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Office 2007SP2 ODF Interoperability Very Bad
David Gerard writes "Microsoft Office 2007 SP2 claims support for ODF 1.1. With hard work and careful thinking, they have successfully achieved technical compliance but zero interoperability! MSO 2007sp2 won't read ODF 1.1 from any other existing application, and its ODF is only readable by the CleverAge plugin. The post goes into detail as to how it manages this so thoroughly."
I mean, really?
Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.
Why did I know something like this was going to happen. This is just like Win2k's "POSIX" subsystem. So, what would an ODF weirdnix equivalent be named?
Bloody hell. I wonder why they would ever want to ship a software product that did that.
As they also claim Microsoft Windows is Posix compliant! It is simply to be able to tic a "mandated" requirement in some government procurement, not as something one would actually use or deploy.
So, this is either a problem with the specification or a problem with other implementations. If MS has made a compliant program, who are we to complain?
Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.
That's what I keep telling myself. I simply can't believe that they are brilliant masterminds crafting up BS like this. I'm probably wrong, but it saves me a lot of time (as far as trying to comprehend such stupidity).
...which is probably the point of this. The only reason to use ODF instead of MS native formats is for interoperability. When people don't use it, MS can point and say "see people don't want or need it and didn't care when we put it in". Useful at all manner of legal proceeding (antitrust anyone) to show that it's not important.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
MS, a for-profit company, refuses to embrace a format that gives an advantage to their open-source free competitors? Surely not!
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I just hope governements see through this and don't fall in this trap.
Oops! This also disables loading opendocument files with sun plugin by default. Now you have to use file picker from word 2007 and select odf text document. Another really awful move by Microsoft. Really, was this so hard?
The article speaks about spreadsheets, which the slashdot blurb neglected to mention.
This is the trouble with people saying the first half of a saying and then trailing off. The people who know the saying get the point, and the people who don't remember a fragment and repeat it even though it makes no sense on its own.
To the people tagging this "embraceandextend". Embracing and extending is not a particularly bad thing to do. Many formats, including XML (upon which ODF is based), are built with this in mind. The complete saying that is referred to with "embrace and extend" is embrace, extend and extinguish . The extinguishing is the goal here, the former two are merely tools to help them achieve this.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Now that'll be good for some fun calls to customer support.
Surprisingly MS has decided to implement ODF in their own strange way, but OOXML is still not available.... why??
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
In the meantime, how the HELL is it possible the spec is so bad that you can be technically-compliant with it, and yet not be read by (almost) any existing implementation?
Comment of the year
Even if MS fails all interoperability (which I would bet they do), at least someone could use ODF with office 2007 and 10-20 years later be able to use the spec to develop an app to recover the documents.
This is one of the best-written articles submitted to slashdot in a long time. Not only is it well-written (at least, it didn't make my brain hurt) but it gives you the technical background AND it tells you in advance how to debunk the stupid arguments which will certainly by coming from M$ trolls and astroturfers. Scrapbook this one, kids. You're going to be referring back to it for months, if not years.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Sun's ODF plugin for Office.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
No surprise that MS has done this. What it does show, however, is that the ODF standard is incomplete. If MS can write out an ODF compliant file that no-one lese can read, ODF has a problem. In an odd sort of a way, MS are doing us a favour here by shaking out the holes. Role on ODF 1.2.
Clearly Microsoft's best interests are served by denying their customers interoperability.
That's what drives Microsoft's policy: cash. Everything else is PR. Which is duly born out by their actions.
If technical compliance doesn't result in interoperability, the specification is bad. Sometimes it takes a dickish company's willfully obtuse implementation to point that out, but the conclusion must be to fix the specification.
I've no idea how to add or nominate tags for an article, but this one needs a "DUH" tag.
TFN talks ONLY about spread sheet interoperability. It's important to note that. Has interoperability testing been done with documents?
Just to clarify what I mean: this proves that whilst MS may preach good and try to work with open groups and open standards, this fiasco is solid proof that MS's profit margins and ability to constrict the user's choice is always going to be the highest priority. As a business - yeah, great. As a company trying to spread out and adopt a FOSS-like community of its own: good luck
This article focuses very specifically on formula support in OpenDocument Spreadsheet. The problem with that is that ODF 1.x does not provide ANY specification for formulas whatsoever. This article claims that the standard be damned and that Microsoft should go and reverse engineer the implementation by OpenOffice. This is only demonstrative of how incomplete and irrelevant the ODF specification really is. There are massive gaping holes in it that implementers are filling on their own which will invariably lead to incompatibilities. The ISO OOXML specification may be absolutely massive, but that's because it's complete, and very specific (I'm referring specifically to the one that did pass ISO, not the first few iterations).
This is like bitching that Internet Explorer can't be CSS compliant because it doesn't implement the moz-* CSS extensions.
Either fix the spec, or get used to this.
ODF does not specify the a language for formulas. Everybody but MS uses one language, MS uses another. Of course there are incompatibilities.
