yeah, that's the problem with these conversion utilities.
DOC is more than just a format for storing text. It's almost like an executable now. It embedds data streams from embedded objects (they are almost always os specific).
If you have a simple document that just contains a letter with simple tables and images, converting isn't a problem (at least, i haven't found it to be).
DOC isn't a difficult fileformat (it's documented in various places), it lays down a framework for multiple seemingly anonymous streams to be persisted.
However in that post and this post, I did try to say that reverse engineering for the purpose of displaying and editing the document can be extremely difficult because it's a compound document format. You'd have to basically reverse engineer all the other data streams that 'objects' people embedd in their word documents generate.
You can still extract stuff out of DOC files without any COM apis. You only need COM when you want to display embedded COM objects. COM support wouldn't make displaying DOCs with COM objects perfectly easy either, since you'd need to support the COM objects that the DOC file contains. Guess what COM objects use? That's right Win32.
BTW, COM is available on Linux and Unix. There are heaps of ports available (all commercial).
There's a clone of COM done by some guys working on this project called mozilla too.
But then, it comes down to the fact that you need Windows to display a Windows format.
If you want to view your word generated document on something other than windows convert it to something like postscript.
I usually insert visio diagrams in my word documents, and i certainly don't expect to be able to edit those diagrams when i open it up at university with staroffice.
Basically, you have to emulate all of Word's bugs in handling it's own file format to get the expected results. And trying to copy 65,000 bugs is non-trivial.:)
Care to point out these 65000 bugs that relate to DOC formats?
Here's another try to act professional, but bash microsoft at the same time type post. Pretty typical of Linux users...
On the other hand, we have DWG, which is a fairly rich format that deals with the description of 3D objects. Could decoding a file format that deals with text and it's presentation really be that much more difficult to reverse engineer?
Well considering DOC can store ANYTHING - including the description of 3D objects yes.
I'd guess this depends more on the design behind said file format. If one of the main goals of the.DOC format is obfuscation, this could be difficult indeed
I see, Microsoft == Evil, so DOC must be created to obfusticate. Very smart of you. Why would a company with the smartest people in the world make life more difficult on themselves by making their own formats hard to read? I guess Microsoft will go out of it's way next to obfusticate their source code to make it more difficult for the OSS community to read their source?
but I wouldn't say that it's impossible... not for 3 big corporations, nor for thousands of loosely organized coders.
Yes, those poor, poor companies like SUN with their open software like Java and Corel Office need to band together and blow up microsoft. resistance is not futile!
Please.
DOC isn't going to be very important in a few years anyway, Microsoft are moving to XML based everything. Serialization of com services will be XML based rather binary based as they are today as well. Just don't complain when your documents are 100MB.
DOC isn't a difficult file format. It's pretty well documented in various places around the web.
The thing is DOC is a compound file format. Meaning it is made up of various serialized data streams from embedded components. Word itself won't even know what many parts of a DOC file means, it'll just pass it on to Visio, Excel, Photoshop etc to read and understand.
DOC is a hugely extensible file format, and you can't support everything DOC can cause DOC can theorectically support just about anything...especially windows applications.
And no that was not done through evil intent. Believe it or not, integration of applications is very much something that good software engineers strive for.
If you have a problem with it, just wait a few years (or maybe a decade) for KOffice etc to mature, and watch people complain as documents created on the Linux version of KOffice won't work because someone decided to embed in their document some python code, or an xpaint image.
If the company does webpages with active-x, no browser works except IE.
Um, ActiveX works fine in Netscape with the plugin (on windows).
ActiveX is a technology that was around before applets where even thought of. It was a natural thing to have IE support ActiveX. Many intranets use ActiveX/IE as a deployment platform cause of it's speed the ease of development. Not many people exclusively use ActiveX on websites without offering an alternative.
Most people today use dynamic html and CSS. The pages look shit on netscape not because of some evil intent from microsoft. They look crap cause netscape is 4 years behind in browser technology. Mozilla is a big step forward, if only it would crash within 15minutes every time.
BTW, did you know that if some company wrote a window application, it'll only work on windows!!!! stuff that. And did you know that if you go and write something for unix, it'll only work on Un*x and not on windows! stuff that too.
