And then we sent out 24 million 800x600 colour glossy JPEGs with scripts and popups and a paragraph below each one explaining why each one wasn't spam and how to opt out...:-)
Sadly, experience suggests that when I *really* need an answer from Moft, it usually involves patches to any and all of those 5000 products that we have in-house;-)
Maybe it's a kind of acceptance of the bleedin' obvious on Moft's part.
And still I work with their stuff, and still I like working with their stuff.
That's not interoperability at all. That's portability. Interoperabilty is feeling comfortable passing serialised typed data, between Solaris and Linux and Windows and macOS and VMS and all the rest...
Interoperability is accepting that the competition is not going to go away, and finding an easier way to survive...
Interoperability is Moft's getout clause in the face of demand for portability...
Interoperability is basically about the evolved descendents of the CSV file.
I find it funny that the schema URL's for the various namespaces don't point to existing URL's.
Don't worry, that's allowed according to the relevant section of the W3C Recommendation on Namespaces in XML:
[Definition:] The attribute's value, a URI reference, is the namespace name identifying the namespace. The namespace name, to serve its intended purpose, should have the characteristics of uniqueness and persistence.
It is not a goal that it be directly usable for retrieval of a schema (if any exists). An example of a syntax that is designed with these goals in mind is that for Uniform Resource Names [RFC2141]. However, it should be noted that ordinary URLs can be managed in such a way as to achieve these same goals.
I think (off the top of my head) that the reason the markup is so verbose , even though 'All settings (fonts, line spacing, etc) are using defaults' could either be because my defaults might not be the same as your defaults (different locale, for example) or because in defining the schema, they may have decided to make a lot of these elements / attributes compulsory, to be on the safe side. Or both. Or neither of course;-)
Actually, looking at it a bit more carefully (OK, repairing it and reformatting it after what/. did to the poor thing, it seems reasonable enough. Defines a bunch of namespaces to keep stuff tidy, and differentiate Office level stuff (o:), Word (w:), Extra word stuff (wx: maybe oversights early in the spec?), then a branch of <w:styles> containing a number of <w:style>s. Then there's a <w:docPr> branch containing what look like Document Properties.
Which makes me think it isn't that far from an HTML file with a bunch of <style> in the <head>. Would be interesting to know if the VBA shows up as something pretty much equivalent to <script> tags. You could immediately dispose of a lot of stuff by XPath-ing down to the <w:body>> and ignoring the <wx: stuff.
There's very little there that you wouldn't have seen in a Word Perfect document using 'show codes', AFAICS.
And how the XML format is only supported with the most expensive version of Office.
Rather, how only the most expensive versions of Office allow you to save to your own custom XML schema rather than to the standard XML schema available to all versions of O2k3.
'The' XML format is in all versions. 'roll your own' XML formats are only available in the top-end offerings. This pisses me off, seeing as I'm one of the vanishingly tiny percentage of non-enterprise customers who might want to use custom schemas, but realistically, I'm pretty weird for wanting that, and it's not like I can't run up an XSLT to get the schema I want from the standard one anyway, so long as I'm trivially competent in XSLT (which I am) and not terminally idle (which I might be;-).
TomV
p.s. the site search engine sucks a lot less since it got a major upgrade about a month ago, though googling with site:msdn.microsoft.com is still a good move.
Say I'm setting up a holiday booking site on the Web. I'm going to offer the whole package.
so I need to talk to, let's say, an airline booking system written in COBOL on a VAX, a variety of car hire booking systems , some in C on Solaris, some in J2EE on Linux, and so forth, a whole bunch of hotel chains' booking systems, train companies, maybe theme park tickets...
If Bill's.net webservices can talk to all these systems, then Bill's a candidate vendor for my project. If they can't, I can't use Bill's groovy dotNet buzztechnology and he makes zero dollars and zero cents.
Whatever else he may be, Bill's not a sufficiently rubbish businessman to turn down that money.
