Once everyone has to sign this little extra form to get this seemingly usless extra card
Wow, an uninformed person spouting off their opinion as if it were fact on Slashdot. Who would have thought.
If you were paying attention, you would've known that the Real ID act doesn't establish a NEW ID card, it simply mandates standards (I thought Slashdotters like standards...) that state drivers licenses must implement.
Wait a minute, I thought Bittorrent was OVERWHELMINGLY used for legitimate purposes, with only a small percentage of users having the audacity to (gasp) break copyright law (if you're to believe what's said on Slashdot).
Why the need for decentralized trackers? I don't get it! Bittorrent is supposed to be a haven for law-abiding citizens to trade Linux ISOs and Project Gutenberg text files.
Presumably, someone at Apple has to do additional work to do more than the bare minimum. Therefore, it would cost Apple money to do this. The KDE guys work for free. Apple says "let them handle it." Makes sense.
Geez, the open source community is about as ungrateful as it gets. They beg and plead for real businesses to use open source, and when they do, they're threatened with litigation if so much as a single source file goes missing or sneered at if detailed instructions outlining the process of merging two complicated code bases together isn't present.
Who's to say that Microsoft isn't planning to use a patent against Mono the way it used a patent against VirtualDub?
Again, Slashdot has been saying "any day now" for years. Microsoft just doesn't care about Mono. There's plenty of stuff in.NET that Mono will never implement, not because of scheming on Microsoft's behalf, but because there are things in.NET that are tied to Windows-specific technologies. Mono is never going to make Windows unnecessary for.NET applications, and Microsoft wins by having more developers embrace.NET by way of Mono.
Nothing is going to happen to Mono. We'll be having this same discussion in five years when Microsoft STILL hasn't done anything about Mono and Slashdot continues to hold on to the belief that they're ready to attack.
Actually, that's not correct. The only problem with System.Windows.Forms is that it's hard to implement on Linux due to the fundamentally different methods of GUI event dispatching methods between X and Windows. There has been lots of progress on that recently, and Mono does indeed implement some amount of that package.
FYI, the only thing covered by ECMA is the CLR, C# syntax, etc. The libraries are not covered.
HOWEVER, what most people forget about libraries is that if the interfaces are made public (which the.NET ones are), there's basically jack anyone can do if you turn around write your own implementation, so long as you don't use any of their code. This is exactly what Mono has been doing for years, despite Slashdotter predictions that Microsoft will crush them "any day now".
Well, they certainly have been very permissive with respect to allowing anyone to implement C#/CLR without paying royalties, so I don't think it's much of a stretch to believe that this new format will be likewise royalty-free (though probably only for non-commercial use).
Don't kid yourself and think the Mozilla team doesn't have "classified" bugs. For instance, there was a bug fixed some months ago whereby "shell://" URIs on Windows would allow execution of arbitrary programs. Turns out the Mozilla developers had known about this for years and classified the bug report. Once the exploit was in the wild, they de-classified it and fixed it promptly.
I think you should ask the Mozilla team why they classify bugs in the first place. To me, it seems incredibly dishonest, especially in the cases (like the one above) that "reaffirm" the open source "bug fixes in two minutes" myth. The reality of that particular situation was not that the bug was fixed immediately, but that it took years to do anything about it.
Certainly gives you something to think about...
IE Comes out with a lot less info about what bugs are there, but the ones they let us know about are ALL bad and more are worse than the worst Firefox bug.
You don't consider chrome spoofing to be that big of a problem?
it contains a reference to a Symantec Internet Security Report which claims that more security vulnerabilities in the last six months of 2004 were found in Firefox than IE.
It seems to me that the author is implying that this claim just has to be invalid, because come on, we all know that Firefox MUST be more secure than IE. I mean, how can you argue that it's not? It's open source! It's an irrefutable fact of life that it's more secure! Duh!
Sarcasm aside, there are valid complaints about Firefox, Mozilla, and other open source products, but submissions like these really drive home the attitudes you're likely to see here on Slashdot and other open source message boards. That is to say, criticism is rarely accepted. Those making the criticism are called corporate shills, biased, etc. Or better yet, the old "if you don't like it, fix it."
