No, I dislike Microsoft for two major reasons: one is that they promote and maintain a monoculture, and actively try to make that monoculture incompatible with anything else. Windows would be a lot more acceptable, if it played nice and interoperated with other systems based on established standards. I'm more than happy to let everyone choose whatever OS they want, based on their needs and what fits them best, but "the Microsoft way" works directly against that: their use of proprietary, incompatible, or just plain broken 'standards' forces many people who would be best suited with a different OS to use Windows, and that's a net loss for everyone.
On a more personal level, I dislike most Microsoft products (with certain notable exceptions), because I think they have a corporate culture that promotes mediocrity and "good enough"-ness. As someone who has always labored to pursue quality and technical correctness as an end in itself, I find the inherent laziness in their products offensive. I understand this is a personal decision; looking at other product arenas, the mass market is usually filled with garbage. This is fine, and consumers should have a choice as to what they want to buy. However, I detest Microsoft for virtually eliminating the consumer's ability to buy better.
Also, they have an apparent contempt for both their competitors, which is understandable if unwarranted, and their customers, which is unacceptable.
I don't hate Microsoft for being on top. I hate them for being on top, while pushing an inferior product than the market would produce in their absence, on all of us.
Knowing how the "free OS" have copied freely GUI concepts off Windows, don't you think it's a hypocrisy to demand compatibility with software created long after Microsoft had their own.
Sure, Unix existed before Windows, but in command line form. NT was built upon concepts in industry strength OS (VMS). Microsoft were among the pioneers of desktop OS-es, and like it or not, no one just "lets go" of their power just because of some whiny OSS advocate, or two.
I'm alergic to all of this crap by now. Yes, it's really bad Microsoft can patch files without your knowledge, and Windows users, and their corporate users especially, should demand clear and fast answers on this non-sense.
But do you stop there? Naaaah. Let's have a talk about monoculture, evil-ness and OS standards, AGAIN. And AGAIN. Just because it seems like a good occasion (anything is).
Monoculture, like it or not, is actually great for a thriving software ecosystem, which I, as a web developer, know very well. Standards only go so far. Even with IE hypothetically out of the market, writing moderately complex interactive applications with very fine tuned UI and behavior is impossible accross the board, since Safari / Opera / Firefox have some horrible subtleties in their handling of supposed "standards".
In fact, I'm glad we only have 4-5 major browsers to test on.
For an organization that dislikes Microsoft Corporation and the platforms distributed by them, they seem to spend an aweful lot of time developing software on or for it. [...] With such hypocracy, maybe they can join forces with the Global Warming crowd...
That makes as much sense as calling it a hypocrisy that creating cure against illness require that you have ill subjects to test on.
MTV hasn't shown a music video (or anything that actually even remotely classifies as "music", for that matter) since the early 1990s; there's championship "wrestling" on the Sci-Fi Channel (and don't even get me started on the so-called "sci-fi" called "Painkiller Jane" or "Flash Gordon" - please bring back SG-1!!!!); TechTV got merged with G4, and promptly went to the sh*tter quite fast; and most of the "news" channels don't seem to have gotten the message that we really don't give a rat's ass about Paris & Britney!
You realize the industry is in a transition. There will be chaos and panic and random merges or non-scifi shows on Sci-Fi for some time to come. Newspapers are migrating online, CNN released their video service for free. Classic TV scrambling to hold "eyeballs" lost to torrents and online shows.
It's nothing to wonder about.
In 10 or so years, new leaders will emerge, producing content in a very different way, and they will likely be nothing like the current ones.
If TV isn't worth watching right now, don't watch it. You'll find there are plenty of better ways to get entertainment in or out of your home.
Every few years the so-called "deadline" keeps getting pushed back. [..] And what makes this more hysterical is that the early adopters got screwed, buying plasma TVs only to find out they didn't support HD. Then the next set of adopters bought HDTVs, only to find out they were not HDMI compatible, and therefore, couldn't run HD content.
There's a phrase: "idiots and their money".
If the 2009 deadline was withheld, how would those early adopters end up in a better situation? They'd be even worse off.
Bottom line is, if you'll be spending thousands of dollars on a TV (which is idiocy on its own), at least do a basic research, or even just ask your nerdiest friend about it.
