Archive | Microsoft

Why OpenDocument Won

David Wheeler has an in-depth essay on Why OpenDocument Won and presents a pretty persuasive argument for OpenDocument.

I still maintain that this is a fantastic opportunity for Microsoft to show that they can develop the best office package for reading and writing the new format. Microsoft went too far in encumbering their Office XML with patents and threats of future licensing, rather than taking the initiative to build the next generation standard.

Patch Tuesday wasn’t patchless

Despite the fanfare that greeted Microsoft’s announcement that they had no patches ready to ship on their regular Tuesday, slipping due to a quality flaw again, Microsoft Watch from Mary Jo Foley reports Microsoft Reissues Windows 2000 Rollup. “Microsoft on Tuesday reissued the Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 Update Rollup that has been causing problems for myriad Windows 2000 customers for the past few months.”

UPDATE: More information. The “re-release,” named “Update Rollup 1 for Windows 2000 SP4 – v2” fixes four issues with the original Update Rollup One for Windows Two Thousand Service Pack Four:

  • Installation of the wrong MSXML3.DLL resulting in errors like “MSXML3.DLL File Not Found,” “Error 0x80244001,” and “Error 0x800700C1”
  • BSOD Stop 0x000001E on older non-PNP, ISA or MCA boards with SCSI controllers
  • Two system drives appear on systems with dynamic disks
  • MS Office programs can’t save to floppy disks (did you know MS Office uses its own fastfat.sys driver? Why?

Problems remain even with version 2 of the Update Rollup One for Windows Two Thousand Service Pack Four. Read this KnowledgeBase article before installing the patch/update/rollup/whatever if you have systems that:

  • connects to a Citrix server using ICA sessions
  • uses an Exchange 5.5 MTA and X.400
  • uses Sophos Anti-Virus
  • uses Internet Security Systems BlackICE products

If you have clients with any of these components and automatic updates turned on, you may need to act quickly. Good luck.

It’s the 38th week of 2005, and Microsoft has issued 43 security bulletins, not counting the multiple re-releases and “update rollup patches.” When should we be expecting Trustworthy Computing to kick in?

Tim Bray reviews the oppositions talking points on Massachusett’s OpenDocument adoption

Tim Bray of Sun Microsystems was given a paper of “talking points” used by some lobbyists in campaigning against Massachusetts’ proposal to adopt the OASIS OpenDocument 1.0 as a standard document format. He reviews the document and points out many distortions, fallacies and, well, cow dung.

Once the world has converted to a common file format so everyone has to compete on features and quality, this will still be a good business to be in, but nobody will be reporting 72% operating profits, which in this particular case means less money going from Massachusetts to Redmond, year after year, forever.

Good reading and thoughtful points.

FireFox flaw found; researcher releases details prematurely; temporary fix available

Computerworld News reports Firefox flaw found: Remote exploit possible. “Computers running the Firefox Web browser could be open to remote attack as a result of a buffer overflow vulnerability reported today by a security researcher.”

In what sounds like a pretty irresponsible act, MozillaZine reports According to the News.com article, Ferris reported the flaw to the Mozilla Foundation on Sunday, in line with the Mozilla security bugs policy. However, he decided to make the vulnerability public “after a run-in with Mozilla staff”.

A description of how to disable the flaw is described in the article (also in the comments) and a patch will be forthcoming soon. Note that the flaw the same researcher reported to Microsoft last month (and did not disclose publicly) has still not been patched.

Get S.M.A.R.T.

I spent yesterday afternoon recovering from a hard drive failure on my ThinkPad A31p. The internal drive, running Windows XP, got flaky in the middle of working on some documents. Explorer.exe “failed to initialize with error 0xc000006,” networked drives disappeared. I had used SpinRite 6 to repair this drive at the end of August, and suspected it was approaching end-of-life. What I didn’t realize is how much information the drive could supply.

