That is absolutely correct. Timeline can go after the end users. But the real question for the end users is can they then turn around and go after microsoft to recover their payments to timeline? The end users' reliance on microsofts comments doesn't indemnify them against timeline, but it might create a cause of action against microsoft so that the end users can use to get the money back from microsoft. It depends on the contract between the users and microsoft. It would be . . . interesting if microsoft had to pay timeline and then had to turn around and pay the end users as well. And in fact, that may be what timeline is assuming if they are going against the end users.
I don't know of any way to follow a link in a graphical browser without using a mouse
As I said, I'm an exception in that I *really* like to type. Mozilla let's you type in the letter in the anchor text on a page and then you go to that link by hitting enter. So if you had a page like this:
You could type n and then enter to follow the news link, or type na to go to the nature link (news would also get you to news) or c and go to the comics link. Then hit enter. Or ctrl+enter for a new tab, then ctrl+ page down and page up to navigate your tabs.
Not everyone likes to use the keyboard as much as I do, I'm the first to admit it. And both gestures and keyboard shortcuts should be present. Not everyone has the manual dexterity to use a mouse only interface. Some people use a wand to hit the keys because they can't control their hands or arms well enough to use the mouse. Luckily, I'm pretty dexterous, which is one reason I like keyboard shortcuts.
Now you know how to navigate links in mozilla without a mouse. And knowing is have the battle.;)
It sounds really cool and all, and I've tried it out it Opera, but I always find myself back on the keyboard. Yeah, I hated Black and White, too.
YMMV obviously, but when I'm at the computer, I'm normally using both hands to type and taking them off the keyboard to perform a fairly precise action with the mouse is a pita.
Icons are actually fairly forgiving. You usually have around a 32x32 area of screen to hit your target. It seems like if you vary more than that in the gestures, then the gesture fails. And since you can increase your icon size, you can increase the allowable area for the doubleclick.
And as others point out, in both windows and linux you can easily make key combinations to launch an app. Although I find myself using both os's autocomplete function in the run command. Type in a command once, then it's a simple win+r or alt+f2 to bring up the run box and type the first letter or two of the app's name to run it. Much faster for me than taking my hands off the keyboard, moving to the mouse and making a gesture.
Easy, when someone comes into the library or whatnot, the clerk runs a little program that generates a random login and password and creates the account on an open workstation. You hand the user a little card with their assigned workstation number, and their login and password. When they leave, they give the clerk the card back, and he deletes the account. It could be automated with barcodes or whatnot if you need high volume.
Good idea, and we do something similar with reserve computers and a checkout floppy. But for public kiosks there are some additional problems.
I come into the library at 10:00am. I get my name and password walk over to computer 3 and do some research. Then I go up to the fourth floor and work in the stacks for an hour. Do I have to go back down to the main floor and use computer 3 to do more research? How long is my password valid on that computer? What if someone else is using it?
While this is a good idea, I don't think it would work for anything but reserved computers. I'm making a distinction here between would I would call kiosk computers, computers that are in place in various public areas that require no or minimal user intervention to use. Reserved computers would have more apps on them, maybe in a small room or carrel that people could use to write papers with. For those kinds of computers, your idea works great.
Ideally, I would have a diskless terminal station for a kiosk computer, but that isn't always possible. It's actually cheaper to use old machines that are past their prime than to purchase even the cheapest terminals.
I can easily hack into a UNIX system without nothing more than a floppy disk and the power switch.
Prevent booting from a floppy, password protect the bios and lock the case. Makes it much harder.
You could still do it, but the odds are that someone would notice that you were literally hacking in to the computer so you could set the dip switch on the motherboard to blank out the bios password.
And it should be obvious to the techs who do maintenance that someone has sawed through their lock.
So how do you make a public machine, where random people can come in off the street a multi-user system? Think of people who go to a library to work on the web because they don't have a computer at home.
The problem isn't inherent in single user windows systems, it's quite simple to lock down a windows machine to prevent easy installation of this kind of program, the problem is lack of security protocols on the tech end.
I'd love to see how one is supposed to do what I described in the first portion of my comment from a command line or cron script in Windows
Simple. The desktop setting is simply another registry setting. Have a batch file run that imports a.reg file with the appropriate background picture then refresh the registry with a command line call to the dll. I forget the exact syntax, but it is possible. I've done very similar things, but I don't have my code in front of me.
