[Coco] Re: [Long] [OT] That Big Shadow Over Your Shoulder, Part 1,

[John E. Malmberg]

Dennis Bathory-Kitsz wrote:
> Woke up this mornin', 'bout the break of daaayy....
> 
> ...and had to finish some thoughts. This is getting too long (my fault!),
> so I'll just put these down & be done with it & leave it back to CoCo
> topics...
> 
> MSWord is a de facto standard, but it's not a standards-body standard. And
> here is that hateful truth that none of us are really comfortable with:
> It's the former that actually matters. (But, recognizing their need for
> legitimacy, Microsoft has spent considerably more time in the past few
> years both participating in and lobbying standards bodies; case in point
> for another discussion: SOAP.)
> 
> The world is full of spurned technologies and rewritten history.

That is for sure.  I still find it interesting how many differences 
there are in the reported history of the IBM PC, and what actually 
happened.  And some of the best stuff seems to have been removed :-)

> But back to your specific comment: As a writer, I would never dream of
> handing a WordPerfect DOS document to a business round-robin discussion or
> shared edit or editor or publisher.

I think that the later versions of WordPerfect can produce documents in 
at least one Microsoft Word format.  Open Office is also supposed to be 
able to do so.

Microsoft has made the format available from them to developers, but put 
a restriction on the copy that I have that it can not be used to produce 
a competing product with out their express permission.

> (And even so, PDF is another 'standard'
> that changes with every iteration from Adobe -- it's a corporate-created
> format just like MSWord, but people tend not to hate Adobe as much as they
> do Microsoft.)

The main difference is that with PDF, Adobe is willing to let others 
know how to read or generate it.  Even with that, it is does take quite 
a bit of work to make a PDF viewer.  Adobe produced a JAVA pdf viewer, 
but it only works with Mac, because it depends on a Mac proprietary java 
class.

So if Adobe does not produce a native viewer for a platform, xpdf is 
about the only alternative.

> I don't always like it. Here's an example of "fixing". I used to serve my
> web pages gzipped. I don't anymore. And why not? Gzip is a standard, right?
> It sure is. But one iteration of IE6 broke it. Gzipped pages came up blank.

Can you check the browser version and just not gzip for the broken 
browsers?  A browser is supposed to report if it supports gzip or not.

Netscape 3.?? on OpenVMS is broken in that it reports to web servers 
that it supports gzip, yet it does not.

> (albeit not monospaced). But the business world now expects to
> *collaborate* via email, meaning editing of content using color, images,
> etc. Even today, when I get some piece of richtext/HTML mail that requires

With Outlook, it is a matter of selecting a format to change from plain 
text to HTML or back on menu bar.  It looks like Mozilla can do this if 
you set up an alternate profile, not as convenient.

Based on past comments of the Mozilla developers about bugs in the 
composing of plain text messages, they would rather just remove the 
plain text option and force everything to be in HTML.

> And, you know, the compromises on quality have been fewer
> than their opponents would lead us to believe. Put any other operating
> system -- any other one -- in 95% of the world's personal computers, and
> see if productivity and enjoyment stay even close to where they are.

The current versions of Microsoft operating systems can be secured from 
the obvious exploits with out most users noticing.  For the professional 
versions, it has been that way since NT 3.5.

The biggest change would be for applications to open embedded documents 
by default in a read-only mode, and this would require people to make an 
extra mouse click if they wanted to make a persistent change or run 
certain script functions.

Most of the scripting exploits are from applications opening in a 
compose mode, where it is useful to have the exploited features.  But in 
read mode, the set of allowable script actions could easily be 
restricted with out anyone noticing.

The buffer overflow problems are just plain sloppy programming.

The other concept is to convince users that they should have a separate 
administrator account that is only for system maintenance not running 
programs.

At one point timesharing machines where the popular standard.  Just 
about all of the exploits seen on Windows / Unix were tried on them at 
the schools, but the lessons were lost on the PC developers.  After all, 
a person would not attack their own machine?

> Wal-Mart's putting it to the test with preconfigured Linux boxes. We'll see
> what standard is next. I'm up for it!

Right now, the margins in home PCs are gone, the number of vendors are 
consolidating.

Knoppix is supposed to a turn key bootable environment where you can put 
a CD-ROM in a standard PC, and have all the Office functions, and read / 
write in the Microsoft formats.

The weakness is that the games that are available for Microsoft 
platforms will not play on LINUX, and that will be the deciding factor 
in the home market.

The only thing that I really need a new PC at home for is to play the 
newer games.  They all seem to require a graphics accelerator with a bit 
of memory on it.


With turn-key office applications, LINUX may make some inroads into the 
office environment, if all that is needed is standard office applications.

But there always seems to be some application that is only available on 
Microsoft Windows, and the provider of that application does not see 
LINUX as having enough market share for them to care about.

And unless there is a change in the corporate buyers to put pressure on 
these vendors that is not likely to change.

So what I see is that the current market mix of operating systems will 
continue, with LINUX picking up some turn-key office environments.


-John
wb8tyw at qsl.net
Personal Opinion Only