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Anatomy Of A Bug In Microsoft Office
bender writes "An insightful look at what it is like to track down and fix a bug in Microsoft Office is available from Microsoft's Blog site."
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Uh, are you sure you're using MS-Office? Ever have any Bullet Madness? Sudden appearance of Times New Roman? Word saving files it can't later read back in (but OpenOffice can)? 1k HTML files processed into 100K HTML files by Word? Pasting text from one document into another and having the document's margins get reset? ... and that's just today!
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
I've used VMS extensively FWIW, it's nothing like NT on the surface, and only shares a handful of features at a low level. An OS based upon VMS, perhaps with VMS's irritating habit of SHOUTING IN CAPITAL LETTERS, and with a slightly saner way of expressing volumes, directories, and filenames (eg: Workbench:Tools/Commodities/Blanker rather than WORKBENCH_DISK:[TOOLS.COMMODITIES]BLANKER.EXE) would make for a very nice operating system.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I'd have to suggesst SciTE as a replacement for notepad. Syntax hilighting for almost every language under the sun (including HTML), and a lot of helpful stuff for debugging.
And yes, I wholeHEARTEDLY AGREE with your opinion of FrontPage's HTML output. Sucks major wind.
EveryDNS. Use it. It works.
AC's need not reply
A CSV file, a simple perl script, and LaTeX would do the invoice well, too.
I use LaTeX for everything, because I switched to linux long before there was AbiWord, KWord, or OOo. And my papers (and resume/CV/etc.) stand out because they are so nicely formatted.
Learning LaTeX is worth however much time you spend learning it. Try it, you'll like it.
(LyX is decent, too, but I like raw LaTeX in emacs myself).
My other car is first.
Crimson
I'm not drunk, I just have a speech impediment. And a stomach virus. And an inner ear infection.
Or better yet AbiWord, it's cross platform too! :-) Yes there are alternatives to OpenOffice.org as well as to MS Office.
Ditto, ever get a REALLY big document into Word, say 100's of pages..it gets nasty to work with. And importing things from Excel, Powerpoint, etc. can get hairy. If you are doing small,simple documents you don't notice the issues with Word. But it is far from being a Desktop Publishing system.
If you're seeing this, it's because you're using Word wrong. Office uses a stylesheet based formatting engine, much like the modern world wide web. When you change the font using the FONT field in the taskbar, you're changing the font at the paragraph level. Hitting enter twice starts a new paragraph, which causes word to load up the original paragraph style.
What you're asking for -- markup based layout -- is how Word Perfect works. There are pluses and minuses to both styles and markup, though styles are really the way to go if you write a lot. They permit you to change ALL the attributes of a paragraph -- size, spacing, font typeface, size and decoration -- just by changing its style. But for short docs, or for tricks like bolding every other letter, style based markup can lead to very confusing behaviour.
When my wife's office switched from WP to Word (when it looked like WP had been EOL'd), I had to help her fix a 50 page document that she had written ENTIRELY paragraph formatted. I spent an hour building a stylesheet and was able to very quickly format her document with it (she had spent three hours previous to this just hitting the enter key trying to get shit to line up, like it was a fucking typewriter). She refuses to use the stylesheet, partly because she thinks WordPerfect is better, but mostly because she doesn't want to admit she was wrong.
If you want your paragraphs to remain one style, that's easily done. Change the font in Format -> Style -> Normal (Font can be selected from a drop down button, which is really the most retarded thing about MS' styles).
Hey freaks: now you're ju
I remember thinking at the time, "this has got to be a file-handle leak problem". I'm surprised to see I was right!
It's not a leak if it's still using those files.
Second, I call bullshit, the current state of Linux sound drivers is still pretty sucky so I don't see all of that happening without a lot of snap/crackle/pop dominating your speakers. Linux sound and CPU usage is bad enough with one or two apps vying for the sound cards attention.
Third, my XP box mutli-task just as vigoruosly and with no stability issues either, albeit without trying to run 3 media apps concurrently (because why would I?). Having multimedia, chat, IM/IRC, web and office apps open simaltaneoulsy sounds like the same activity as 90% of Windows users every day, tack on Automatic Updates transferring files in the background and it't not that far off. Robust multitasking isn't unique to Linux.