The AT command schedules commands and programs to run on a computer at a specified time and date. The Schedule service must be running to use the AT command.
AT [\\computername] [ [id] [/DELETE] |/DELETE [/YES]] AT [\\computername] time [/INTERACTIVE]
[/EVERY:date[,...] |/NEXT:date[,...]] "command"
\\computername Specifies a remote computer. Commands are scheduled on the
local computer if this parameter is omitted. id Is an identification number assigned to a scheduled
command. /delete Cancels a scheduled command. If id is omitted, all the
scheduled commands on the computer are canceled. /yes Used with cancel all jobs command when no further
confirmation is desired. time Specifies the time when command is to run. /interactive Allows the job to interact with the desktop of the user
who is logged on at the time the job runs. /every:date[,...] Runs the command on each specified day(s) of the week or
month. If date is omitted, the current day of the month
is assumed. /next:date[,...] Runs the specified command on the next occurrence of the
day (for example, next Thursday). If date is omitted, the
current day of the month is assumed. "command" Is the Windows NT command, or batch program to be run.
I thought the point was that shell would crumple as it absorbed energy, thus reducing energy transfered to the occupants. And keep your head from flying through the windshield.
So what's the big deal? Stores with print catalogs have been doing this for years. Ever buy something from the Sears or Penney's catalog? They collect sales tax because they have stores in the states the items are shipped too. And if you look at the speculation, those kinds of ubiquitous stores are what are mentioned. They should have been doing this a long time ago.
Where it becomes tricky is with stores like Amazon, who don't have a presence in every state (or any, really). Why should they be able to avoid what Sears can't?
You are going to tell me installing any (recent or old) linux distribution is as easy as this?:)
I've never used the feature, so I'm willing to be shown I'm wrong, but Mandrake has had an option at the end of its install process since I think version 7 that says "Do you want to create a boot floppy with your installation choices?" I've always understood that this meant I could boot from the floppy with the cd in the drive and it would automatically install Mandrake with the exact same installation choices I just made. The downside of course is that unless you have the DVD version, you will have to swap cd's during the install.
Actually, IceWM does that quite nicely. If you go into IcePrefs, the configuration utilty, then click on Taskbar, you can tell it you want either a double sized taskbar or that you don't want to show the open windows on the taskbar. If you do that, you can click on a blank area of the taskbar and quickly type in commands. Need to make a directory quickly? It's simple to type mkdir ~/new on the task bar and have a new directory created. It really integrates the cli very nicely into the gui world. You don't get feedback, but for simple things it works just fine. For example, ls won't scroll through all the files and display them in the command are of the taskbar, but ls >> myfiles will pipe the output to a file nicely.
I've been looking for something similar for windows for a while but haven't found anything this powerful.
You are right. That is sad. I'm doing an app for our students so they can sign up for job interviews via a nice little web app. Because it uses javascript, I decided to test the app on:
--Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 and above on any version of Windows 9x or later --Mozilla 1.0 and above on Windows or Linux --Netscape 7.0 and above on Windows or Linux --Opera 6.0 on Windows --Konqueror 3.1 on Linux
We don't have any macs in the building, and I just haven't gotten around to walking to one of the other buildings and checking it out. But I will before it goes live.
During the interview season I suppose we'll get maybe 2,000 hits a week from our 750 students. But their eventual livlihood depends on their student jobs now, so this is very important to them.
And people rag on those of us who work for the government instead of private business (which is, of course, perfectly efficient and hires only the best and brightest people).
It's XMingWin because it's the X implementation of Minimalist GNU for Windows.
I believe the article suggested that the X indicated it generated cross platform executables:
Xmingwin is my label for, "Mingwin run as a cross-generating application." Be aware: you'll also see it spelled as "cross Mingw32," "Xmingw32," or other variations. Usage isn't well standardized at this point.
Since it is a command line compiler, not an X based ide, there's no reason to have x even installed on your box to use this. Well, that I can see.
You can produce work on the Server but to properly test you still need the windows environment
Of course you do, and I don't think the column anywhere suggested otherwise. The column is talking solely about code generation, not code testing. What this stops is having to reboot a different os, to work with the same app but in a different ide. Which means you don't have to learn 2 sets of compilers and their little idiosyncracies, maintain 2 sets of code with the hassle that entails.