How long until Microsoft is allowed to sue OpenOffice.org because the "functional structure" of OpenOffice Writer infringes upon the proir art of Microsoft Word?
From the article, the answer to 'how long?' is currently approximately (-1 days) here in the UK.
In fact new US regulations have killed the classic lines of cars like Aston Martins as they now have to be designed so that idiots who drive without safety devices don't hurt themselves too much.
In fairness, this is nothing new - it was US safety regs in the 1970s that put that vile plastic bumper onto the front of Pininfarina's beautiful MGB bodyshell.
God[0] - God, YHVH, Allah, whatever God[1] - Father - pointer to God[0] God[2] - Holy spirit - pointer to God[0] God[3] - Jesus - pointer to God[0]
That way it's a bit less blasphemous. To keep the inquisitors happy, you'd probably be better off inheriting Father, Son and Holy Spirit from an abstract GOD base class.
With all properties strictly read-only I suspect. And whatever happens, don't ask awkward questions about the ctor() on the GOD class... TomV
Though it's important to note that a company I once worked for back in the C20th had a Network Manager (Cheesey Dave, ah Dave, what can I say...) who, on noticing that there wasn't much room left on the main VAX fileserver, decided to clear up some space.
By deleting all files more than a year old.
Which included all the system files. Nice one Dave. And around 100 safety-critical-certified hourly-paid ADA contractors sat on their arses for a whole working day while the real techies who made it possible for Dave to pretend he was competent rebuilt the poor thing. About 50 grand in wasted contractor fees alone, we reckoned.
Dave was home-grown, Dave was probably fairly cheap. Most of the convincing theories on how Dave got that job would be libellous if untrue. Incompetence doesn't start at the border.
However, the differences between VB.NET and plain ole VB are monumental. It's really just a ruse to get stunted VB programmers to buy into.NET before they see what it entails.
Well, the Moftspeak for the difference between VB.net and C# is that VB is 'task-oriented' and C# is 'code-oriented', which I think means that C# is a better fit for modelling stuff that happens inside computer architectures - b-trees, linked lists, whatever, while VB.net is a better fit for modelling stuff that happens outside the computer (inventory control, workflow, payment processing). But each language is meant to be just as capable as the other at any of these tasks.
A lot of my code-for-pay these last 7 years has been in VB/VBA, and when I started to play with dotNET it was VB.net. But I've actually moved to C# now, primarily because I still have to do a lot of VBA for work, and the ostensible but deceptive similarity between VBA and VB.net was becoming an issue - at least in C# I'm not constantly tripping over VB6-VB7 changes. And since it seems that I can make better money for the precise same skills if they're labelled "C#" rather than "VB.net" (the actual skill is knowing the Framework and understanding the CLR, nothing language-specific really) it would seem churlish to turn down the cash;-)
Or, as a lot of Indians seem to be saying about Coke and Pepsi at the moment:
They may be "just trying to earn a living", but this is OUR country, not theirs, so what right do they have to earn a living at our expense??
The same could be said for people moving from the other end of the country, people commuting from the next city along, people commuting from the other end of town. It's all arbitrary man-made boundaries.
It's not really a recipe for a comfortable life, is it?
well if the door is open and if you come into my house it isn't a crime. is it?
Of course it's a crime. What on earth gives you the idea that there's any possibility that it might not be?
I can see how there might be exceptions if, say, the house was on fire and you came in to see if anyone needed rescuing, or if there were blood-curdling screams coming from within and you came in to defend someone apparently in trouble.
Second if you just look around and not take anything or disturb anything then i am not going to kick you butt but would indeed buy you a drink for being honest.
Fair, but not remotely relevant to the criminal nature of the event. If you were to batter the chairman of the British National Party (racist fvcks) to death, slowly and painfuly, sure I'd buy you a drink, but it would still be murder.
That's exactly that kind of stuff that makes the rest of the world laugh about the US.
