"Two months ago, the Brazilian Linux community gathered around BR-Linux invited Novell to answer 10 questions sent and selected by the users, about the company's stance on Linux, open source, licenses, document formats and other subjects." "Novell has been very consistent on this issue and we have publicly stated that we do not believe that Linux infringes on any Microsoft patents. That being said, our agreement with Microsoft takes the patent issue off the table for customers. We have simply made the patent issue a non-event as part of a customer buying decision."
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Member since:2005-07-06
Others are easily fixable (typos) or revisable (eliminating VML from the next version of the spec).
If Office 2007 produces documents with VML in it (as a result of legacy Office documents being opened and saved) then on a practical level, this is absolutely meaningless.
Regardless of whether you allow KParts or Bonobo or anything else, you still need a viewer for that embedded element and the document wouldn't work on the alternate platform anyway. The same is true of ODF or any other format which allows embedding data and rendering instructions from outside apps.
The difference is that ODF references standards that have largely been implemented elsewhere in the open source world, such as SVG. Anyone implementing OOXML will need to recreate large amounts of technology that only runs on Windows.
This doesn't make an actual difference for interoperability, because one would only presume docs to be interoperable if they stay within the standard and are produced solely by the standardized implementation...
Errrrr, right, yer. Take a look at what Office 2007 produces:
http://www.codeproject.com/cs/library/office2007bin.asp
What was that about interoperability again?
Do you have something specific here from these comments, or is there some set of specific complaints that you think will make OOXML unimplementable by outsiders?
I would suggest some serious reading before asking that question, because it has been done to death.
(Incidentally, check out Jody Goldberg's post on dealing with SpreadsheetML for Gnumeric:
Have you seen how utterly basic that example file is? People have macros, charts, formulas etc. etc. in the real world. Jody also tells us this:
"Brian’s example of Numbers reading an OOX file written by Gnumeric could just as easily been an XLS file.....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."
So in order to handle a naively simple spreadsheet file, they already largely had what they needed to implement it having mucked about with XLS for several years? Well that's just brilliant, and not exactly a ringing endorsement for OOXML.
I would advise reading Stephane Rodriguez's comments in that article for a fuller picture.
Member since:2006-01-02
Have you seen Stephane Rodriguez's comments?? He's not exaclty an unbiased or particularly polite commenter. He goes around calling people "bitches."
What you've shown is that there are features in Office which do not fall under the purview of the OOXML standard. So what? If you want to interchange documents, then don't use those features. If you're writing an app which has special processing instructions (say, for instance AppleScript from iWork), you can include your stuff in the container as well without any problems. Can you explain why you think the BIN parts are a problem?
Official Apple statement on PRISM and privacy: "Regardless of the circumstances, our Legal team conducts an evaluation of each request and, only if appropriate, we retrieve and deliver the narrowest possible set of information to the authorities. In fact, from time to time when we see inconsistencies or inaccuracies in a request, we will refuse to fulfill it." This is basically Apple re-publishing their earlier statement in a more official manner. You either believe it, or you don't.
The open source Contiki operating system and its commercial Thingsquare distribution are making strides towards the connected home. According to a Computerworld article, a new LED light bulb manufacturer is putting small computers into their light bulbs. Each computer runs the Contiki OS, which gives each bulb an IP address and allows them to be controlled with a smartphone application. To connect the bulbs to the application, the bulbs use both Wi-Fi and the much lower power IEEE 802.15.4 mesh technology.
