The "rub" is that while we may not buy future Microsoft products we are still tied to legacy ones, and that's important. It's important because while you and I may be willing to dual-boot, Joe User probably isn't. To them spending $750 on OS and software is less unreasonable than asking them to deal with rebooting when they want to run one application versus another. And if your clients are running Visio 2003 and you're not, they'll have to be sure to save in 2002 format or you will not be able to read their files. Eventually, you'll need to run the same version your clients are running. Welcome back to the Microsoft treadmill.
In my case, it's the lack of an Adobe Audition (or SoundForge) replacement in Linux that keeps Windows on my box. Unfortunately, WINE won't even run the Adobe Audition setup files, let alone run the application. In your case, it's the lack of a solid flowcharting/workflow illustration tool. There are audio and flowcharting apps, but they are nowhere near the functionality and productivity of their Windows counterparts. Sorry, but that's the truth. And until it's not, whether because WINE matures enough to run stuff besides the simplest applications, or application vendors start coding for Linxu en-masse, Linux desktop adoption will not be what it could be.
An example of Windows 98 is at my gym where the barcode check in/check out system churns along happily day after day on a Windows 98 box (not connected to the Internet, or I'm sure it would be unusable by now). Here's an example of an old box, probably better made than half the crap churned out today (decent power supplies, hard drives that were throroughly Q/A'd, memory modules with matching chips, etc.), that will continue being used until it implodes upon ifself. The application does not need the eye candy of XP/Gnome/KDE, nor does it need access to infinite amounts of virtual RAM, etc. It needs to start quickly (which Windows 98 does) and go.
This may be a perfect opportunity to set up a simple Linux application that runs under X (not using KDE/Gnome), but who is going to spend the money to fund the development? It's not a "sexy" project that it going to be picked up on by some hacker for fun, and the kind of guys who write boring database apps like this are mostly busy in the US these days working 10 hour days trying to keep their jobs.
It's not Microsoft Office that keeps these Windows 98 boxes alive; but the small, VB apps that do not die but continue doing useful work day in and day out. Could these be built on Linux? Absolutely. Would they be better? Sure they could. Could they be built as quickly and easily as their VB 6 counterparts? Not that I have seen so far, and that includes Gnome, KDE/Qt, Tk and wxPython (I know there are many more). That's where Windows picked up so much momentum; it was the ability to toss together small, useful, ugly RAD apps that were not things of Computer Science beauty, but they could be built by people who didn't know C++ but knew what they needed.
IMO, this is a big reason why Linux hasn't caught on the way it ought to have on the Desktop. There is no easy way for the non-computer scientist to put together quick, useful applications. This is something IBM never got with OS/2, and why it died a stagnant death, because while it could run Windows 3.1 apps better than Windows itself, to do anything in native you pretty much had to do it in C++.
Most Linux users like the idea of their apps being constructed by committees of uber-hackers in Europe who really know their stuff. However, until your average hobbiest or business professional can put together useful applications as easily as they could in VB (and to a lesser extent VB.NET), and distribute it, legacy operating systems like Windows 98 and XP will still be floating around for many years to come.
Microsoft makes it almost impossible to figure out how licensing should work if you are a small or medium size business running their servers (outside of sending them blank checks every year for Software Assurance). I would venture a good portion of the "pirating" the BSA is complaining about involves confusion about regarding how many CAL's, and what kind of CAL's a business should have. Even Microsoft admits that CAL licensing can be a complicated area.
I am personally offended that none of my submissions ever made it onto Slashdot (even given that they weren't the typicaly "Microsoft Sucks, Open Source Rules" fare) and this vile piece of non-information did.
Representatives from the automotive insurance industry released a self-authored report yesterday that confirmed most freeways lead people through areas that are heavy in traffic, subject to increased probability of colissions and even vandalism and crime.
"I was shocked that people would create a place to drive my car without making sure there was no possiblity of me or my vehicle getting injured," stated a randomly selected driver.