We've got maybe 250 computers in out little department, and before I deploy an app, I test on at least 3 different classes of computer. I would imaging that big companies just have a room of computers with their various base installs and various hardware classes used just for testing.
But if you use exactly the same language, then the person on the other end doesn't know whether 15 people sent the same letter or 1 person sent the letter 15 times. No one reads the return address and postmark on the letters.
Plus, if I see that all you did was grab the generic text, then I might think that your commitment is pretty shallow.
Does their implementation of the open kerberos [thestandard.com] standard now work with Linux machines?
It does so far. I have web pages that use kerberos to authenticate the main campus's active kerberos domain. I'm running the kerberos software straight from MIT. It could be that the main IT shop did something to force interopability, but knowing them I doubt it.
I'm also not doing anything fancy, just a quick kinit through perl and parsing the result.
Evolution does not necessarily come from animals adapting to changing environments. Stating it that way also has the side effect of including an assumption that there's some sort of stimulus/response going on. The environment changes, species change to adapt. That's not what happens. This may happen, and in fact there may be evidence that very drastic environment changes create drastic mutatations, but the emphasis is different.
What happens is that species are constantly throwing out oddballs or changes to the individuals, in other words mutants. There may exist something in this mutant that increases its ability to produce offspring. If those offspring carry the mutation, and if the environmental factors that enable that mutation to have an increased ability to produce offspring still exists, then the mutation will continue to be passed on. Perhaps, although not necessarily, this will lead to a change in species. It may not.
Another way in which species can arise are through cultural changes. A subset of a species may develop different mating rituals, meaning that members of that culture are no longer attractive to members of the other culture becuase their mating rituals are too incompatible. Over time, these two cultures may drift far enough apart that 2 species arise.
A similar split can occur through geographic separation.
So to say that humans will are not subject to evolutionary forces is to say that there are no cultural differences, that there are no geographic barriers, and that mutations have stopped entirely. All of these are simply false.
If there were no cultural differences, we would no longer have race problems (yes, I know that these aren't separate species of humans) because we'd all be part African, part Asian and part European. And we'd all look like Dean Cain or whats-his-name from Blackout and XXX.
There are obvious geographic differences, especially with remote tribes in the Amazon and the south seas.
And there's no way you can say that mutations don't happen.
Ah. So not self-aware in any of the general meanings of the word. I don't think any serious scientists debate whether or not we are subject to evolution. We are. There are no established "evolutionary constraints."
Define self aware so I know what you mean by it. I can think of no human behavior or emotion that does not also exist in the "animal world" -- note how everyone always forgets that humans are animals too.
Apes recognize themselves in mirrors; it's quite fascinating to see footage of them seeing a mirror for the first time and then working out what it is and how to use it. Apes have language and can even be bilingual (ape and something else), they have emotions, they even have pets. There's a very touching story (sure to get a derisive laugh from the jaded slashdot crowd) about how the kitten belonging to Koko the gorilla dies and how she got another one. She even named her pet smoke because it had a gray coat. (Not sure how much human influence there was there.)
So you tell me what you mean by self aware, and I'll try to think of a couple examples of other species that are also self aware.
I suppose it's a cheap way of wishing humans out of the picture
Yes, it was a non-disturbing way of getting humans out of the picture. In his book, Dixon points out that species have a limited lifespan, and there is no indication that humans are any different. So in his book, we have simply gone extinct, which is very likely to happen within the next million years or so. Perhaps that was too depressing for the Discovery channel.
I suspect that while they may have talked to Dougal Dixon at some point, they didn't give him final approval of the the show because of some of the glaring errors (not to mention the stupid voice overs). The biggest error I saw go by was the giant turtle, the Toraton which had splayed out front legs. No animal that big would have a splayed leg arrangement; the legs become pillars directly under the animal. I also had a hard time believing the giant bats could take off from the ground. They would either need to be be redesigned with more pectoral muscles or once they are down have to take off from cliffs to soar. The Flish had the same problem -- the body shaped wasn't right for how the muscles should need to attach.
If MS makes Office for Linux, it will have effect of "blessing" a particular distribution, and in turn creating its biggest competitor.
Because each distro has its own little quirks, I can't imagine a sane company releasing something as large as Office for all distros. Even the differences between RH and Mandrake are pretty big. So they'd have to pick 1 or 2 distros and test for them.
