Fecking exactly, all this Echelon stuff came to my attention originally because as far as I remember the listening station that Britain used to listen into our phones was decommissioned and the site put up for sale, which prompted a few stories in the local newspapers into how the IDA had gotten terribly suspicious at some Scottish undercutting of their offers and had started getting very security conscious in communication with potential investers under the assumption that they were actively under surveilence
Of couse there are listening stations and there are listening stations, and who knows what is part of what network, nevertheles...
Hell I think what particularly annoys people about Echelon is that it looks like Britain helped nick secrets from their fellow EU partners for the benefit of America, not even for themselves. For instance if the French are correct that Echelon was used to nick stuff from Airbus then it would have been used by Britain to steal from itself as Airbus is part owned by British Aerospace. That would be particularly insane if true.
I never heard of "Enterprise Resource Planning" before in my life, I suspect that a large number of people are the same way, nevertheless some quick dashing about the web trying to figure out what kind of software this is I fell asleep to the strains of marketing hype along the lines of "How can your company increase operating efficiency, speed up customer service, and deliver products faster to the marketplace?, The key is Enterprise Resource Planning ". Utterly unsexy.
ERP appears to be "put all your data in a single database, now make sure thats its a damn reliable setup. Beat all your sub departments into submission and force them to merge all their little fiefdoms of data into one single corporate wide one and off you go".
Dunno if anyone would care if it went OS, perhaps the big corps could share it amoung themselves, but I doubt it would have any impact for the likes of me or you.
And even without the track changes feature any document saved in fastsaved format will contain the original unedited documents full text along with chunks of text from the various edits.
Looking with a hex editor will easily slurp out parts of text the editor thinks have disappeared for good. Any body or company should either ditch word if it has any pretensions of security or ensure that the stupid little fastsaved check in options is turned off
I might as well follow up to myself with some cynical commentry. I was far too late to meet the slashdot moderators so there are 300+ useless moanings about the lack of a doc converter sitting up nice and high while an attempt to draw attention to an existing GPLed function converter just screaming for helpers languishes in the doldrums
Listen again and again this comes up, and again and again I make the point that my wv does read.doc format. Abiword uses this for their.doc import. KWord uses a munged copy of it too. It is not perfect, but it does support versions 6, 95, 97 and should handle 2000 as well.
Its GPLed, granted it needs work. So scoot onto the abiword mailing list and cvs down the latest version, get hacking on it and sort it out.
ole2 is fully sorted out with libole2, excel is being handling by gnumeric.
What is not handled by wv is not by lack of documentation or design, its simply a matter of spending some time at it. Easy peasy. Info on the MSDN docs can be got from here. They can be gotten off the MSDN 1998 July cd, or you can get some of them from wotsit.org. I even wrote ivt2html for you to convert the office.ivt file into html. Like what else do you need.
90% of all the hard work has been done, wv can parse fast and simple with no bother to it, which was a nightmare to do, it can construct the correct PAP (paragraph properties) and CHP (character properties) for a given run of text. Feed you the correct characters and charset and font, the TAP (table properties), graphic properties and handle to graphics. The correct OLE handle for embedded objects. Document properties etc. There is an example html conversion program included for reference (wvHtml).
I put together libwmf to convert wmf file into something useful as well. Theres a half done implementation of an Escher (the graphics for Office) importer floating around in there as well.
Theres also an implementation of a Summary Stream displayer for all ole2 documents.
I even bust my ass and dragged together the right bunch of motivated people to help implement the decryption module for word 97, 95 and 6, and that was not fun at all to say the least
The hard work is done, if you want something improved you have a very very solid base to work from. Yes the spec is confusing, yes its not a great format, yeah is sort of moves over time, but in a fairly rational way that can be supported with some work. There are any number of equally crap formats with weak documentation supported in various tools.
