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Michael Meeks On ODF and OOXML
biscuitfever11 writes "ZDNet has up a great interview with Michael Meeks, the distinguished Novell engineer, who's currently deeply involved in open document format and OpenOffice.org. In the interview, Meeks takes Microsoft to task on its alternative format OOXML and argues that Microsoft should adopt ODF — but says that realistically they never will. He also mentions his favorite example to explain the benefits of open source software to a nontechnical person: the flexibility of open source would have allowed us to free ourselves from Clippy, the world's most despised paperclip, by changing a single line of code."
Given half a chance the OSS world would probably have neded up patching Office with:
' remove MS cruft:
' AssistantLoad "clippy.acs"
AssistantLoad "Tux.acs"
liqbase
Not that I don't enjoy a good OSS flamewar, but isn't this something of a leading question? As an individual in a position to make buying decisions based on this sort of thing, this is exactly what turns me off to ODF and other "community" technologies.
The closed techs may have more technical annoyances and whatnot, but when it comes right down to it, open technologies and the confrontation they create even within their own support base just turns me off to the whole thing. Give me something that works for 95% of the whole group and I'll happily support the remaining 5% rather than risk 100% of my user base's productivity on something that may collapse from internal quibbling in a few months.
Just my 2 cents, is all....
Talk to me about WoW and I'll punch your faggot face.
There is no need to change one line of code for that. My mom never could do that, nor could 3/4 of the population. That's why there is Options-Help-Don't use office asistent. Nothing is black and white. there is a lot of gray there in between and while OS is a completly good and fair option, commercial software is a completly good and fair option as well. Both have their advantages and disadventages, and OS id not the paradise, nor is commercial software the hell....
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
I'll put on my Executive Hat here: "So Open Source is good for removing features, gotcha." Arguing about turning off Clippy not necessarily a shining example of why OSS is good. Things like zero-day exploits, internationalization, and no per server (or VM!!!) costs are what will make people adopt OSS.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
is the one Metacity uses. The patch to remove that one is also only a few lines, but I have yet to see a non-technical person manage to do that. The great advantages of free software aren't technical, they are social. People working together for a common good because it is fun is a more efficient economic system than the one in which you do it to get a paycheck. Imagine what would happen if the rest of the world where also structured like free software communities?
Football Odds
Last time I checked you can disable Clippy in 10 seconds from the Office Options menu, without the need to find the right line, remove it, and recompile. Anyone who is not capable of clicking Tools->Options and checking off a checkmark would not be capable of editing the code either.
Not being anti-OOS in any way, and there are many instances when editing a few lines WOULD make a difference in the usefulness of software (Windows Firewall sure comes to mind), but this is not one of them. Sorry.
It looks like you're writing code to remove me!
"the flexibility of open source would have allowed us to free ourselves from Clippy, the world's most despised paperclip, by changing a single line of code."
This is also a prime example of where OSS fails too. How many basic users would be able to even compile a version with the altered code, let alone alter the codes themselves? Heck even finding a specific "no clippy" version among a variety of differently configured distributions could prove too taxing. Microsoft's approach to clippy is that if you hide it 3 times in general usage it'll present a user with an option to turn it off and it'll never appear again (provided you've a well configured server). An "if you don't like it, change it" approach simply isn't as effective as good interface usability testing when you're dealing with a userbase comprised of vastly different skill levels.
But couldn't you free yourself from the Evil Clippy with a single click of a checkbox? He could make that analogy better and more current by saying "You know the 65535 issue? Programmers could find that and help fix it rather than waiting however long for an official patch"
I like music
If that paperclip where a person I'd shoot him in the fooking head.
Haiku for you!
The format war is the main reason why most people stick with MS Office. And well... let's take a look at Microsoft's balance sheets.
So, "Microsoft adopting ODF"? Or even "Microsoft not sabotaging ODF plugins"? No freaking way.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Set /apps/metacity/general/reduced_resources to true in gconf.