I would be all cool with that 1984 stuff, if homo sapiens was at a level where the average individual was smart enough to handle this responsibly, fairly, and produce useful results out of it, versus take unfair advantage for side activities.
Which we know is laughable for the current evolutionary stage of the homo sapiens. In fact, we've apparently built and surrounded ourselves with technologies allowing us to damage ourselves far beyond what we can comprehend with our little brains.
Who is this Dark Web technology supposed to stop? The 12 year old Susie terrorist wanna-be? I wanna see them crawl past beyond a plain basic authentication dialog with an average password. Hell, it probably will even miss ROT-13 encoded text.
Will Dark Web be crawling around, brute-force attacking our servers, trying to get at out protected content? Who the hell is this good for anyway, except the contractors who will walk away richer.
Yes. Let's look at a typical example. A terrorist manages to sneak in a crowded place. Say US airport, you know they don't check a lot just to enter an airport, it's only hard to get to the plane. Now, the terrorist reveals he's all dressed up in explosives and threatens to activate them.
Solution: drop FOAB on the airport, this will surely kill the terrorist.
"Recent studies indicate that the value added to the U.S. economy by copyright industries amounts to $1.3 trillion.", said CCIA President and CEO Ed Black. The value added to the U.S. economy by the fair use amounts to $2.2 trillion."
This sounds very interesting until you realize that without copyright industry there's no fair use industry too.
In fact, if I blindly accept the given numbers for canonical (just for a moment), then 1.3 trillion is the money, PART of which the *content producers* will receive for creating their work.
And 2.2 trillion is then industries enabled by the *same* content, but NO PART of which content producers will receive.
So this is a study you can spin any way you want. The copyright industries will use it to claim how fair use robs content producers of their income, and pro-fairuse supporters will use it to point out how fair use creates a lot of additional value that will be otherwise lost if it copyright industry had a full lock down.
A problem that will become more and more obvious as internet multimedia pick speed, is that there will be less and less difference between "personal use" and "commercial business use".
If I host a YouTube video for my relatives with personal photos synched to some commercial track, it's supposed to be ok. But what if I have a cut from the ads since I signed a deal with YouTube.
Even worse, what if YouTube automate the process, and I get a cut if my video becomes popular automatically. Then I can wake up one day to see the video popularity rise and I'm suddenly a criminal.
I really wish the industry representatives would sit down and rethink copyright, DMCA and fair use (while following the same basic rules), but I know if they do, they'll tilt it further away from fair use rights, versus recognizing them better.
We'll need some screwed up revolution again after sitting through hundreds of frivolous suits, since greed on both sides (consumers and the industry) overshadows their reasoning.
Considering the cost to them is next to nothing, there should be a huge profit margin.
The cost being next to nothing is just BS. Any idea how much money they have to pay to the artist, composer, lyrics writer, mixer, promotion, video clip, administration...
WTF ARE THESE IDIOTS THINKING??? That I'm going to spend over NINETY THOUSAND DOLLARS to load up my 160gig iPod?
You're kidding, but I don't understand what kind of logic is that. Why on Earth are you supposed to be able to fill up your 160GB iPod. I have a 500GB hard disk, and I have huge speakers connected to my PC. Am I supposed to be able to afford to legally fill my entire disk with low bitrate mp3-s?
You realize that:
- iPod comes with video support - won't explode if you don't manage to fill up all of those 160GB - iPod classic was never the best sold model ever since iPod nano was introduced (which has far more modest capacity). - if you can't fill a 160GB iPod, there's also 80GB iPod, and hell, there's even 8GB iPod.
But, you gotta face it, iPod Classic's capacity has always targeted pirated downloads, and iTunes was just a convenience. Only last 1-2 years the capacity was made potentially use of by having large video downloads.
Let's call things by their real names. While there's a lot to frown upon in how the industry distirbutes the revenue from those downloads, and how they sue innocent people to suit their ill conceived agenda, I believe 1-2 USD for a song is fair.
They will try to sell for more, if they fail, they will try to sell for less, or drive themselves in a niche and then go out of business.
Nothing to shout and cry over. You'll survive even if you don't buy Britney Spears' latest album.