Auto insurance representatives questioned for the story said the frightening study proves that their product (which provides no guaranteed protection against auto collisions) is absolutely essential to safe driving. When asked why they spend millions of dollars to make sure they are not held liable in all but the most obvious of cases, insurance representatives had not comment, but reminded everybody how dangerous freeways are, and suggested that people should hold the state liable for offering such questional places for people to drive their cars in the first place.
In an interview series composer Bear McCreary said:
"Bear McCreary sees Battlestar Galactica's music as taking a more emtoional turn as it gets closer to the long-lost colony of Earth."
So, for those of you who missed Galactica 1980, your chance will come! (a show so bad even SciFi Channel won't re-air it). It makes you wonder though, when they will turn up though.
My company uses Netsuite as its accounting application. It is a web-based accounting and salesforce automatication suite that does many things well. There are some things that it does not do well, but can be worked around.
Companies like Netsuite and Salesforce may tout 99.99% uptime, but we have often run into scenarios where the service was running too slow to be unusable. Unfortunately, strictly speaking, the system was not experiencing "downtime", thus allowing the vendor to maintain their statistic, even though for us the system was as good as down.
The "lower cost of ownership" claims may not pan out over the long term. The article talks about SaaS being metered by usage levels. Netsuite charges by the named user, and I believe Salesforce still does, as well. The pricing model is similar to "normal" softawre. The TCO measurement depends largely on the size of an organziation, i.e. do they already have the pieces to implment a full-fledged CRM/SFA, (enterprise database, email and storage servers)? If you have these things in place and are used to supporting them, a traditional CRM or accounting package may cost less than an SaaS.
Other metrics that are missing are customer support response time. The unfortunate part of SaaS is that if the system goes down, everybody will call at once, and when you need the vendor the most they will be the most inaccessible. In general, though, I would love to see metrics of quality of customer support not only for SaaS but for regular vendors as well. When you deal with an SaaS, you typically don't have a VAR helping you out, it's you and the vendor directly. If their call center is understaffed or undertrained, it's painful
The article, itself, reads like a press-release and is horribly vague, especially when mentioned the "new 'Live' version of [Microsoft's] Office suite" - which does not implement Word or Excel, and treats on-demand updating of anti-viral software as SaaS. It isn't.
What we've found as a past user of Salesforce.com and current user of Netsuite is that you really need to do the upfront due-dillegence to make sure that these SaaS systems conform to your business model. Netsuite, especially, is awkward to deal with if your company provides services as opposed to sells widgets. Get a strong consultant on the front-end to make sure the product is a fit for your organization, and be prepared to do significant customization. Also, be careful to get specifics on how much it costs to import and export data to other systems. In Netsuite, for example, you have to have certain versions of their system to import/export XML records of your data (their webservice based pricing is, at the moment, still free depending on how much data you move through it). Make sure you have access to your data.
Good point. I purposely sign my cards "Please ask for ID" so that if my wallet gets stolen, it's slightly more difficult to use my cards in an unauthorized manner. In reality though, beacuse of the whole "why do I have to show my ID" paranoia, credit card theft is much easier than it ought to be.
There is no constitutional protection for your momma' to not be slapped around be me and then taken from behind. That doesn't mean that it's legal, it just means that it is left up to the states to regulate such criminal activity.
The Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution specifically because the Constitution did not provide explicit protections from an overeager government. Fotunately, important individual protections such as women's sufferage were also later added.
The Consitution is not meant to either explicitly enumerate all of the rights we have or don't have. It lays out the structure of government, its responsibilities; and, in those cases where either government screws up or anticipated to screw up, amendents can be added to protect the individual.
You want a constitutional right to anonymity? Petition your Congressional representatives and governor to encourage a constitutional amendment. Other than that, you're pretty much at the mercy of NSA/TSA/et al.
I would hardly consider myself a conservative (at least in the Neocon sense), but it is a but discouraging to have individuals keep asserting "constitutional" rights which are completely illusory.