There is just this false myth that the Microsoft formats are inpenetrable and/or not available. Just download wv, fair enough there might be problem documents, if there are, just debug wv and get onto the abiword list and work it out with them. If something fails it can be fixed and improved, its not a case of "ah well, its a MS format, nothing can be done". If you truly want to handle Microsoft formats there are a number of people working on it that you can help.
So its right there for the right bunch of motivated people to work on. C.
When a standard says MUST, then the implementation might
When a standard says SHOULD, then the implementation will not
When a standard RECCOMENDS, then the implementer will laugh scornfully
When there are two possible interpertations of a standard there will be 4 possible implementations, correct for readings 1 and 2, a mad attempt to fit both contraditory meanings and the the old reliable invention of something completely incompatible with both.
The situation is farcical for many standards, they work together but everyones code and documentation is riddled with lines like "do this technically incorrect or unnecessary thing for this broken but important application", A perfect example is the rfc822 mail standard. Read the qmail information on the reality of what shows up in headers
Your average programmer is a completely incompetent ego riden madman. A standard is an affront to his cherised belief that he is the best programmer on the planet. How dare someone restrict his options to make a complete mess. So they trample all over the standards, and each program that is broken but not broken enough to fail immediately and catastrophically adds to the standards pollution. Limiting the solution space in which it is possible to create an app that interoperates correctly with everything else.
A proper standard shouldn't be released unless it has a few things which most lack,
A rationale, Why are decisions made, egoboy is more likely to follow a standard if its reasoning is made clear and the thinking behind various decisions are explicit.
A big set of tests which the app must pass before it can conform to the standard. Not that that mattered much in the case of rfc822 btw most mail programs wouldn't know what to do with the complex commenting and line folding behaviour.
A section threatening intense physical suffering for anyone caught trying to subvert it. "By reading this document you hereby agree to a punishment no less than being nailed to a tree for creating any software which almost but not quite matches the standard herein"
And a sample implementation released.
Thus the md5 and sha1 rfcs are solid as they have tests and an implementation hanging off them. Telnet and mail were doomed for the beginning to always spawn numerous implementations almost correctly work together but always requiring vast amount of under the hood trickery and special case handling.
This was covered and commented on extensively by advogato
Of more interest but rejected by slashdot is the story of how Microsoft has frightened virtualdub into removing its reverse engineered support for the asf file format. MS got a patent on its asf file format you see. Now if they do the same for the next release of their MsOffice package or SMB you can kiss interoperability goodbye.
A working implementation of the CAB inflater and details of its format can be gotten from the freeware DUMPCAB program. It was quite trivial to convert the decompression routine to cross platform code. I did this for my ivt2html utility to convert those pesky proprietry Microsoft InfoViewer.ivt files to html..ivt uses the exact same MSZIP compression mechanism as CAB.
MSDN is not really a realistic resource for useful data for interoperability with windows. There are a few nuggets spread thinly about the site but it is awesomely hard work to track them down, links are forever moving around and the search engine sucks. Formats are usually described in terms of their windows api interfaces and MS always invents new terms for existing standards and mechanisms. Concise and complete descriptions are hard to find
On the other hand people are very quick to assume that a format is secret or not documented, this is not always true so it is a very good idea to check msdn before simply lying back and saying "ack its proprietry, we can never support it". There are a lot of MS formats which could be supported right now from working with the available documentation. Simple examples which I did some fiddling with include the wmf format, emf format, pe and ne executable formats. In addition windows and dos programmers have often made source available to parse some of the undocumented formats already and just need some massaging to make that source crossplatform. And note that theres ole2 stream support for linux as well, so thats no barrier.
Wander over to wotsit.org and take an unsupported windows format and write a linux converter today.
It looks just beautiful, I could snivel into my morning coffee considering the vast improvements that have taken place between 93 and now for linux. In comparison the interface for windows hasn't changed more than a micron, and as for the pathetic attempts of the commercial unix companies (spit!).
