1. Ok, take a deep breath there friend, and do a Google for "Opera" and "December 13" and "lawsuit". Although Opera's press release does not use the word "lawsuit," plenty of other third-partymedia do. It's a legal action, whether the Oxford dictionary would consider this a "lawsuit" seems like splitting hairs.
2. Opera only released their browser to be completely free (no ads or licensing fee) in September 2005. See their press release
3. Opera, like any other company, does things to make money, including initializing legal action. If Opera would truly "not make a dime" from this action, I'm sure their board would have never approved bringing this complaint.
Finally, I'm not sure where you get the idea that I approve of anything that Microsoft does or doesn't do. I simply glad I am not a stakeholder in Opera.
And yeah, I was trolling a bit, but at least I am somewhat better informed than you. Go have a coffee and relax a bit.
The fact that this article got marked as flamebait is demonstrative of how disconnected from reality a lot of people on this site are. What happens when Firefox gets to 50% or more of the browser market? Are Opera going to sue them as well for predative price fixing with Microsoft and Apple? Hell, why not sue GNU for enabling the techinical and legal foundations for creating and distributing free/zero-cost software?
Screw Opera and their retarded, litigation-based business model. I see them as one small step on the food chain above SCO. Maybe they can hire McBride to bleed this out for a few more years.
I personally look forward to when TV's are no longer sold with remotes. Only when we stop the unfair bundling of remotes with TV's will consumers be forced to no longer accept "good enough" remotes when far better remotes are available for purchase.
Personally, I find the whole IE bundling witch hunt paternalistic. Let Opera, or whoever, advertise their products in the marketplace, and get people to buy them. Firefox did that full-page ad and that did far more to increase its market exposure and usage than all of the thousands upon thousands of dollars wasted on anti-trust litigation.
Like it or not, pure coding jobs in the "Western world" are going away. The "cheap code" genie is out of the bottle.
There is such a low expectation on quality for code these days (thanks M$) that a lot of management can assume that project will be delayed and most likely have bugs. There are a lot of reasons for this (changes in project specs, using cheap coders, buggy OS's and toolkits); but there is not a perceived value anymore in having in-house development (Infoworld just had an article on this)
We have fought to keep useless certifications from the programming world. Because of this, one programming peep looks about the same as another to the HR dept and the people who budget programming labor
There is a lot of really good, free (as in beer) code - operating systems, office suites, etc. While this has done little to wedge M$ out of their desktop monopoly, it does contribute to the opinion (admittedly held by the ignorant) that coding can be had on the cheap.
I think the "salvation" of those of is with programming and systems experience is to leverage our skills in leadership positions where we enable companies to do more outsourcing with successful outcomes. Would I like to be paid to code all day? Absolutely. But I don't think that's realistic when somebody claims that they can do the same job for less than half of what I make. The survivors, the pointy-hair bosses and consultants, stay around because they market their ability to get things accomplished. Our best hope for survival as senior developers is to sell upper management that we are their best chance to successfully use the inexpensive labor they are so desperate to hire.
There are two different issues being tackled with SSL encryption. The first is encrypting the data packets between the browser and the server, which doesn't require a Certificate Authority. The second is confirming the identity of the site, which does require an authority that can verify the existence of the entity in question.
In the case of a self-issued certificate, it would be a lot easier if Firefox and other browser simply said, "Data between you and the server will be encrypted, but the site's identity cannot be vouched for. Sensitive data should not be submitted to this site. Do you want to continue?" as opposed hyperbole about misconfigured servers, end-of-the-world psuedo-hack warnings, etc.
I agree with a lot of what you're saying and especially the timeframe. We are pretty far off, though, where appliances with computing power become as reliable, and ubiquitous, as the "dumb" appliances we use today. The iPhone 3G is a good example - a great device built by The Greatest and Goodest Company in the World, but it has more than a few problems - we aren't there yet.