There is no constitutional right to complete anonymity, there never was. There is protection in the Fourth Amendment against unreasonable search and seizure. Asking for your identification before boarding a plane is no more unreasonable than asking for your ID when making a credit card transaction, if for nothing else to ensure you are not stealing somebody else's ticket (notwithstanding the security issues).
When the EFF (or anybody else) raises a fit over something that is this unobtrusive, it makes it more difficult for voices to be heard when our government is so outside the law it feels the need to bypass warrants, even those issued from secret rubber-stamping courts. Those who argue "security above all else" simply lump civil libertarians in with nut jobs who want to be as anonymous in real life as they are when playing Warcraft.
For me, an important issue is that it is difficult (but not impossible, see the Mozilla Control project) to substitute a different rendering engine in place of IE's. Microsoft's real "crime" was making it relatively simple to include their browser engine in other applications, and making it relatively difficult to have a different engine be included in it's place.
I was developing an Windows application that required an embedded web control. I looked at the Mozilla Control but the control is tied in to specific versions of Firefox/Mozilla. Every time a user downloaded an updated copy of Firefox/Mozilla, my app would "break" until a matching copy of the control was released. A "test" version of the control for Firefox 1.5 was released on 12/15/05, no "release" version is out yet. For commercial applications to implement a Gecko-based ActiveX plugin instead of IE's - Mozilla needs to include a plug-in as part of its release when it puts out browsers. Otherwise, IE isn't going to go away (in its executable or ActiveX incarnations)
There are a couple of challenges with this type of technology. Sign language does not depend only on finger movements but gestures and facial expressions to convey emotion and context. Finger-spelling hands, being mechanical, can only accept data so fast before they start "choking" and sezing up/breaking (we tried hooking one up to a teleprompter application, and its middle finger got stuck - go figure).
This technology can be exciting on a small scale, but is not meant (not able) to act as a replacement for sign language or even closed captioning.
I've been a Rhapsody subscriber for three years. A few months ago, Rhapsody released a new version of their client (3.0) that included support for DRM so you can copy files to your portable player. The problem is that this client was much more of a resource pig than their previous version (2.0). If you don't care about copying music and just want to be able to listen to it on demand, 3.0 would tie up much more of your system resources than the previous version - for no discernable improvement in audio quality, features, etc. Perhaps the web release is an attempt to begin backing off of the horrid 3.0 release.
On first try, the web client ran well under Firefox 1.5 - nice integrated screens, exaplaining exactly how to allow permission for the music client to get loaded, and it seemed to be responsive, well behaved and much less of a resource hog than 3.0.
Forget about using the music as a soundtrack for your latest family photo slideshow, or mash-ups, or sampling. The EULA forbids changing, altering, or make derivative works from the music on your computer.
My wife is a figure skating coach and it is common for us to create short cuts of tracks (usually between 1:30 and 4:00) for use in skating programs. I'm wondering if Sony truly wants to kill the use of its music for performances such as skating, dance, etc. At any rate, it seems based on this language that her students may not be able to skate to music released under such a license. If Disney were to release such a license for its soundtracks, it would kill about 80% of the programs in lower level competitions!
NT has had pretty extensive ACL capabilities since it's very first version.
True, and my comment was poorly phrased. I wish execute permission was better implemented by installation programs and the OS itself (namely, more emphasis on requiring explicit permissions for a program to run as opposed to letting "Read & Execute" trickle down throughout c:\Program Files...)
1. Most screen readers and such work within the Windows environment, not just Microsoft Word. If the concern is that keyboard shortcuts or accessibility features won't work, these things are easily adapted to OpenOffice
2. The idea that government documents are designed for accessibility is absurd. Anytime you hit embedded tables (or worse, nested tables), columns, etc., it is that much harder for screen magnifiers/screen readers to deal with. Which is why...
3. An open document format is actually better for people with visual disabilities because custom document readers can be created that are more friendly to screen readers and magnifiers.