Coming from a Windows user to a Linux user, that was truly funny. Thanks for the chuckle:)
Idiot, so you think that source code means configurable? I don't consider having to change code configurable. A well written application shouldn't require you to change code to add features (good compoenentisation and software engineering is the solution - not crappy source).
And please tell me what you CAN'T do from the command line with Windows 2000. I can add users, enumerate and configure hardware...do ANYTHING from the command line with windows scripting and windows management instrmentation (WMI).
Ever heard of shell extensions? Why do you think when you right click on a file you can go ICQ -> Send to any online user etc.
Cause you can write many extensions to windows. You can like do autopreview from exploorer of any media type (explorer panes are now HTML) etc etc.
You can write your own mini toolbar that sits in the task bar easily (explorer bands) or your own Folder/tree list in explorer (explorer bands again) etc.
No other OS allows the level of flexibility with explorer - without having to go and change source (ick).
And as for the command line - why does microsoft still sell a resource kit for windows 2000, and include an integrated telnet server with windows 2000? Get a clue next time.
They exist for different reasons, but the software concepts used to take advantage of them is remarkably similar.
NOT.
Apples generated images statically and hacked on the colour white by using subpixeling.
Microsoft isn't claiming to invent subpixeling, it's the software behind it.. which is NOTHING like what apple had to do.
I don't think apple used fourier analysis to dynamically smooth fonts.
Re:And X still doesn't have anti-aliasing?
on
Cleartype In Depth
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· Score: 1
Windows 2000 server supports multiple remote displays (NT has ALWAYS supported multiple users - just not in a graphical sense) - and it's MUCH faster and uses much less b/w than X does. Comparing X to VNC is unfair, VNC is quite slow (with a console window, it does polling for god sakes). You should compare it more to metaframe, windows terminal services or radmin. All of which are faster and lower b/w. (metaframe supports remote sound too:P). X font handling SUCKS. Bitmap fonts with no antialiasing. Joy.
Microsoft thinks, "Well the command line is not very useful to the average computer user, let us do away with it."
1) Microsoft are good software engineers, they know they can't do everything for everyone. No one entity can do everything for everyone. It doesn't mean other windows software developers can't do it though.
2) Microsoft has not 'done away' with the command line. The latest version of Windows NT and 9x(Windows 2000/NT5 and Windows 98) still have command lines. There's heaps of powerful stuff you can do with the Windows 2000 command line (many people don't bother to learn commands beyond dir and del though).
The overhead of quicksort gets to be a drag when the size of the sorted list is really small (2 or 3 itemsl as you say). So some implementors have chosen to modify quicksort so that it does another kind of sort during the dash to the finish line.
Um no.
When the list size gets small, jumping to another sorting algorithm doesn't help. Since the entire list isn't sorted. Quicksort does not leave the list in a stable state. Quicksort is NOT that bad on small lists. It's only bad in the worst case on sorted lists (but there are very easy ways to bypass that).
What some people do do (and Tony Hoare recommended), is run some iterative sortting algorithm for a while, then do a quicksort. This helps reduce the number of recursions required by quicksort (which can get really bad with long lists).
Slashdot Mirror
yeah, that's the problem with these conversion utilities.
DOC is more than just a format for storing text. It's almost like an executable now. It embedds data streams from embedded objects (they are almost always os specific).
If you have a simple document that just contains a letter with simple tables and images, converting isn't a problem (at least, i haven't found it to be).
Are you one of the smartest people in the world
No. But I believe that Microsoft has some of the smartest people in the world working for them.
DOC isn't a difficult fileformat (it's documented in various places), it lays down a framework for multiple seemingly anonymous streams to be persisted.
However in that post and this post, I did try to say that reverse engineering for the purpose of displaying and editing the document can be extremely difficult because it's a compound document format. You'd have to basically reverse engineer all the other data streams that 'objects' people embedd in their word documents generate.
Do you even know what COM is?
You can still extract stuff out of DOC files without any COM apis. You only need COM when you want to display embedded COM objects.
COM support wouldn't make displaying DOCs with COM objects perfectly easy either, since you'd need to support the COM objects that the DOC file contains. Guess what COM objects use? That's right Win32.