I applaud the great work of GNOME (and feck it KDE as well I suppose, it doesn't really matter at the end of the day). Ok we've got ourselves an interface that works, its just bugfixing from now on:-). Functioning spreadsheet and word processor base, nifty graphic package. I would like to see some sound apps myself, video editing software and 3d apps (blender I suppose though)
One telling thing about free software is not how great it is in itself, but how it blatently reveals the sheer incompetence and glacial slowness to deliver of most established software corporations.
Will you shutup for two seconds and let me finish a sentence for christsakes.
You have allowed moronic patents for trivial issues, open up the process the exact same way the European Patent Office does and let the world see the patents before they are granted so that they can defend against stupidity in their own core competencies. That way we can police the patents ourselves and defend ourselves against what is basically a system which is currently stealing large tracts of commenage out from under us.
Doubt it, escape velocity for the moon is pretty damn low. My bet (completely unbacked up by figure though) is that any significant incoming velocity would be sufficient to bounce the lander back out of the moons gravity well
Its interesting to note that from my perspective that the fact that the majority of our EU partners allow even their police to carry guns is completely insane and about two steps from anarchy. So you can imagine the yawning gulf of disbelief that I feel whenever this topic arises and the US launches into singing from their constititional prayerbook.
I wrote a very long post and then deleted the lot because it just doesn't matter. *I* won't convince anyone. I just think that having anyone around me having a gun is a tremendously bad idea. I have a deep suspicion of the type of person who carrys a penknife around let alone some sort of border line freak with a firearm.
What ever else you cannot deny that your average american gunowner has a tendancy towards trigger happiness.
They vary considerably from the reality, but it is my firm belief that this is not intentional and that the microsoft internal developers themselves struggle with the difficulty of a lack of clear and sane documentation
Nonetheless the documentation exists and while you must take the exact details under advisement and constantly check against the reality of the implementation, the docs do exist and are very useful
I am blue in the face from repeating that they have published their specs, you can get them on the July 1998 MSDN cd, they had them on their website for over a year. They can now be got from wotsit.org. These are the Office97 formats, in addition worsit also has the word 6 spec
Also my wv project has a passable word reader that abiword is using as a word importer, and gnumeric has quite a good excel importer
I believe that when a government infringes upon your rights, you should avail yourself of all legal, nonviolent means to eliminate that infringement. In the event that these means fail, then it is time to consider revolution and overthrow of the oppressive regime.
For this reason, I think it is necessary to defend the right to bear arms at all costs.
Now my friend what is your position on a scenario where a group believes itself to have run out of peaceful possibilities and uses their weapons to overthrow an oppressive regime. But in fact the oppressive regime isn't all that oppressive at all, and is actually democractically elected and unrepressive, and its the people doing the overthrowing that are the insane nutcases that need to be kept away from sharpened pencils, let along serious military hardware. See numerous countries which have had guerilla led coups, or long running guerilla campaigns for examples. All of which leading to long running misery and suffering for the ordinary person
I suspect that already know your answer, "if the ordinary person had guns then they would be safe from the maniacs with guns". Rubbish. I find it fascinating that denisons of the US blithly talk about requiring guns for the eventuality of having to overthrow their own government, why not just vote them out! You'd swear that the US was perpetually on the edge of having some sort of jackbooted repressive regime springing unannounced on their citizens, it doesn't work that way.
I suspect that if the "bad government" comes along then it'll almost certainly be because the majority of Americans think its a great idea and vote them in. (how else, someone is going to invade and dominate 200million people!, what kind of size of army would you need to achieve that goal) So your little uprising will be resisted by the majority of americans. So what you are preparing for is the possibility of a civil war, one where the group that will get the benefit of free guns for all during this preapocalyptic timeperiod by being armed and able to overthrow the perceived baddies will be outnumbered by their equally well armed but more numerous fellow citizens who supported the "evil government" in the first place by instating them there!.
Gagh, some of the nonsense masquerading as questions here is apalling. They righteously query "oh how could you attempt to create life and take away the power that only god can give", they dribble down their chins with "surely they will achieve great powers and take over the earth!". Run for the hills eh ?