What? All of you? You're all using this man's technology right now. Accusations of this product being vaporware do not account for the man's track record (no pun intended). You should all give this man a little credit, okay?
Yea, ok. It's funny you posted this although no any previous comment even attempted to doubt his credibility, you karma whore.
And I want to add. There was a time when Windows 98 was a better option than Windows 2000, and even Windows XP.
Times change, service packs smooth things, up, Microsoft realizes some of its mistakes, hardware catches up.
Now, I realize that quality-wise Vista is the worst to yet come out of Microsoft. I wouldn't touch Vista with a 20 foot pole, except as a developer (which I am).
But Vista is a mixed bag of things: it's not completely bad. It's like a perfect set of Lego blocks, amazing technologies, that are just put together poorly to form a mess of an OS, and now sabotage itself with WGA.
I believe Microsoft will get their act together in the next 3-4 years and we'll get Vista right. Maybe it'd be Vista SP2, maybe it'd be Windows 7, only time will show.
The industry is supposed to try raping our wallets every day, and the consumers are supposed to be trying to rape the industry by piracy every day.
And hopefully we meet somewhere in the middle. Jungle rules, people, don't be surprised.
Of course it could all be more civilized and honest, but then the industry will lose edge and stop innovating, and consumers will grow even more trusting and dumb in just few short generation.
No one forces people to buy "ringles" for $7 the piece. If they buy it, it's not industry's fault.
It's been a few decades since the people have "demanded" ANYTHING. So long as they have their beer and their sports channels and big screen tv's, the people - for perhaps the first time in history - are content to let you take everything else away from them. Or am I wrong?
You know, I do believe WGA in Vista is Microsoft setting up themselves for disaster, but let's face it, far worse things have happened to people for them to react with organized violence. Your machine not booting up isn't a reason to react with violence.
Individual users will react by avoiding Vista (for XP or Mac.. should I dare say Linux), and big corporations will react with lawsuits and eventually moving away too.
Or.. if it's NOT as bad as everyone suspects, they'll keep drinking beer and running Vista. Natural selection still works, give it some time.
Dissatisfied customers might decide to try something different like Mac OS X or Linux.
Uh, wait a minute, I forgot to take my meds this morning. People won't switch from Windows regardless of how bad the experience or poor the customer support becomes.
You know, the individual consumer may be dumb, but collectively they're not so dumb. They found and are going for another option: keep your XP while it works (which is for another good 5-6 years).
Then we watch early adopters get hurt by piracy missdetection, bugs, poor resource usage, lack of drivers and incompatibility, while we just enjoy our amazing XP-rience in a brand new way.
As is known for quite some time in the industry, Microsoft's biggest competitor is Microsoft.
So there you have it, a mouthful of personal opinions. I bet you wanted to spend your time doing something else, like making out with your girlfriend (haha, just kidding, if you actually reading my opinion on OOXML you have no girlfriend to make out with).
Ladies and gentlemen, the Novell Vice President...
For the last few years, I've been reading forums like webhostingtalk.com and this happens more than you think. The webhosting business has been a real competitive arena for the last few years and people expect to get good service for as little as $1 per month. I'm not surprised when some business get their throat cut.
You know, people expect to get service for free as well, but it doesn't mean this should always meet reality. That separates smart buyers from dumb buyers. Dumb buyers will always exist, never mind the market situation.
If Jatol.com dependent on a single guy, then most likely it didn't have plenty of customers, and most of those were quite cheap customers. They got what they paid for.
I pay 60/mo for a virtual server (yes I know I could get dedicated for 50) in a large datacenter, still get great support, and os/updates management, and if any one single guy ceases to show up at work, they'll just hire a new one.
Yes, he said this: "ODF's model of 'chartness' didn't fit well with Gnumeric. In contrast XLSX may be ugly, but it''s concepts were very familiar from XLS. We already had much of the code required to handle it."
He didn't say it's a great standard. He said it's a great spec upon XLS serialization in XML, and hence it's easier for him to port XLS importer to XLSX importer. Is anyone even arguing about this here? If there is I never saw him/her.
May I entertain the possibility you have difficulty understanding the fundamental difference between good spec, and a good standard?