Turns off the other useless eyecandy too.
So, $60,000. For 164 person company.
We're a little over a 100 people and we spend over $500,000 a year on a single contract.
Why would Apache "fail"?
And why would anyone not directly involved in it even know what you're running?
But you said, and I quote "I make buying decisions".
Noooooo...... What is "holding OSS back" is the fact that all those companies have LARGE investments in their current systems.
It takes a LONG time for companies to migrate from something that is working TODAY that they know how to support TODAY and that has been paid for TODAY.
That depends upon what you mean by "established".
Microsoft has a MONOPOLY. Therefore, they are going to be around for a LONG time.
People will continue to buy from Microsoft because it is what they know and what they use and what works.
Free software (as in speech) will be taken up by non-US governments and such. It's easier to pitch a change there when you can show $X (or whatever the local medium of exchange is) being sent to Redmond, Washington, USofA instead of into the local economy.
As much as I'd love an injunction saying that MS must make its DOCX File format readable by other Office suites, and it must produce a plugin for OO.org to open it NOW. We are screwed. MS already has Office 2007 out in the wild, and I'm starting to get .docx files I can't open in OO.org. There's only one reason this was done, OO.org is so good at opening Docs it started to threaten Office. It doesn't matter if whether OOXML gets certified, its going to be up to OO.org to reverse engineer it as fast as possible or it will make everyone cry blood.
By the way, what do you think the result will be in a year when we start seeing Samba 4 AD? MS will attack again with even harsher resolve/.
Well, at least the OpenOffice clippy hasn't told me anything so far. It's just there, on the bottom of my screen smiling and cheerfully eating up a little bit of the memory space and graphical space. Maybe it's there to appease the user by helping him to believe it's really like MS office? It's just not working on me...
You cannot forecast when to replace PC's? And you have 160+ users?
Huh?
Huh?
Even at 100+ users, we lease our workstations and replace them every 3 years. It's a known cycle and they're under warranty. Not to mention that there aren't any surprises for Accounting for the next 3 years.
Yeah, maybe you could just answer the question, okay?
Yeah, maybe you could just answer the question, okay?
Yeah, the question, care to answer it?
How would they KNOW it was Apache? You haven't answered that question, either.
I didn't ask if it was "unfair".
I asked how Apache would "fail" and how they'd even know that it was Apache.
You have not answered either of those questions.
Seeing as how you cannot answer either of those questions and you think $60,000 is a lot of money for a business and you cannot even forecast workstation purchases
I've been deploying Linux throughout the company I work at. And no one can tell the difference. As long as the service is available, they're happy.
Here's a free clue. Hardware fails. Real professions know this and have already taken steps to mitigate such failures. If a drive dies on your Apache server, the end users should not ever know about it.
If you're claiming that they'll be complaining about running Apache when that happens
Finally a flash game that's on topic!
http://www.microsoft.com/taiwan/office/clippy/game.html
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
When you get a .docx file you can't read, you say the same thing Office 2003 users say... "I can't open DOCX files, send it in DOC". The only difference is that Office 2k3 has Office 2k7 format plugins, but really, only the people who already know about them are probably going to be finding and using them.
Furthermore, considering that OOXML is basically Office 2k3 formats converted to plaintext and zipped up, I'd have thought there would ALREADY be support in OO.org by now... at least, soon. OOXML was made to allow devs to easily generate their own or read them so I'd expect writing loading/saving functions would be quicker than the original Office 2k3 format functions...
In short: There's still hope for OO.org. :)
MSOffice 2007 costs:
..... Access databases. Those are the biggest problems in such a migration.
#1. MSOffice 2007 for each person.
#2. MSOffice 2007 training for each person.
#3. MSOffice 2007 deployment to each person.
OpenOffice.org costs:
#1. OOo deployment to each person.
With MSOffice 2007, due to the default file format issue, EVERYONE has to get it AT THE SAME TIME. Or they won't be able to open the documents that other people are creating. And they all have to be trained to use it. And it has to be rolled out to all of them.