It's this kind of corporate squabbling that lends ammo to those looking to "internationalize" the Internet. You know, to make sure that responsible countries, like China and Iran, can keep the Internet open and free...
Under XP, and I'm assuming Vista, they've finally merged the regedit/regedt32 functionality - so you can actually search and look at permissions from the same program (about time).
Personally, I think whether a program is hooking itself in through Programs\Startup, registry run keys, win.ini or as a service, the operating system should warn you about it -- and not allow it unless you are running as admin (assuming someday Microsoft will implement a decent non-admin default in it OS products)
1. As of W2K, you can assign permissions (granted, useless if everybody runs as admin) 2. Program settings under HKCU follow users around (when implemented properly, this works very well) 3. Easy to read/write from
The pains of the registry often have not much to do with the registry itself:
1. Silly things like HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run (where a lot of spyware hooks itself) shouldn't even exist because it refers to machine-specific files (not user specific)
2. IE's poorly-implemented ActiveX plug-in architecture is not a registry problem, it is an application design problem (if IE used a flat config file to store the ActiveX info, it would still be just as bad)
3. Microsoft Office stores its configuration data as binary blobs instead of typed data - laziness that causes unnecessary cross-version compatibility issues
If Microsoft would simply disable the Run key in HKCU, set up an Execute flag (like *nix) and make it default to run as non-admin (which it does in Vista, AFAIK), it would be quite a bit more secure than it is. At any rate, though, none of these things has much to do with the registry. If startup programs were stored in a file somewhere, it would be well-known quickly enough, and we would have just as many problems. Security through obfuscation doesn't work, we all know that.
I work at a shop that does a lot of transcription. We have been able to keep our VBA macros (which are quite extensive) working between all versions of Word from 97 on without too much difficulty.
Has anybody heard if the object model has changed significantly (i.e. Application / Document / Range / etc.)? If Microsoft revamps the back-end macros in Word the way they are revamping the front-end, it would certainly be an impetus for companies to look at other office solutions
Slashdot Mirror
The "rub" is that while we may not buy future Microsoft products we are still tied to legacy ones, and that's important. It's important because while you and I may be willing to dual-boot, Joe User probably isn't. To them spending $750 on OS and software is less unreasonable than asking them to deal with rebooting when they want to run one application versus another. And if your clients are running Visio 2003 and you're not, they'll have to be sure to save in 2002 format or you will not be able to read their files. Eventually, you'll need to run the same version your clients are running. Welcome back to the Microsoft treadmill.
In my case, it's the lack of an Adobe Audition (or SoundForge) replacement in Linux that keeps Windows on my box. Unfortunately, WINE won't even run the Adobe Audition setup files, let alone run the application. In your case, it's the lack of a solid flowcharting/workflow illustration tool. There are audio and flowcharting apps, but they are nowhere near the functionality and productivity of their Windows counterparts. Sorry, but that's the truth. And until it's not, whether because WINE matures enough to run stuff besides the simplest applications, or application vendors start coding for Linxu en-masse, Linux desktop adoption will not be what it could be.
An example of Windows 98 is at my gym where the barcode check in/check out system churns along happily day after day on a Windows 98 box (not connected to the Internet, or I'm sure it would be unusable by now). Here's an example of an old box, probably better made than half the crap churned out today (decent power supplies, hard drives that were throroughly Q/A'd, memory modules with matching chips, etc.), that will continue being used until it implodes upon ifself. The application does not need the eye candy of XP/Gnome/KDE, nor does it need access to infinite amounts of virtual RAM, etc. It needs to start quickly (which Windows 98 does) and go.
This may be a perfect opportunity to set up a simple Linux application that runs under X (not using KDE/Gnome), but who is going to spend the money to fund the development? It's not a "sexy" project that it going to be picked up on by some hacker for fun, and the kind of guys who write boring database apps like this are mostly busy in the US these days working 10 hour days trying to keep their jobs.