And of course the big benefit I have on my XP box is I don't have to urpmi/emerge 3/4s of the contents of my machine each month while compiling a new kernel. When will people figure out that this kind of software maintenance is not a positive selling point for Linux? So you have to shut a few apps during an install to make sure critical DLLs aren't in use with XP, I have to fall back to Init3 to update my nVidia drivers under Linux, I don't have to boot into DOS or safemode to upgrade my video drivers under Windows? See, just trade offs. Get to what Linux really does better and attack MS based on facts, not OSS rhetoric.
Do you know that for a fact, huh? What do you do when my company becomes ( or wants to become ) a customer, and you learn that we all have Macintosh OS X machines on our desktops, and only one or two PCs in the building, which we won't want to use for your website?
If you think this is some sort of joke, it's not. There is at least one major business service we're dumping this year because their website supports only a specific version of Windows, and there are too many good alternate services for us to have to deal with that.
I can't say enough about how I dislike your assumption. It's wrong.
...is a pretty good analogy when you thnk about it:
* MS Word/Office is built around a big, powerful and complex engine, just like a Ferrari. Both are high-performance but tempermental and quirky.
* OpenOffice is derived from another project (StarOffice) which Sun bought (through purchase of StarDivision) rather than invented itself. The Yugo is derived from the Zastava GTL from Eastern Europe, the design of which Zastava bought (from Fiat for the Fiat 128) rather than invented itself.
* The casual MS Word user is completely mystified by its exotic internal workings. When things go wrong they must contend with clueless and/or irritated tech support people who offer incomprehensible advice. Proper support is expensive. The Ferrari driver is also mystified by the internal workings of his car, and when things go wrong must contend with a clueless and/or irritated Italian mechanic who offers incomprehensible advice. Parts and labour are expensive.
* The dealer network was always sparse and is now non-existant, so Yugo drivers must fend for themselves by searching the wrecking yards for parts. The internal workings are primitive but well known to owners--there is no fancy, proprietary technology. Tech support for OpenOffice is sparse to non-existant, so OO.o users must fend for themselves by Googling for patches on the 'net. The source is less complex than that of MS Office and is open, so it is known to many of its users.
* A lot of people know and use MS office because it is more powerful and popular than the rest, so they put up with all the annoyances and pay a lot of money for it, even though they don't use it to its full potential. Most Ferrari drivers buy a Ferrari because it is powerful and a popular status symbol, so they put up with all the annoyances and pay a fortune for it, even if they can't legally drive it anywhere NEAR it's full potential--and seldom do.
* Properly cared for, a Yugo can serve you well as basic transportation--even though it has less features than a lot of other cars and is slow to start. OpenOffice, properly used, can serve you well as a productivity suite--even though it has less features than some other office suites and is a bit slow to start.
* Both the Yugo and OpenOffice can be obtained and used for basically no money and some amount of tinkering.
let's face it - OOo is SLOW
Or is it... We use OOo where I work and I also use it at home. One the Celeron stations we use at work it runs like a dog. On my Athlon XP at home it screams along at a similar speed as my installation MS Office 2000 (I keep this installed for those odd occasions that I need it).
Karma? Hey I just call it as I see it.
Excuse me, but first of all, an "open file limit" and a "Disk is full" error are two slightly different things. The first thing that is wrong is that the wrong error message is being displayed. 10 years of debugging could have been cut short by actually reporting the correct error message.
So the only bugs Microsoft developers can solve in a reasonable amount of time are those that conveniently show up in their debuggers (otherwise it will take them 10 years)? Debugging without a debugger is one of the first skills that, what I would call, an "advanced coder" learns.
And if I understood the rest of the article correctly -- the fix is not a systemic deterministic fix. Its just a method for mitigating the problem in the scenario in the one way in which they have been able to observe it.
This is the unravelling of a convoluted web which they are tring to piece together with scotch tape, bandaids and spit. Its pathetic. Their problem is an "running out of file handles" issue. They need to solve the problem definitively -- if they cannot rewrite the architecture of the code, then they need to write a virtual file layer that can have an unlimited number of file handles. Or something comparable.
These pathetic one-off patches that seem to be just barely mated to the specific problem manifestation just increase the complexity of the code.