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Microsoft To Share Office Source Code
I_Love_Pocky! writes "According to this article, Microsoft is going to give its source code for Office 2003 to more than 30 different world governments. The purpose? So they can inspect the code for security flaws."
I'll believe it when the government of Randomistan announces that they received the source code and build tools, and have compiled a version that bit-for-bit matches the retail CD.
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
They wont have a license to distribute the MS office code and any license they do have from MS is likely to be so encumbered that it would be incompatible with the opensource license.
The only viable option a government wishing to do this is to do a clean room design. Unless of course there are patent restrictions.
This won't work in the UK. You can't sue the UK Government unless it allows you to. Somthing called Crown immunity
Wouldn't it be nice if schools got all the money they wanted and the army had to hold jumble sales for guns
To get the same binaries, they'd need to use the same compiler, all the same options, breath the right way, and hope that they get the right thing.
On the other hand, if the idea is patented, it makes no difference what the source of the idea was, you can't use it period. Most patents have some kind of external manifestation anyway, so most patented ideas could be inferred just by looking at or using the final product, nevermind the source code. From a patent point of view, just using the product would probably "taint" you more than inspecting its source code.
Writers don't avoid reading other people's books for fear that their writing will become "tainted". That's ridiculous. The way they learn how to write well is exactly by reading other people's books.
I think a logic checker would be more useful.
"30 different world governements"
Trojans can still be introduced by evil compilers. See Ken Thompson's Turing Award Lecture.
A trivial example I posted 15 years ago is by ordering the definition of global functions. If you have n functions in a file then you have n! ways of ordering them (assuming they are all prototyped correctly).
Sure there is the free MS Word Viewer, though that only says it supports MS Word 2000 and doesn't mention WinXP. So it may or may not work.
Rather more significantly (for me, and many others) it is only available for Microsoft operating systems. That means the "free viewer" is useless to anyone using a Mac, Linux, BSD, Solaris, or any of a number of other operating systems. Yes, they're all small percentages of the market, but according to Google by the time you add all those up, you're looking at almost 10% of the desktop market. That's a pretty significant chunk that you've just relegated to being completely unable to read Word Documents properly.
Jedidiah.
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If you've ever spoken with a native Russian speaker, you'd realize that they're 'v' sound is extremely soft. So soft, in fact, that it sounds extremely like a 'w.'
You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.