And all that within the same short time frame.
With OpenOffice.org, it will look practically identical to MSOffice 2000/XP/2003 so there isn't any training needed. As long as you roll it out slowly.
And there's not cost to license it so it comes out significantly less expensive from the beginning.
As long as you don't have macros or such or your major client isn't switching to MSOffice 2007.
Or
Uh.. Clippy could be disbaled with three clicks. That's going to mean a lot more to the vast majority of non-programmers than "one line of code".
Christ. You might as well tell them all it takes is building a Porsche out of paper-clips for all the good that line will do.
"I can't open DOCX files, send it in DOC". This won't last forever.
http://overklocked.com/comic.php?c=54[www.overklocked.com
May he always be remembered as one...
Tell me something...it's still "We, the people"... right?
"the flexibility of open source would have allowed us to free ourselves from Clippy, the world's most despised paperclip, by changing a single line of code."
Or.... like every other user in the world - just turn, clippy, off.
Code changes are not always a solution.
everyone doesn't compile OSS software themselves
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
The vast number of idiots that keep repeating clippy can be disabled with an option -- and keep getting modded up for this!
Do I want to be associated with such morons? Do I want to be associated with the ones who vote'm up?
Those of us that have to install Office on umpteen computers would benefit from a more flexible distro. Especially if there isn't a nerd handy on site to go around tweaking the installs. Office has it problems, but makes its money off of enterprise distributions. Why not make that a better selling point? I use Open Office at home, but can't roll it out at work for a variety of reasons (proprietary Access database mostly). I'd like to have some of the man hours back I lost hiding Clippy, mapping to Templates, etc...
The Clippy complaint is 10 years old and wasn't that compelling even then (as mentioned, you can easily turn it off).
So bringing up Clippy means either the author has an MS chip on their shoulder or hasn't really used Office in years. I won't read TFA based on the Clippy reference alone. Maybe he has a good point, I wouldn't know.
I am not really satisfied with any of the above replies and I have to say this is the first time I have bothered to write a meaningful reply because someone usually is on the ball.
.NET completely incompatible with prior versions, making all of an organizations investment worthless as they have done in the past as they did with VB6, ruining the investment in that code.
The ONLY reason to support open source is power in the form of self-determination.
Microsoft can try to force Vista on you and refuse to sell Window XP. Microsoft can decide next version of Office is not backwards compatible with other versions of office and refuse to sell your prior versions of office. Microsoft could decide tomorrow to make the next version of
In the above scenario, Microsoft is in a position to directly mandate your business. If Microsoft -- or any vendor -- were to discontinue a product your business depends on and refuse to sell it, you are guilty of copyright infringement if you try to resist the change since there are no legal venues for the additional purchase of product X, Y or Z (let alone possible DMCA or EULA violation).
Any business depending heavily on a closed source solution has empowered the closed source vendor to be the bus driver and they can -- by accident, by design or by circumstance -- drive your organization off the cliff.
Open source, in contrast, grants the organization the power to control their activities. There are no unexpected surprises forced upon them, no vendor-lock, etc.
It is NOT that whether or not you DO change, modify or compile open source software -- it is that you COULD and that you could decide to change or not change as you see fit and your organization can control its own destiny with no forced surprises.
Open source grants control, there is not one other significant advantage it has because Open Source solutions are not necesarily superior (and often not!) to their non-open source alternatives.
Open source means the freedom to not drive off the cliff if you do not wish to do so.
My email server (Linux + Exim4 + SpamAssassin + ClamAV + chroot'ed BIND9) has over 600 days of contiguous uptime. And it's being hit every day by crackers from all over the world.
Any competent admin can keep IIS running. Any competent admin can keep Apache running.
And NONE of the users would even KNOW what webserver was running. My users don't know that I'm running Exim4. They don't know that ClamAV blocks the viruses. They only care about the SERVICE. And they're very happy with the service.