BTW, COM is available on Linux and Unix. There are heaps of ports available (all commercial).
There's a clone of COM done by some guys working on this project called mozilla too.
But then, it comes down to the fact that you need Windows to display a Windows format.
If you want to view your word generated document on something other than windows convert it to something like postscript.
I usually insert visio diagrams in my word documents, and i certainly don't expect to be able to edit those diagrams when i open it up at university with staroffice.
Seeing as that was the only real point made in that post and the post got moderated to 3 insightful, I expected it not to be a joke.
Why would you be 'screwed'?
Every tried using Microsoft Equation? (it comes with Word/Office).
Wordpad supports Word 97/2000 files, and so does MFC.
The source code for MFC comes with Visual Studio and the Windows Platform SDK.
You can also download the complete source code for Wordpad from MSDN (Under sample applications).
Once the file format changes, as it does every year (or faster) people start getting emails with the new format in attachments.
The last time the DOC format changed was 1997.
2000 - 1997 is 3, which is not less than 1 last time i checked.
Basically, you have to emulate all of Word's bugs in handling it's own file format to get the expected results. And trying to copy 65,000 bugs is non-trivial.
Care to point out these 65000 bugs that relate to DOC formats?
Here's another try to act professional, but bash microsoft at the same time type post. Pretty typical of Linux users...
.DOC format is obfuscation, this could be difficult indeed
... not for 3 big corporations, nor for thousands of loosely organized coders.
On the other hand, we have DWG, which is a fairly rich format that deals with the description of 3D objects. Could decoding a file format that deals with text and it's presentation really be that much more difficult to reverse engineer?
Well considering DOC can store ANYTHING - including the description of 3D objects yes.
I'd guess this depends more on the design behind said file format. If one of the main goals of the
I see, Microsoft == Evil, so DOC must be created to obfusticate. Very smart of you.
Why would a company with the smartest people in the world make life more difficult on themselves by making their own formats hard to read? I guess Microsoft will go out of it's way next to obfusticate their source code to make it more difficult for the OSS community to read their source?
but I wouldn't say that it's impossible
Yes, those poor, poor companies like SUN with their open software like Java and Corel Office need to band together and blow up microsoft. resistance is not futile!
Please.
DOC isn't going to be very important in a few years anyway, Microsoft are moving to XML based everything. Serialization of com services will be XML based rather binary based as they are today as well. Just don't complain when your documents are 100MB.
DOC isn't a difficult file format. It's pretty well documented in various places around the web.
The thing is DOC is a compound file format. Meaning it is made up of various serialized data streams from embedded components. Word itself won't even know what many parts of a DOC file means, it'll just pass it on to Visio, Excel, Photoshop etc to read and understand.
DOC is a hugely extensible file format, and you can't support everything DOC can cause DOC can theorectically support just about anything...especially windows applications.
And no that was not done through evil intent. Believe it or not, integration of applications is very much something that good software engineers strive for.
If you have a problem with it, just wait a few years (or maybe a decade) for KOffice etc to mature, and watch people complain as documents created on the Linux version of KOffice won't work because someone decided to embed in their document some python code, or an xpaint image.
If the company does webpages with active-x, no browser works except IE.
Um, ActiveX works fine in Netscape with the plugin (on windows).
ActiveX is a technology that was around before applets where even thought of. It was a natural thing to have IE support ActiveX. Many intranets use ActiveX/IE as a deployment platform cause of it's speed the ease of development.
Not many people exclusively use ActiveX on websites without offering an alternative.
Most people today use dynamic html and CSS. The pages look shit on netscape not because of some evil intent from microsoft. They look crap cause netscape is 4 years behind in browser technology. Mozilla is a big step forward, if only it would crash within 15minutes every time.
BTW, did you know that if some company wrote a window application, it'll only work on windows!!!! stuff that. And did you know that if you go and write something for unix, it'll only work on Un*x and not on windows! stuff that too.
By the way....
#include "stdio.h"
int main()
{
printf("You suck");
}
Kick ass eh? I've given you the source code, and as you can see, my program is the most configurable in the world. Even more so than windows!