Even when the magical day comes when the PC dies, we will still have the issue of getting a peripheral that facilitates positioning, orientation and event triggering in a a finite amount of desk space. With apologies to stylus pads, thumb pads, ThinkPad erasers and even game console controllers, IMHO nothing coordinates and facilitates these tasks as well as the humble mouse (at least the ones with multiple buttons and scroll wheels).
So, to increase accuracy, I'm supposed to slap at the screen with my pizza-slopped fingers? Facial recognition? Maybe banging my head on my desk will act as a signal to restart Windows yet again.
Somebody who has some obscure input device, which will "kill the mouse", probably paid Gartner to conduct yet another bogus study that seeks to convince people what technology to use as opposed to demonstrate what they are actually using.
Joe Public can go buy a FAX machine with a decent multisheet feeder, plug it into a phone line, and quickly send out faxes. You do not have to wait for the scan, you don't even have to wait for it to dial, you can plop in 20 pages, dial a number, hit Start and off you go
Contrast this with a scanning on a PC. Even low-end FAX machine usually has a better multi-sheet feeder than most scanners. If you get a multi-function scanner/printer, the resolution isn't going to be much better than a dedicated FAX anyway. Windows (I don't know about Mac) comes with really crappy scanning software, and most packages I've seen that come with multi-function scanners/printers aren't much better.
Same situation with receiving a FAX versus getting an email, hoping the attachment isn't blocked because it is too large, waiting for FAX or PDF software to load, and then waiting for printing. With a FAX - it "just works"
As much as we may wish for the Paperless Office, it isn't coming soon. The world still runs on paper. And FAX'ing is still much more expedient than scanning/emailing/printing.
This reminds me of a boss who demanded that we deploy "digital signatures" - by which he meant we scanned our signatures into image files and attached them to an email. No amount of articles explaining actual PKI signatures would convince him that this was, in fact, less than useless because it gave a really false sense of security. I think I finally convinced him by emailing myself a directive to abandon the project, using his scanned signature, and copying him on it.
The problem is that for any real authentication to work, you usually have to have a trusted third-party, and because of all the costs involved in maintaining compliance with industry standards like PCI (for credit card processing, not motherboard card slots), this is going to cost money. Factor in the tin-foil hat paranoia we all have regarding trusting anybody to authoritatively authenticate on our behalf, and real digital signatures become really difficult to implement.
Can it be done? Absolutely, there are plenty of ways to do it now, and for individuals, it can be free. But for companies who spend thousands upon thousands of dollars on compliance issues, it becomes more difficult.
And anyway, do we really want signatures that are authoritatively authenticated with the force of law? I'm guessing we don't, which is why you don't see a bigger corporate push for this. There is some comfort in the wiggle room to say "that really wasn't me."
If they wanted to set up a shortcut in the Startup folder to an executable that needed to run with Administrative privileges, they could use IShellLinkDataList::SetFlags to modify the shortcut in their installer package.
I think your points about the handling of "civilians" are well-taken. In general, there seems to be this notion that the "civies" should be maintaining, to the extent possible, normal lives; while the "professionals" take care of the fight. That mentality is a bit incongruous with the notion that we are at war. Sort of reminds me of...
You could abstract just about anything to say it's an agreement. Back when we were on the "gold standard", currency used to be an agreement that the US held a certain amount of a precious metal (gold or silver) for each note that made its way out of the Treasury. These days, floating currency is a much more abstract concept. Nonetheless, most of us frown upon the idea of the government arbitrarily taking money (outside of taxes, legal settlements, fees, etc.).
If Congress decided that it was for the "public good" that nobody should go hungry, and withdrew $25 out of every bank account monthly in the US to feed the poor; a lot of people would feel that was improper. Regardless of how "nebulous" money is, and what a good thing it would be that people be fed; people see things like contracts, agreements and currency as property that should have some level of protection from their government.