Why did ODF not specify a spreadsheet formula language?
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
I was thinking exactly the same thing. If MS have made a compliant implementation but it isn't compatible with anyone else's, doesn't that mean that ODF is broken? Isn't this exactly the sort of complaint certain people around here have made against Microsoft's own formats in the past: just because there's a standard that officially states what the document format is, it's no use if other people can't realistically implement it and then trust that interoperability will work?
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Microsoft will not allow users moving to ODF format straightly. They will always put underwater rocks on migration way.
The title could have been: Grass is green.
If you have a standard where there are implementations that are 100% compliant and yet are totally non-interoperable then you have a badly specified standard.
This should easy to test. Take a ODF doc created by OpenOffice, edit and spoof the authoring tool and claim it was written by Office97. If Office2007 reads and acts correctly then we have proof that it is deliberately being incompatible. Let us get this proof or shut up.
We definitely need a compliance monitor tool like acid test for html and make sure we hold the feet of all the vendors to the fire.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
This is a prime example of Microsoft's intentions. They never intended it to be anything more than lip service and a smoke screen to hide their real intentions. It seems to be an ideal smoking gun to dismiss all appeals by Microsoft shills to "give them more time" or "give them freedom to compete" etc. Microsoft are well practiced and deeply entrenched organized criminals but this seems like a simple cut & dried case even a layman can understand.
Methinks it's time to banish Microsoft products from government contracts in the EU, adopt ODF as the standard document format but exclude M$ Office on the grounds of "intentional incompatibility". Maybe being locked out of being able to sell to governments will teach them a lesson, although I doubt it.
It is astounding at just how much Microsoft can get away with despite all the evidence.
Did anyone predict any other outcome when Microsoft announced that they'd be including odf support in M$ Office that it wasn't anything more than a token half-assed, broken implementation to try and ease the punishment against them for anti-competitive behavior? I read somewhere that they chose 1.0 when everyone else was on 2.0 too.....I wonder why. Is anyone stupid enough to believe that there will be any effort to make it work properly in M$ Office, let alone keep it up to date?
I thought one of the pieces that wasn't completed yet for the ODF standard was spreadsheet formulas. The article is all about how Excel doesn't read the formulas from ODF spreadsheets. WTF? I can't stand using MS Office for anything, but I think this article is ridiculous.
As far as I can see, OOo 3 does a pretty clean job of storing formulas (I think it is using ODF 1.2, but anyway):
(left bracket)table:table-cell table:formula="of:=SUM([.C4:.C13])" office:value-type="float" office:value="350.5"(right bracket)(left bracket)text:p(right bracket)350.50(left bracket)/text:p(right bracket)(left bracket)/table:table-cell(right bracket)
The cell reference notation seems fairly straightforward to me (as well as similar to Excel - except *.xls goes much further in obfuscating contents). B/c ODF is just an archived XML container, you can simply open an *.ods file with an archive tool and go from there. Works for me. I haven't really noticed if the localized versions try to translate the formula names like Excel does.
From my point of view the equation is pretty straightforward: I can open most MSOffice files with OpenOffice, as well as save in MSO format most of the time (lately I even had an example, where a M$-supplied PowerPoint viewer couldn't open a MSO 2007 presentation, and, similarly, Word 2002 had trouble opening a *.docx file even with the M$-supplied plug-in that was distributed for the very purpose - they just want you to buy the full versions of every new suite).
In the last 5 years or so, I have not missed more than some exotic Excel graphs or macros a couple of times, but anyone can open the files I send. The crazy thing about it is that people pressure me to use MSOffice formats (I can see why they are not excited about installing another Office suite). Monopoly Power!
Every problem has a solution that is simple, easy and wrong. Selling our Liberty for a little Security is a much too de
You are a troll, because in fact they are getting rich with crappy code since 1981. MS-BASIC was a pretty good BASIC interpreter and microcomputer OS. They also didn't get very rich from it.
Unfortunately, it all started going downhill from there.
So let me get this straight:
What is wrong about asking OpenOffice to follow the specs? How about ODF getting an ovarhaul to weed out ambiguities and to properly
What goes around comes around. ODF was initially just a clever assault launched by Sun and IBM. With one strike they propelled ISO into relevance and took Microsoft completely off-guard. But customers saw the light and started demand good standards. Only, it is now evident that ODF and the posterchild OpenOffice were never prepared for the success.
OpenOffice and derivatives, Sun and IBM just have to eat their own dogfood. Admit that the "perfect" ODF was at least partly a hype.
We've seen from the browsers what "lenient" parsing can lead to. It is called tag soup. Requiring all products to leniently compensate for ambiguities in the spec or faulty implementations are definately the wrong path!
The chickens are coming home to roost. Suck it up. Fix it instead of point fingers.
Reading slashdot one-liner: (irm http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot).rdf.item | fl title,desc*
Seems the pigs took a trip to the airport, but then failed to achieve take off
There's another saying, and one that I think better applies here: "Once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, three times is a conspiracy."