If you have to reboot IIS to get "kudos", then you're incompetent. That is all.
Competent admins get "kudos" for helping the end users perform their jobs faster and/or easier and for fixing the "I accidentally deleted an important document" problems.
Well, I haven't tested Excel vs. OO Calc, I have tested Word vs. OO Writer.
I sat someone down who was familiar with Word, but not very comfortable with computers in general. With no training and absolutely no help from me, they were able to bang out and print a resume.
I heard from contact in Microsoft that the reason they didn't approve/use Open Document format is that it doesn't support all of the features of Office, and they would have had to make a ton of modifications to it to realistically make use of it. I don't know exactly which features it doesn't support that .doc does, but that's what I was told.
Comment of the year
It seems to work for me. But I might have misunderstood you. I'm on Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon with OpenOffice.org 2.3.
Novell has apparentally signed an interoperability (mostly patents) deal with MS, yet it looks like it is more about Novell working with MS or something, I mean, see these declarations! "It is unlikely in reality MS adopts ODF" , shouldn't Novell be... asking the partner to help them, you only see Novell implementing OOXML and nothing else, why is this deal working in only one direction?
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
Well, it's a bad example for those who know how to turn off office assistant and what-not.
However, the goal for Michael Meeks seem to be to push open source to a larger public audience, particularly the nontechnical savvies. Using his likable example of Clippy, could be part of that goal. Meaning, make our product easier than easy.
So, hopefully the Clippy example Meeks portrayed for open source and OpenOffice is the 'you get the point' idea.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
That's the missing feature...
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
It's virtually a certainty.
... I had never heard of Michael Meeks, but as soon as I read "ZDNet has up a great interview with Michael Meeks" in the summary, I knew exactly which format he supports. Slashdot can be so transparent sometimes.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
I thought there was an update for the past few versions of Office that allowed docx files to be read.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=941B3470-3AE9-4AEE-8F43-C6BB74CD1466&displaylang=en
Just another crappy blog
Maybe Acrimonymous created this particular account just to post controversial statements. But maybe Acrimonymous doesn't really have a deep history of making contributions on /., and maybe he / she is a paid troll. I'm not making accusations. Not yet. But look at his / her posting history. If I read his / her profile correctly, Acrimonymous has a very high /. user number, and has only posted on this particular thread. And, lo and behold, this comment is a criticism of Free Open Source Software production methods.
/. number and a very shallow history here on /., and his / her first series of comments are directed at a broad-based criticism of Free Open Source Software production methods.
Okay, nothing human is perfect, and only ideologues would say that Free Open Source Software is perfect, etc. But I find it really curious that this poster has a high
So I would like to know, Acrinonymous, who are you, really? My name is Christian Einfeldt. I'm an attorney in San Francisco, California. I have used FOSS since 2001. I know about 20 CLI commands, and I use openSUSE 10.2 and Kubuntu Edgy in my law practice and in producing a documentary film called the Digital Tipping Point about how Free Open Source Software is changing global culture. I earn no money from representing FOSS industry players.
I respect the fact that you might want privacy, and that you might want to continue to post behind the shield of your Acrinonymous handle. But I would encourage you to consider telling us all who you are, and the extent of your experience with FOSS, and, most important, what industry you are in. Because right now, a first gut impression is that you are, indeed, acrimonious by nature and by trade.