This, and comments like "OH MY GOD THEY USE A BITFIELD THAT IS JUST SO-NOT-XML (am using caps to encapsulate the outrage in an actual discussion when an acquaintance of mine lost it)" doesn't help your position stand up.
When you publish your opinion, people read this opinion and you get feedback on it. If you were an average Joe, probably no one would care. You're not however, this is why people like you should put more thought into what they put out in the public than you did, and then now whine that someone "obsesses" over it.
Miguel has been fascinated with Microsoft since long before he started writing Gnome, and that fascination shows no signs of having waned.
Honestly though, I had lots of respect of Miguel and it just vanished with this post. If it's from him, that is.
I am too fascinated with Microsoft.
I'm fascinated with how they helped the PC concept take speed, how they commoditized the desktop OS and changed the world. I'm fascinated.NET and the associated technologies like Avalon and Indigo. I'm also looking positively on Silverlight (even though I'm a Flash developer), and I love Office and especially Office 2007 suite, but the OOXML standard is INDEED what people think it is: patchwork, serialization of the DOC format into XML with minor modifications. You can look at it left to right, right to left, up, down and it's still garbage, turn on any page of the spec and keep on reading for few pages you'll hit something that doesn't make sense in a standard that someone else should implement.
What bothers me most though: it's easy to sample and find flaws in the OOXML, but it's much harder to read ALL of it so you can say for sure there are no loopholes or problems with it. Did he even bother reading and comprehending the ENTIRE huge OOXML spec before he came out praising it? I seriously doubt that.
I'd rather have it fixable, because I have near-infinite faith in my ability to fix broken things.
Now, if you don't feel that way, then sure, you'd want it all closed up.
You have no even clue about what I'm talking about, do you. Well, too bad. One day you'll work in a team or need to integrate someone else's code, or integrate your code with someone else's, and then you'll figure it out.
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No, I dislike Microsoft for two major reasons: one is that they promote and maintain a monoculture, and actively try to make that monoculture incompatible with anything else. Windows would be a lot more acceptable, if it played nice and interoperated with other systems based on established standards. I'm more than happy to let everyone choose whatever OS they want, based on their needs and what fits them best, but "the Microsoft way" works directly against that: their use of proprietary, incompatible, or just plain broken 'standards' forces many people who would be best suited with a different OS to use Windows, and that's a net loss for everyone.
On a more personal level, I dislike most Microsoft products (with certain notable exceptions), because I think they have a corporate culture that promotes mediocrity and "good enough"-ness. As someone who has always labored to pursue quality and technical correctness as an end in itself, I find the inherent laziness in their products offensive. I understand this is a personal decision; looking at other product arenas, the mass market is usually filled with garbage. This is fine, and consumers should have a choice as to what they want to buy. However, I detest Microsoft for virtually eliminating the consumer's ability to buy better.
Also, they have an apparent contempt for both their competitors, which is understandable if unwarranted, and their customers, which is unacceptable.
I don't hate Microsoft for being on top. I hate them for being on top, while pushing an inferior product than the market would produce in their absence, on all of us.
Knowing how the "free OS" have copied freely GUI concepts off Windows, don't you think it's a hypocrisy to demand compatibility with software created long after Microsoft had their own.
Sure, Unix existed before Windows, but in command line form. NT was built upon concepts in industry strength OS (VMS). Microsoft were among the pioneers of desktop OS-es, and like it or not, no one just "lets go" of their power just because of some whiny OSS advocate, or two.
I'm alergic to all of this crap by now. Yes, it's really bad Microsoft can patch files without your knowledge, and Windows users, and their corporate users especially, should demand clear and fast answers on this non-sense.
But do you stop there? Naaaah. Let's have a talk about monoculture, evil-ness and OS standards, AGAIN. And AGAIN. Just because it seems like a good occasion (anything is).
Monoculture, like it or not, is actually great for a thriving software ecosystem, which I, as a web developer, know very well. Standards only go so far. Even with IE hypothetically out of the market, writing moderately complex interactive applications with very fine tuned UI and behavior is impossible accross the board, since Safari / Opera / Firefox have some horrible subtleties in their handling of supposed "standards".
In fact, I'm glad we only have 4-5 major browsers to test on.
For an organization that dislikes Microsoft Corporation and the platforms distributed by them, they seem to spend an aweful lot of time developing software on or for it. [...] With such hypocracy, maybe they can join forces with the Global Warming crowd...