The problem is not that patents have value as property. The issue is that we have an inept PTO that doesn't understand the content of the patents they are blithely granting. It almost seems that as long as people put "A process of..." in front of just about anything, the PTO grants a valuable monopoly. Fix the PTO. Keep Congress, as much as possible, out of the business of deciding when to take things for "the public good".
...nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.
In a lawful society, the government does not give priveleges to the People, the People consent to be governed by the government. The patent system may suck, but having the government taking property, intellectual or otherwise, without due process or compensation is against the law. Period. (Notwithstanding our current administration's attempt to skirt the Constitution when it deems it convenient).
Mod parent up. You shouldn't be told to RTFM when asking why enabling your modem disables your soundcard. Or be ragged on for using a GUI tool to configure something like Samba when you should know that it doesn't expose every option in the/etc config file. Or be told that the data files you have been building over time are worthless because you were too much of an ass to use the Linux Free equivalent of the Windows application (even though it wasn't even in Alpha when you started your business, and still only has 75% of the functionality the Windows application has). Joe User will happily pay the Microsoft Tax, and most business do also, in part to not deal with the 15 root kiddies.
The Ubuntu community forums, happily, seem to be frequented by more polite human beings, and the Wiki is pretty well maintained. Even so, you will have to wander around the wilderness to solve problems like ATI compatibility on 3+ yr hold notebooks. In the Windows world, you hunt down the vendor, find the hidden support page, and generally, after a day or two will get a link to a driver that 90% of the time will address your problem.
Side Note: A previous post's point about hardware vendors support Windows, and Linux supports hardware, was also dead-on. IMHO, this is part of the issue. You can argue that the Linux model works well; but I remember the bad old DOS days, specifically Word Perfect 5.1, Lotus 123, etc. We take printer drivers for granted now (in Windows and Linux), but that wasn't always the case. In WP, you had to worry about if your HP-compatible or Epson-compatible printer was truly compatible. If it wasn't, sometimes you could find a working driver on the bulletin boards, sometimes the printer vendor would release the driver, and sometimes you had to live with reduced functionality. One of the main reasons Windows 3.1 because was a hit because, mostly, you didn't have to worry about fonts or printer drivers any more.
If it's a purchase, then you're right, it's fscked up.
In the case of Rhapsody, it's a subscription, and if Rhapsody isn't around a year from now you won't be listening to your tracks, but you won't be paying for a subscription either.
Actually, my understanding on a subscription deal is that you pay an agreed upon amount of money to have access to a source of music for an agreed upon amount of time. Unless Yahoo is not giving their customers the ability to opt-out of a prolonged subscription (instead of switching to Rhapsody), I don't see how there is any bad faith on their part, or a problem with subscription models in general.
It would be a different story if I purchased a track and the DRM on the file required connection to a back-end server that didn't exist in the future (like Google video). In that case, if I purchased a track, and if I am denied future access to it then I should get a full refund. I agree with you if you're saying that purchasing a track with the potential of being denied access to it later should be avoided.
In Rhapsody's case, you can buy tracks (most of the time) by burning them onto a CD. Some artists are allowing purchase of unencumbered mp3's, nicer yet. Sometimes, artists may pull their music from Rhapsody (like Radiohead, bastards), in which case I can decide to cancel my subscription if it pisses me off enough. At any rate, I am paying a subscription to legitimately listen to music (and maybe get the artist 1/1000th of a penny when I do so). Works well enough for me.
I work at a company that does transcription and the only reason we have stuck with Word was that we have been able to continue utilizing the considerable VBA macro code base we have maintained since Word 97. With the various Word updates, there have been some hiccups, but for the most part, we've been able to keep the same code for Word 97 even through the abomination that is Word 2007. Before you guys start pulling out the flamethrower, in 97 you had Word and WordPerfect, and WordPerfect was busy figuring out how to kill whatever marketshare they still had.
If I have to rewrite everything to work with the next rev of Word, and we have to tell all our transcriptionists they have have to buy the latest (and probably not greatest version) of Word, what incentive would I have not to seriously consider a migration to Open Office?