I think the question that springs to mind from reading that sort of nonsense is more how much as AI research been held back by..
Hijacking of the field in its early days by the naive and foolish promising the earth, and that at a stage when computers were just about capable of adding two numbers together before needing a rest for the rest of the day.
The lack of desire of researchers to get involved in a field in which the majority of the public throws all their common sense out the window on hearing its name.
Everyone has an opinion on AI, I suspect this is so for the same reason that everyone has an opinion on the weather. You don't have to have a clue about what you are saying to be unafraid to open your big mouth and make completely vapid prouncements and get away without serious censure. I suspect that AI's never quite reached human level because researchers at the back of the minds want to create something useful, AI's are weighted towards goals. Who would weight an AI towards becoming a completely useless entity ? Methinks that trying to teach a system to be of no worth would be a good way to make a system with equal intelligence as what I see here today.
More calmly, what of bottom up Aritifical Life thingies, small, simple, stupid but with interesting emergent behavior. Was that AL stuff eventually revealed as a dead end, or just far too nondeterministic to create something useful with.
As I said already, the word 97 format is already public.
Right now, abiword is helping wv achieve winword exporting to go with wv's current ability to import word 2000,97 and 6 formats
Some code to help those projects would be 100 times better than waiting for any microsoft code to appear, as even if this very unlikely event took place the code would certainly be windows/intel centric and horrific to extract and integrate anyhow
Getting microsoft code will not be a magic pill, even with the best will in the world as with mozilla it is very hard to seperate and make modular huge codebases, it is even difficult to read and understand them as so much of the knowledge required to make head or tails of them exists only in the heads of the original developers
Its difficult when they want to make themselves understood, imagine if they were forced
Indeed they are already documented, and im blue in the face from repeating it. Noone want to hear it, and very few despite their constant gripes about the lack of support for them sees fit to aid the various projects that are importing them, namely that
Right now, gnumeric can import excel, and could do with more help
abiword uses wv to import word documents, kword also uses wv though they have seen fit to branch off their own version to do so. It too could do with more help
These specifications are also available on the July 1998 MSDN Microsoft Developer CD. They are stored on this CD in the proprietry.ivt format, but nonetheless I've even implemented an.ivt to.html converter for you to read those files under linux.
Get ivt2html and convert that office.ivt on disk 3
Alternatively wotsit.org has versions of many of them as well, including the word 6 file format which wv can handle as well
Now if someone wanted to do something constructive but wants to start small, then rather than sitting around on their arse blathering uselessly they could take a look at the public specs for mathtype and put together a linux equation edit file format to mathml converter which both abi and kword might use as an importer for equations.
Or they could help enhance libwmf to convert wmf files into svg format.
Its not just the office formats that are the problem, its the fact that they all embed or are based upon, or otherwise require the ability to convert all the secondary windows formats as well, so theres loads to see and do
But nonetheless this is pretty much bogus in a genetic engineering forum as the ear was surgically attached to the mouse in question to give it a place to grow a an implanted cartilage template. The mouse was not genetically manipulated to sprout human ears on reaching puberty or anything:-), merely the host of the paratisical scaffolding
Its even worse than that, The European Patent Office has recently decided that software is patentable in Europe as well. See yesterday's posting for links and details
Id like to see some documented validation of that, somehow I do not have faith that patents can be copletely ignored by hobbyists and researchers
Though if it was true twould be cool, but what of a hobbist project that a company decided to sponser as a commercial project, i.e. wine. If wine stumbled over a microsoft patented mechanism of doing something, say the binary loader and was protected by some hobbyist clause, would commercial submissions by corel invalidate that and make the whole project liable to horrendous consequences ?
Slashdot Mirror
Of couse there are listening stations and there are listening stations, and who knows what is part of what network, nevertheles...
