as a windows coder, i've done some VBA coding for office applications, and there are some VERY good reasons for ms office formats not being compatible from version to version.
first, to get it out of the way: backwards compatibility IS getting better. go ahead, type up a simple document in word xp (2002), and then open it in office 2000 or even office 97. you'll notice that it opens up quite nicely.
where it gets complicated is when you start to mess with complex documents. you see, office documents aren't just files of text - they're persisted objects. MS adds value to the object model in every iteration of MS Office. this IS all based off of a type-library that defines the object interfaces, as per proper object-oriented programming.
word, excel, and powerpoint are all based on object models, and every iteration adds new functionality - either a new object that defines a new type of text break, or a function that allows copying from an ADO or DAO recordset into your current application. sometimes outdated/unneeded properties & methods are removed because of obsolescence (better fn(), external exposed technology has evolved, etc.). and they're allowed to do this because... well, they made it up. however, the core pieces - for instance in excel, the range, sheet, and workbook objects - remain the same, despite the latest & greatest enhancements.
a lot of those enhancements are added solely so that the product that most users use - the application - can now do new things to the documents, or remove old functionality that never worked too well in the first place.
the documents support the app. not the other way around, like most people think.
what import function creators need to focus on is:
1) get the data out.
2) decide what formatting is integral for YOUR app. it's obvious that there will be incompatibilities between document formats due to value-added features, so decide what YOUR app will do and what you want to be able to extract from it.
3) update your formats. and object-orient your parsers. it's possible to mimic the base functionality of the model, using some smarts and reverse engineering.
hope this sheds some light on what's REALLY required - nothing is easy.
as for forcing an open standard: MS made that format up, and forced no-one to use it. the values of the application are what drove the documents, even though it's the documents that drive the application on a developer level. forcing MS to open their document will only stagnate people's willingness to change it for their own purposes.
like RTF.
or GIF.
or JPEG.
those standards were made BY the people, FOR the people.
.doc,.xls, and.ppt are proprietary. don't be jealous 'cause they're better than other open formats can hope to be.
"Personally I'd stick w/ whatever was already out there for the banking systems...I trust them more than I do MS."
sometimes that works..
but isn't that what banks did for say, 30 years or so, and then spend billions/trillions of dollars worldwide upgrading 'cause of Y2K ? remember the fear & commotion? did you get interest additions of several negative thousands of dollars added to your account?
well, it's not about controlling content, but the idea of a quantum key/signature to control content seems rather feasible if we ever reach that threshold.
and check the linked story. it talks about quantum transmission.
note: this may apply more to say, encrypting transmissions for military use that we wouldn't want, say, al-qaida sniffing & decrypting.
Re:Microsoft can't be to happy about this...
on
XBox Netplay Already
·
· Score: 1
i think this is going to be one of those deals where they "officially come out against this practice", but unofficially won't worry that much about it since it won't hurt sales, and instead cause popularity and buzz. MS has so much cash going into marketing the box just to get people to buy it - no troubles on this front.
i seem to recall previous slashdot articles telling us not to sink our money into the xbox and "yawn, big whoop, this/that is/will be better". seems the joke's on michael, as this box's popularity seems to be going through the roof in this particularly anti-ms forum;) hell, even CmdrTaco wants one "so badly".
it's fun, it seems to be hackable and being an MS product, is a rather more prolific target of such hacking. i think we have a winner, folks.
Re:why so negative towards xbox?
on
XBox Released
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
it's absolutely true - the anti-MS FUD campaign is unbelievable, in every respect of the word.
just recently, i was at my local electronics boutique. i was talking with the sales rep there, and of course there were the mandatory kids in there eying all the games & consoles. at the time, they were staring at the display consoles that were hooked up - one PS2, one xbox. the screens in EB are mounted in the ceiling, so it's not readily apparant which console is which unless you know the games.
they started yapping about the xbox sucking, ps2 is better, etc etc etc. me & the sales guy looked at them & asked them what was so bad about the xbox, and they came out with the "ms sucks" or the "gamecube will rock" rhetoric. the sales rep argued back with xbox's actual capabilities, but they'd have none of that: this was xbox, MS's evil handiwork, and therefore it would have to suck.
after some time, they left. the sales rep switched games in the display setups and put in some other games.
same kids come back. they started staring at the screen for Project Gotham (xbox), and started ooooooohing and aaaaaaahhhing.
sales rep smiles, goes up to them & tells them a bald-faced lie:
"that's a new PS2 game coming out soon"
they started talking about how awesome the graphics were, staring at how u could see the men inside the cars actually turning the wheel, the detail, textures, etc.
