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IH8Rice

I'm Mr. Negative! I Fail!
Aug 2, 2008
24,524
494
Im over here now
Microsoft Word is now scheduled to be prohibited from sale beginning January 11, 2010
But it's no joke. In August of this year, a court sided with a small Canadian company called i4i that holds a 1998 patent on the way the XML language is implemented, finding that Microsoft was in violation of that patent. The result: Microsoft was told to license the code in question from i4i or reprogram it, or else Microsoft Word would have to be removed from sale in the market. The original ruling gave Microsoft until October to get its legal affairs in order, but appeals pushed that out a bit.

Now a federal court has upheld that original ruling -- plus a fat, $290 million judgment against the company -- imposing the new January 11 D-Day on the matter.
http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/null/158160
its nice to see big companies getting whats coming to them for screwing over smaller companies.
 

syadasti

i heart mac
Apr 15, 2002
12,690
290
VT
dont tell me you prefer Works
Perhaps Wordperfect?

Open Office works fine and Google Docs is good for most things.

2007 sucks because it defaults to the new document .docx format and makes things a headache for the rest of the world which could read regular .doc just fine...
 

PatBranch

Turbo Monkey
Sep 24, 2004
10,451
9
wine country
I use notepad ++ most of the time for lists and stuff, Word Perfect for most school papers and Indesign for things with more of a layout and graphics.
 
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sanjuro

Tube Smuggler
Sep 13, 2004
17,373
0
SF
I use Word. I have a fondness from when MS held back the API's for Win 3.1 to Wordperfect, so that Word looked and worked a lot better in Windows than WP.
 
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syadasti

i heart mac
Apr 15, 2002
12,690
290
VT
They can read docxs just fine too if they bother to download the reader bit for their older version...
Which is a PITA because someone will ask you to fix it for them or implement something else (of course you can just implement a policy for the domain and default to 97-2003 for new documents). Doc was fine and most third party solutions handled it fine. MS comes out with release after release and people usually only use a handful of basic features. What killer app has the new format enabled that makes the additional time and money warranted?
 
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Which is a PITA because someone will ask you to fix it for them or implement something else (of course you can just implement a policy for the domain and default to 97-2003 for new documents). Doc was fine and most third party solutions handled it fine. MS comes out with release after release and people usually only use a handful of basic features. What killer app has the new format enabled that makes the additional time and money warranted?
In particular, I believe that the file is in some fashion XML, which is what the X is for. I cannot speak to the advantages of this - my opinion of XML is that it is a tool of the devil, especially if a human being is to edit it directly without having a high probability of fvcking up.

Edit:

Did some research. If you rename a .docx or .xslx to .zip and open it, you'll find a nested structure of XML files. I'm still not savvy enough to understand why this is an advantage.

Example from a small Word file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes" ?>
- <Types xmlns="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/package/2006/content-types">
<Default Extension="rels" ContentType="application/vnd.openxmlformats-package.relationships+xml" />
<Default Extension="xml" ContentType="application/xml" />
<Override PartName="/word/document.xml" ContentType="application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document.main+xml" />
<Override PartName="/word/styles.xml" ContentType="application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.styles+xml" />
<Override PartName="/docProps/app.xml" ContentType="application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.extended-properties+xml" />
<Override PartName="/word/settings.xml" ContentType="application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.settings+xml" />
<Override PartName="/word/theme/theme1.xml" ContentType="application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.theme+xml" />
<Override PartName="/word/fontTable.xml" ContentType="application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.fontTable+xml" />
<Override PartName="/word/webSettings.xml" ContentType="application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.webSettings+xml" />
<Override PartName="/docProps/core.xml" ContentType="application/vnd.openxmlformats-package.core-properties+xml" />
</Types>

Another edit:

See Office Open XML - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia@@AMEPARAM@@/wiki/File:X-office-document.svg" class="image"><img alt="X-office-document.svg" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1b/X-office-document.svg/48px-X-office-document.svg.png"@@AMEPARAM@@commons/thumb/1/1b/X-office-document.svg/48px-X-office-document.svg.png.
 
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BikeMike

Monkey
Feb 24, 2006
784
0
I really hope that Microsoft includes a freakin' option to view and edit formatting directly, like Word Perfect had. Although it has been probably 9 years since I last used Word Perfect, it will always hold a special place in my heart for giving the user the ability to find and fix screwy formatting issues with much greater ease than has ever been possible with Word. Word works fine 97% of the time; the other 3% of the time I want to punch the designer who decided it would be a good idea not to let the user do something akin to "reveal codes."
 

jonKranked

Detective Dookie
Nov 10, 2005
85,570
24,185
media blackout
even though he's no longer the richest dude in the world, bill gate's probably has that much change in his couches and under his car seats.