And with Microsoft we're way past three times.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
Most of the world is in chains. They're chained to M$Office by their proprietary document, spreadsheet, presentation etc. formulas.
They're chained to M$ Windoze by the fact that, although you can get a Mac M$Office, you are still screwed in oh, so many ways that eat interoperability.
They are chained to either Windows or MacOs by their media files that can't be transferred to a new computer with another OS because of Digital "Rights" Management (whose rights? one might ask). Sure, iTunes Store dropped DRM, which appears to be a step in the right direction.
If OS'es were interoperable, we probably would have more choice. That some low-level C/C++ code compiles on both Windows and some 'Nix is just that: low-level. The stuff with real portability is run on VMs, and you still have the trouble of translating 'Nix LF chars into Win CR chars or vice versa.
Every problem has a solution that is simple, easy and wrong. Selling our Liberty for a little Security is a much too de
Wow holy I don't believe it. Another fail by Microsoft. There OS fails and now there office suite fails. Who on earth would go spend hundreds of dollars on Microsoft Office when you can download the elite Open Office. The stand points of a good program. Works cross platform, Open Source, Proper Extension Support, Easy to use, oh ya and works. Does anyone think it's funny how much Microsoft failure stories appear on the front page, they must have a record going. Well in either case another example on how a company who can't do one thing, tries to do another and fails. They can't make an OS so try an office suite, Can't make an Office Suite so make a worse OS, whats next for Microsoft and Crapows. Can't wait, I'll just look on the front page tomorrow I'm sure there impress me yet again. Thanks Docmur
How ever half hearted Microsoft's implementation is, at least they are close enough to the spec that someone could write a piece of XSL to correct the issues. Doing the same between OOXML and ODF is a little harder.
The only thing I would like to see now is other solutions, such as Apple's iWorks supporting ODF.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Almost overnight, Microsoft becomes the market leader in ODF-compliant office suites. So now, OracleOffice.org and KOffice will have to code up all sorts of ugly hacks and reverse engineering tricks to maintain compatibility with Microsoft Office ODF documents. Exactly as they had to do to get compatible with .doc and .xls documents.
.doc and .xls space.
Microsoft plays dirty. All the time. This was totally expected, of course.
It's ok though; we're still in better shape than we were just a few years ago. A Microsoft ODF document, or even a Microsoft OOXML document, is still at least roughly following a standard that has some documentation somewhere. The free world can develop Microsoft Office compatibility in this space a lot easier than in the
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
That's why they were saying openoffice's future is uncertain coz MS is taking over
...the POSIX subsystem should be disabled. This is recommended by NSA and required by DoD.
we see things not as as they are, but as we are.
-- anais nin
I'd say that it had a bad smell of Hypocrisy. If the standard doesn't cover important(I dare say) areas such as the friggin formula language, what good is the standard?
No, the author is trying to preempt the obvious and very valid argument that if the standard didn't cover this and implementers need to reverse engineer a specific implementation (OpenOffice), maybe the standard wasn't good enough?
The author is making silly analogies with someone willfully going through hoops (investing time) to sabotage interoperability with an implementation in which the implementor has chosen not to invest time and effort reverse engineering and testing functionality which is clearly outside the specification.
Reading slashdot one-liner: (irm http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot).rdf.item | fl title,desc*
Sun is just as bad or worse than Microsoft by implementing incomplete standards leading to the same incompatibility that ODF is supposed to resolve.
Since MS have just as much chance (nay, better!) of implementing an open standard as anyone else.
What it does is throw away a format that gives THEM the advantage.
A subtle but very important difference.
Create all you current documents in OO and send them to people with this link or else send as a PDF. The biggest bone-of-contention for people is receiving documents that don't display correctly on different computers with different printers and different msOffice versions.
davecb5620@gmail.com
I am beginning to think that Gates Foundation will have a better chance of irradiating malaria in Africa, than Microsoft does at ever satisfying its customers. It seems there is more effort placed in resisting the will of sensible expectations of interoperability and open source creative common, community code. The stupidity of this constant resistance persists like the yellow fever treadmill. This attitude is fueling anti trust lawsuits, Open source application standards, like open office. This futility is just senseless as the African Malaria epidemic that the Gate's Foundation vows to end. Maybe if we can cure all parasitical bloodsucking behavior we can move forward without getting tangled up in repeating the same mistakes and wasted opportunities.
The latest version of Windows is fully compliant with the ISO's 'Piece of Shit v9'
But... that makes Windows v7 two version ahead of the schedule!
is the formula that they use instead of the Please Excuse My Aunt Sally order of Mathematical Operations.
