Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Office 2003 - Reviews, Overviews, Issues
securitas writes "The first users of Microsoft's Office 2003 are weighing in and the response is mixed. The new Outlook has received a favorable response, but the mantra seems to be there's little reason to upgrade unless you absolutely need the new features. Meanwhile, Bill Gates dismissed the open source competition. One of the new features - self-destructing documents - seems to have caused some confusion, because 'Microsoft says the new feature is not designed to remove all traces of a file' and MS spokesman Mike Pryke-Smith says, 'The message will still be in various places', so emails will not cleanly self-destruct. A related issue is the permissions technology called Information Rights Management, which may shut out Mac users. PC World has a detailed review of Office 2003 which sums things up well."
It doesn't matter what my feelings are about it because in the end it will be preinstalled on all new systems anyway whether you like it or not.
If my organization is indeed that paranoid, I would insist that document suffer at least a shred(1) if not the destruction of the entire hard disk.
This sounds like a rather half-assed solution.
Just wait until the IRM server gets comprimized, there is no such thing privacy in the digital world, If don't want something leaked, don't put it on a computer connected to the internet or has a disk drive on it. I say it gets cracked tonight!
Is Outlook properly multi-threaded now? We use 2000 at work, and it's really frustrating to not be able to have a big message downloading from the Exchange server and read others at the same time.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
Software, or digital content, doesn't wear out. Even if a company could produce a perfect piece of software, office suite or otherwise, it'd be detrimental to do so under current business models. "Software as service" subscriptions could address this, but customers don't seem to go for it. To keep revenue coming in customers have to be convinced, cajoled, or forced into upgrades.
OK, none of this is news to anyone...but what are some viable commercial alternatives? The Open Source model tends to favor charging for support/service, one time charges for feature creation/customization, and donations; micropayments for content has been tried; and Macromedia and Adobe have had success with a "free-to-view pay-to-create" model.
The current "artificial upgrade" seems unethical and possibly doomed. Are traditional business obsolete in the digital arena? What's next?
I can appreciate the value of the concept of self-destructing documents. We all know that once information becomes digital, the potential of controlling its integrity is questionable at best, but that notwithstanding, it could be a useful feature.
However, my concern over the abuse of this feature overshadows any benefit it may offer. If documents, or even worse, all files, now have flags associated with them that could trigger not easily interruptable deletion, you can imagine the total havoc an il-behaved program could wreak on a user's system.
Can you imagine worms and viruses that mass flag files for automatic destruction at random dates? Receive a nasty e-mail or visit the wrong web site and have it cause files to dissapear months later with virtually no evidence or detectable agent? That's scary.
Of course, I'm sure Microsoft has carefully considered these circumstances so we have nothing to worry about.
Oh Great Gates, Isn't it better to build bridges (Mac) than destroy documents?
Trix are for kids!
I know this much: this will be disabled to send or recieve at every lawfirm in the world. You are simply not going to read something that you can't print out, copy, etc and will expire in four hours.
What really bothers me is that this is truly "lazy man's crypto." MS could have made a nice GUI for gpg and better PGP support in its XP products, but they deliver this instead? MS is in a position where it can bring crypto to the masses and other goodies. Its a shame really.
Not to mention they can't plug the "analog hole" namely the fact that your monitor is a passive listening device and as such screenshots cannot be blocked. Even if they block it on the OS level a cheap digital camera will do in a pinch.
How many of you really use 10% of all the features Microsoft Office has to offer. If you don't use more than 70% of the features MS Office offers, just install Openoffice for Windows and Linux. For gtk/gnome users, Ximian's Openoffice is an absolute must. I think MS Office 2003 is going to be a failure. It's a nice product, but I don't thinks it's worth a priced upgrade giving the fact that openoffice provides you with more than 70% of what most of us use MS Office for, and for free.
I had a lecturer at uni whose entire course was in powerpoint.
not coincidentally, it was the worse course I've ever had.
since taking decent notes was impossible, the only thing to do was download the presentations (43MB for a bit of text and pictures!) and print them off, 2 slides per page.
worst... technology... ever!
Having been a consultant for over 8 years, most business users I know still haven't grasped the feature set from Office 95, little alone '97, 2000, XP and now 2003. The reason they upgrade has largley been due to compatibility issues (users unable to open documents sent to them buy users with newer versions).
The "need for features" is not because most users need them, but rather Microsoft needs them to make the case for upgrading.
Open Office, Star Office and other suites will eventually win over Microsoft Office. Maybe not today or tomorrow, but soon.
Ruby on Rails Screencast
Point about hardware speeds grudgingly accepted :-) Nowadays, your word processor can be checking your spelling between keystrokes. But back in those halcyon days, there was nothing else like it.
.....
Cygwin isn't part of the default Windows installation. It's an ugly hack, and you may as well buy a dog as teach a cat to bark.
Tools like sort, uniq, sed, awk and so forth are not "things that almost nobody will use". That is a bit like saying "Who needs coal anyway now we've got electricity?" If you look in your rcscripts sometime, you probably will see plenty of references to these tools. You might never use them directly from the command line, but they're there, and all sorts of applications make heavy use of them. For instance, the spell() function in PHP makes use of spell - so the PHP developers didn't have to get distracted by working on a spelling checker, nor did the PHP source get bloated by the inclusion of a spelling checker. Not to mention that all applications that use spell as opposed to incorporating their own spelling checker will automatically share a common word list.
If you want to change one word for another in a whole lot of files, sed is, and always will be, the quickest way to do it. The fact is that some tasks are inherently unsuited to a point-and-drool interface. With any kind of user interface, you will have to type the word you want to change and the word you want to change it to. Using sed just adds a few extra keystrokes.