Hell I think what particularly annoys people about Echelon is that it looks like Britain helped nick secrets from their fellow EU partners for the benefit of America, not even for themselves. For instance if the French are correct that Echelon was used to nick stuff from Airbus then it would have been used by Britain to steal from itself as Airbus is part owned by British Aerospace. That would be particularly insane if true.
C.
ERP appears to be "put all your data in a single database, now make sure thats its a damn reliable setup. Beat all your sub departments into submission and force them to merge all their little fiefdoms of data into one single corporate wide one and off you go".
Dunno if anyone would care if it went OS, perhaps the big corps could share it amoung themselves, but I doubt it would have any impact for the likes of me or you.
C.
C.
Looking with a hex editor will easily slurp out parts of text the editor thinks have disappeared for good. Any body or company should either ditch word if it has any pretensions of security or ensure that the stupid little fastsaved check in options is turned off
C.
C.
Oh the bitter irony of it all
C.
Its GPLed, granted it needs work. So scoot onto the abiword mailing list and cvs down the latest version, get hacking on it and sort it out.
ole2 is fully sorted out with libole2, excel is being handling by gnumeric.
What is not handled by wv is not by lack of documentation or design, its simply a matter of spending some time at it. Easy peasy. Info on the MSDN docs can be got from here. They can be gotten off the MSDN 1998 July cd, or you can get some of them from wotsit.org. I even wrote ivt2html for you to convert the office.ivt file into html. Like what else do you need.
90% of all the hard work has been done, wv can parse fast and simple with no bother to it, which was a nightmare to do, it can construct the correct PAP (paragraph properties) and CHP (character properties) for a given run of text. Feed you the correct characters and charset and font, the TAP (table properties), graphic properties and handle to graphics. The correct OLE handle for embedded objects. Document properties etc. There is an example html conversion program included for reference (wvHtml).
I put together libwmf to convert wmf file into something useful as well. Theres a half done implementation of an Escher (the graphics for Office) importer floating around in there as well.
Theres also an implementation of a Summary Stream displayer for all ole2 documents.
I even bust my ass and dragged together the right bunch of motivated people to help implement the decryption module for word 97, 95 and 6, and that was not fun at all to say the least
The hard work is done, if you want something improved you have a very very solid base to work from. Yes the spec is confusing, yes its not a great format, yeah is sort of moves over time, but in a fairly rational way that can be supported with some work. There are any number of equally crap formats with weak documentation supported in various tools.
There is just this false myth that the Microsoft formats are inpenetrable and/or not available. Just download wv, fair enough there might be problem documents, if there are, just debug wv and get onto the abiword list and work it out with them. If something fails it can be fixed and improved, its not a case of "ah well, its a MS format, nothing can be done". If you truly want to handle Microsoft formats there are a number of people working on it that you can help.
So its right there for the right bunch of motivated people to work on. C.
- When a standard says MUST, then the implementation might
- When a standard says SHOULD, then the implementation will not
- When a standard RECCOMENDS, then the implementer will laugh scornfully
- When there are two possible interpertations of a standard there will be 4 possible implementations, correct for readings 1 and 2, a mad attempt to fit both contraditory meanings and the the old reliable invention of something completely incompatible with both.
The situation is farcical for many standards, they work together but everyones code and documentation is riddled with lines like "do this technically incorrect or unnecessary thing for this broken but important application", A perfect example is the rfc822 mail standard. Read the qmail information on the reality of what shows up in headersYour average programmer is a completely incompetent ego riden madman. A standard is an affront to his cherised belief that he is the best programmer on the planet. How dare someone restrict his options to make a complete mess. So they trample all over the standards, and each program that is broken but not broken enough to fail immediately and catastrophically adds to the standards pollution. Limiting the solution space in which it is possible to create an app that interoperates correctly with everything else.
A proper standard shouldn't be released unless it has a few things which most lack,
- A rationale, Why are decisions made, egoboy is more likely to follow a standard if its reasoning is made clear and the thinking behind various decisions are explicit.