Simply put, there is absolutely no reason to have defined a standard for the mathematical fomula's in spreadsheets because we already have a mathematical standard called Order of Operations, which is Paranthesis, Exponents, Multiplication and Division then Addition and Subtraction or PEMDAS. This is how all Math is taught and if the application does not follow those rules, then it's impossible to determine if the application is generating correct output.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
In the words of the immortal Stewie, I think they describe MS's stance on this problem/issue:
"Bitch, I thought I told you to shut the hell up and be lookin' fine..."
Opened Word 2007 SP2, created a document, saved as Open Document Text (.odt), closed Word and opened it with OpenOffice.org 3.0 -- worked like a champ.
It looks like Microsoft has learned from its IE experience. Instead of chasing an "anything but Microsoft" standard put together by a community that's actively hostile to Microsoft, they've decided to wait them out. Microsoft is refusing to give them a target and telling them to get off the pot.
What Microsoft has done should speed up the ODF standards process. We should thank them for that.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
The article states that the plug-in fails to read files created with 2 of the 6. Of the two it "fails" on, one is in BETA, the other is a RC.
It MUST be Microsoft's fault that their proven product that's been on the market for years and is used everywhere, doesn't work when you try to feed it files created in unproven piece of shit applications. Yeah.
interoperate: windows authentication doesnt support NIS
media player doesnt support flac files
the microsoft home firewall doesnt support google.com
its a proprietary piece of software from a closed source commercial vendor. stomping your feet and demanding interoperability doesnt serve much purpose unless we have a tacit communal agreement that microsoft is a monopoly, and this is the only way we can get this interoperability to come about. in any other market, failure to interoperate (EX: my honda supports IPod connections and mp3 files in general on its hard drive) normally results in a loss of customers.
Good people go to bed earlier.
If you RTFA (yeah, yeah, I know...), the problem is with spreadsheet formulas.
Okay fine, assuming your premise, shouldn't Microsoft be helping wit the fixing? Shouldn't they be doing things like working as fast as they can to submit improvements to ODF, dropping OOXML, and if ODF is "fixed" in a manner they don't like, going with the consensus under which it was fixed and adjusting their applications accordingly to interoperate with that consensus approach?
I mean, really. OASIS membership is open to Microsoft. And they are on the ODF TC. So a company that plays nicely would be using that access to help, instead of doing all manner of other activities to hinder.
I think youre reading too much into it. Writing software is hard. Writing good software is really hard. In Microsofts case by just writing software and not putting in the extra effort to write good software, they also achieve vendor lockin.
If you were managing a bunch of software engineers and you had to choice to write better software, but all your engineers will have bleeding fingers AND you'll weaken your companys position AND you'll be finishing over budget and late by 2 months which direction would you actually go in.
Microsoft might be evil, but I seriously doubt that its the evil overlord type of evil.
... water still makes stuff wet. Surprise surprise!
-Viz
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
It must be really frustrating to be employed by Microsoft as a software developer, and be assigned to the project of building and releasing something that works but will never be used. Every time I see somebody using a piece of software that has my handwriting in it, I feel proud to have produced something useful (and validated for all the little fun side projects that aren't actually that useful). If somebody told me to spend months to dig into a (700 page?) specification and implement it, but to add just enough incompatibilities that nobody's ever going to actually work with it, I'd tell them to go to hell.
CJ
Ah, arrogance and stupidity, all in the same package. How efficient of you. -- Londo Mollari
I was puzzled by Microsoft's decision to imbed ODF compatibility in their current Office program so quickly. Now I understand why. They realized that if they hurried they could release BEFORE the spec was usable for spreadsheets. Now they will stall as long as possible. Their lobbyists are happy because they can say "we support ODF." Their marketers are happy because there is something labeled ODF in the program that is utterly useless. Pointy haired bosses will never understand the distinction between version 1.1 vs. 1.2, and will conclude forever that ODF is broken.
To paraphrase (the obligatory) Futurama: "Microsoft is technically compliant! The best kind of compliant."
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
"The post goes into detail as to how it manages this so thoroughly." Don't know why, but I read this as "The post goes into detail as to how it mangles this so thoroughly." After reading more, I think mangle is a better description than manage.
Is this really a surprise? ... twack!
Poor Dead Horse (MS)
Sun ODF Plugin for Microsoft Office:
http://www.sun.com/software/star/odf_plugin/index.jsp
http://www.sun.com/software/star/odf_plugin/get.jsp
~hylas
Actually, their MSX computer was pretty good as well.
The problem isn't that you can't open a Word 2007 ODF document in another ODF compliant program, it's that it refuses to open to other program's ODF documents.
If you actually read the article, you'll find that Google, KSpread, Symphony, OpenOffice, and the Sun plugin are all unable to open documents created in Excel 2007. The issue here is not that it's one way, it's that the MS interpretation is different from what everyone else uses (though the actual specification leaves it open). And it's also about spreadsheets (Excel), not word-processor documents (Word).
It's part of M$ new Genuine Dis-Advantage Program!
Say hello to my little sig.
Microsoft's supposed ODF 1.1 spreadsheet output is not compliant with the ODF 1.1 specification.
