November 2006

Beware of Geeks Bearing Gifts

November 27, 2006

Some interesting news, via Bob Sutor. Let’s take a closer look at the what is being offered as part of this “royalty free” deal from Microsoft. At first it appears like an early Christmas present from Microsoft, a royalty-free license to the Office UI for “software vendors who wish to incorporate the 2007 Microsoft Office [...]

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Happy Thanksgiving

November 22, 2006

1920 was the 300th anniversary of the landing at Plymouth of the Puritan separatists. In commemoration of this tercentenary, three stamps were issued based on designs by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing’s chief designer, Clair Aubrey Huston. Let’s take a closer look. The 1-cent green “Mayflower” (Scott #548) was based on a photograph of [...]

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Genesis 11:5-9

November 14, 2006

This, fresh from from Office Watch: “Office 2007 compatibility pack disappoints”. Update 11/15: Some readers have written with more information. This may be an issue between the pre-1.5-final-draft version of OOXML and the final RTM Compatibility Pack. Evidently there were some late changes to the OOXML specification, including a change in namespace URI’s. So the [...]

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Two simple questions

November 6, 2006

Some pertinent quotes from Microsoft’s Brian Jones, thematic quotes made over a sustained period of time: “The Open XML formats were designed to be 100% backward compatible with the existing set of Office binary formats, and that was really a goal that we can’t compromise on.” “It needs to be 100% full fidelity” “[F]rom our [...]

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Unlocking the Wordhord

November 1, 2006

I have a backlog of shorter items that I’ve accumulated in recent weeks that I’d like to share with you. I hope you find something here interesting. First, congratulations to OpenOffice.org and KOffice, who both recently announced new releases. In my mind the notable features include an improved extensions framework in OpenOffice 2.04 and leading [...]

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