You are also an idiot. First of all, DVDs don't predate 1997 (that is to say, consumers didn't have access to them before that date). Do you mean to suggest that home broadband didn't exist AT ALL in 1997?
But even that is beside the point. I think there is good reason to believe that DVD encryption did not just appear out of thin air but was devised out of legitimate piracy concerns (considering the long history of software and just-developing MP3 piracy). With the inevitable explosion of home broadband looming, I think it is quite obvious why encryption was implemented on DVDs.
Even more relevant to my point, we see that the half-hearted encryption implemented on DVDs did nothing to discourage vast numbers of users from downloading anything they wanted for free, in addition to sharing movies with millions of anonymous internet users. The result? Far tougher encryption is being promoted for the next generation of DVDs. Thanks again, pirates!
They can then 'revoke' these keys by just refusing to encrypt future DVD keys with these device keys but since each DVD player doesn't have its own key they can't disable movies player by player.
Well then, I guess this would be another instance where pirates would end up ruining it for everyone else, sorta like how all these wacky restrictions became prevalent after a massive number of people decided that "Fair Use" entails downloading anything they want for free and redistributing anything they want to millions of people.
Re:Not quite
on
Voom No More
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
So, the world doesn't include any of America? (Which America, btw...North, South, or did you mean a specific nation?)
Why does everyone have to be so pedantic about this? First of all, the United States of America is the only country in the world that has America as part of its name. Second, it is far more common for someone to declare their country of origin rather than their continent of origin. And if someone does come on a message board declaring themselves to be an American in fluent English, then they're likely either a Canadian or from the United States of America, and you know a Canadian will do all he possibly can to prevent people from thinking he's an "American".
In conclusion, get over it. To declare oneself a "United States of American-er" (or some other cute term, like "USAian") is cumbersome. It is sufficient to call oneself an American because there are a sufficient number of disambiguating factors involved that unfortunately a number of self-righteous Europeans and Canadians cannot discern because they are overly pedantic and lack context reasoning skills. That, and they're looking for any reason they possibly can to paint Americans as being self-centered.
How dare they! The feds have no right to break into someone's wireless network, no matter how simple the password! I want to see the FBI taken down for this! <continues ranting about "the feds">...
I'm sure we'll hear many comments along those lines from Slashdotters who are no doubt using a wireless connection that they've broken into...
With Windows, you HAVE TO have their TCP/IP stack. I don't hear anyone complaining about that, despite the fact that that move put a few third party TCP/IP stack companies out of business.
It's all about what reasonable computer users expect to be bundled with an OS. Once upon a time, we didn't expect TCP/IP stacks to be bundled with the OS (consumer grade OSs, not ancient versions of UNIX and Linux). Now we do. Likewise, I think anyone with an ounce of sense realizes that a web browser is a fairly essential component that MUST be included with the OS in some manner (after all, how do you expect to download new software without one?).
Most (all?) modern desktop operating systems, for example, render help information with HTML. How exactly can they do that without a pre-installed web browser engine? What about programs that embed a web browser? Don't you think that there should always be a web browser component that they can rely on using?
If you remove IE, you remove the ability for all those programs that embed IE to embed a webbrowser unless they are rewritten to embed some other browser. Even if they're rewritten to embed Mozilla, what about _my_ favorite browser? I want every program that embeds a browser to embed Links, dammit. That's stifling my choice (horror)!
The way some of you guys talk about it, you'd think that the existence of IE on your system prevents you from installing any other browser whatsoever. Geez, delete the IE icon, delete iexplore.exe, and get over it.
Sorry, but it's well known that the PNG standard's language regarding alpha channel handling is vague enough that Microsoft is not in the wrong for not supporting it directly in IE.
All of that instead of just correctly implementing the PNG standard.