From 8.1.3 (emphasis mine):
From 8.3.1 Referencing Table Cells (emphasis mine):
Now look at a Microsoft formula in their ODF 1.1 spreadsheets. You'll see a formula attribute value of "msoxl:=B4-B3". For that to be correct per the ODF 1.1 specification, that should be "msoxl:=[.B4]-[.B3]". Compare this to the OpenOffice.org and OpenFormula syntax:
msoxl:=[.B4]-[.B3]
oooc:=[.B4]-[.B3]
of:=[.B4]-[.B3]
Ignoring the prefix, they're identical. Furthermore, the formula functions used by OpenOffice.org are generally based on the functions in Excel to begin with (such as "TODAY", for example), so I can only conclude that Microsoft is intentionally sabotaging interoperability to keep people from using ODF while still claiming conformance.
This announcement came as such a big surprise to me I had to see it with my own eyes. So I specifically downloaded (ahem) Office 2007 and SP2 for this purpose to see how it actually performs. Now I only tested odt (text docs), so the spreadsheets and presentations may be different, but I opened some docs I made with OpenOffice, which were not very complex, but has some tables, images with subscripts, OOo fomulae and not completely run off the mill markup, and I was surprised to see Word showed it pixelperfect to me. I could even edit the formulae I inserted with OOo. Only at the back of the document we're some quirks with positioning of images. I havent done much further testing, but from a first glance it looks like MS did it right for once. I was impressed, and I hate Microsoft as much as the next /.'er... But it seems this blurb just isnt true. I hope I can get the Microsofties in my circles to use at least this service pack so that I can just email files I made with OOo.
Is there a reason other than Microsoft's damage done to ISO that ODF 1.2 with OpenFormula is still not released?
Problem:
- Excel 2007 SP2's built-in ODF is not interoperable with other editors, while CleverAge plug-in is.
Solution:
- Fix CleverAge.
http://dilbert.com/2010-12-13
Don't go all crazy about this "formulas are unspecified".
This is an ABSOLUTE REQUIREMENT because of Excel.
People want to import Excel spreadsheets. Thus OpenOffice must read the formulas. It would be silly to alter them, as this would risk breaking them, and there really is nothing wrong with Microsoft's formulas.
Thus the formula language MUST be the one Excel produces, by definition. Microsoft does not document the Excel language, thus the lack of a standard IS THERE OWN FAULT!
The astroturfers have been parroting this "ODF does not have a standard formula language" bullshit for years now. And we are seeing the fruit of their efforts with this.
OOXML does not define a formula language either, you know. For the same reason, it has to be compatible with Excel.
If the spec assumes that all implementers are doing it with the intention of achieving interoperability, then there's not as much need to nail down every byte of the syntax.
If, however, one of your implementers is Microsoft, and you can more or less assume that one of their goals is to assure *incomplete* interoperability, then you've got a whole other thing.
The folks designing ODF were building a standard that they thought all implementers would treat as a standard. Yes, things were left out, and I guess the OOo implementation was assumed as a reference implementation to go to for the details. But it's not quite incompetence to assume people are approaching implementing your standard in good faith.
By the way, wasn't there a Sun-generated plugin for MSOffice to handle ODF? Does that work better?
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
From TFA:
Interesting. This actually allows you to compute the TCO of a PC running Windows Vista Ultimate: $249 / (100% - 60% - 15%) = 996$
Policy-makers need objective analyses to base their decisions on.
We need more analyses showing this supposed effort at interoperability doesn't work, so many more that it causes the monolith to publicly defend its choices.
Either their implementation of ODF was an honest effort, or not. If they can prove it was an honest effort, great, good on them.
If they can't defend it, though, you have no idea how big the nail just was they are fitting into their own coffin.
So please, keep going. What else is wrong with their implementation? Let policy-makers know, in spades. This time, their wiggle room is CLOSED.
No, it's not the same complaint. Microsoft never fully documented all the variations of format changes they have used in their binary Microsoft Office formats. Users I've worked with show that even they got their own formats wrong (Microsoft Office 97 didn't do such a hot job of reading all previous variations of files made with previous versions of what are now called Microsoft Office programs). Microsoft also never documented why they changed these formats in the first place. While some of the changes may have had good technical reasons behind them, the antitrust trials have revealed that they were also changing format details to defeat interoperability and lock in their users. I don't see the similarity to what ODF is after in intent or implementation. After all, the article shows rather high cross-implementation compatibility over 6 other implementations.
Digital Citizen
This is not bullshit. Compare this with having to compete against a secretive spec run by a convicted abuser of monopoly; a spec which nobody else is allowed to contribute to, debate, or discuss beforehand (which is how Microsoft arrived at its previous specs for Microsoft Office formats). As undesirable as ODF is, I'd rather use ODF and either wait for more maturity or help make it better. The fact that the specs are published and can be fixed through a process available to far more people is a better than what Microsoft did before ODF.