Doesn't make me laugh. Makes me cry when I think what it will do to the air-fares / travel-insurance part of my holiday costs once the case is finished. Thank you Osama, thank you New York District Judge Alvin Hellerstein and an especially big thank you to the bar-certified bloodsuckers who will retire on the fees from this.
I'm getting perfectly acceptable c&p from Firebird 0.6 (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030516 Mozilla Firebird/0.6) into Word 2000 (9.0.6926 SP3) on Win2k SP3 (Win 5.0 build 2195) using this Slashdot page as the source.
Could you be more specific about the software versions which were exhibiting the symptoms you described?
Maybe more attractive still, if you tax traffic by the megabyte, then it's in the government's interests to maximise the number of megabytes moving.
So first you tax the traffic, then, to protect and grow the revenue stream...
You give per-MB tax breaks to the carriers:-)
You get your tax revenue, the bandwidth providers get an incentive to provide more and more bandwidth, new bandwidth-heavy applications become feasible and start to appear, this year more MB move than last year...
loop...
And I finally get that groovy videophone they promised when I was little in the 1970's*:-)
Plenty good points. But, you referred to real History...
Sounds fabulous. Where can I find some? Not, sadly, amongst the products of this particular self-delusional subjective irrational story-weaving species if which I'm a member.
I know I've got plenty of clear, vivid, rock-certain memories which differ radically from the recollections of other people in the events in those memories.
The future is a work of fiction, the past even more so. All you can hope to do is find some congruent patterns in all the accounts and assign them a slightly greater weight in the balance of interpretation.
Following up the 'national game' thing, it occurred to me this morning, listening to reports of Bush's speech, and anticipating the end of the Test Match (Cricket)...
We've got three major sports here in the UK, football (association), cricket and rugby. And in all of them, a draw is a likely outcome, and accepted as such, not as an aberration.
It's my impression that draws are a lot more uncommon in baseball, football (gridiron) and basketball.
Just a thought-provoker - might that be reflected in or from some aspect of 'national character' (if there is such a thing)?
TomV
p.s. to keep it bang ontopic, Staff Beer used to use football as an example of Syntegrity. Put one team of 11 players on a field, and they'll just score a couple of thousand goals in the 90 minutes and go home. Dull, dull, dull. Put a second team of 11 players on the pitch pointing in the other way and you've got the most popular sport on the planet.
I bet "Cybernetic Principles" sounded really groovy in 1971
True. But when Staff wrote 'Cybernetics and Management" in 1959, the idea that you could apply Wiener's 1948 observational theories to real enterprises, let alone an entire national economy, has got to have been one of the all-time crazy ideas. Like Team Syntegrity (part of the Viable Systems Model, kicking off from the idea that every imaginable system can in some sense be modelled as an icosahedron), based on Buckminster Fuller's idea that 'all systems are polyhedra' - nuts perhaps, but terribly terribly useful and possibly *the* most complete model of 'organisations' (whatever they are, read the book!) ever constructed.
Here's a lecture(pdf) Staff gave in 1973 looking back at his work in Chile. And nearly two decades later, here's 'world in torment' which gives both a lovely flavour of what Staff was all about and a frightening summary of where the world may be going.
NOTHING has ever hit me with the same combination of 'wow' and 'my brain is burning' than Staff's Viable Systems Model seminars, sorry, Syntegrations. But like the man used to say, 'you need big words for big ideas. And you should find it hard to understand.' And you just knew you were being inspired by one of *the* great minds.
Slashdot Mirror
And then we sent out 24 million 800x600 colour glossy JPEGs with scripts and popups and a paragraph below each one explaining why each one wasn't spam and how to opt out... :-)
Sadly, experience suggests that when I *really* need an answer from Moft, it usually involves patches to any and all of those 5000 products that we have in-house ;-)
Maybe it's a kind of acceptance of the bleedin' obvious on Moft's part.
And still I work with their stuff, and still I like working with their stuff.
That's not interoperability at all. That's portability. Interoperabilty is feeling comfortable passing serialised typed data, between Solaris and Linux and Windows and macOS and VMS and all the rest ...