"you idiots, that's not a PS2. that's an xbox." and he reset the xbox console to prove it.
FUD works, and quite well. too bad some people resort to it without knowing the REAL facts.
i know that here in canada, some of the smaller retail outlets are selling xboxes as soon as they get them (to people that pre-ordered).
2 new consoles and a major PS2 game (MGS2) coming out so soon from each other... places like walmart can handle that kinda rush volume, but smaller vendors wouldn't be able to take it. hence, selling stock as soon as it's out.
they know as well as us: this is gonna be one of the greatest console competitions we've ever seen.
and hardly anyone has anything ELSE to say about the GAME. but we all knew this, didn't we?
lord knows we'd never say anything POSITIVE about ANYTHING affiliated with MS, michael. but i expect so much more out of slashdot posters than just "well, i won't play it 'cause i'm anti-microsoft, so it must such" or "xbox will fail anyway".
god forbid we appreciate the work of a man who's spent years making a game that, to all ungrieved hearts who've played it, is truly beautiful and amazing.
god forbid we allow him the ability to take advantage of a 600mhz proc & dedicated gaming system to speed up product delivery a bit and increase detail, NOOO, NOT GOOD ENOUGH, IT DOESN'T RUN ON LINUX OR MY 200MHZ PENTIUM.
god forbid we give credit where credit is due and just say "yes, this looks like an amazing game."
- people used to have hobbies. you'd go to work, come home, eat, and then on some days you'd take up some kind of craft(s) or hobby(ies) that ate up your time and kept the rest of your brain sharp on the whole.
having something on the side that you tinker with & do on your own keeps the juices flowing by giving you something else to learn from the ground up. the learning process is truly an ongoing experience, but it doesn't mean more school, necessarily. and it doesn't necessarily have to be something career-oriented, either.
for instance, some people tinker on cars/automotive in their spare time, or work on re-finishing a room in their house. others enjoy gardening/landscaping, or reading/writing. but the general trend is that you have your work life - something that pays the bills that you can do well enough - and your hobby life, which is something creative that you do entirely on your own, for yourself.
i'm also in IT, working as a programmer/data analyst. it's boring, boring work sometimes, and before i found a few hobbies (photography, self-teaching, and exercise), i could go for a month feeling totally wiped out because of the same old, same old, without a change or anything else stimulating my brain. this of course led me to believe that i needed to do LESS things with myself, or easier things (i.e. drinking every friday night, sitting home on weekdays watching the boob tube). nothing changed in my attitude at work, and i felt worse. in actuality, doing MORE makes you feel more energized and gives you a more positive feeling on the inside.
in short: most work gets boring & repetitive after a while. that probably won't change unless you really do a career change. in the meantime, a much better method is to just take up some new hobbies & keep yourself going.
this is very interesting to me in particular - i've been considering a system for establishments that would in part run on a wireless scheme (ease of installation, basically), and encryption was honestly one thing i hadn't thought of.
this alerts us to something else, too: wireless networks, encrypted or not, can be sniffed easier than regular wire networks, since you don't have to be physically connected to the internet to be sniffed.
now, as we all know, encryption isn't the one-stop shop in terms of securing data. in a wireless environment where intruders can get at you with relative ease, what other forms of protection are there against having data stolen?
it's legacy remains, better than ever.
on
MS DOS: A Eulogy
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
even though DOS is pretty much obsolete, i'd like to clarify to all of you that MS has ***NOT*** removed the command prompt from XP.
Start -> Other Programs -> Accessories -> Command Prompt.
not only that, but remember when you upgraded to winNT/2K, and couldn't run those old DOS apps that you loved so much?
XP returns that to you. when i discovered that this was supposed to be the case, i quickly installed one of my old favorites, "Stunts" (by Broderbund software), and found myself happily cruising the old tracks in my F1 racer. since then i've loaded on all my old classic *QUALITY* DOS games (like Doom, id software) and had a rollicking good time with XP.
(sure, it sounds like it should violate NT's HAL, but try it for yourself. it works, hasn't crashed my system, and by god - it's glorious to have those games back again.)
Slashdot Mirror
for once, michael reports good news about MS.