Digital Citizen
Actually the early 80s. You see, before MSFT started the clone market by selling Compaq MS DOS and thus creating the IBM PC compatible market, things were VERY different. It was 'welcome to proprietary land" where my VIC wouldn't talk to your TRS80 [...]
Actually, it was Digital Research's CP/M (and AT&T's UNIX) that were leading the charge against "proprietary land". Bill Gates just got lucky when DR's Gary Kildall was out the day IBM came calling, and managed to steal DR's thunder with a hastily-purchased CP/M clone and IBM's marketing power. BG doesn't deserve credit for anything except dumb luck and being in the right place at the right time. The market was already headed in the direction of platform-independent OSes as fast as it could go.
It was probably much harder to achieve this non-interoperability than actual interoperability would have ever been.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Are you dumb, or what?
Microsoft have just broken interoperability, and been caught doing it.
Many functions/formulas have a natural mathematical or functional meaning and it is those that will appear in useful spread sheets, together with 'spreadsheeting convention'. What is needed here is not further functional expansion, it is concensus based around improving software, not gaming the standards process.
OOXML was an international disaster demonstrating that ISO, and its employees, are simply guns for hire, do it "like office 95" is nonsense.
We can just expect M$ to continue with this, and that in itself is why it should be broken up.
We switched 1 pig for another.
Who would be Snowball?
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Dude! How heinously bogus can you get? You totally spaced on my beloved favorites, the TRaSh-80 and the Timex Sinclair.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
Once is misfortune, twice is happenstance, three times is enemy action.
But it wont open in Excel. Something about function problems.
it was only pillow talk.
-Microsoft
It sounds like Microsoft recognised and took advantage of flaws in the ODF specification, specifically that there is no standard namespace for formulas. Sure, Microsoft is evil and deserves nothing less than utter liquidation, but can one really blame them in this case?
If we have been touting ODF as a serious document specification for so long I'd say we got exactly what we deserved - market fragmentation and a bad reputation.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
This is just another example of Microsoft being deliberately anti-competitive.
I am not convinced this is a purely deliberate move by MS. I am reminded of something I found when Lucent introduced TCP/IP to their telecommunications network elements.
While Lucent was true to the specifications, just defining the gateway address was a complicated task. Effectively, Lucent built their TCP/IP stack from scratch without any understanding of common 'real world' practices. There were a few actual issues with the TCP/IP, but the most memorable was an outright frustrating configuration interface. 010.032.000.005/FFFFFF00
Both of these companies are used to building their software and then defining the standards. When presented with an accepted set of standards that are not based on their own designs, they can make it work OK but don't have the ability to apply the common practices. Which is the root cause of the ODF interoperability issues.
...which is why I'm just astounded with incredulous dismay that standards bodies are still WRITING specifications for PROTOCOLS and SCHEMAS and ALGORITHMS in HUMAN SPEECH LANGUAGES!
We've got UML, XML, SGML, BNF, Verilog, VHDL, ADA, DublinCore, MATHML, JAVA, LISP, Haskell, OCAML, Literate Programming ...a whole SLEW of very precisely detailed specifications coming out of IT, CS, EE, library science, et. al. And yet apparently these aren't sufficiently expressive for the people on the standards bodies so they write descriptions of data structures, protocols, algorithms in ENGLISH or whatever?!
What ever happened to expressing CS / EE / IT related definitions in a precisely defined grammar / language which is machine readable and unambiguous? Use all the CASE tools you want to create human readable documentation, diagrams; use code generators for various alternative languages, optimizers, HDL compilers, etc. as needed to create specific targeted IMPLEMENTATIONS of the standard. But the standard ITSELF should be one way or another specified as a machine readable schema / UML / reference implementation etc. That way there would be basically zero ambiguity about how to interpret essential details of the standard. What's more, a hugely beneficial side-effect would be that there would be automated tools possible to actually synthesize / compile / translate conformant multi-lingual IMPLEMENTATIONS and DOCUMENTATIONS of the key parts of the specification.
One wouldn't end up with one canonical implementation in Visual Basic or something that is widely regarded as 'the best' but still sucking in terms of performance or portability and no easy (without man-months / man-years of refactoring / translating / coding / design) portable implementation for other languages / platforms. From day 1 pretty much one would be able to have
the key data flows / protocols implemented cross-platform in a dozen different relevant languages given suitable CASE tools which exist and work reasonably well.
The other huge benefit would be the automated implementation of tests and "design by contract" style contracts relating to the implementations of the key standardized elements; no more buggy derivative implementations would exist simply because someone misinterpreted the intent of a given factor or forgot to implement a piece of logic, etc.
I really just don't get it; I must either assume that the people who are participating on many standards bodies are either:
A -- overspecialized so much that they don't KNOW about better ways to specify things using formal methods
B -- incompetent
C -- malicious and greedy and really don't WANT others to be able to easily implement / understand their specifications, but
rather they're often acting as agents of some particular commercial organization which has a stake in being the "first, best, only" available implementor of the given standard.