This idea was probably thought up by the same genius that decided to shut off backward-file compatibility and save as formatted text filters.
This is as stupid as the decision of Microsoft to not include support for the "Text With Layout" in Word 2003. There are, as with most Microsoft products, registry hacks that may or may not let you get away using the text with layout converter that came with Word 2000 - I have had mixed success depending on the installation. There are other workarounds that involve printing from the Generic Text Printer (but you are on your own to remove unwanted intra-page blank lines from margins) and other such contortions.
IMHO, it seems that after Word 2000 (some would argue 97) that Microsoft forgot that Word was supposed to be more of a word processor than a desktop publishing application or a showcase for the latest GUI "innovations" their labs came up with.
As far as security goes, there is no argument being made that the file conversions themselves are insecure - only that Microsoft has chosen not to sign the conversion libraries (something that isn't hard to do at all). Publishing a bunch of registry hacks because your deployment team can't take the 30 minutes to sign these libraries is stupid. If Microsoft really was worried about security, all they would need to do is to add on option, enabled by default, to remove all OLE/ActiveX context from all documents in a non-supported legacy format.
This is about bad architecture decisions and laziness - it has nothing to do with security.
Javascript is an ugly, inconsistent (in and of itself as a language let alone the browser differences) beast, and I don't know of too many people who enjoy dealing with it. If you are going to radically change the functionality, why not start from scratch? Leave "Active"xxx and "Java"xxx out of it.
Use something that, by nature, has flexible data types, expandability and clarity built into it. My vote would be for Python, but I'm sure both Mozilla and Microsoft would feel differently. In a perfect world, both sides would quit pretending that JavaScript should anything to do with Java and quit pretending that a HTML scripting language should be a portal to the OS.
Even James Randi isn't going to put money on somebody not being able to differentiate between a CD and 160kbps MP3, even on my modest car sound system (not Bose, but not tinfoil speakers either.
Slashdot Mirror
Somebody please mod parent up
1. Ok, take a deep breath there friend, and do a Google for "Opera" and "December 13" and "lawsuit".
Although Opera's press release does not use the word "lawsuit," plenty of other third-partymedia do. It's a legal action, whether the Oxford dictionary would consider this a "lawsuit" seems like splitting hairs.
2. Opera only released their browser to be completely free (no ads or licensing fee) in September 2005. See their press release
3. Opera, like any other company, does things to make money, including initializing legal action. If Opera would truly "not make a dime" from this action, I'm sure their board would have never approved bringing this complaint.
Finally, I'm not sure where you get the idea that I approve of anything that Microsoft does or doesn't do. I simply glad I am not a stakeholder in Opera.
And yeah, I was trolling a bit, but at least I am somewhat better informed than you. Go have a coffee and relax a bit.
The fact that this article got marked as flamebait is demonstrative of how disconnected from reality a lot of people on this site are. What happens when Firefox gets to 50% or more of the browser market? Are Opera going to sue them as well for predative price fixing with Microsoft and Apple? Hell, why not sue GNU for enabling the techinical and legal foundations for creating and distributing free/zero-cost software?
Screw Opera and their retarded, litigation-based business model. I see them as one small step on the food chain above SCO. Maybe they can hire McBride to bleed this out for a few more years.
I personally look forward to when TV's are no longer sold with remotes. Only when we stop the unfair bundling of remotes with TV's will consumers be forced to no longer accept "good enough" remotes when far better remotes are available for purchase.
Personally, I find the whole IE bundling witch hunt paternalistic. Let Opera, or whoever, advertise their products in the marketplace, and get people to buy them. Firefox did that full-page ad and that did far more to increase its market exposure and usage than all of the thousands upon thousands of dollars wasted on anti-trust litigation.
We've had pretty good luck using Openfire with Pidgin
Like it or not, pure coding jobs in the "Western world" are going away. The "cheap code" genie is out of the bottle.