And at that point, those distros will become the defacto standard Linux desktop.
Slashdot Mirror
That is absolutely correct. Timeline can go after the end users. But the real question for the end users is can they then turn around and go after microsoft to recover their payments to timeline? The end users' reliance on microsofts comments doesn't indemnify them against timeline, but it might create a cause of action against microsoft so that the end users can use to get the money back from microsoft. It depends on the contract between the users and microsoft. It would be . . . interesting if microsoft had to pay timeline and then had to turn around and pay the end users as well. And in fact, that may be what timeline is assuming if they are going against the end users.
I don't know of any way to follow a link in a graphical browser without using a mouse
;)
As I said, I'm an exception in that I *really* like to type. Mozilla let's you type in the letter in the anchor text on a page and then you go to that link by hitting enter. So if you had a page like this:
Check out the latest news, nature news and comics
You could type n and then enter to follow the news link, or type na to go to the nature link (news would also get you to news) or c and go to the comics link. Then hit enter. Or ctrl+enter for a new tab, then ctrl+ page down and page up to navigate your tabs.
Not everyone likes to use the keyboard as much as I do, I'm the first to admit it. And both gestures and keyboard shortcuts should be present. Not everyone has the manual dexterity to use a mouse only interface. Some people use a wand to hit the keys because they can't control their hands or arms well enough to use the mouse. Luckily, I'm pretty dexterous, which is one reason I like keyboard shortcuts.
Now you know how to navigate links in mozilla without a mouse. And knowing is have the battle.
It sounds really cool and all, and I've tried it out it Opera, but I always find myself back on the keyboard. Yeah, I hated Black and White, too.
YMMV obviously, but when I'm at the computer, I'm normally using both hands to type and taking them off the keyboard to perform a fairly precise action with the mouse is a pita.
Icons are actually fairly forgiving. You usually have around a 32x32 area of screen to hit your target. It seems like if you vary more than that in the gestures, then the gesture fails. And since you can increase your icon size, you can increase the allowable area for the doubleclick.
And as others point out, in both windows and linux you can easily make key combinations to launch an app. Although I find myself using both os's autocomplete function in the run command. Type in a command once, then it's a simple win+r or alt+f2 to bring up the run box and type the first letter or two of the app's name to run it. Much faster for me than taking my hands off the keyboard, moving to the mouse and making a gesture.
That's just horrible. ;)
Easy, when someone comes into the library or whatnot, the clerk runs a little program that generates a random login and password and creates the account on an open workstation. You hand the user a little card with their assigned workstation number, and their login and password. When they leave, they give the clerk the card back, and he deletes the account. It could be automated with barcodes or whatnot if you need high volume.
Good idea, and we do something similar with reserve computers and a checkout floppy. But for public kiosks there are some additional problems.
I come into the library at 10:00am. I get my name and password walk over to computer 3 and do some research. Then I go up to the fourth floor and work in the stacks for an hour. Do I have to go back down to the main floor and use computer 3 to do more research? How long is my password valid on that computer? What if someone else is using it?
While this is a good idea, I don't think it would work for anything but reserved computers. I'm making a distinction here between would I would call kiosk computers, computers that are in place in various public areas that require no or minimal user intervention to use. Reserved computers would have more apps on them, maybe in a small room or carrel that people could use to write papers with. For those kinds of computers, your idea works great.
Ideally, I would have a diskless terminal station for a kiosk computer, but that isn't always possible. It's actually cheaper to use old machines that are past their prime than to purchase even the cheapest terminals.
I can easily hack into a UNIX system without nothing more than a floppy disk and the power switch.
Prevent booting from a floppy, password protect the bios and lock the case. Makes it much harder.
You could still do it, but the odds are that someone would notice that you were literally hacking in to the computer so you could set the dip switch on the motherboard to blank out the bios password.
And it should be obvious to the techs who do maintenance that someone has sawed through their lock.
So how do you make a public machine, where random people can come in off the street a multi-user system? Think of people who go to a library to work on the web because they don't have a computer at home.
The problem isn't inherent in single user windows systems, it's quite simple to lock down a windows machine to prevent easy installation of this kind of program, the problem is lack of security protocols on the tech end.