Obviously SOME standards have good machine-readable reference code implementations or use things like BNF to define certain aspects of their behavior, but it seems like formal methods / languages / grammars / modeling systems are vastly underutilized even in many of the most ripe possible use cases for them.
The programming world has been through wave after wave of infatuation with design / specification methodologies like OOP, UML, et. al. yet reading some of these standards (and their reference code when they even have that!) makes me feel like I'm back in the 1970s... and even THEN we had things like LISP, ML, Literate Programming (q.v. Knuth), APL, ADA, et. al.
Is this the best we can do?
I'm guessing that at least 5% of the people reading this thread are programmers / architects that would have little trouble
writing a functional UML model / schema for the persisted / file-system exported form of any given office document type in about a week or less of careful work. Why do we praise formal methods / specifications / modeling systems in our technical / management theory se
What could be done to alter the business framework so that these data and file format incompatibility games stop dominating the American software business landscape?
In the last few months I have been puzzling about why the American economic system continues to make it a good business strategy to continually introduce data format changes that render old formats incompatible and unusable.
The rationale behind this churning change is described in the book "Information Rules" by Shapiro and Varian.
Essentially, companies like Microsoft and Adobe are trying to maximize their revenue stream for their proprietary products by changing the user data storage format.
The problem is, the changes in data storage format imposes enormous costs in wasted time on everybody that is not a user of the dominant company's software.
So here is the puzzle: Can the American proprietary software file format change game be altered?
How many billions of man-hours are wasted screwing around upgrading to the "latest Flash player" or "saving to word-95 format" or "removing blank lines to make a .doc file print right in open office"?
In any case the waste probably is 1000 times greater than the direct economic benefit to the dominating software player who introduced the incompatibility.
Adobe is forcing everybody to upgrade their Flash and .pdf readers. Microsoft is elaborating one of their file formats.
The book mentioned:
Information Rules, A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy by Carl Shapiro and Hal R. Varian, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, Massachusetts, c. 1999.
One approach would be adding to the fair use terms of copyright and patent law. Any reading or writing of user data containing patent or copyright features for import or export purposes is a fair use.
A second approach would be data formats could be made not subject to copyright (accounting and data collection forms used to be excluded from copyright).
A third approach would be it is contrary to the public interest for software to be sold without a published and described file format
My first reaction is what the f***! I have tested an ODF document create in OpenOffice, and it worked in MSO 2007 SP2. After reading the link, I understood that it was the formula part that caused problems (Excel, but not Word). Of course, this is bad. But the original post is just exaggeration.
"Google failed to find any offical mention of your work with Russinovich" - by ion.simon.c (1183967) on Monday May 04, @10:57PM (#27825779)
GOOGLE didn't fail, YOU DID (as usual, per this reply AND the list of your screwups here I enumerate below in this exchange)...
See this -> http://www.pcmech.com/article/defragging-the-windows-page-file/ (& the comment by "SuperFluid" there)
YOU can't even GOOGLE something right, lol...
LOL, trouble is, you're showing yourself to be nothing more than a "I can't do anything w/out GOOGLE" type online... and, you say you're a programmer? PROVE IT (how do you like it? That's the kind of crap you've been saying to me & I provide proof below... lol, you do not & have NOTHING LIKE THE LISTS I PROVIDE BELOW, to your credit)
----
"I've emailed Mr. Russinovich to figure out what work that you've done with him" - by ion.simon.c (1183967) on Monday May 04, @10:57PM (#27825779)
For Sunbelt Software (I'll save you the time there) to whom we contracted out wares we had written, thru LC (& also MANY years later, in 2003, when I fixed up his pagedefrag program, instructing him where it was hardcoded and how/why it could adversely affect the operations of his application if people moved their pagefile.sys location (which is doable on both accounts) to another disk (he had them hardcoded to C: drive only, & it made his program fail - he emailed me back thanking me in fact).
----
"You're thread's not stickied on xtremepccentral, btw. Why is that? It's not stickied over on Ars, either. Why is that? :)" - by ion.simon.c (1183967) on Monday May 04, @02:18AM (#27812855)
I don't believe they do that, & I can't get that EVERY place I imagine though I'd like to!
(However, my guide IS rated "5/5 stars" there, AND is in the top 2 most viewed of all time @ that website within the forums section it is featured on)...
NOW, for what You're asking for now? Well, it has done so in becoming an "Essential Guide", & on these websites:
http://www.tcmagazine.com/forums/index.php?s=ab63b5c5b7b51bde1ed34c6db909d3a7&act=SF&f=87&st=0&changefilters=1
http://forum.soft32.com/windows/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewforum&f=26&start=0
http://forums.guru3d.com/forumdisplay.php?s=c90357a670c55c225331de7ca6e1d8a2&f=27&page=1&pp=25&sort=views&order=desc&daysprune=-1
http://forums.tweaktown.com/f34/?pp=20&sort=views&order=desc&daysprune=-1
http://www.proprofs.com/forums/index.php?s=abcd398e654a2bb1de0042564186ceeb&showforum=135
(AND, as noted above? On many websites, it is in their top 1-5 most viewed usually, or "5/5 star rated" many times, would you like a list of those also?? Heh, sad really, all those years you claim to have been on a PC & yet accomplished nothing on your end apparently. I.E.-> My guide alone thus is, by far, more than YOU have shown you have ever done over 22++ yrs. on these machines on your part, for comparison's sake!)