It's not Microsoft Office that keeps these Windows 98 boxes alive; but the small, VB apps that do not die but continue doing useful work day in and day out. Could these be built on Linux? Absolutely. Would they be better? Sure they could. Could they be built as quickly and easily as their VB 6 counterparts? Not that I have seen so far, and that includes Gnome, KDE/Qt, Tk and wxPython (I know there are many more). That's where Windows picked up so much momentum; it was the ability to toss together small, useful, ugly RAD apps that were not things of Computer Science beauty, but they could be built by people who didn't know C++ but knew what they needed.
IMO, this is a big reason why Linux hasn't caught on the way it ought to have on the Desktop. There is no easy way for the non-computer scientist to put together quick, useful applications. This is something IBM never got with OS/2, and why it died a stagnant death, because while it could run Windows 3.1 apps better than Windows itself, to do anything in native you pretty much had to do it in C++.
Most Linux users like the idea of their apps being constructed by committees of uber-hackers in Europe who really know their stuff. However, until your average hobbiest or business professional can put together useful applications as easily as they could in VB (and to a lesser extent VB.NET), and distribute it, legacy operating systems like Windows 98 and XP will still be floating around for many years to come.
It's yellow primer! (Obscure movie reference - Kurt Russel's finest hour!)
Microsoft makes it almost impossible to figure out how licensing should work if you are a small or medium size business running their servers (outside of sending them blank checks every year for Software Assurance). I would venture a good portion of the "pirating" the BSA is complaining about involves confusion about regarding how many CAL's, and what kind of CAL's a business should have. Even Microsoft admits that CAL licensing can be a complicated area.
I am personally offended that none of my submissions ever made it onto Slashdot (even given that they weren't the typicaly "Microsoft Sucks, Open Source Rules" fare) and this vile piece of non-information did.
Representatives from the automotive insurance industry released a self-authored report yesterday that confirmed most freeways lead people through areas that are heavy in traffic, subject to increased probability of colissions and even vandalism and crime.
Auto insurance representatives questioned for the story said the frightening study proves that their product (which provides no guaranteed protection against auto collisions) is absolutely essential to safe driving. When asked why they spend millions of dollars to make sure they are not held liable in all but the most obvious of cases, insurance representatives had not comment, but reminded everybody how dangerous freeways are, and suggested that people should hold the state liable for offering such questional places for people to drive their cars in the first place.
Well, actually, he didn't say it, but rather the article author did, sorry...
In an interview series composer Bear McCreary said:
So, for those of you who missed Galactica 1980, your chance will come! (a show so bad even SciFi Channel won't re-air it). It makes you wonder though, when they will turn up though.
My company uses Netsuite as its accounting application. It is a web-based accounting and salesforce automatication suite that does many things well. There are some things that it does not do well, but can be worked around.
Companies like Netsuite and Salesforce may tout 99.99% uptime, but we have often run into scenarios where the service was running too slow to be unusable. Unfortunately, strictly speaking, the system was not experiencing "downtime", thus allowing the vendor to maintain their statistic, even though for us the system was as good as down.
The "lower cost of ownership" claims may not pan out over the long term. The article talks about SaaS being metered by usage levels. Netsuite charges by the named user, and I believe Salesforce still does, as well. The pricing model is similar to "normal" softawre. The TCO measurement depends largely on the size of an organziation, i.e. do they already have the pieces to implment a full-fledged CRM/SFA, (enterprise database, email and storage servers)? If you have these things in place and are used to supporting them, a traditional CRM or accounting package may cost less than an SaaS.
Other metrics that are missing are customer support response time. The unfortunate part of SaaS is that if the system goes down, everybody will call at once, and when you need the vendor the most they will be the most inaccessible. In general, though, I would love to see metrics of quality of customer support not only for SaaS but for regular vendors as well. When you deal with an SaaS, you typically don't have a VAR helping you out, it's you and the vendor directly. If their call center is understaffed or undertrained, it's painful
The article, itself, reads like a press-release and is horribly vague, especially when mentioned the "new 'Live' version of [Microsoft's] Office suite" - which does not implement Word or Excel, and treats on-demand updating of anti-viral software as SaaS. It isn't.