...
...
Interoperability is accepting that the competition is not going to go away, and finding an easier way to survive
Interoperability is Moft's getout clause in the face of demand for portability
Interoperability is basically about the evolved descendents of the CSV file.
Don't worry, that's allowed according to the relevant section of the W3C Recommendation on Namespaces in XML:I think (off the top of my head) that the reason the markup is so verbose , even though 'All settings (fonts, line spacing, etc) are using defaults' could either be because my defaults might not be the same as your defaults (different locale, for example) or because in defining the schema, they may have decided to make a lot of these elements / attributes compulsory, to be on the safe side. Or both. Or neither of course
Actually, looking at it a bit more carefully (OK, repairing it and reformatting it after what
After the <w:docPr> it's just
<w:body>
<wx:sect>
<w:p><w:r>
<w:t>Hello World!</w:t>
</w:r>
</w:p>
<w:sectPr>
<w:pgSz w:w="11906" w:h="16838"/>
<w:pgMar w:top="1417" w:right="1417" w:bottom="1417" w:left="1417" w:header="708" w:footer="708" w:gutter="0"/>
<w:cols w:space="708"/>
<w:docGrid w:line-pitch="360"/>
</w:sectPr>
</wx:sect>
</
and a closing </w:wordDocument>.
Which makes me think it isn't that far from an HTML file with a bunch of <style> in the <head>. Would be interesting to know if the VBA shows up as something pretty much equivalent to <script> tags. You could immediately dispose of a lot of stuff by XPath-ing down to the <w:body>> and ignoring the <wx: stuff.
There's very little there that you wouldn't have seen in a Word Perfect document using 'show codes', AFAICS.
TomV
And how the XML format is only supported with the most expensive version of Office.
;-).
Rather, how only the most expensive versions of Office allow you to save to your own custom XML schema rather than to the standard XML schema available to all versions of O2k3.
'The' XML format is in all versions. 'roll your own' XML formats are only available in the top-end offerings. This pisses me off, seeing as I'm one of the vanishingly tiny percentage of non-enterprise customers who might want to use custom schemas, but realistically, I'm pretty weird for wanting that, and it's not like I can't run up an XSLT to get the schema I want from the standard one anyway, so long as I'm trivially competent in XSLT (which I am) and not terminally idle (which I might be
TomV
p.s. the site search engine sucks a lot less since it got a major upgrade about a month ago, though googling with site:msdn.microsoft.com is still a good move.
The whole POINT of XML is interoperability. So can this XML be used by someone else? Is it limited to Office?
XSLT?
TomV
Exactly.
.net webservices can talk to all these systems, then Bill's a candidate vendor for my project. If they can't, I can't use Bill's groovy dotNet buzztechnology and he makes zero dollars and zero cents.
Say I'm setting up a holiday booking site on the Web. I'm going to offer the whole package.
so I need to talk to, let's say, an airline booking system written in COBOL on a VAX, a variety of car hire booking systems , some in C on Solaris, some in J2EE on Linux, and so forth, a whole bunch of hotel chains' booking systems, train companies, maybe theme park tickets...
If Bill's
Whatever else he may be, Bill's not a sufficiently rubbish businessman to turn down that money.
TomV
How long until Microsoft is allowed to sue OpenOffice.org because the "functional structure" of OpenOffice Writer infringes upon the proir art of Microsoft Word?
From the article, the answer to 'how long?' is currently approximately (-1 days) here in the UK.
Deeply, deeply silly, as you point out.
Good news for those VisiCalc boys, though...
TomV
In fact new US regulations have killed the classic lines of cars like Aston Martins as they now have to be designed so that idiots who drive without safety devices don't hurt themselves too much.
In fairness, this is nothing new - it was US safety regs in the 1970s that put that vile plastic bumper onto the front of Pininfarina's beautiful MGB bodyshell.