That makes as much sense as calling it a hypocrisy that creating cure against illness require that you have ill subjects to test on.
MTV hasn't shown a music video (or anything that actually even remotely classifies as "music", for that matter) since the early 1990s; there's championship "wrestling" on the Sci-Fi Channel (and don't even get me started on the so-called "sci-fi" called "Painkiller Jane" or "Flash Gordon" - please bring back SG-1!!!!); TechTV got merged with G4, and promptly went to the sh*tter quite fast; and most of the "news" channels don't seem to have gotten the message that we really don't give a rat's ass about Paris & Britney!
You realize the industry is in a transition. There will be chaos and panic and random merges or non-scifi shows on Sci-Fi for some time to come. Newspapers are migrating online, CNN released their video service for free. Classic TV scrambling to hold "eyeballs" lost to torrents and online shows.
It's nothing to wonder about.
In 10 or so years, new leaders will emerge, producing content in a very different way, and they will likely be nothing like the current ones.
If TV isn't worth watching right now, don't watch it. You'll find there are plenty of better ways to get entertainment in or out of your home.
Every few years the so-called "deadline" keeps getting pushed back. [..] And what makes this more hysterical is that the early adopters got screwed, buying plasma TVs only to find out they didn't support HD. Then the next set of adopters bought HDTVs, only to find out they were not HDMI compatible, and therefore, couldn't run HD content.
There's a phrase: "idiots and their money".
If the 2009 deadline was withheld, how would those early adopters end up in a better situation? They'd be even worse off.
Bottom line is, if you'll be spending thousands of dollars on a TV (which is idiocy on its own), at least do a basic research, or even just ask your nerdiest friend about it.
I would be all cool with that 1984 stuff, if homo sapiens was at a level where the average individual was smart enough to handle this responsibly, fairly, and produce useful results out of it, versus take unfair advantage for side activities.
Which we know is laughable for the current evolutionary stage of the homo sapiens. In fact, we've apparently built and surrounded ourselves with technologies allowing us to damage ourselves far beyond what we can comprehend with our little brains.
Who is this Dark Web technology supposed to stop? The 12 year old Susie terrorist wanna-be? I wanna see them crawl past beyond a plain basic authentication dialog with an average password. Hell, it probably will even miss ROT-13 encoded text.
Will Dark Web be crawling around, brute-force attacking our servers, trying to get at out protected content? Who the hell is this good for anyway, except the contractors who will walk away richer.
Can you really fight terrorists with giant bombs?
Yes. Let's look at a typical example. A terrorist manages to sneak in a crowded place.
Say US airport, you know they don't check a lot just to enter an airport, it's only hard to get to the plane.
Now, the terrorist reveals he's all dressed up in explosives and threatens to activate them.
Solution: drop FOAB on the airport, this will surely kill the terrorist.
"Recent studies indicate that the value added to the U.S. economy by copyright industries amounts to $1.3 trillion.", said CCIA President and CEO Ed Black. The value added to the U.S. economy by the fair use amounts to $2.2 trillion."
This sounds very interesting until you realize that without copyright industry there's no fair use industry too.
In fact, if I blindly accept the given numbers for canonical (just for a moment), then 1.3 trillion is the money, PART of which the *content producers* will receive for creating their work.
And 2.2 trillion is then industries enabled by the *same* content, but NO PART of which content producers will receive.
So this is a study you can spin any way you want. The copyright industries will use it to claim how fair use robs content producers of their income, and pro-fairuse supporters will use it to point out how fair use creates a lot of additional value that will be otherwise lost if it copyright industry had a full lock down.
All in all, business as usual.
A problem that will become more and more obvious as internet multimedia pick speed, is that there will be less and less difference between "personal use" and "commercial business use".
If I host a YouTube video for my relatives with personal photos synched to some commercial track, it's supposed to be ok. But what if I have a cut from the ads since I signed a deal with YouTube.
Even worse, what if YouTube automate the process, and I get a cut if my video becomes popular automatically. Then I can wake up one day to see the video popularity rise and I'm suddenly a criminal.