I could go on, but I suspect we aren't aiming at the same point. My point is that I think it's good to have many small programmes that each do one thing - and do it well - which can then be called from within other programmes. A mail client, for instance, just needs a call to sendmail - it doesn't have to handle the intricacies of SMTP. Thus leaving human-interface designers to get on with designing human interfaces
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Really - what's the big deal here?
We don't know. Why don't you have a go?
...the king of floating document formats. Once again, Microsoft is changing it's formats, in an attempt to force users to upgrade their software, as well as lockout 3rd party apps and OS's.
This is why I prefer Corel Wordperfect myself, they've not changed file formats since version 6 (I think that's right), and they're up to what's officially version 11 or 12 one. (Now branded by year, not a number.)Wow, imagine if Microsoft hired engineers smart enough to design a file format that could last through 5-6 versions! Why Hell might freeze over real nice!
Theres an API that loads you default virus scanner to examine the contents of the document after it has been decrypted.
So... I could write a "virus scanner" program, and have Word pipe me the text of the supposedly copy-proof document. Neat.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Regulatory compliance requires routine recordkeeping of customer and other communications. That includes emails and documents. You can be sure brokerage firms and their regulators will have new policy challenges with self-destructing emails and documents.
In the early 80's they had a much larger market share, and as far as I can tell it has been shrinking ever since. That said, Apple has recently done some very inovative things and seem to be on the leading edge of the next entertainment "killer app", Itunes + Ipod. Now, if only they would release it for GNU/Linux instead of relying on community based support.
Besides, it is against MS's best interests to completely kill of Apple (that's why the invested, what was it, 150 million dollars in Apple in the late 1990's). For a long time, MS Office was the only office suite avalible to Macintosh users, causing the bizar phenomina that MS made more off the sale of an Macintosh than Apple did. This still may be the case.
Galium Arsenide is the material of the future, and always will be.
I had a cellular biology teacher that did the same thing. Surprisingly, I found this particular class lends itself to powerpoint presentations and other visual aids. Biology is one of the courses that is very helpful to see how things fit together to understand it. You can absorb a lot more information that way. What people in the class would do is print out the PP presentation before class (w/ ~6 slides a sheet), and take notes in the margins. I quite liked it, but it would be annoying for most other classes (especially math classes).
This post was generated by a Cadre of Uber Monkeys for Monkey-Man2000 (603495).
I predicted this the first time I heard about Microsoft's content "protection" feature. People complain that Palladium-style DRM will prevent people from booting Linux, but that would be far too blatent. Instead, "protections" like these are going to turn Microsoft file formats, which are hard enough to reverse engineer already, into proprietory files protected from reverse-engineering by the DMCA. How long will it be before some sort of content-protection functionality is needed to open *all* Office documents, not just ones that specify certain protections? After all, Windows users would never know --- Office will dutifully open encrypted letters from grandma, but a Linux user will be shut out, even if he should be able to read the document.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Hope you're right. More likely, whatever Office 2003 uses to authenticate that you're the intended recipient of a DRM word doc isn't going to work with OO. Once the doc is locked, OO isn't going to have the key to open it.
And, since it's DRM, it's going to harder to reverse-engineer that key, than, say, the document format. And, even if it is reversed, I wonder if it'll be a DMCA violation.
Not a big issue; you, of course, don't have to lock your documents. This time. Next version of Office, watch for the DRM feature to be 'on' by default; you have to turn it off, but it'll just take a preference selection. Version after that, two versions from now, DRM "feature" is on all the time, and takes arcane hacks to turn it off.
Bet on it.
--
$tar -xvf
Isn't this just common sense that applies to any software? If it does everything you need and works well for you, don't upgrade. I don't care what software it is or how much it does or doesn't cost, I'm not upgrading if I don't need anything in the new version. No (sensible) person recommends you upgrade to the newest Linux kernel every time one is released if you have an old stable one that does exactly what you want perfectly. Why would MS Office be any different? The only reason to upgrade is new features. If you don't need the new features, you don't need to upgrade.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
12,000 users in Exchange and were able to reduce the number of servers that that requires from something like 14 to 8.
Oh, by the way, is Exchange still this much of a joke? Serving 12,000 people should require no more than two redundant servers (or one "enterprise" server with built-in redundancy). If an administrator can't set up a single four-way box to handle thousands of users, that administrator is a loser (gigahertz CPUs + gigs of RAM + mirrored RAID SCSI/FibreChannel = one fucking beast of a machine for crap like e-mail).
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
I'd like to see backup for your claims of tabbed browsing and gestures. I use both all the time and love them. I've shown them to several people. They all loved tabbed browsing and simply disabled mouse gestures the first time Moz mentioned them.
Feature innovation? I can't tell you when the last time I wanted new "features" in an Office suite was. I want to type shit, save my document, print it, and go. The most advanced "feature" I've ever actually seen used in Word was tables/borders - and they were being misused because the stupid document should've been in Excel (idiot put all the data into tables in a Word doc, then did a bunch of calculations on a calculator and typed the results). I don't need my document editor to do graphics editing, make my coffee, and triangulate the position of all commercial flights currently flying within 150 land miles of my house. It needs to type text and do a couple of basic formatting with fonts and positions. That's all. That's a document editor. Autosave can be nice too. Wordpad does all that. Except the autosave. And I don't have to pay extra for it (although.. I'd have to use it with WINE if I wanted to use it...).
Really... I'd like to see one good reason to move from Office 97... much less to move to Office 2003. Same goes for Windows. XP offered stablity and an ugly UI, but broke all my old DOS games and even a lot of my Win9x stuff. Is that innovation? If so, I'm sure glad the OSS community doesn't have it...
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!