Actually, if you would READ the PNG standard instead of spouting off about "standards" without having a clue about them, you would realize that standards documents do not always say beyond a shadow of a doubt HOW particular things are to be handled. Case in point, the wording of the PNG standard never explicitly says that alpha channel processing MUST be handled:
The alpha channel can be used to composite a foreground image against a background image. The PNG datastream defines the foreground image and the transparency mask, but not the background image. PNG decoders are not required to support this most general case. It is expected that most will be able to support compositing against a single background colour.
Note that it is merely "expected" that "most" PNG decoders can handle alpha transparency against a single background color. It is never emphatically stated that ALL PNG decoders MUST handle transparency against a single background. Blame the W3C for wording this part poorly.
Hence, Microsoft is not in the wrong for not supporting PNG transparency in the manner you expect them to.
Without full support for CSS2, less and less web developers will be pushing the limits of what CSS2 can do (lets face it.. MS/IE still has the majority).
You're right, and maybe Mozilla should start by FULLY supporting CSS2 as well.
About the only news station that I have seen that is massively biased is Fox News (some guy screaming LIAR; give me a break).
Please cite when a Fox News reporter, reporting the news, so blatantly issued his own opinion.
Oh you're talking about O'Reilly or Hannity? Those are opinion shows, not "here's the facts" news shows. If you have a problem with shows like O'Reilly, then you must have a problem with your newspaper's editorials as well.
The point is, you still fail the "pick up a random piece of consumer hardware and have it work out of the box" test. This implies that Linux is still not as mainstream as many make it out to be since a good amount of the hardware being sold at places like Best Buy just plain won't work or work poorly with Linux.
It's one thing to say "if you limit yourself to all hardware that works in Linux out of the box, then all hardware works with Linux out of the box!", but it's quite another to say that the hardware your average Joe picks up at Best Buy will work out of the box with Linux (whereas, we know that all PC hardware sold at Best Buy will work with Windows without even checking).
Because most of the time, with mainstream devices, I work out of the box.
That's because you're either working with fairly generic devices (i.e., disk drives, ethernet cards), or of the more "exotic" devices, you're specifically buying the ones you KNOW have proper driver support.
When you expand your scope of hardware to include things like multi-function printers, webcams, wireless ethernet cards, USB video digitizer boxes, etc. your chances of success are greatly reduced.
To put it another way: if you were to be handed some random piece of hardware from a Best Buy store, you still don't have the utmost confidence that it'll work "out of the box" because there's lots of hardware in retail stores that either doesn't have a Linux driver or at best requires a long, convoluted install process in order to get reduced functionality (i.e., your multi-function printer can now print, albeit at a lower resolution and the scanner functionality doesn't work).
By contrast, at least you know with Windows that that random piece of hardware should at least in theory work with Windows since there was obviously a Windows driver written for it.
Linux, in my opinion, still doesn't win this challenge.
But I know nothing about the XForms standard, so I can't speak intelligently about it.
You're absolutely right, because you make statements like this:
Microsoft is ignoring XForms just like everyone else. Microsoft would prefer people use XAML
XAML is for creating rich user interfaces (think web applications that are close to "real" applications). XForms is merely a new way of collecting webpage form data using XML from end to end. Saying that Microsoft prefers XAML over XForms is about as ridiculous as saying Microsoft prefers XAML over regular HTML web forms. Let's also not forget that Microsoft is a member of the W3C XForms committee.
Microsoft prefers XAML over XUL because XAML and XUL are actual competing technologies. XAML has nothing to do with XForms.
I've been meaning to check out The Soprano's, as everyone I've heard talking about it goes on about how it's one of the greatest shows ever, blah blah blah. For a buck a pop, I'd download a few episodes and then determine whether or not that $80 DVD set was worth purchasing.
You're thinking of the simple case -- simply choosing which browser you want to use when viewing a website or an HTML file. It's trivially easy to use any browser you want, and Windows has always supported this.
However, you're neglecting to consider the case where an application embeds an HTML browser as a component of the application (for example, Winamp's minibrowser, etc.). The only way to allow for arbitrary renderers to be used in such a situation is to develop a unified browser API and hope that every browser implements it.