I think the "salvation" of those of is with programming and systems experience is to leverage our skills in leadership positions where we enable companies to do more outsourcing with successful outcomes. Would I like to be paid to code all day? Absolutely. But I don't think that's realistic when somebody claims that they can do the same job for less than half of what I make. The survivors, the pointy-hair bosses and consultants, stay around because they market their ability to get things accomplished. Our best hope for survival as senior developers is to sell upper management that we are their best chance to successfully use the inexpensive labor they are so desperate to hire.
There are two different issues being tackled with SSL encryption. The first is encrypting the data packets between the browser and the server, which doesn't require a Certificate Authority. The second is confirming the identity of the site, which does require an authority that can verify the existence of the entity in question.
In the case of a self-issued certificate, it would be a lot easier if Firefox and other browser simply said, "Data between you and the server will be encrypted, but the site's identity cannot be vouched for. Sensitive data should not be submitted to this site. Do you want to continue?" as opposed hyperbole about misconfigured servers, end-of-the-world psuedo-hack warnings, etc.
I agree with a lot of what you're saying and especially the timeframe. We are pretty far off, though, where appliances with computing power become as reliable, and ubiquitous, as the "dumb" appliances we use today. The iPhone 3G is a good example - a great device built by The Greatest and Goodest Company in the World, but it has more than a few problems - we aren't there yet.
Even when the magical day comes when the PC dies, we will still have the issue of getting a peripheral that facilitates positioning, orientation and event triggering in a a finite amount of desk space. With apologies to stylus pads, thumb pads, ThinkPad erasers and even game console controllers, IMHO nothing coordinates and facilitates these tasks as well as the humble mouse (at least the ones with multiple buttons and scroll wheels).
So, to increase accuracy, I'm supposed to slap at the screen with my pizza-slopped fingers? Facial recognition? Maybe banging my head on my desk will act as a signal to restart Windows yet again.
Somebody who has some obscure input device, which will "kill the mouse", probably paid Gartner to conduct yet another bogus study that seeks to convince people what technology to use as opposed to demonstrate what they are actually using.
Some of us geezers prefer print ;)
First they came for the game crackers,
and I did not speak up because I did not play games
Then they came for the pornographers,
and I did not speak up because I did not view porn
Then they came first for the spammers,
and I did not speak up because I was not a spammer
First they came for the music pirates
and I did not speak up because I was not a pirate
Then they came for me,
and by that time there was no fair-use left.
Joe Public can go buy a FAX machine with a decent multisheet feeder, plug it into a phone line, and quickly send out faxes. You do not have to wait for the scan, you don't even have to wait for it to dial, you can plop in 20 pages, dial a number, hit Start and off you go
Contrast this with a scanning on a PC. Even low-end FAX machine usually has a better multi-sheet feeder than most scanners. If you get a multi-function scanner/printer, the resolution isn't going to be much better than a dedicated FAX anyway. Windows (I don't know about Mac) comes with really crappy scanning software, and most packages I've seen that come with multi-function scanners/printers aren't much better.
Same situation with receiving a FAX versus getting an email, hoping the attachment isn't blocked because it is too large, waiting for FAX or PDF software to load, and then waiting for printing. With a FAX - it "just works"
As much as we may wish for the Paperless Office, it isn't coming soon. The world still runs on paper. And FAX'ing is still much more expedient than scanning/emailing/printing.
This reminds me of a boss who demanded that we deploy "digital signatures" - by which he meant we scanned our signatures into image files and attached them to an email. No amount of articles explaining actual PKI signatures would convince him that this was, in fact, less than useless because it gave a really false sense of security. I think I finally convinced him by emailing myself a directive to abandon the project, using his scanned signature, and copying him on it.
The problem is that for any real authentication to work, you usually have to have a trusted third-party, and because of all the costs involved in maintaining compliance with industry standards like PCI (for credit card processing, not motherboard card slots), this is going to cost money. Factor in the tin-foil hat paranoia we all have regarding trusting anybody to authoritatively authenticate on our behalf, and real digital signatures become really difficult to implement.