Coming from a Windows user to a Linux user, that was truly funny. Thanks for the chuckle
Idiot, so you think that source code means configurable? I don't consider having to change code configurable. A well written application shouldn't require you to change code to add features (good compoenentisation and software engineering is the solution - not crappy source).
And please tell me what you CAN'T do from the command line with Windows 2000.
I can add users, enumerate and configure hardware...do ANYTHING from the command line with windows scripting and windows management instrmentation (WMI).
I just love your ignorance.
LOL. The Windows is HIGHLY configurable.
Ever heard of shell extensions? Why do you think when you right click on a file you can go ICQ -> Send to any online user etc.
Cause you can write many extensions to windows. You can like do autopreview from exploorer of any media type (explorer panes are now HTML) etc etc.
You can write your own mini toolbar that sits in the task bar easily (explorer bands) or your own Folder/tree list in explorer (explorer bands again) etc.
No other OS allows the level of flexibility with explorer - without having to go and change source (ick).
And as for the command line - why does microsoft still sell a resource kit for windows 2000, and include an integrated telnet server with windows 2000? Get a clue next time.
Um ever heard of cygwin? Bash works fine on NT here.
There are also other perfectly good more dos like (but more feature rich) shells for Windows and NT like 4DOS and 4NT.
They exist for different reasons, but the software concepts used to take advantage of them is remarkably similar.
NOT.
Apples generated images statically and hacked on the colour white by using subpixeling.
Microsoft isn't claiming to invent subpixeling, it's the software behind it.. which is NOTHING like what apple had to do.
I don't think apple used fourier analysis to dynamically smooth fonts.
Windows 2000 server supports multiple remote displays (NT has ALWAYS supported multiple users - just not in a graphical sense) - and it's MUCH faster and uses much less b/w than X does. Comparing X to VNC is unfair, VNC is quite slow (with a console window, it does polling for god sakes). You should compare it more to metaframe, windows terminal services or radmin. All of which are faster and lower b/w. (metaframe supports remote sound too :P). X font handling SUCKS. Bitmap fonts with no antialiasing. Joy.
So why do apple's current computers/powerbooks not render fonts anywhere near as well as PocketPCs with ClearType?
They somehow 'forgot'?
And I guess Tony Hoare's quicksort sucked cause they already invented a way to sort - bubble sort.
Microsoft thinks, "Well the command line is not very useful to the average computer user, let us do away with it."
1) Microsoft are good software engineers, they know they can't do everything for everyone. No one entity can do everything for everyone. It doesn't mean other windows software developers can't do it though.
2) Microsoft has not 'done away' with the command line. The latest version of Windows NT and 9x(Windows 2000/NT5 and Windows 98) still have command lines. There's heaps of powerful stuff you can do with the Windows 2000 command line (many people don't bother to learn commands beyond dir and del though).
3) Microsoft have been researching and developing 3D interfaces and sound feedback systems for a while.
That's bullshit. IE still starts in a new process.
Netscape is slow cause it's POOORRRLY written.
Look at any other Microsoft product like Office. The load times are excellent (usually under 2 seconds). Look at the competition.
And preloading doesn't explain IE's excellent CSS2, VML and XML support. Nor does it explain why IE is faster at rendering AFTER it's loaded.
whoops :)
:P
still prefer mergesort
Mergesort rocks on almost sortted and random data. And it can be easily written non recursively too.
The overhead of quicksort gets to be a drag when the size of the sorted list is really small (2 or 3 itemsl as you say). So some implementors have chosen to modify quicksort so that it does another kind of sort during the dash to the finish line.
Um no.
When the list size gets small, jumping to another sorting algorithm doesn't help. Since the entire list isn't sorted. Quicksort does not leave the list in a stable state.
Quicksort is NOT that bad on small lists. It's only bad in the worst case on sorted lists (but there are very easy ways to bypass that).
What some people do do (and Tony Hoare recommended), is run some iterative sortting algorithm for a while, then do a quicksort. This helps reduce the number of recursions required by quicksort (which can get really bad with long lists).
why can't mircosoft simply put out a good clean tested browser.
You mean like IE?
Show me a better browser.