I'd love to see how one is supposed to do what I described in the first portion of my comment from a command line or cron script in Windows
.reg file with the appropriate background picture then refresh the registry with a command line call to the dll. I forget the exact syntax, but it is possible. I've done very similar things, but I don't have my code in front of me.
Simple. The desktop setting is simply another registry setting. Have a batch file run that imports a
I thought the point was that shell would crumple as it absorbed energy, thus reducing energy transfered to the occupants. And keep your head from flying through the windshield.
Or something like that.
So what's the big deal? Stores with print catalogs have been doing this for years. Ever buy something from the Sears or Penney's catalog? They collect sales tax because they have stores in the states the items are shipped too. And if you look at the speculation, those kinds of ubiquitous stores are what are mentioned. They should have been doing this a long time ago.
Where it becomes tricky is with stores like Amazon, who don't have a presence in every state (or any, really). Why should they be able to avoid what Sears can't?
You are going to tell me installing any (recent or old) linux distribution is as easy as this? :)
I've never used the feature, so I'm willing to be shown I'm wrong, but Mandrake has had an option at the end of its install process since I think version 7 that says "Do you want to create a boot floppy with your installation choices?" I've always understood that this meant I could boot from the floppy with the cd in the drive and it would automatically install Mandrake with the exact same installation choices I just made. The downside of course is that unless you have the DVD version, you will have to swap cd's during the install.
Actually, IceWM does that quite nicely. If you go into IcePrefs, the configuration utilty, then click on Taskbar, you can tell it you want either a double sized taskbar or that you don't want to show the open windows on the taskbar. If you do that, you can click on a blank area of the taskbar and quickly type in commands. Need to make a directory quickly? It's simple to type mkdir ~/new on the task bar and have a new directory created. It really integrates the cli very nicely into the gui world. You don't get feedback, but for simple things it works just fine. For example, ls won't scroll through all the files and display them in the command are of the taskbar, but ls >> myfiles will pipe the output to a file nicely.
I've been looking for something similar for windows for a while but haven't found anything this powerful.
You are right. That is sad. I'm doing an app for our students so they can sign up for job interviews via a nice little web app. Because it uses javascript, I decided to test the app on:
--Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 and above on any version of Windows 9x or later
--Mozilla 1.0 and above on Windows or Linux
--Netscape 7.0 and above on Windows or Linux
--Opera 6.0 on Windows
--Konqueror 3.1 on Linux
We don't have any macs in the building, and I just haven't gotten around to walking to one of the other buildings and checking it out. But I will before it goes live.
During the interview season I suppose we'll get maybe 2,000 hits a week from our 750 students. But their eventual livlihood depends on their student jobs now, so this is very important to them.
And people rag on those of us who work for the government instead of private business (which is, of course, perfectly efficient and hires only the best and brightest people).
It's XMingWin because it's the X implementation of Minimalist GNU for Windows.
I believe the article suggested that the X indicated it generated cross platform executables:
Xmingwin is my label for, "Mingwin run as a cross-generating application." Be aware: you'll also see it spelled as "cross Mingw32," "Xmingw32," or other variations. Usage isn't well standardized at this point.
Since it is a command line compiler, not an X based ide, there's no reason to have x even installed on your box to use this. Well, that I can see.
You can produce work on the Server but to properly test you still need the windows environment
Of course you do, and I don't think the column anywhere suggested otherwise. The column is talking solely about code generation, not code testing. What this stops is having to reboot a different os, to work with the same app but in a different ide. Which means you don't have to learn 2 sets of compilers and their little idiosyncracies, maintain 2 sets of code with the hassle that entails.
We've got maybe 250 computers in out little department, and before I deploy an app, I test on at least 3 different classes of computer. I would imaging that big companies just have a room of computers with their various base installs and various hardware classes used just for testing.
But if you use exactly the same language, then the person on the other end doesn't know whether 15 people sent the same letter or 1 person sent the letter 15 times. No one reads the return address and postmark on the letters.
Plus, if I see that all you did was grab the generic text, then I might think that your commitment is pretty shallow.
Does their implementation of the open kerberos [thestandard.com] standard now work with Linux machines?
It does so far. I have web pages that use kerberos to authenticate the main campus's active kerberos domain. I'm running the kerberos software straight from MIT. It could be that the main IT shop did something to force interopability, but knowing them I doubt it.
I'm also not doing anything fancy, just a quick kinit through perl and parsing the result.