Can it be done? Absolutely, there are plenty of ways to do it now, and for individuals, it can be free. But for companies who spend thousands upon thousands of dollars on compliance issues, it becomes more difficult.
And anyway, do we really want signatures that are authoritatively authenticated with the force of law? I'm guessing we don't, which is why you don't see a bigger corporate push for this. There is some comfort in the wiggle room to say "that really wasn't me."
If they wanted to set up a shortcut in the Startup folder to an executable that needed to run with Administrative privileges, they could use IShellLinkDataList::SetFlags to modify the shortcut in their installer package.
I think your points about the handling of "civilians" are well-taken. In general, there seems to be this notion that the "civies" should be maintaining, to the extent possible, normal lives; while the "professionals" take care of the fight. That mentality is a bit incongruous with the notion that we are at war. Sort of reminds me of...
You could abstract just about anything to say it's an agreement. Back when we were on the "gold standard", currency used to be an agreement that the US held a certain amount of a precious metal (gold or silver) for each note that made its way out of the Treasury. These days, floating currency is a much more abstract concept. Nonetheless, most of us frown upon the idea of the government arbitrarily taking money (outside of taxes, legal settlements, fees, etc.).
If Congress decided that it was for the "public good" that nobody should go hungry, and withdrew $25 out of every bank account monthly in the US to feed the poor; a lot of people would feel that was improper. Regardless of how "nebulous" money is, and what a good thing it would be that people be fed; people see things like contracts, agreements and currency as property that should have some level of protection from their government.
The problem is not that patents have value as property. The issue is that we have an inept PTO that doesn't understand the content of the patents they are blithely granting. It almost seems that as long as people put "A process of..." in front of just about anything, the PTO grants a valuable monopoly. Fix the PTO. Keep Congress, as much as possible, out of the business of deciding when to take things for "the public good".
From the 5th Amendment:
In a lawful society, the government does not give priveleges to the People, the People consent to be governed by the government. The patent system may suck, but having the government taking property, intellectual or otherwise, without due process or compensation is against the law. Period. (Notwithstanding our current administration's attempt to skirt the Constitution when it deems it convenient).
Mod parent up. You shouldn't be told to RTFM when asking why enabling your modem disables your soundcard. Or be ragged on for using a GUI tool to configure something like Samba when you should know that it doesn't expose every option in the /etc config file. Or be told that the data files you have been building over time are worthless because you were too much of an ass to use the Linux Free equivalent of the Windows application (even though it wasn't even in Alpha when you started your business, and still only has 75% of the functionality the Windows application has). Joe User will happily pay the Microsoft Tax, and most business do also, in part to not deal with the 15 root kiddies.
The Ubuntu community forums, happily, seem to be frequented by more polite human beings, and the Wiki is pretty well maintained. Even so, you will have to wander around the wilderness to solve problems like ATI compatibility on 3+ yr hold notebooks. In the Windows world, you hunt down the vendor, find the hidden support page, and generally, after a day or two will get a link to a driver that 90% of the time will address your problem.
Side Note: A previous post's point about hardware vendors support Windows, and Linux supports hardware, was also dead-on. IMHO, this is part of the issue. You can argue that the Linux model works well; but I remember the bad old DOS days, specifically Word Perfect 5.1, Lotus 123, etc. We take printer drivers for granted now (in Windows and Linux), but that wasn't always the case. In WP, you had to worry about if your HP-compatible or Epson-compatible printer was truly compatible. If it wasn't, sometimes you could find a working driver on the bulletin boards, sometimes the printer vendor would release the driver, and sometimes you had to live with reduced functionality. One of the main reasons Windows 3.1 because was a hit because, mostly, you didn't have to worry about fonts or printer drivers any more.
If it's a purchase, then you're right, it's fscked up.
In the case of Rhapsody, it's a subscription, and if Rhapsody isn't around a year from now you won't be listening to your tracks, but you won't be paying for a subscription either.