I thought I might throw this into the hat, why not an open source hardware/software solution? I suppose I mean something that would have to be revolutionary. I know that there are some open source hardware projects out there, but I have only seen a few (although I have more research to do on this and I hope to find cool stuff). I just keep coming back to the thought that perhaps something revolutionary being developed by a large group of people for the benefit of each other is one of the goals of open source or at least a side effect, yet the there is nothing really revolutionizing the industry other than the original idea of open source and what that brings. I don't want anyone to take my statement as an attempt to take away from the great open source software or even hardware that may be out there. But I do see more evolutionary or alternative steps being taken rather than whole new paradigms emerging or breakthroughs that might benefit most people in new ways instead of specific tasks or groups that now have the option of open source VS commercial solutions. I do think something like Woz giving away the schematics to build a personal computer at the Homebrew Club is one thing that sticks in my mind as a revolutionary step, and it may or may not be a good analogy for where I am coming from. I was not a member of the Homebrew club, so perhaps at the time the idea of an easy to use personal computer was not that revolutionary, I am not sure. I mean, can open source hardware/software produce a quantum computer? Is that just something that is going to be left to be owned and licensed by a University or Corporate patent? Are software/hardware solutions like this just not possible in open source?
If my wife received a
when an old version of office opens a docx file it asks if you want to download and install the compatibility pack. click OK and its installed. It's very painless, and only requires a few clicks of next/OK buttons.
If the user doesn't have the privileges to install the file, then there is usually an IT department/guy who can and probably should install this for them.
Say what you will about the technical merits of docx, but MS had done a good job or ensuring the new file format works well with older versions of MS office.
Just another crappy blog
That's crap... They've been saying that along, but never really giving any serious examples.
Also, when the ODF format was being created, Microsoft were invited to join the committee and would have been able to address any missing features at that stage, they refused repeatedly.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Why don't you just grow a backbone and ask them to install the ODF plugin for office and send you an ODF.
I'd like to hear Microsoft's excuse for not adopting ODF.
they must have one, don't they?
There's only one reason this was done, OO.org is so good at opening Docs it started to threaten Office. It doesn't matter if whether OOXML gets certified, its going to be up to OO.org to reverse engineer it as fast as possible or it will make everyone cry blood.
You're not correct. This is temporary situation. As writers of other OSS Office alternatives have said, it's relatively easy to write a *X (DOCX, XLSX etc) wrapper around their existing * (DOC, XLS) importer, since they're basically the same thing, except one is XML and the other is binary.
Furthermore, Microsoft pushing for it being a standard (and it being a standard) means publicly accessible standards to base your work on, and let's face it: XML with spec is tons better than binary without spec.
What Microsoft wanted to do here is not lock out OSS from importing Office documents. They wanted to 1) ride the "XML is open and interoperable!" wave 2) keep their control on a Office document standard (with ODF they figured they'd not have the control they wanted). 3) Ensure MS Office remains the best suite to open said standard. And what better way than serializing MS Office's own formats (which is works perfectly with) in XML.
So basically expect next release of OpenOffice to open those *X formats, expect them again not to do perfect job of it. And pray OOXML doesn't become ISO standard, on the basic merit.. it's just a terrible standard with too much legacy on its back. Otherwise Office 2007 is a great suite.
Get over yourself and your alternate reality: it is possible for something to be wrong, bad, inadequate or harmful. It's not all a spectrum of opinions. Look at the businesses that succeeded before, during and after the dot-bomb they work with facts not wishful thinking. Take a friggin look at the specs and compare ODF vs MSOOX yourself, or hire someone to do so. It's not a matter of opinion that one is hands down better, it's a reproduceable fact. There are many metrics to measure by, including third-party availability.
Not that I don't enjoy a good OSS flamewar, but isn't this something of a leading question? As an individual in a position to make buying decisions based on this sort of thing, this is exactly what turns me off to ODF and other "community" technologies.I would hope that someone in the position to make buying decsions should be able to figure out the difference between a format and an application. Let's apply the wirebrush of enlightenment to the foreskin of ignorance here:
...Give me something that works for 95% of the whole groupBzzzt. Sorry. Thanks for playing. Even an astroturfer is expected to produce better than that these days. While you are correct that MSOOX or what ever it is called this week, is a closed technology, it is incorrect to say that it works for significant portion of the population. Currently it is limited to MSO2007 users and that application has far less than MSO 2003 market share. MSO 2003 never even hit 15%. As it stands there are currently more applications deployed which support ODF.