---
"You claim that you're a professional. Prove it" - by ion.simon.c (1183967) on Sunday May 03, @08:52PM (#2
"Google failed to find any offical mention of your work with Russinovich" - by ion.simon.c (1183967) on Monday May 04, @10:57PM (#27825779)
GOOGLE didn't fail, YOU DID (as usual, per this reply AND the list of your screwups here I enumerate below in this exchange)...
See this -> http://www.pcmech.com/article/defragging-the-windows-page-file/ (& the comment by "SuperFluid" there)
YOU can't even GOOGLE something right, lol...
LOL, trouble is, you're showing yourself to be nothing more than a "I can't do anything w/out GOOGLE" type online... and, you say you're a programmer? PROVE IT (how do you like it? That's the kind of crap you've been saying to me & I provide proof below... lol, you do not & have NOTHING LIKE THE LISTS I PROVIDE BELOW, to your credit)
----
"I've emailed Mr. Russinovich to figure out what work that you've done with him" - by ion.simon.c (1183967) on Monday May 04, @10:57PM (#27825779)
For Sunbelt Software (I'll save you the time there) to whom we contracted out wares we had written, thru LC (& also MANY years later, in 2003, when I fixed up his pagedefrag program, instructing him where it was hardcoded and how/why it could adversely affect the operations of his application if people moved their pagefile.sys location (which is doable on both accounts) to another disk (he had them hardcoded to C: drive only, & it made his program fail - he emailed me back thanking me in fact).
----
"You're thread's not stickied on xtremepccentral, btw. Why is that? It's not stickied over on Ars, either. Why is that? :)" - by ion.simon.c (1183967) on Monday May 04, @02:18AM (#27812855)
I don't believe they do that, & I can't get that EVERY place I imagine though I'd like to!
(However, my guide IS rated "5/5 stars" there, AND is in the top 2 most viewed of all time @ that website within the forums section it is featured on)...
NOW, for what You're asking for now? Well, it has done so in becoming an "Essential Guide", & on these websites:
http://www.tcmagazine.com/forums/index.php?s=ab63b5c5b7b51bde1ed34c6db909d3a7&act=SF&f=87&st=0&changefilters=1
http://forum.soft32.com/windows/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewforum&f=26&start=0
http://forums.guru3d.com/forumdisplay.php?s=c90357a670c55c225331de7ca6e1d8a2&f=27&page=1&pp=25&sort=views&order=desc&daysprune=-1
http://forums.tweaktown.com/f34/?pp=20&sort=views&order=desc&daysprune=-1
http://www.proprofs.com/forums/index.php?s=abcd398e654a2bb1de0042564186ceeb&showforum=135
(AND, as noted above? On many websites, it is in their top 1-5 most viewed usually, or "5/5 star rated" many times, would you like a list of those also?? Heh, sad really, all those years you claim to have been on a PC & yet accomplished nothing on your end apparently. I.E.-> My guide alone thus is, by far, more than YOU have shown you have ever done over 22++ yrs. on these machines on your part, for comparison's sake!)
---
"You claim that you're a professional. Prove it" - by ion.simon.c (1183967) on Sunday May 03, @08:52PM (#2
This is not a tl;dr.
This is a ZOMFG TL;DR.
It sure showed us how much trolling and messing up on technical issues that ion.simon.c makes here though. Hilarious amusement, thanks apk.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1221343&cid=27831825 ion.simon.c, do you now see where your trolling crap takes you? Straight to "the land of humiliation and being laughed off slashdot" is where. Couldn't happen to a bigger idiot than you ion.simon.c and this entire website's been laughing at you for the last 12 hours or more now once that and others facts of your technical blunders here were exposed in that link above. You say you are a programmer, and though you ask others to prove their points as you had apk and he did quite convincingly, you had nothing like the lists he put out in that thread link above. My Lord, thanks for the laugh and showing us how stupid someone can be in your poor performance here. Just based on your largely incorrect and erroneous responses here I know that is not true, about your stating you are a programmer, and you are just another lying troll.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1221343&cid=27831925 rotflmao. Couldn't happen to a nicer guy (than this trolling error spewing liar named ion.simon.c) To others reading - Yes, and I am trolling him myself and laughing all the while. How can I help it once I read the link I posted? Ion.simon.c likes to troll others, and I hate trolls, so I am only giving him his own medicine so he can see how it feels. I looked at ion.simon.c's post history and trust me he has this coming.