TomV
Who, indeed, will rid me of this turbulent priest?
tv
To avoid the Aryan heresy, you should really have
God[0] - God, YHVH, Allah, whatever
God[1] - Father - pointer to God[0]
God[2] - Holy spirit - pointer to God[0]
God[3] - Jesus - pointer to God[0]
That way it's a bit less blasphemous. To keep the inquisitors happy, you'd probably be better off inheriting Father, Son and Holy Spirit from an abstract GOD base class.
With all properties strictly read-only I suspect. And whatever happens, don't ask awkward questions about the ctor() on the GOD class...
TomV
Though it's important to note that a company I once worked for back in the C20th had a Network Manager (Cheesey Dave, ah Dave, what can I say...) who, on noticing that there wasn't much room left on the main VAX fileserver, decided to clear up some space.
By deleting all files more than a year old.
Which included all the system files. Nice one Dave. And around 100 safety-critical-certified hourly-paid ADA contractors sat on their arses for a whole working day while the real techies who made it possible for Dave to pretend he was competent rebuilt the poor thing. About 50 grand in wasted contractor fees alone, we reckoned.
Dave was home-grown, Dave was probably fairly cheap. Most of the convincing theories on how Dave got that job would be libellous if untrue. Incompetence doesn't start at the border.
TomV
However, the differences between VB.NET and plain ole VB are monumental. It's really just a ruse to get stunted VB programmers to buy into .NET before they see what it entails.
;-)
Well, the Moftspeak for the difference between VB.net and C# is that VB is 'task-oriented' and C# is 'code-oriented', which I think means that C# is a better fit for modelling stuff that happens inside computer architectures - b-trees, linked lists, whatever, while VB.net is a better fit for modelling stuff that happens outside the computer (inventory control, workflow, payment processing). But each language is meant to be just as capable as the other at any of these tasks.
A lot of my code-for-pay these last 7 years has been in VB/VBA, and when I started to play with dotNET it was VB.net. But I've actually moved to C# now, primarily because I still have to do a lot of VBA for work, and the ostensible but deceptive similarity between VBA and VB.net was becoming an issue - at least in C# I'm not constantly tripping over VB6-VB7 changes. And since it seems that I can make better money for the precise same skills if they're labelled "C#" rather than "VB.net" (the actual skill is knowing the Framework and understanding the CLR, nothing language-specific really) it would seem churlish to turn down the cash
TomV
I've yet to see a single one, [...] And this applies to the UK, Greece and Italy.
I've seen a couple of Insights in Oxfordshire over the last year, there's a light blue one and a nasty olive green one.
I've seen 7 distinct Aston Martins and a GT40 over the same period, though.
It's fair to say that at the moment it's a smaller niche than the Lotus Elise, by a huge margin.
TomV
it's from "a man for all seasons" by robert bolt (1962)
Or, as a lot of Indians seem to be saying about Coke and Pepsi at the moment:
They may be "just trying to earn a living", but this is OUR country, not theirs, so what right do they have to earn a living at our expense??
The same could be said for people moving from the other end of the country, people commuting from the next city along, people commuting from the other end of town. It's all arbitrary man-made boundaries.
It's not really a recipe for a comfortable life, is it?
TomV
well if the door is open and if you come into my house it isn't a crime. is it?
Of course it's a crime. What on earth gives you the idea that there's any possibility that it might not be?
I can see how there might be exceptions if, say, the house was on fire and you came in to see if anyone needed rescuing, or if there were blood-curdling screams coming from within and you came in to defend someone apparently in trouble.
Second if you just look around and not take anything or disturb anything then i am not going to kick you butt but would indeed buy you a drink for being honest.
Fair, but not remotely relevant to the criminal nature of the event. If you were to batter the chairman of the British National Party (racist fvcks) to death, slowly and painfuly, sure I'd buy you a drink, but it would still be murder.
TomV
That's exactly that kind of stuff that makes the rest of the world laugh about the US.