What we've found as a past user of Salesforce.com and current user of Netsuite is that you really need to do the upfront due-dillegence to make sure that these SaaS systems conform to your business model. Netsuite, especially, is awkward to deal with if your company provides services as opposed to sells widgets. Get a strong consultant on the front-end to make sure the product is a fit for your organization, and be prepared to do significant customization. Also, be careful to get specifics on how much it costs to import and export data to other systems. In Netsuite, for example, you have to have certain versions of their system to import/export XML records of your data (their webservice based pricing is, at the moment, still free depending on how much data you move through it). Make sure you have access to your data.
Maybe it was all of that hairspray
Good point. I purposely sign my cards "Please ask for ID" so that if my wallet gets stolen, it's slightly more difficult to use my cards in an unauthorized manner. In reality though, beacuse of the whole "why do I have to show my ID" paranoia, credit card theft is much easier than it ought to be.
There is no constitutional protection for your momma' to not be slapped around be me and then taken from behind. That doesn't mean that it's legal, it just means that it is left up to the states to regulate such criminal activity.
The Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution specifically because the Constitution did not provide explicit protections from an overeager government. Fotunately, important individual protections such as women's sufferage were also later added.
The Consitution is not meant to either explicitly enumerate all of the rights we have or don't have. It lays out the structure of government, its responsibilities; and, in those cases where either government screws up or anticipated to screw up, amendents can be added to protect the individual.
You want a constitutional right to anonymity? Petition your Congressional representatives and governor to encourage a constitutional amendment. Other than that, you're pretty much at the mercy of NSA/TSA/et al.
I would hardly consider myself a conservative (at least in the Neocon sense), but it is a but discouraging to have individuals keep asserting "constitutional" rights which are completely illusory.
There is no constitutional right to complete anonymity, there never was. There is protection in the Fourth Amendment against unreasonable search and seizure. Asking for your identification before boarding a plane is no more unreasonable than asking for your ID when making a credit card transaction, if for nothing else to ensure you are not stealing somebody else's ticket (notwithstanding the security issues).
When the EFF (or anybody else) raises a fit over something that is this unobtrusive, it makes it more difficult for voices to be heard when our government is so outside the law it feels the need to bypass warrants, even those issued from secret rubber-stamping courts. Those who argue "security above all else" simply lump civil libertarians in with nut jobs who want to be as anonymous in real life as they are when playing Warcraft.
For me, an important issue is that it is difficult (but not impossible, see the Mozilla Control project) to substitute a different rendering engine in place of IE's. Microsoft's real "crime" was making it relatively simple to include their browser engine in other applications, and making it relatively difficult to have a different engine be included in it's place.
I was developing an Windows application that required an embedded web control. I looked at the Mozilla Control but the control is tied in to specific versions of Firefox/Mozilla. Every time a user downloaded an updated copy of Firefox/Mozilla, my app would "break" until a matching copy of the control was released. A "test" version of the control for Firefox 1.5 was released on 12/15/05, no "release" version is out yet. For commercial applications to implement a Gecko-based ActiveX plugin instead of IE's - Mozilla needs to include a plug-in as part of its release when it puts out browsers. Otherwise, IE isn't going to go away (in its executable or ActiveX incarnations)
There is an article Evolution of Mechanical Fingerspelling Hands for People who are Deaf-Blind that talks about the development of this technology since 1977.
There are a couple of challenges with this type of technology. Sign language does not depend only on finger movements but gestures and facial expressions to convey emotion and context. Finger-spelling hands, being mechanical, can only accept data so fast before they start "choking" and sezing up/breaking (we tried hooking one up to a teleprompter application, and its middle finger got stuck - go figure).
This technology can be exciting on a small scale, but is not meant (not able) to act as a replacement for sign language or even closed captioning.
