform, fully-featured office suite that you wrote. oh wait. hmm. nevermind.
You weren't a Mac user in the mid-90s were you?
Word 6:
Slower? Yep!
Crashed more often? Oh yeah!
Less efficient? The media took up space in the dumpster no more or less efficiently than anything else in there. The boxes and manuals had glossy stock covers which meant they had to be thrown away in "mix recyclables" instead of "white paper". So I would say, "Yes, slightly less efficient."
Actually, I agree with all the real points of your post. And it's unfair to the current Mac team at Microsoft to give them too much flack for the marketing droids and the sins of their (hopefully sacked) coding elders. It's just that... well Word 6 was REALLY bad.
..they just want to cripple all of those pirated copies I've been handing out.
Ok, so...let's see..ah, here it is... 'Hack-O'Matic 2000'. My favorite tool for making those little updated blackbag patchers.
Yes..those mac users..always saying stuff like that. (sarcasm)
Proteus is what you're after. I'd say it's even sweeter than Trillian, and runs on OS X.
I have a couple beefs with the original version of Office X. Does anyone know if they've been fixed in SR1?
1. Text entry in Word doesn't support the normal Mac OS X way of entering characters in other character sets. (This may be tied to the fact that the Mac and Windows versions use a common file format; I don't know. That still doesn't make it good behaviour.)
2. The interface for text entry, etc. follows the Windows conventions, not the Mac OS ones. What I mean by this is such things as how the keys behave when you're scrolling through text on the keyboard, and what happens when you click the mouse below the last line of text - small annoyances, but frustrating to a long-time Mac user. (Whether the Mac conventions are better or not isn't so much the issue; the issue is that, if you're going to develop a Mac OS X app, follow the Mac OS X interface conventions, not the Windows ones!)
...but it's still the same old slashdot, as evidenced by the lame trolling news posting.
...if you are using a pirated serial number.
(sorry, missed the title in the previous post)
___
The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason. --Ben Franklin