Doesn't make me laugh. Makes me cry when I think what it will do to the air-fares / travel-insurance part of my holiday costs once the case is finished. Thank you Osama, thank you New York District Judge Alvin Hellerstein and an especially big thank you to the bar-certified bloodsuckers who will retire on the fees from this.
TomV
Well, ESR did specifically refuse to state whether he'd built this tool specifically for the SCO case, but he did say:
which suggests that he may, just, subtly have hinted at a possible SCO connection...
TomV
I'm getting perfectly acceptable c&p from Firebird 0.6 (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030516 Mozilla Firebird/0.6) into Word 2000 (9.0.6926 SP3) on Win2k SP3 (Win 5.0 build 2195) using this Slashdot page as the source.
Could you be more specific about the software versions which were exhibiting the symptoms you described?
TomV
Maybe more attractive still, if you tax traffic by the megabyte, then it's in the government's interests to maximise the number of megabytes moving.
:-)
:-)
So first you tax the traffic, then, to protect and grow the revenue stream...
You give per-MB tax breaks to the carriers
You get your tax revenue, the bandwidth providers get an incentive to provide more and more bandwidth, new bandwidth-heavy applications become feasible and start to appear, this year more MB move than last year...
loop...
And I finally get that groovy videophone they promised when I was little in the 1970's*
Next step the Hilton Orbital!
TomV
* with a really long curly cable, of course.
Plenty good points. But, you referred to real History...
Sounds fabulous. Where can I find some? Not, sadly, amongst the products of this particular self-delusional subjective irrational story-weaving species if which I'm a member.
I know I've got plenty of clear, vivid, rock-certain memories which differ radically from the recollections of other people in the events in those memories.
The future is a work of fiction, the past even more so. All you can hope to do is find some congruent patterns in all the accounts and assign them a slightly greater weight in the balance of interpretation.
Following up the 'national game' thing, it occurred to me this morning, listening to reports of Bush's speech, and anticipating the end of the Test Match (Cricket)...
We've got three major sports here in the UK, football (association), cricket and rugby. And in all of them, a draw is a likely outcome, and accepted as such, not as an aberration.
It's my impression that draws are a lot more uncommon in baseball, football (gridiron) and basketball.
Just a thought-provoker - might that be reflected in or from some aspect of 'national character' (if there is such a thing)?
TomV
p.s. to keep it bang ontopic, Staff Beer used to use football as an example of Syntegrity. Put one team of 11 players on a field, and they'll just score a couple of thousand goals in the 90 minutes and go home. Dull, dull, dull. Put a second team of 11 players on the pitch pointing in the other way and you've got the most popular sport on the planet.
but perhaps you have noticed that the distance between the 2 closest points in England & France is a mere 21 miles?
;-)
"fog on the Channel, Continent isolated"?
Compare - Statute Miles, Nautical Miles, Pschological Miles.
England is, incidentally, a fairly populous and rich country, and look what happened to the neighbours to the north and west...
TomV
I bet "Cybernetic Principles" sounded really groovy in 1971
True. But when Staff wrote 'Cybernetics and Management" in 1959, the idea that you could apply Wiener's 1948 observational theories to real enterprises, let alone an entire national economy, has got to have been one of the all-time crazy ideas. Like Team Syntegrity (part of the Viable Systems Model, kicking off from the idea that every imaginable system can in some sense be modelled as an icosahedron), based on Buckminster Fuller's idea that 'all systems are polyhedra' - nuts perhaps, but terribly terribly useful and possibly *the* most complete model of 'organisations' (whatever they are, read the book!) ever constructed.
Here's a lecture(pdf) Staff gave in 1973 looking back at his work in Chile. And nearly two decades later, here's 'world in torment' which gives both a lovely flavour of what Staff was all about and a frightening summary of where the world may be going.
NOTHING has ever hit me with the same combination of 'wow' and 'my brain is burning' than Staff's Viable Systems Model seminars, sorry, Syntegrations. But like the man used to say, 'you need big words for big ideas. And you should find it hard to understand.' And you just knew you were being inspired by one of *the* great minds.