However, let's try bending your quote back. Let's say as an individual in a position to make buying decisions based on this sort of thing you realize that it is possible for *everybody* except MSO2007 users to use ODF and that for them it is possible to install a helper application parallel to MSO2007. What then? Are you still going to have an axe to grind and force the latest, most-proprietary-todate MS format? Or will you go with the interoperability provided by an industry backed format?
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
For Microsoft to support ODF would require them to give up the monopoly that results from being able to write files that only Office can truly understand. Early versions of MS Word used to be able to import documents from all the popular word processors ..... just not export back to them. So MS Word ended up becoming the "default" word processing application because only it was certain to be able to read its own savefiles.
.doc format contains various tricks and hacks designed especially to thwart reimplementation. So when your £20 otherwise-adequate office suite mucks up a Word document, you get a pirate copy of MS Word instead and you warn your friends not to buy cheap software. Microsoft haven't got your money, but they have got your heart and mind; and maybe the next time you buy a computer, you'll insist for it to come with Office pre-installed. That of course will be a newer version, and maybe some of your friends' older versions won't be able to read the files you save -- so some of them will upgrade.
The
Microsoft could mung their ODF export filter so that any document saved as ODF didn't render properly; but they would be shooting themselves in the foot, because then Word wouldn't be able to read back properly any ODF documents it had saved. And also, ODF is a human-readable format; so it will be obvious what has happened. (MS could put in an obfuscated proprietary XML container that would tell Word and only Word about the munging, but it'd still be obvious.)
It wouldn't actually take much to get ODF support into Word, because the relevant modules are already licenced under the "leech-friendly" LGPL. But -- unless someone rewrote the code in VBA -- only Microsoft -- or some renegade with access to the Office Source Code -- could actually link it into Word.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
bulby? I despise it more than Clippy.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Use of the word "default" is deprecated. That said, can't a Group Policy change the initial file format that Microsoft Office 2007 applications suggest?
As long as you don't have macros [...] OrYou've just found the show-stopper.
He's missing the point. The advantage of using an open, published standard with multiple implementations is that, twenty years from now when you really need to read the documents about the Jones contract, you'll be able to do so.
If you're a big company in business for a while, you probably have some documents in Word Perfect, some in WordStar, many in PDF, and maybe some on 8" floppies from a Wang word processor. There's no uniform way to archive all this stuff. And, because there isn't, it's not in an archive you can search like Google.
So you're probably paying for filing cabinets, off-site document storage, and people to track all that stuff, just in case. And you can't find anything in the archives anyway without a huge amount of work. It's a poor way to run a business.
That's what you tell management.
There is a port of the Novell plugin for Ubuntu Feisty at Getdeb:
http://www.getdeb.net/app.php?name=OpenOffice.org+OpenXML+Translator
I have installed it and tried it out on various random .docx files I have been able to find on the web. The results have varied from total failure (nothing is imported) through poor (formatting is obviously screwed up) to excellent (results look perfect even if I haven't got the Office2007 available to compare the result).
To be fair, if Microsoft HAD joined the committee and proposed changes, the shrill cries of "embrace and extend!" would have echoed across the Internet, and they wouldn't have been any better off in the long run anyway.
Comment of the year
That would have depended on the changes they proposed...
Any proposed changes would have been evaluated, and if the different vendors reached a consensus that the changes provided a valid benefit, then they would have been accepted.
Many of the garbage that microsoft put into ooxml would probably have been rejected, because it provides no benefit to end users or any vendor except microsoft. Similarly, any requirements without full implementation details would have been rejected.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
I'd love to see "alternative code" patches to apps, like patches that delete "Clippy", or replace it with a different character, or add an on/off GUI widget. Several different patches, each targeted to only that single feature/bugfix. Instead we get these bundles of several unrelated patches, just because they're all releasable at the same time, that keep a single bug/feature snapshot in a single version.