Vulterant is a perfectly cromulent word. I don't know why people are so confused about it.
Evolution does not necessarily come from animals adapting to changing environments. Stating it that way also has the side effect of including an assumption that there's some sort of stimulus/response going on. The environment changes, species change to adapt. That's not what happens. This may happen, and in fact there may be evidence that very drastic environment changes create drastic mutatations, but the emphasis is different.
What happens is that species are constantly throwing out oddballs or changes to the individuals, in other words mutants. There may exist something in this mutant that increases its ability to produce offspring. If those offspring carry the mutation, and if the environmental factors that enable that mutation to have an increased ability to produce offspring still exists, then the mutation will continue to be passed on. Perhaps, although not necessarily, this will lead to a change in species. It may not.
Another way in which species can arise are through cultural changes. A subset of a species may develop different mating rituals, meaning that members of that culture are no longer attractive to members of the other culture becuase their mating rituals are too incompatible. Over time, these two cultures may drift far enough apart that 2 species arise.
A similar split can occur through geographic separation.
So to say that humans will are not subject to evolutionary forces is to say that there are no cultural differences, that there are no geographic barriers, and that mutations have stopped entirely. All of these are simply false.
If there were no cultural differences, we would no longer have race problems (yes, I know that these aren't separate species of humans) because we'd all be part African, part Asian and part European. And we'd all look like Dean Cain or whats-his-name from Blackout and XXX.
There are obvious geographic differences, especially with remote tribes in the Amazon and the south seas.
And there's no way you can say that mutations don't happen.
Ah. So not self-aware in any of the general meanings of the word. I don't think any serious scientists debate whether or not we are subject to evolution. We are. There are no established "evolutionary constraints."
Define self aware so I know what you mean by it. I can think of no human behavior or emotion that does not also exist in the "animal world" -- note how everyone always forgets that humans are animals too.
Apes recognize themselves in mirrors; it's quite fascinating to see footage of them seeing a mirror for the first time and then working out what it is and how to use it. Apes have language and can even be bilingual (ape and something else), they have emotions, they even have pets. There's a very touching story (sure to get a derisive laugh from the jaded slashdot crowd) about how the kitten belonging to Koko the gorilla dies and how she got another one. She even named her pet smoke because it had a gray coat. (Not sure how much human influence there was there.)
So you tell me what you mean by self aware, and I'll try to think of a couple examples of other species that are also self aware.
Yes, it was a non-disturbing way of getting humans out of the picture. In his book, Dixon points out that species have a limited lifespan, and there is no indication that humans are any different. So in his book, we have simply gone extinct, which is very likely to happen within the next million years or so. Perhaps that was too depressing for the Discovery channel.
As others have pointed out, the author is Dougal Dixon. And the books aren't out of print either. You can order After Man from here:
3 12 194331/qid=1041771018/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_1/002-459043 2-5004812?v=glance&s=books&n=507846o wells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=7-0312 011628-1n key=7-0312 194331-0a rch/isbnIn quiry.asp?userid=2VCMTHDF9B&isbn=0312194331&it m=3
8 81 623016/qid=1041771301/sr=1-47/ref=sr_1_47/002-4590 432-5004812?v=glance&s=books
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0
http://www.p
http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?i
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/bookse
All ship in 2-3 days.
The New Dinosaurs does appear to be out of print, but you can find used copies at:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0
I suspect that while they may have talked to Dougal Dixon at some point, they didn't give him final approval of the the show because of some of the glaring errors (not to mention the stupid voice overs). The biggest error I saw go by was the giant turtle, the Toraton which had splayed out front legs. No animal that big would have a splayed leg arrangement; the legs become pillars directly under the animal. I also had a hard time believing the giant bats could take off from the ground. They would either need to be be redesigned with more pectoral muscles or once they are down have to take off from cliffs to soar. The Flish had the same problem -- the body shaped wasn't right for how the muscles should need to attach.
If MS makes Office for Linux, it will have effect of "blessing" a particular distribution, and in turn creating its biggest competitor.
Because each distro has its own little quirks, I can't imagine a sane company releasing something as large as Office for all distros. Even the differences between RH and Mandrake are pretty big. So they'd have to pick 1 or 2 distros and test for them.
And at that point, those distros will become the defacto standard Linux desktop.