Actually, my understanding on a subscription deal is that you pay an agreed upon amount of money to have access to a source of music for an agreed upon amount of time. Unless Yahoo is not giving their customers the ability to opt-out of a prolonged subscription (instead of switching to Rhapsody), I don't see how there is any bad faith on their part, or a problem with subscription models in general.
It would be a different story if I purchased a track and the DRM on the file required connection to a back-end server that didn't exist in the future (like Google video). In that case, if I purchased a track, and if I am denied future access to it then I should get a full refund. I agree with you if you're saying that purchasing a track with the potential of being denied access to it later should be avoided.
In Rhapsody's case, you can buy tracks (most of the time) by burning them onto a CD. Some artists are allowing purchase of unencumbered mp3's, nicer yet. Sometimes, artists may pull their music from Rhapsody (like Radiohead, bastards), in which case I can decide to cancel my subscription if it pisses me off enough. At any rate, I am paying a subscription to legitimately listen to music (and maybe get the artist 1/1000th of a penny when I do so). Works well enough for me.
I work at a company that does transcription and the only reason we have stuck with Word was that we have been able to continue utilizing the considerable VBA macro code base we have maintained since Word 97. With the various Word updates, there have been some hiccups, but for the most part, we've been able to keep the same code for Word 97 even through the abomination that is Word 2007. Before you guys start pulling out the flamethrower, in 97 you had Word and WordPerfect, and WordPerfect was busy figuring out how to kill whatever marketshare they still had.
If I have to rewrite everything to work with the next rev of Word, and we have to tell all our transcriptionists they have have to buy the latest (and probably not greatest version) of Word, what incentive would I have not to seriously consider a migration to Open Office?
This idea was probably thought up by the same genius that decided to shut off backward-file compatibility and save as formatted text filters.
Ok, I'll bite. I don't see how this is FUD.
I don't think anybody fears this as much as is annoyed by it.
There is no uncertainty about it, there is a Microsoft-published knowledge base article
I'll give you doubt - as to I doubt whether it's a good idea to require registry editing (or group policies) to keep in place existing functionality,
This is as stupid as the decision of Microsoft to not include support for the "Text With Layout" in Word 2003. There are, as with most Microsoft products, registry hacks that may or may not let you get away using the text with layout converter that came with Word 2000 - I have had mixed success depending on the installation. There are other workarounds that involve printing from the Generic Text Printer (but you are on your own to remove unwanted intra-page blank lines from margins) and other such contortions.
IMHO, it seems that after Word 2000 (some would argue 97) that Microsoft forgot that Word was supposed to be more of a word processor than a desktop publishing application or a showcase for the latest GUI "innovations" their labs came up with.
As far as security goes, there is no argument being made that the file conversions themselves are insecure - only that Microsoft has chosen not to sign the conversion libraries (something that isn't hard to do at all). Publishing a bunch of registry hacks because your deployment team can't take the 30 minutes to sign these libraries is stupid. If Microsoft really was worried about security, all they would need to do is to add on option, enabled by default, to remove all OLE/ActiveX context from all documents in a non-supported legacy format.
This is about bad architecture decisions and laziness - it has nothing to do with security.
Javascript is an ugly, inconsistent (in and of itself as a language let alone the browser differences) beast, and I don't know of too many people who enjoy dealing with it. If you are going to radically change the functionality, why not start from scratch? Leave "Active"xxx and "Java"xxx out of it.
Use something that, by nature, has flexible data types, expandability and clarity built into it. My vote would be for Python, but I'm sure both Mozilla and Microsoft would feel differently. In a perfect world, both sides would quit pretending that JavaScript should anything to do with Java and quit pretending that a HTML scripting language should be a portal to the OS.
Even James Randi isn't going to put money on somebody not being able to differentiate between a CD and 160kbps MP3, even on my modest car sound system (not Bose, but not tinfoil speakers either.