Windows without IE, or at the very least with the option during install to not install IE at all and install FireFox instead (you know, a dialog that asks you which browser you want. Since it's theirs, they'd make IE default, but at least you could choose not to have IE at all).
If you don't want IE, find wherever iexplore.exe is stored and delete it. Now you can't run IE anymore.
Guess what, that's all IE is -- it's a bunch of HTML rendering libraries (and Javascript libraries, etc.) with a small wrapper application called iexplore.exe. Microsoft was right all along about IE (rather, the libraries that constitute it) being an integral part of the system. I mean really, don't you think Windows, like any other modern OS (I'm thinking Mac OS X here) or UNIX desktop environment (KDE, GNOME), kinda NEEDS to be able to rely on SOME sort of HTML rendering library?
There are various bundled applications that embed an HTML browser. Lacking IE, what do you propose they use instead? You can't just arbitrarily embed any browser's rendering libraries into any application without the application somehow understanding how to do it. The APIs are all different, some browsers lack embeddable browser components, etc.
The day a Linux zealot can take KDE, remove all the Konqueror libraries, and magically have EVERY application that embeds Konqueror as a KPart instead embed ANY browser WITHOUT recompiling the application, I will be impressed.
However, I think you'll find the above challenge quite difficult to accomplish. Why then do you insist that Microsoft be able to pull off the same impossible task?
Before everyone gets excited that OpenOffice will be able to read Word files perfectly (and subsequently become paranoid that this is all some big legal trap set by Microsoft), remember that these are just XML Schemas. Having the schema means that you're able to determine whether or not the XML file (Word document) is valid. In other words, you've got the syntax (big deal) and not the semantics.
So no, this announcement is not going to bring OpenOffice any closer to Word interoperability.
Slashdot Mirror
Once everyone has to sign this little extra form to get this seemingly usless extra card
Wow, an uninformed person spouting off their opinion as if it were fact on Slashdot. Who would have thought.
If you were paying attention, you would've known that the Real ID act doesn't establish a NEW ID card, it simply mandates standards (I thought Slashdotters like standards...) that state drivers licenses must implement.
Wait a minute, I thought Bittorrent was OVERWHELMINGLY used for legitimate purposes, with only a small percentage of users having the audacity to (gasp) break copyright law (if you're to believe what's said on Slashdot).
Why the need for decentralized trackers? I don't get it! Bittorrent is supposed to be a haven for law-abiding citizens to trade Linux ISOs and Project Gutenberg text files.
Presumably, someone at Apple has to do additional work to do more than the bare minimum. Therefore, it would cost Apple money to do this. The KDE guys work for free. Apple says "let them handle it." Makes sense.
Geez, the open source community is about as ungrateful as it gets. They beg and plead for real businesses to use open source, and when they do, they're threatened with litigation if so much as a single source file goes missing or sneered at if detailed instructions outlining the process of merging two complicated code bases together isn't present.
Who's to say that Microsoft isn't planning to use a patent against Mono the way it used a patent against VirtualDub?
.NET that Mono will never implement, not because of scheming on Microsoft's behalf, but because there are things in .NET that are tied to Windows-specific technologies. Mono is never going to make Windows unnecessary for .NET applications, and Microsoft wins by having more developers embrace .NET by way of Mono.
Again, Slashdot has been saying "any day now" for years. Microsoft just doesn't care about Mono. There's plenty of stuff in
Nothing is going to happen to Mono. We'll be having this same discussion in five years when Microsoft STILL hasn't done anything about Mono and Slashdot continues to hold on to the belief that they're ready to attack.
Actually, that's not correct. The only problem with System.Windows.Forms is that it's hard to implement on Linux due to the fundamentally different methods of GUI event dispatching methods between X and Windows. There has been lots of progress on that recently, and Mono does indeed implement some amount of that package.
.NET ones are), there's basically jack anyone can do if you turn around write your own implementation, so long as you don't use any of their code. This is exactly what Mono has been doing for years, despite Slashdotter predictions that Microsoft will crush them "any day now".