So much open source SW could benefit from this. But instead we look for the topheavy "plugin" architectures. If plugins were more portable across different apps that could share that plugged feature, the plugins might be more worth it. But just "pluggable patches" would be a very good way to "roll our own" version of apps, streamlined and hotrodded to our own preferences.
I don't see why the APT system couldn't use a database of optional patches dependent on the main app package to offer the different optional configs directly at the code level, not just config parameters for a monolithic codebase.
--
make install -not war
@ozmanjusri,
/. comment sections to advance an employer's interest or a client's interest by posing as an individual /. reader if, in fact, the poster is paid to advance the interests of an employer or client, and does not disclose that bias.
/. itself is at issue. If astroturfers continue to post under a false identity, ultimately the credibility of the comments section on /. itself will suffer, as more and more readers come to believe that they cannot trust the integrity of the contributions by readers. /. is one of the oldest and most venerable on-line publications that has relied on the contributions of its readers to supplement the content presented in the referenced article.
/. because we know that if the calibre of the content is not up to snuff, the community will discover those flaws and improve the overall article by correcting it here in the comment section. It is up to each of us to monitor each other as well, so that can know that the overall system is trustworthy.
/. moderation system is working. I was originally modded down (I guess) as a troll (it happened during the night here in San Francisco, so I didn't see it happen). But then ozmanjusri made a comment, and my score when from a 2 to a 3 when a moderator apparently picked up on ozmanjusri's comment.
/. is all about, and why it is so powerful. Robust debate.
Thanks for point out that I was not trolling. I really am not looking for a fight. I merely would like to know if Acrinonymous is being paid to write his / her opinions in this thread. I believe that it is an abuse of the anonymity of
IMHO, it is perfectly fine for people to be paid to post to Slashdot, but an ethical paid poster would announce their bias. In fact, it is deeper than that. Ultimately, the veracity of
We all come to
ozmanjusri's comment shows that the
Ultimately, if a moderator had decided that I was, in fact, a troll, and no one from the community had spoken up, then I would have had to consider that hey, maybe it was *I* who was out of line, and not Acrinonymous!! But I was merely asking for accountability on Acrinonymous' part, and both ozmanjusri and at least one moderator agreed with my position, and so the system is working. It's working both because I was modded down AND because I was then modded back up. I recognize that people will not always agree with me. That is what a community-moderated magazine like
So how about, it, Acrinonymous? Are you part of our community or not? If your opinions are your own, they why not make yourself accountable? Tell us who you really are! And if you are being paid to render your opinion, don't we, your community, deserve to know your biases?
This is NOT overrated. This is CORRECT. However, there is likely a patch to Office responsible for this prompt - I don't think an out of the box installation will do it.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
Even an out of the box (ie non-patched) version of office will tell the user how to open the docx file.
from MS's own website. Well a google HTML cache of a Doc file on the MS website.
http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:gAUhPMTsDS8J:www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/2007office/docs/2007OfficeFileFormatFS.doc+office+2003+behaviour+docx&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=7&gl=us&client=firefox-a
What Happens If Office Updates Are Not Current and the Compatibility Pack Is Not Installed?
If neither the Office Update nor the Compatibility Pack is installed when users of Office XP or Office 2003 attempt to open a 2007 Microsoft Office system file, they will be notified that the file cannot be opened and they will be presented with the standard Microsoft Windows interface for handling unknown file types. By selecting the "Use a Web service to find the appropriate program" option, users will be directed to the Compatibility Pack download site that instructs them to first update Office with all the latest service packs and updates, and then install the Compatibility Pack. If the installation of Office XP and Office 2003 is current with security fixes and updates, Word, Excel or PowerPoint will direct the user to the download page for the Compatibility Pack. Office 2000 users will be directed to the Compatibility Pack download site as well.