- A big set of tests which the app must pass before it can conform to the standard. Not that that mattered much in the case of rfc822 btw most mail programs wouldn't know what to do with the complex commenting and line folding behaviour.
- A section threatening intense physical suffering for anyone caught trying to subvert it. "By reading this document you hereby agree to a punishment no less than being nailed to a tree for creating any software which almost but not quite matches the standard herein"
- And a sample implementation released.
Thus the md5 and sha1 rfcs are solid as they have tests and an implementation hanging off them. Telnet and mail were doomed for the beginning to always spawn numerous implementations almost correctly work together but always requiring vast amount of under the hood trickery and special case handling.C.
Of more interest but rejected by slashdot is the story of how Microsoft has frightened virtualdub into removing its reverse engineered support for the asf file format. MS got a patent on its asf file format you see. Now if they do the same for the next release of their MsOffice package or SMB you can kiss interoperability goodbye.
MSDN is not really a realistic resource for useful data for interoperability with windows. There are a few nuggets spread thinly about the site but it is awesomely hard work to track them down, links are forever moving around and the search engine sucks. Formats are usually described in terms of their windows api interfaces and MS always invents new terms for existing standards and mechanisms. Concise and complete descriptions are hard to find
On the other hand people are very quick to assume that a format is secret or not documented, this is not always true so it is a very good idea to check msdn before simply lying back and saying "ack its proprietry, we can never support it". There are a lot of MS formats which could be supported right now from working with the available documentation. Simple examples which I did some fiddling with include the wmf format, emf format, pe and ne executable formats. In addition windows and dos programmers have often made source available to parse some of the undocumented formats already and just need some massaging to make that source crossplatform. And note that theres ole2 stream support for linux as well, so thats no barrier.
Wander over to wotsit.org and take an unsupported windows format and write a linux converter today.
C.
I applaud the great work of GNOME (and feck it KDE as well I suppose, it doesn't really matter at the end of the day). Ok we've got ourselves an interface that works, its just bugfixing from now on :-). Functioning spreadsheet and word processor base, nifty graphic package. I would like to see some sound apps myself, video editing software and 3d apps (blender I suppose though)
One telling thing about free software is not how great it is in itself, but how it blatently reveals the sheer incompetence and glacial slowness to deliver of most established software corporations.
C.
You have allowed moronic patents for trivial issues, open up the process the exact same way the European Patent Office does and let the world see the patents before they are granted so that they can defend against stupidity in their own core competencies. That way we can police the patents ourselves and defend ourselves against what is basically a system which is currently stealing large tracts of commenage out from under us.
C.
C.
I wrote a very long post and then deleted the lot because it just doesn't matter. *I* won't convince anyone. I just think that having anyone around me having a gun is a tremendously bad idea. I have a deep suspicion of the type of person who carrys a penknife around let alone some sort of border line freak with a firearm.
What ever else you cannot deny that your average american gunowner has a tendancy towards trigger happiness.
C
C.
Nonetheless the documentation exists and while you must take the exact details under advisement and constantly check against the reality of the implementation, the docs do exist and are very useful
C.
Also my wv project has a passable word reader that abiword is using as a word importer, and gnumeric has quite a good excel importer
C.
For this reason, I think it is necessary to defend the right to bear arms at all costs.
Now my friend what is your position on a scenario where a group believes itself to have run out of peaceful possibilities and uses their weapons to overthrow an oppressive regime. But in fact the oppressive regime isn't all that oppressive at all, and is actually democractically elected and unrepressive, and its the people doing the overthrowing that are the insane nutcases that need to be kept away from sharpened pencils, let along serious military hardware. See numerous countries which have had guerilla led coups, or long running guerilla campaigns for examples. All of which leading to long running misery and suffering for the ordinary person
I suspect that already know your answer, "if the ordinary person had guns then they would be safe from the maniacs with guns". Rubbish. I find it fascinating that denisons of the US blithly talk about requiring guns for the eventuality of having to overthrow their own government, why not just vote them out! You'd swear that the US was perpetually on the edge of having some sort of jackbooted repressive regime springing unannounced on their citizens, it doesn't work that way.