FYI, the only thing covered by ECMA is the CLR, C# syntax, etc. The libraries are not covered.
HOWEVER, what most people forget about libraries is that if the interfaces are made public (which the
Well, they certainly have been very permissive with respect to allowing anyone to implement C#/CLR without paying royalties, so I don't think it's much of a stretch to believe that this new format will be likewise royalty-free (though probably only for non-commercial use).
Don't kid yourself and think the Mozilla team doesn't have "classified" bugs. For instance, there was a bug fixed some months ago whereby "shell://" URIs on Windows would allow execution of arbitrary programs. Turns out the Mozilla developers had known about this for years and classified the bug report. Once the exploit was in the wild, they de-classified it and fixed it promptly.
I think you should ask the Mozilla team why they classify bugs in the first place. To me, it seems incredibly dishonest, especially in the cases (like the one above) that "reaffirm" the open source "bug fixes in two minutes" myth. The reality of that particular situation was not that the bug was fixed immediately, but that it took years to do anything about it.
Certainly gives you something to think about...
IE Comes out with a lot less info about what bugs are there, but the ones they let us know about are ALL bad and more are worse than the worst Firefox bug.
You don't consider chrome spoofing to be that big of a problem?
it contains a reference to a Symantec Internet Security Report which claims that more security vulnerabilities in the last six months of 2004 were found in Firefox than IE.
It seems to me that the author is implying that this claim just has to be invalid, because come on, we all know that Firefox MUST be more secure than IE. I mean, how can you argue that it's not? It's open source! It's an irrefutable fact of life that it's more secure! Duh!
Sarcasm aside, there are valid complaints about Firefox, Mozilla, and other open source products, but submissions like these really drive home the attitudes you're likely to see here on Slashdot and other open source message boards. That is to say, criticism is rarely accepted. Those making the criticism are called corporate shills, biased, etc. Or better yet, the old "if you don't like it, fix it."
You are also an idiot. First of all, DVDs don't predate 1997 (that is to say, consumers didn't have access to them before that date). Do you mean to suggest that home broadband didn't exist AT ALL in 1997?
But even that is beside the point. I think there is good reason to believe that DVD encryption did not just appear out of thin air but was devised out of legitimate piracy concerns (considering the long history of software and just-developing MP3 piracy). With the inevitable explosion of home broadband looming, I think it is quite obvious why encryption was implemented on DVDs.
Even more relevant to my point, we see that the half-hearted encryption implemented on DVDs did nothing to discourage vast numbers of users from downloading anything they wanted for free, in addition to sharing movies with millions of anonymous internet users. The result? Far tougher encryption is being promoted for the next generation of DVDs. Thanks again, pirates!
They can then 'revoke' these keys by just refusing to encrypt future DVD keys with these device keys but since each DVD player doesn't have its own key they can't disable movies player by player.
Well then, I guess this would be another instance where pirates would end up ruining it for everyone else, sorta like how all these wacky restrictions became prevalent after a massive number of people decided that "Fair Use" entails downloading anything they want for free and redistributing anything they want to millions of people.
So, the world doesn't include any of America? (Which America, btw...North, South, or did you mean a specific nation?)
Why does everyone have to be so pedantic about this? First of all, the United States of America is the only country in the world that has America as part of its name. Second, it is far more common for someone to declare their country of origin rather than their continent of origin. And if someone does come on a message board declaring themselves to be an American in fluent English, then they're likely either a Canadian or from the United States of America, and you know a Canadian will do all he possibly can to prevent people from thinking he's an "American".
In conclusion, get over it. To declare oneself a "United States of American-er" (or some other cute term, like "USAian") is cumbersome. It is sufficient to call oneself an American because there are a sufficient number of disambiguating factors involved that unfortunately a number of self-righteous Europeans and Canadians cannot discern because they are overly pedantic and lack context reasoning skills. That, and they're looking for any reason they possibly can to paint Americans as being self-centered.
How dare they! The feds have no right to break into someone's wireless network, no matter how simple the password! I want to see the FBI taken down for this! <continues ranting about "the feds">...