"Google asked the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on Tuesday to ease long-standing gag orders over data requests it makes, arguing that the company has a constitutional right to speak about information it's forced to give the government. The legal filing, which cites the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech, is the latest move by the California-based tech giant to protect its reputation in the aftermath of news reports about sweeping National Security Agency surveillance of Internet traffic." Draining the ditch after the cow has drowned in it."I can't find one person who has been using the Nexus 7 for an extended period of time, and hasn't seen a massive downgrade in performance. Just what kind of downgrade are we talking here? I cannot pick up my Nexus 7 without experiencing problems like a lag of ten seconds, or more, just to rotate the display; touches refusing to acknowledged; stuttering notification panel actions; and unresponsive apps." Fully and utterly agreed. My Nexus 7 was blazing-fast and awesome for a few months, and at some point, it just started sucking. Just like that. I've tried loads of ROMs, and nothing helps.A new release of the hobby operating system MenuetOS! The release notes are a bit non-descript, but you'll have to take what you can get: "updates and improvements (picview, httpc, ehci, ...)"."The Internet is one of the most transformative technologies of our lifetimes. But for 2 out of every 3 people on earth, a fast, affordable Internet connection is still out of reach. And this is far from being a solved problem. There are many terrestrial challenges to Internet connectivity - jungles, archipelagos, mountains. There are also major cost challenges. Right now, for example, in most of the countries in the southern hemisphere, the cost of an Internet connection is more than a month's income. Solving these problems isn't simply a question of time: it requires looking at the problem of access from new angles. So today we're unveiling our latest moonshot from Google[x]: balloon-powered Internet access." Insane.
"MineAssemble is a tiny bootable Minecraft clone written partly in x86 assembly. I made it first and foremost because a university assignment required me to implement a game in assembly for a computer systems course. Because I had never implemented anything more complex than a 'Hello World' bootloader before, I decided I wanted to learn about writing my own kernel code at the same time. Note that the goal of this project was not to write highly efficient hand-optimized assembly code, but rather to have fun and write code that balances readability and speed. This is primarily accomplished by proper commenting and consistent code structuring." Just cool.
Jon Rubinstein, former CEO of Palm: "Well, I'm not sure I would have sold the company to HP. That's for sure. Talk about a waste. Not that I had any choice because when you sell a company you don't get to decide that. Obviously, the board and shareholders decide that. If we had known they were just going to shut it down and never really give it a chance to flourish, what would have been the point of selling the company? I think the deal we had with Verizon really hurt us, but who knew that at the time? These things are all hindsight.""And so it is with Dell's Alienware X51 R2, a small form factor gaming PC in console digs. It's shaped similar to Microsoft's Xbox 360 Slim, and though it's slightly larger than either a 360 or PlayStation 3, the X51 R2 would be right at home in a living room setting nestled next to a large screen TV. Indeed, it's adept at running Steam's Big Picture mode, and if your primary objective is to play games in the living room, go ahead and consider the X51 R2 a hybrid game console." This is obviously not the only machine like this - still, these are very valid console alternatives even for those that don't like being hunched over with a cramped WASD-claw. Also, PC gamers among us: could you get away with the $699 model for gaming?
From Bloomberg: "Microsoft, the world's largest software company, provides intelligence agencies with information about bugs in its popular software before it publicly releases a fix, according to two people familiar with the process. That information can be used to protect government computers and to access the computers of terrorists or military foes." The lid has officially been blown off.
Member since:
2006-01-02
I looked through the first 30-40 comments in that Danish reply. Some of them are unnecessary ("make this change to do it like ODF") because ODF and OOXML are different specs and it's okay for them to diverge in minor ways (they are wildly different in overall structure anyway). Others are easily fixable (typos) or revisable (eliminating VML from the next version of the spec). The OLE comments in there are interesting: if you have some data linked into the document and you don't have OLE on your platform, what are you going to do? Regardless of whether you allow KParts or Bonobo or anything else, you still need a viewer for that embedded element and the document wouldn't work on the alternate platform anyway. The same is true of ODF or any other format which allows embedding data and rendering instructions from outside apps. This doesn't make an actual difference for interoperability, because one would only presume docs to be interoperable if they stay within the standard and are produced solely by the standardized implementation (i.e. not using non-standard pieces, like OLE embeddables).
Do you have something specific here from these comments, or is there some set of specific complaints that you think will make OOXML unimplementable by outsiders? Keep in mind that implementing an Office Suite is hard and that the file format isn't usually the biggest issue. (Incidentally, check out Jody Goldberg's post on dealing with SpreadsheetML for Gnumeric: http://blogs.gnome.org/jody/2007/09/10/odf-vs-oox-asking-the-wrong-...).