On SourceForge, you’ll find SmartMon Tools, a set of utilities available for Windows, OS X and Linux, that communicate with the S.M.A.R.T. interfaces available on most modern hard drives. I had not appreciated the capabilities of the interface: it stores recent errors, performs short and long self-tests, and displays logs of tests. Details on using SmartMonTools are available on the SourceForge site as well as this Linux Journal article.

Running tests on the drives confirmed my worst fears. Multiple read errors were scattered over the drive. With 19k run hours, it was in pretty bad shape. Luckily, I had anticipated this. Using Norton Ghost 2002 and the Open Source equivalent g4U, I had backed up and now restored the partition images to a spare hard drive. Swapping the new hard drive to the internal slot and the bad drive to the expansion slot, I rebooted into Knoppix to read the recently changed files off the bad drive and onto a USB tab. Rebooting into Windows, I copied the files from the USB tab onto the new drive. Why two-step? I’m a bit shy of writing to an NTFS partition within anything other than Windows, as the file system format is proprietary and not completely documented. Back up and running!

Check out the SmartMonTools, though. It looks like you can set them up to run tests in the background and on a regular schedule. Catch the hard drive failures before they become real trouble.

Massachusetts’ worries over patents drove OpenDocument decision

Slashdot post: Massachusetts Explains Legal Concerns for Open Documents. Tontoman writes “ZDNet is running a story that sheds new light on the decision by Massachusetts to switch to open formats for the commonwealth’s official documents. This issue has previously been discussed on Slashdot, first The Massachusetts Office Party and then Microsoft Lashes out at Massachusetts IT Decision . From the article: ‘Eric Kriss, Secretary of Administration & Finance for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, told CRN on Friday that Massachusetts had concerns about the openness of Microsoft XML schemas as well as with potential patent issues that could arise in the future.’ The article also quotes a Microsoft executive on further reason that Microsoft’s upcoming Office 12 will not support OpenDocument.”

Microsoft chooses to buck the industry standard, again.

Slashdot post: Microsoft Lashes out at Massachusetts IT Decision. scoop writes “Infoweek is reporting that the plan to eliminate the use of Office by the Massachusetts state government (previously covered on Slashdot) has not gone over well with Microsoft. Microsoft’s Yates said the company agrees with the adoption of XML but does not agree that the solution to “public records management is to force a single, less functional document format on all state agencies.” Microsoft also states they will not support the OpenDocument format. Looks to me Microsoft is scared their biggest cash cow is in danger from a free alternative. Soon I’m sure we’ll see a Microsoft funded comparison between Office and OpenOffice.”

A FUD attack! After all this time, I am still surprised when Microsoft refuses to adopt an industry standard. I should know better, but I keep hoping the Microsoft will come around and start acting as an industry leader instead of a greedy monopoly. The OASIS open standard is a marvelous opportunity for Microsoft to shine and show off what it can do. It’s non-trivial, but certainly possible, for Microsoft to read and write this format and be the best office package in that format. Instead, they refuse to compete on a level plain. Let’s hope it is their loss. The only message Microsoft can understand is the one you deliver with your wallet. Support those who support the OASIS standard, and Microsoft will come around.

Microsoft’s Dis-Services For Unix

Microsoft Watch from Mary Jo Foley notes Microsoft SFU: Here Today, Gone Tomorrow. Microsoft is shelving the standalone version of its Services for Unix (SFU) product, with no plans to do future enhancements.” Portions of Services For Unix will be integrated into Microsoft’s new operating systems. For those trying to maintain a stable environment, don’t look for any significant updates, although Microsoft promised some support through 2011 or 2014.

The complaint that Open Source doesn’t have a roadmap that can be depended upon is turned upside down when you look at vendors swapping, switching, renaming, pruning and just plain dropping features that are likely mission-critical for some of their customers. Customers have no control over commercial software. If you don’t like what’s happening with an Open Source project, you own the code. You can rewrite it in the direction you want it to go, pay a developer to do it for you, or foment a split or branch to encourage developers to follow your roadmap. Try doing that with your commercial vendors.

Powered by WordPress. Designed by Woo Themes

This work by Ted Roche is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.