I really wish the industry representatives would sit down and rethink copyright, DMCA and fair use (while following the same basic rules), but I know if they do, they'll tilt it further away from fair use rights, versus recognizing them better.
We'll need some screwed up revolution again after sitting through hundreds of frivolous suits, since greed on both sides (consumers and the industry) overshadows their reasoning.
Best DOS ever was DOS 6.20. However that contained the pirated Stak data compression software
If you'll link to Wikipedia article, at least bother reading it. There was never pirated software in DOS 6.20.
It was a patent issue.
Considering the cost to them is next to nothing, there should be a huge profit margin.
The cost being next to nothing is just BS. Any idea how much money they have to pay to the artist, composer, lyrics writer, mixer, promotion, video clip, administration...
It's not free.
WTF ARE THESE IDIOTS THINKING??? That I'm going to spend over NINETY THOUSAND DOLLARS to load up my 160gig iPod?
You're kidding, but I don't understand what kind of logic is that. Why on Earth are you supposed to be able to fill up your 160GB iPod. I have a 500GB hard disk, and I have huge speakers connected to my PC. Am I supposed to be able to afford to legally fill my entire disk with low bitrate mp3-s?
You realize that:
- iPod comes with video support
- won't explode if you don't manage to fill up all of those 160GB
- iPod classic was never the best sold model ever since iPod nano was introduced (which has far more modest capacity).
- if you can't fill a 160GB iPod, there's also 80GB iPod, and hell, there's even 8GB iPod.
But, you gotta face it, iPod Classic's capacity has always targeted pirated downloads, and iTunes was just a convenience. Only last 1-2 years the capacity was made potentially use of by having large video downloads.
Let's call things by their real names. While there's a lot to frown upon in how the industry distirbutes the revenue from those downloads, and how they sue innocent people to suit their ill conceived agenda, I believe 1-2 USD for a song is fair.
They will try to sell for more, if they fail, they will try to sell for less, or drive themselves in a niche and then go out of business.
Nothing to shout and cry over. You'll survive even if you don't buy Britney Spears' latest album.
Extra capacity is useless if the cost of data is artificially inflated
If your measure of data cost is size, then I have an uncompressed bridge to sell you.
Quality-wise, wouldn't you consider Windows Me the worst? Even with all the updates that OS was a nightmare.
:P
When I imagine the timeline of Windows releases, somehow ME doesn't even appear there
Even evolution happens in jumps, not gradually.
What? All of you? You're all using this man's technology right now. Accusations of this product being vaporware do not account for the man's track record (no pun intended). You should all give this man a little credit, okay?
Yea, ok. It's funny you posted this although no any previous comment even attempted to doubt his credibility, you karma whore.
And I want to add. There was a time when Windows 98 was a better option than Windows 2000, and even Windows XP.
Times change, service packs smooth things, up, Microsoft realizes some of its mistakes, hardware catches up.
Now, I realize that quality-wise Vista is the worst to yet come out of Microsoft. I wouldn't touch Vista with a 20 foot pole, except as a developer (which I am).
But Vista is a mixed bag of things: it's not completely bad. It's like a perfect set of Lego blocks, amazing technologies, that are just put together poorly to form a mess of an OS, and now sabotage itself with WGA.
I believe Microsoft will get their act together in the next 3-4 years and we'll get Vista right. Maybe it'd be Vista SP2, maybe it'd be Windows 7, only time will show.
The industry is supposed to try raping our wallets every day, and the consumers are supposed to be trying to rape the industry by piracy every day.
And hopefully we meet somewhere in the middle. Jungle rules, people, don't be surprised.
Of course it could all be more civilized and honest, but then the industry will lose edge and stop innovating, and consumers will grow even more trusting and dumb in just few short generation.
No one forces people to buy "ringles" for $7 the piece. If they buy it, it's not industry's fault.
It's been a few decades since the people have "demanded" ANYTHING. So long as they have their beer and their sports channels and big screen tv's, the people - for perhaps the first time in history - are content to let you take everything else away from them. Or am I wrong?
You know, I do believe WGA in Vista is Microsoft setting up themselves for disaster, but let's face it, far worse things have happened to people for them to react with organized violence. Your machine not booting up isn't a reason to react with violence.
Individual users will react by avoiding Vista (for XP or Mac.. should I dare say Linux), and big corporations will react with lawsuits and eventually moving away too.
