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Digital Restrictions Management in Office 11
conaone writes "According to a Microsoft Watch, there is a feature in the leaked Office 2003 called "Information Rights Management." A lot more control over documents with this... the story says: "Microsoft is threading DRM throughout the Office 2003 suite, allowing restrictions to be set on Outlook mail messages, as well as on Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. Using "permission templates," document authors can determine restriction policies to be applied to entire categories of documents, according to Microsoft's site." Here's a link to the whole story."
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-985496.html
If some people thought that GNU/RMS is bad enough, now we have MS-RMS!
Open Office.
1. its NOT microsoft
2. its open source
3. it WORKS
4. it can do everything m$ 0ffic3 can do.. cross platform.
5. i like the logo
Actually, Open Office, cannot do all the things office can do. The problem comes in where you define as what is Office? First, most think of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Access (Professional) as the standard office suite. But now, with the 2000 versions, include Project/Project Server, Visio, MapPoint, Frontpage, Publisher, and the list goes on and on.
Secondly, I think you mean to say that it can do everything MS can do considering the basic functionality I use. This is probably true with any productivity suite out there, since they all essentially do the same basic things.
However, if you take Excel for example, and have seen the myriad ways in which it is used, sometimes other packages have similar functionality, and often times it is completely unique to MS Office.
I can wear gloves and shorts like Mike Tyson and say, 'See I'm a boxer now, I'm sparring and jumping rope, I can do anything Mike can do.' Then Mike connects and you realize the difference.
The only place where things are probably similar is WORD, which boiled down could be replaced by just about anything, really.
You argument is good, except for the problems noted with #4, but otherwise you've made a good argument.
"This isn't a study in computer science, its a study in human behavior"
Not yet. But it's getting there.
Is this a reference to the speed at which OO loads? If so, touché! I use it, and it works for me, but damn is it ever slow to load initially. Of course half of Office loads with Windows at boot time, so there are trade offs.
-Ben
when they call it Microsoft Something Something it's bad
More or less. They have a knack for making things bad. PGP can work with ANY data. The new Office "upgrade" will only work with the new office upgrade. PGP doesn't mean lock-in. It's generic, open, and there's even competing implementations. Microsoft's solution is, naturally, about lock-in.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Incidently, this may be the first time someone's tried using the DMCA to enforce *file format* incompatibility. MS has done it before with copyrights (claiming that the C header files in wine used to implement Win32 were "derivative" of their own header files), with trade secrets (claiming that the "open" spec for their Kerberos modifications were protected as a "trade secret" and that no one else could implement it). It's been done before with patents (people claiming that an executable packer uses a patented algorithm). The special cases the DMCA puts into law are the only fork of IP that hasn't yet been used to try to ensure incompatibility.
Oh, and I dunno what MS's lawyers were threatening Nullsoft with if they didn't disable their "save to WAV" feature whenever users play a WMA file in WinAmp, but that theoretically could have been patent claims, so this may be a grand slam for MS in terms of misapplying IP law to screw the consumer if they try to go with a competitor's product -- they alone will have covered the entire gamut.
May we never see th
Mod this guy up!
I laughed so hard I damn near pissed my pants!
No matter where you go... there you are.
The only place where things are probably similar is WORD, which boiled down could be replaced by just about anything, really...
Were that only the case.
Take a real-life case: doing a manuscript for a novel in one file. This requires a few basic things:
Sounds simple, right?
You'd be amazed at how few modern word processors are able to do this. I say "modern" because, ironically, this was pretty trivial with most non-GUI word processors like WordStar. (Incidentally, to those who'd suggest using a text editor and LaTeX, it's a good idea in theory, but in practice you want a manuscript to be set in Courier, to use underlines instead of italics, to use "--" and straight quotes instead of em dashes and typographer's quotes, etc. Ironically, LaTeX and other good print formatters have a lot of trouble dumbing their output down sufficiently.)
At any rate, once you get into Word's collaboration features, forms, mail merge, multilevel indexing, and so on (all things I've actually had to use!), competitors get even fewer and farther between--for the most part, in fact, you may pretty much be limited to OpenOffice and WordPerfect. There are a few single-platform competitors which come close in the feature department and even surpass Word for certain functions (Nota Bene on Windows, Nisus Writer on the Mac), but the uncomfortable truth is that Word really doesn't have a lot of competition out there in terms of its feature set.
Go google for "mandatory access control" vs "discretionary access control". Basically, if you have clearance to create top-secret documents, you CAN'T (the OS won't let you) create documents at a lower clearance level; sure, you can cut and paste, but only into another top-secret document.
Jon.
Have you installed 1.0.2? It improves the initial load time.
Fully licensed blockchain psychiatrist
You're talking about end notes; he's talking about EndNote, which is a completely different thing. EndNote is almost mandatory for anyone who writes any kind of document that requires a serious bibliography. It can import and store lists of references, reorganize them so that they're easy to find, and automatically format them into whatever exact format is required by the publisher. Every serious scientist I know has a huge library of EndNote references ready to put into their documents, and I assume that the same thing is true of scholars in other fields, lawyers, and just about anyone else who needs bibliographies.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
This is great, because at work I hate to protect every worksheet with our department's password. Now all we have to do is associate the file with our password, and only the right people get to edit it. This is brilliant.
It makes the chances of writing an office suite that is compatible with MS Office 2003 almost impossible. I bet the DMCA will make it illegal to reverse engineer the crypto you'll find this new IRM technology uses.
Actually, the DMCA has explicit provisions to allow defeating copyright protection if it is for the purpose of reverse engineering. It's one of the only exceptions there is.