I'm sure we'll hear many comments along those lines from Slashdotters who are no doubt using a wireless connection that they've broken into...
With Windows, you HAVE TO have their TCP/IP stack. I don't hear anyone complaining about that, despite the fact that that move put a few third party TCP/IP stack companies out of business.
It's all about what reasonable computer users expect to be bundled with an OS. Once upon a time, we didn't expect TCP/IP stacks to be bundled with the OS (consumer grade OSs, not ancient versions of UNIX and Linux). Now we do. Likewise, I think anyone with an ounce of sense realizes that a web browser is a fairly essential component that MUST be included with the OS in some manner (after all, how do you expect to download new software without one?).
Most (all?) modern desktop operating systems, for example, render help information with HTML. How exactly can they do that without a pre-installed web browser engine? What about programs that embed a web browser? Don't you think that there should always be a web browser component that they can rely on using?
If you remove IE, you remove the ability for all those programs that embed IE to embed a webbrowser unless they are rewritten to embed some other browser. Even if they're rewritten to embed Mozilla, what about _my_ favorite browser? I want every program that embeds a browser to embed Links, dammit. That's stifling my choice (horror)!
The way some of you guys talk about it, you'd think that the existence of IE on your system prevents you from installing any other browser whatsoever. Geez, delete the IE icon, delete iexplore.exe, and get over it.
Sorry, but it's well known that the PNG standard's language regarding alpha channel handling is vague enough that Microsoft is not in the wrong for not supporting it directly in IE.
All of that instead of just correctly implementing the PNG standard.
Actually, if you would READ the PNG standard instead of spouting off about "standards" without having a clue about them, you would realize that standards documents do not always say beyond a shadow of a doubt HOW particular things are to be handled. Case in point, the wording of the PNG standard never explicitly says that alpha channel processing MUST be handled:
The alpha channel can be used to composite a foreground image against a background image. The PNG datastream defines the foreground image and the transparency mask, but not the background image. PNG decoders are not required to support this most general case. It is expected that most will be able to support compositing against a single background colour.
Note that it is merely "expected" that "most" PNG decoders can handle alpha transparency against a single background color. It is never emphatically stated that ALL PNG decoders MUST handle transparency against a single background. Blame the W3C for wording this part poorly.
Hence, Microsoft is not in the wrong for not supporting PNG transparency in the manner you expect them to.
Without full support for CSS2, less and less web developers will be pushing the limits of what CSS2 can do (lets face it.. MS/IE still has the majority).
You're right, and maybe Mozilla should start by FULLY supporting CSS2 as well.
About the only news station that I have seen that is massively biased is Fox News (some guy screaming LIAR; give me a break).
Please cite when a Fox News reporter, reporting the news, so blatantly issued his own opinion.
Oh you're talking about O'Reilly or Hannity? Those are opinion shows, not "here's the facts" news shows. If you have a problem with shows like O'Reilly, then you must have a problem with your newspaper's editorials as well.
The point is, you still fail the "pick up a random piece of consumer hardware and have it work out of the box" test. This implies that Linux is still not as mainstream as many make it out to be since a good amount of the hardware being sold at places like Best Buy just plain won't work or work poorly with Linux.
It's one thing to say "if you limit yourself to all hardware that works in Linux out of the box, then all hardware works with Linux out of the box!", but it's quite another to say that the hardware your average Joe picks up at Best Buy will work out of the box with Linux (whereas, we know that all PC hardware sold at Best Buy will work with Windows without even checking).
Because most of the time, with mainstream devices, I work out of the box.
That's because you're either working with fairly generic devices (i.e., disk drives, ethernet cards), or of the more "exotic" devices, you're specifically buying the ones you KNOW have proper driver support.
When you expand your scope of hardware to include things like multi-function printers, webcams, wireless ethernet cards, USB video digitizer boxes, etc. your chances of success are greatly reduced.