Or.. if it's NOT as bad as everyone suspects, they'll keep drinking beer and running Vista. Natural selection still works, give it some time.
Dissatisfied customers might decide to try something different like Mac OS X or Linux.
Uh, wait a minute, I forgot to take my meds this morning. People won't switch from Windows regardless of how bad the experience or poor the customer support becomes.
You know, the individual consumer may be dumb, but collectively they're not so dumb. They found and are going for another option: keep your XP while it works (which is for another good 5-6 years).
Then we watch early adopters get hurt by piracy missdetection, bugs, poor resource usage, lack of drivers and incompatibility, while we just enjoy our amazing XP-rience in a brand new way.
As is known for quite some time in the industry, Microsoft's biggest competitor is Microsoft.
So there you have it, a mouthful of personal opinions. I bet you wanted to spend your time doing something else, like making out with your girlfriend (haha, just kidding, if you actually reading my opinion on OOXML you have no girlfriend to make out with).
Ladies and gentlemen, the Novell Vice President...
For the last few years, I've been reading forums like webhostingtalk.com and this happens more than you think. The webhosting business has been a real competitive arena for the last few years and people expect to get good service for as little as $1 per month. I'm not surprised when some business get their throat cut.
You know, people expect to get service for free as well, but it doesn't mean this should always meet reality. That separates smart buyers from dumb buyers. Dumb buyers will always exist, never mind the market situation.
If Jatol.com dependent on a single guy, then most likely it didn't have plenty of customers, and most of those were quite cheap customers. They got what they paid for.
I pay 60/mo for a virtual server (yes I know I could get dedicated for 50) in a large datacenter, still get great support, and os/updates management, and if any one single guy ceases to show up at work, they'll just hire a new one.
Yes, he said this: "ODF's model of 'chartness' didn't fit well with Gnumeric. In contrast XLSX may be ugly, but it''s concepts were very familiar from XLS. We already had much of the code required to handle it."
He didn't say it's a great standard. He said it's a great spec upon XLS serialization in XML, and hence it's easier for him to port XLS importer to XLSX importer. Is anyone even arguing about this here? If there is I never saw him/her.
May I entertain the possibility you have difficulty understanding the fundamental difference between good spec, and a good standard?
This, and comments like "OH MY GOD THEY USE A BITFIELD THAT IS JUST SO-NOT-XML (am using caps to encapsulate the outrage in an actual discussion when an acquaintance of mine lost it)" doesn't help your position stand up.
When you publish your opinion, people read this opinion and you get feedback on it. If you were an average Joe, probably no one would care. You're not however, this is why people like you should put more thought into what they put out in the public than you did, and then now whine that someone "obsesses" over it.
Miguel has been fascinated with Microsoft since long before he started writing Gnome, and that fascination shows no signs of having waned.
.NET and the associated technologies like Avalon and Indigo. I'm also looking positively on Silverlight (even though I'm a Flash developer), and I love Office and especially Office 2007 suite, but the OOXML standard is INDEED what people think it is: patchwork, serialization of the DOC format into XML with minor modifications. You can look at it left to right, right to left, up, down and it's still garbage, turn on any page of the spec and keep on reading for few pages you'll hit something that doesn't make sense in a standard that someone else should implement.
Honestly though, I had lots of respect of Miguel and it just vanished with this post. If it's from him, that is.
I am too fascinated with Microsoft.
I'm fascinated with how they helped the PC concept take speed, how they commoditized the desktop OS and changed the world. I'm fascinated
What bothers me most though: it's easy to sample and find flaws in the OOXML, but it's much harder to read ALL of it so you can say for sure there are no loopholes or problems with it. Did he even bother reading and comprehending the ENTIRE huge OOXML spec before he came out praising it? I seriously doubt that.
I'd rather have it fixable, because I have near-infinite faith in my ability to fix broken things.
Now, if you don't feel that way, then sure, you'd want it all closed up.
You have no even clue about what I'm talking about, do you. Well, too bad. One day you'll work in a team or need to integrate someone else's code, or integrate your code with someone else's, and then you'll figure it out.
At least bother to read the summary: FreePascal is the standard ported to many platforms. One single standard.