/.'s next trick, JonKatz will post a relevant article, and /.'ers won't bash him.
for
as a windows coder, i've done some VBA coding for office applications, and there are some VERY good reasons for ms office formats not being compatible from version to version.
.xls, and .ppt are proprietary. don't be jealous 'cause they're better than other open formats can hope to be.
first, to get it out of the way: backwards compatibility IS getting better. go ahead, type up a simple document in word xp (2002), and then open it in office 2000 or even office 97. you'll notice that it opens up quite nicely.
where it gets complicated is when you start to mess with complex documents. you see, office documents aren't just files of text - they're persisted objects. MS adds value to the object model in every iteration of MS Office. this IS all based off of a type-library that defines the object interfaces, as per proper object-oriented programming.
word, excel, and powerpoint are all based on object models, and every iteration adds new functionality - either a new object that defines a new type of text break, or a function that allows copying from an ADO or DAO recordset into your current application. sometimes outdated/unneeded properties & methods are removed because of obsolescence (better fn(), external exposed technology has evolved, etc.). and they're allowed to do this because... well, they made it up. however, the core pieces - for instance in excel, the range, sheet, and workbook objects - remain the same, despite the latest & greatest enhancements.
a lot of those enhancements are added solely so that the product that most users use - the application - can now do new things to the documents, or remove old functionality that never worked too well in the first place.
the documents support the app. not the other way around, like most people think.
what import function creators need to focus on is:
1) get the data out.
2) decide what formatting is integral for YOUR app. it's obvious that there will be incompatibilities between document formats due to value-added features, so decide what YOUR app will do and what you want to be able to extract from it.
3) update your formats. and object-orient your parsers. it's possible to mimic the base functionality of the model, using some smarts and reverse engineering.
hope this sheds some light on what's REALLY required - nothing is easy.
as for forcing an open standard: MS made that format up, and forced no-one to use it. the values of the application are what drove the documents, even though it's the documents that drive the application on a developer level. forcing MS to open their document will only stagnate people's willingness to change it for their own purposes.
like RTF.
or GIF.
or JPEG.
those standards were made BY the people, FOR the people.
.doc,
"Personally I'd stick w/ whatever was already out there for the banking systems...I trust them more than I do MS."
sometimes that works..
but isn't that what banks did for say, 30 years or so, and then spend billions/trillions of dollars worldwide upgrading 'cause of Y2K ? remember the fear & commotion? did you get interest additions of several negative thousands of dollars added to your account?
yeah, i trust banks more than MS...
well, it's not about controlling content, but the idea of a quantum key/signature to control content seems rather feasible if we ever reach that threshold.
3 24 2&mode=thread
see:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/06/29/202
and check the linked story. it talks about quantum transmission.
note: this may apply more to say, encrypting transmissions for military use that we wouldn't want, say, al-qaida sniffing & decrypting.
i think this is going to be one of those deals where they "officially come out against this practice", but unofficially won't worry that much about it since it won't hurt sales, and instead cause popularity and buzz. MS has so much cash going into marketing the box just to get people to buy it - no troubles on this front.
;) hell, even CmdrTaco wants one "so badly".
i seem to recall previous slashdot articles telling us not to sink our money into the xbox and "yawn, big whoop, this/that is/will be better". seems the joke's on michael, as this box's popularity seems to be going through the roof in this particularly anti-ms forum
it's fun, it seems to be hackable and being an MS product, is a rather more prolific target of such hacking. i think we have a winner, folks.
it's absolutely true - the anti-MS FUD campaign is unbelievable, in every respect of the word.
just recently, i was at my local electronics boutique. i was talking with the sales rep there, and of course there were the mandatory kids in there eying all the games & consoles. at the time, they were staring at the display consoles that were hooked up - one PS2, one xbox. the screens in EB are mounted in the ceiling, so it's not readily apparant which console is which unless you know the games.
they started yapping about the xbox sucking, ps2 is better, etc etc etc. me & the sales guy looked at them & asked them what was so bad about the xbox, and they came out with the "ms sucks" or the "gamecube will rock" rhetoric. the sales rep argued back with xbox's actual capabilities, but they'd have none of that: this was xbox, MS's evil handiwork, and therefore it would have to suck.
after some time, they left. the sales rep switched games in the display setups and put in some other games.
same kids come back. they started staring at the screen for Project Gotham (xbox), and started ooooooohing and aaaaaaahhhing.
sales rep smiles, goes up to them & tells them a bald-faced lie:
"that's a new PS2 game coming out soon"
they started talking about how awesome the graphics were, staring at how u could see the men inside the cars actually turning the wheel, the detail, textures, etc.