I've been a Rhapsody subscriber for three years. A few months ago, Rhapsody released a new version of their client (3.0) that included support for DRM so you can copy files to your portable player. The problem is that this client was much more of a resource pig than their previous version (2.0). If you don't care about copying music and just want to be able to listen to it on demand, 3.0 would tie up much more of your system resources than the previous version - for no discernable improvement in audio quality, features, etc. Perhaps the web release is an attempt to begin backing off of the horrid 3.0 release. On first try, the web client ran well under Firefox 1.5 - nice integrated screens, exaplaining exactly how to allow permission for the music client to get loaded, and it seemed to be responsive, well behaved and much less of a resource hog than 3.0.
Already done in 1999 in Mystery Men!
From TFA:
My wife is a figure skating coach and it is common for us to create short cuts of tracks (usually between 1:30 and 4:00) for use in skating programs. I'm wondering if Sony truly wants to kill the use of its music for performances such as skating, dance, etc. At any rate, it seems based on this language that her students may not be able to skate to music released under such a license. If Disney were to release such a license for its soundtracks, it would kill about 80% of the programs in lower level competitions!
True, and my comment was poorly phrased. I wish execute permission was better implemented by installation programs and the OS itself (namely, more emphasis on requiring explicit permissions for a program to run as opposed to letting "Read & Execute" trickle down throughout c:\Program Files...)
But what about an executable flag?
1. Most screen readers and such work within the Windows environment, not just Microsoft Word. If the concern is that keyboard shortcuts or accessibility features won't work, these things are easily adapted to OpenOffice 2. The idea that government documents are designed for accessibility is absurd. Anytime you hit embedded tables (or worse, nested tables), columns, etc., it is that much harder for screen magnifiers/screen readers to deal with. Which is why... 3. An open document format is actually better for people with visual disabilities because custom document readers can be created that are more friendly to screen readers and magnifiers.
It's this kind of corporate squabbling that lends ammo to those looking to "internationalize" the Internet. You know, to make sure that responsible countries, like China and Iran, can keep the Internet open and free...
Under XP, and I'm assuming Vista, they've finally merged the regedit/regedt32 functionality - so you can actually search and look at permissions from the same program (about time).
Personally, I think whether a program is hooking itself in through Programs\Startup, registry run keys, win.ini or as a service, the operating system should warn you about it -- and not allow it unless you are running as admin (assuming someday Microsoft will implement a decent non-admin default in it OS products)
Why the registry is Good:
n (where a lot of spyware hooks itself) shouldn't even exist because it refers to machine-specific files (not user specific)
1. As of W2K, you can assign permissions (granted, useless if everybody runs as admin)
2. Program settings under HKCU follow users around (when implemented properly, this works very well)
3. Easy to read/write from
The pains of the registry often have not much to do with the registry itself:
1. Silly things like HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Ru
2. IE's poorly-implemented ActiveX plug-in architecture is not a registry problem, it is an application design problem (if IE used a flat config file to store the ActiveX info, it would still be just as bad)
3. Microsoft Office stores its configuration data as binary blobs instead of typed data - laziness that causes unnecessary cross-version compatibility issues
If Microsoft would simply disable the Run key in HKCU, set up an Execute flag (like *nix) and make it default to run as non-admin (which it does in Vista, AFAIK), it would be quite a bit more secure than it is. At any rate, though, none of these things has much to do with the registry. If startup programs were stored in a file somewhere, it would be well-known quickly enough, and we would have just as many problems. Security through obfuscation doesn't work, we all know that.
I work at a shop that does a lot of transcription. We have been able to keep our VBA macros (which are quite extensive) working between all versions of Word from 97 on without too much difficulty.
Has anybody heard if the object model has changed significantly (i.e. Application / Document / Range / etc.)? If Microsoft revamps the back-end macros in Word the way they are revamping the front-end, it would certainly be an impetus for companies to look at other office solutions