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MS Issues Word Patch To Comply With Court Order
bennyboy64 writes "iTnews reports that Microsoft has begun offering what appears to be a patch for its popular Word software, allowing it to comply with a recent court ruling which has banned the software giant from selling patent-infringing versions of the word processing product. The workaround should put an end to a long-running dispute between Canadian i4i and Redmond, although it has hinted that the legal battle might yet take another turn."
Existing copies of Word were expressly grandfathered in by the ruling -- only the sale of new copies was prohibited. Is the patch intended to be applied against shrink-wrapped copies bought after Jan. 11th?
Semi-OT, but a handy way to use different versions of Office on the same PC, and portably on a USB key, is to modify their installation via VMWare ThinApp:
http://www.vmware.com/products/thinapp/
I found out about Thinstals/Thinapps/"portable" versions when I accidentally browsed a torrent site where they are popular for various reasons, but the concept works well and it's easier to copy/paste a folder than do a conventional install.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
So angry.
Have you ever had a support contract before? At the university where I'm the backup software license officer, we've got a Microsoft Campus Agreement, as well as software site license for SPSS, and multiple other statistical and mathematical software packages. If a widespread problem occurs due to a software fault, such as the calendar issues we were having on the 2003-2007 Office switch, they had someone on the problem and the problem resolved in less than a day.
When a similar glitch occurred in our Evolution users, we had to submit a bug report, then wait for a new version to be released to repository, as we couldn't expect our users to compile from CVS, as the majority of them don't even have a build toolkit.
There's anecdotal evidence for both sides of the argument, but I stand by what's been said.
That's not worth the electrons you used to type that sentence. Through work, I have had a "platinum" trouble ticket open with these idiots for about 6 years now. It's a pretty serious issue - documents that become corrupted either while they are being edited, or when opened and then closed. Not trivial stuff - characters just change from one thing to another. They haven't even made a decent effort to resolve it. Their solution to document corruption is to get a correct printed copy, somehow, then scan it in as a TIFF file. This from a senior tech at MS. Not only that, they have consistently been unable to get a simple NDA signed and ITAR certification so that I can give them some of the examples. The sticking point is that they seemingly can't ensure that all the people working it are US citizens. That's not asking a lot for the kind of money that my very large aerospace company pays them in support costs, for this serious an issue.
Brett