"you idiots, that's not a PS2. that's an xbox." and he reset the xbox console to prove it.
FUD works, and quite well. too bad some people resort to it without knowing the REAL facts.
i know that here in canada, some of the smaller retail outlets are selling xboxes as soon as they get them (to people that pre-ordered).
2 new consoles and a major PS2 game (MGS2) coming out so soon from each other... places like walmart can handle that kinda rush volume, but smaller vendors wouldn't be able to take it. hence, selling stock as soon as it's out.
they know as well as us: this is gonna be one of the greatest console competitions we've ever seen.
and hardly anyone has anything ELSE to say about the GAME. but we all knew this, didn't we?
lord knows we'd never say anything POSITIVE about ANYTHING affiliated with MS, michael. but i expect so much more out of slashdot posters than just "well, i won't play it 'cause i'm anti-microsoft, so it must such" or "xbox will fail anyway".
god forbid we appreciate the work of a man who's spent years making a game that, to all ungrieved hearts who've played it, is truly beautiful and amazing.
god forbid we allow him the ability to take advantage of a 600mhz proc & dedicated gaming system to speed up product delivery a bit and increase detail, NOOO, NOT GOOD ENOUGH, IT DOESN'T RUN ON LINUX OR MY 200MHZ PENTIUM.
god forbid we give credit where credit is due and just say "yes, this looks like an amazing game."
where've we all heard this one before?
athlon vs. pentium
ati vs. nvidia
and now tape measures vs. rated antennas.
no good will come of this one, either.
seems to me -
"a long time ago..."
- people used to have hobbies. you'd go to work, come home, eat, and then on some days you'd take up some kind of craft(s) or hobby(ies) that ate up your time and kept the rest of your brain sharp on the whole.
having something on the side that you tinker with & do on your own keeps the juices flowing by giving you something else to learn from the ground up. the learning process is truly an ongoing experience, but it doesn't mean more school, necessarily. and it doesn't necessarily have to be something career-oriented, either.
for instance, some people tinker on cars/automotive in their spare time, or work on re-finishing a room in their house. others enjoy gardening/landscaping, or reading/writing. but the general trend is that you have your work life - something that pays the bills that you can do well enough - and your hobby life, which is something creative that you do entirely on your own, for yourself.
i'm also in IT, working as a programmer/data analyst. it's boring, boring work sometimes, and before i found a few hobbies (photography, self-teaching, and exercise), i could go for a month feeling totally wiped out because of the same old, same old, without a change or anything else stimulating my brain. this of course led me to believe that i needed to do LESS things with myself, or easier things (i.e. drinking every friday night, sitting home on weekdays watching the boob tube). nothing changed in my attitude at work, and i felt worse. in actuality, doing MORE makes you feel more energized and gives you a more positive feeling on the inside.
in short: most work gets boring & repetitive after a while. that probably won't change unless you really do a career change. in the meantime, a much better method is to just take up some new hobbies & keep yourself going.
this is very interesting to me in particular - i've been considering a system for establishments that would in part run on a wireless scheme (ease of installation, basically), and encryption was honestly one thing i hadn't thought of.
this alerts us to something else, too: wireless networks, encrypted or not, can be sniffed easier than regular wire networks, since you don't have to be physically connected to the internet to be sniffed.
now, as we all know, encryption isn't the one-stop shop in terms of securing data. in a wireless environment where intruders can get at you with relative ease, what other forms of protection are there against having data stolen?
this one has an SEP field ;)
even though DOS is pretty much obsolete, i'd like to clarify to all of you that MS has ***NOT*** removed the command prompt from XP.
Start -> Other Programs -> Accessories -> Command Prompt.
not only that, but remember when you upgraded to winNT/2K, and couldn't run those old DOS apps that you loved so much?
XP returns that to you. when i discovered that this was supposed to be the case, i quickly installed one of my old favorites, "Stunts" (by Broderbund software), and found myself happily cruising the old tracks in my F1 racer. since then i've loaded on all my old classic *QUALITY* DOS games (like Doom, id software) and had a rollicking good time with XP.
(sure, it sounds like it should violate NT's HAL, but try it for yourself. it works, hasn't crashed my system, and by god - it's glorious to have those games back again.)