To put it another way: if you were to be handed some random piece of hardware from a Best Buy store, you still don't have the utmost confidence that it'll work "out of the box" because there's lots of hardware in retail stores that either doesn't have a Linux driver or at best requires a long, convoluted install process in order to get reduced functionality (i.e., your multi-function printer can now print, albeit at a lower resolution and the scanner functionality doesn't work).
By contrast, at least you know with Windows that that random piece of hardware should at least in theory work with Windows since there was obviously a Windows driver written for it.
Linux, in my opinion, still doesn't win this challenge.
But I know nothing about the XForms standard, so I can't speak intelligently about it.
You're absolutely right, because you make statements like this:
Microsoft is ignoring XForms just like everyone else. Microsoft would prefer people use XAML
XAML is for creating rich user interfaces (think web applications that are close to "real" applications). XForms is merely a new way of collecting webpage form data using XML from end to end. Saying that Microsoft prefers XAML over XForms is about as ridiculous as saying Microsoft prefers XAML over regular HTML web forms. Let's also not forget that Microsoft is a member of the W3C XForms committee.
Microsoft prefers XAML over XUL because XAML and XUL are actual competing technologies. XAML has nothing to do with XForms.
I've been meaning to check out The Soprano's, as everyone I've heard talking about it goes on about how it's one of the greatest shows ever, blah blah blah. For a buck a pop, I'd download a few episodes and then determine whether or not that $80 DVD set was worth purchasing.
You can rent Soprano's DVDs from Blockbuster.
The last 100-150 years of the 20th Century
Not only does your link prove the existence of global warming, it also proves that centuries can exceed 100 years! Fascinating.
Folks, if this isn't good science, I don't know what is.
That's the same bullshit I hear from them with every single problem.
"Wait until the next version."
"You should upgrade to the newest version."
Why is it so fucking hard for them to just issue a patch for their existing versions?
Yeah, you NEVER hear anyone associated with Open Source software suggesting that the user upgrade to solve their problems!
You're thinking of the simple case -- simply choosing which browser you want to use when viewing a website or an HTML file. It's trivially easy to use any browser you want, and Windows has always supported this.
However, you're neglecting to consider the case where an application embeds an HTML browser as a component of the application (for example, Winamp's minibrowser, etc.). The only way to allow for arbitrary renderers to be used in such a situation is to develop a unified browser API and hope that every browser implements it.
Windows without IE, or at the very least with the option during install to not install IE at all and install FireFox instead (you know, a dialog that asks you which browser you want. Since it's theirs, they'd make IE default, but at least you could choose not to have IE at all).
If you don't want IE, find wherever iexplore.exe is stored and delete it. Now you can't run IE anymore.
Guess what, that's all IE is -- it's a bunch of HTML rendering libraries (and Javascript libraries, etc.) with a small wrapper application called iexplore.exe. Microsoft was right all along about IE (rather, the libraries that constitute it) being an integral part of the system. I mean really, don't you think Windows, like any other modern OS (I'm thinking Mac OS X here) or UNIX desktop environment (KDE, GNOME), kinda NEEDS to be able to rely on SOME sort of HTML rendering library?
There are various bundled applications that embed an HTML browser. Lacking IE, what do you propose they use instead? You can't just arbitrarily embed any browser's rendering libraries into any application without the application somehow understanding how to do it. The APIs are all different, some browsers lack embeddable browser components, etc.
The day a Linux zealot can take KDE, remove all the Konqueror libraries, and magically have EVERY application that embeds Konqueror as a KPart instead embed ANY browser WITHOUT recompiling the application, I will be impressed.
However, I think you'll find the above challenge quite difficult to accomplish. Why then do you insist that Microsoft be able to pull off the same impossible task?
Before everyone gets excited that OpenOffice will be able to read Word files perfectly (and subsequently become paranoid that this is all some big legal trap set by Microsoft), remember that these are just XML Schemas. Having the schema means that you're able to determine whether or not the XML file (Word document) is valid. In other words, you've got the syntax (big deal) and not the semantics.
So no, this announcement is not going to bring OpenOffice any closer to Word interoperability.