Just another crappy blog
ODF has already been accepted as an ISO standard, and is already supported by all of the following groups:
http://www.odfalliance.org/members.php#viewall
Fascinating how a group all about "standards" can't put together a standards-compliant Web page:
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://www.odfalliance.org/members.php
Failed validation, 815 Errors (150kB page)
gewg_
Imagine for a minute that you are Microsoft. You want to add a rich XML file format to Office because your customers have been asking for this feature for a while. They want to be able to more easily read, write, modify documents because dealing with VBA through the running Office applications and dealing with the binary formats directly is a pain.
You have two options to choose from:
1. Implement ODF. While this is a standard, the format is basically the native format of a different Office suite, one that is basically a clone of MS Office. Its feature set is similar to that of MS Office a few versions ago, but the file formats are very different. Making it work for MS Office is going to take a lot of labor on the part of development staff.
2. Implement OOXML. This is not (yet) a standard, but it's more or less just the old OLE binary document formats extended out to XML. The amount of development time needed for this is much less because you have a more direct mapping between old and new formats.
Now, remember that you have only so many resources to go around for a release of Office. If you take the first option, you won't be able to do certain other features because there's only so much you can do in a release. Features are what get *customers* to buy a new version of your software, features that (they think) will make them more productive and allow their business to be more efficient and thus more profitable. Customers are not the always the same as users either. In fact, in large companies (which comprise the lion's share of revenue for products like Office) , the customer is the CIO or whatever big whig makes organization-wide decisions on what version of the software will be used. These features to sell the product have to appeal to big whigs.
Recall that the goal of the software was to provide an XML file format to enable easier reading/writing of these files, largely by developer types. It's not to start a revolution. It's not to allow interoperability with Linux. It's not for the sake of open standards that allow competition. Big whigs want to make it so that their employees can get shit done or at least make it look that way to their big whig peers (i.e., their board, their CEOs, etc.).
So of course Microsoft is going to choose to implement option 2. It provides more value to their customers by giving them what they want--lots of other features like an XML format, a new charting engine, a new equation editor, a new UI, better integration with Sharepoint and so on. If customers were to ask for ODF support, Microsoft might add it. If customers were to ask for it as their #1 wanted thing, Microsoft would have to add it. However, the only customers asking for ODF support at this time are governments and even then it's not ODF so much as "open standards". Hence, the moves by Microsoft to get OOXML fast tracked as an ISO standard.
IBM managed it, KOffice managed it, Wordperfect managed it. Many other "not OpenOffice" Office suites use the ODF format. It was 5 years (IIRC) in the making, so it wasn't as if it was a sudden move. And there's the souce code to look at if how to do X isn't all that easy for you to see.
MS are supposed to hire the best and brightest.
If they cannot support ODF when so many others can, if they produce 6000 pages of crud as their documented standard, it doesn't look as though MS are getting their moneys' worth.
Or what you said could be a load of self-serving crap.
I'll let you 'splain.
Look, as much as I hate it, he's right. I have personal experience in this. I took over running the website for a non-profit organization that shared a building with another non-profit (all of this pro-bono as you might imagine). I switched their entire web host and thus their e-mail servers. The other organization's e-mail went down at the same time; no matter how many of the "techies" explained that the two systems weren't connected at all, the people in charge (who can't figure out how to upload their speeches to the website) explained repeatedly that "you don't know how these things interconnect."
It's sad, it pathetic, but it's true. Of course, at the end of the day, I nailed the problem on Outlook (e-mail worked from a Thunderbird install, but not Outlook), and eventually after changing the settings enough times it worked from Outlook. If you doubt any of this story, e-mail me privately, I'll be glad to give more information. I think it's very important for the OSS community to understand this: any time there's a change anywhere in a computer system, even something totally unrelated, and something somewhere else breaks, the most recent change is blamed.
Thank God for evolution.
According to you, Vista has been "about to collapse" for quite some time now. But its demise is surely still imminent, I assume? Any time now?
You are to Microsoft what Jack Thompson is to Take-Two. Except that Take-Two actually notices Thompson from time to time, of course.