I suspect that if the "bad government" comes along then it'll almost certainly be because the majority of Americans think its a great idea and vote them in. (how else, someone is going to invade and dominate 200million people!, what kind of size of army would you need to achieve that goal) So your little uprising will be resisted by the majority of americans. So what you are preparing for is the possibility of a civil war, one where the group that will get the benefit of free guns for all during this preapocalyptic timeperiod by being armed and able to overthrow the perceived baddies will be outnumbered by their equally well armed but more numerous fellow citizens who supported the "evil government" in the first place by instating them there!.
C.
I think the question that springs to mind from reading that sort of nonsense is more how much as AI research been held back by..
- Hijacking of the field in its early days by the naive and foolish promising the earth, and that at a stage when computers were just about capable of adding two numbers together before needing a rest for the rest of the day.
- The lack of desire of researchers to get involved in a field in which the majority of the public throws all their common sense out the window on hearing its name.
Everyone has an opinion on AI, I suspect this is so for the same reason that everyone has an opinion on the weather. You don't have to have a clue about what you are saying to be unafraid to open your big mouth and make completely vapid prouncements and get away without serious censure. I suspect that AI's never quite reached human level because researchers at the back of the minds want to create something useful, AI's are weighted towards goals. Who would weight an AI towards becoming a completely useless entity ? Methinks that trying to teach a system to be of no worth would be a good way to make a system with equal intelligence as what I see here today.More calmly, what of bottom up Aritifical Life thingies, small, simple, stupid but with interesting emergent behavior. Was that AL stuff eventually revealed as a dead end, or just far too nondeterministic to create something useful with.
C.
Right now, abiword is helping wv achieve winword exporting to go with wv's current ability to import word 2000,97 and 6 formats
Some code to help those projects would be 100 times better than waiting for any microsoft code to appear, as even if this very unlikely event took place the code would certainly be windows/intel centric and horrific to extract and integrate anyhow
Getting microsoft code will not be a magic pill, even with the best will in the world as with mozilla it is very hard to seperate and make modular huge codebases, it is even difficult to read and understand them as so much of the knowledge required to make head or tails of them exists only in the heads of the original developers
Its difficult when they want to make themselves understood, imagine if they were forced
C.
Right now, gnumeric can import excel, and could do with more help
abiword uses wv to import word documents, kword also uses wv though they have seen fit to branch off their own version to do so. It too could do with more help
These specifications are also available on the July 1998 MSDN Microsoft Developer CD. They are stored on this CD in the proprietry .ivt format, but nonetheless I've even implemented an .ivt to .html converter for you to read those files under linux.
Get ivt2html and convert that office.ivt on disk 3
Alternatively wotsit.org has versions of many of them as well, including the word 6 file format which wv can handle as well
Now if someone wanted to do something constructive but wants to start small, then rather than sitting around on their arse blathering uselessly they could take a look at the public specs for mathtype and put together a linux equation edit file format to mathml converter which both abi and kword might use as an importer for equations.
Or they could help enhance libwmf to convert wmf files into svg format.
Its not just the office formats that are the problem, its the fact that they all embed or are based upon, or otherwise require the ability to convert all the secondary windows formats as well, so theres loads to see and do
C.
C.
But nonetheless this is pretty much bogus in a genetic engineering forum as the ear was surgically attached to the mouse in question to give it a place to grow a an implanted cartilage template. The mouse was not genetically manipulated to sprout human ears on reaching puberty or anything :-), merely the host of the paratisical scaffolding
C.
C.
Though if it was true twould be cool, but what of a hobbist project that a company decided to sponser as a commercial project, i.e. wine. If wine stumbled over a microsoft patented mechanism of doing something, say the binary loader and was protected by some hobbyist clause, would commercial submissions by corel invalidate that and make the whole project liable to horrendous consequences ?
C.