|
 |
 |
Bryan Jones |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
Info: Biography, Pictures, Discography of all CDs & DVDs |
|
| "Are you sure you want to block this user?ControlRecord LabelControl, Ringside, MOS, Ultra, OM, i!Bryan Jones has been a staple in house music for years now.Bryan's original songs and remixes can be heard on labels such as Ministry of Sound, Ultra, OM, i!He has also remixed for many big artists like Kaskade, Todd Edwards, Kid Creme, Harrison Crump, Chuck Love, Supafly, CZR, Angel Alanis, Richard Les Crees, Damon Trueitt, and more.Bryan currently runs Control Recordings, Ringside Recordings which both focus in Funky Jackin Chicago House.He also runs Low End Recordings which will make its first appearance in late 2007.He is currently touring for the album as well.In the last year Bryan has DJ'ed in Australia, UK, Belgium, Spain, Netherlands, Bulgaria, Russia, The West Indies, Canada, Mexico, and all over the United States.Check the video below to hear a preview of some of the best songs on the label as of spring 07."Are you sure you want to delete this comment?"Solid mixing, sweet tunes!SjS vinyl faves uploaded last night......Fabios remix of Let It Go on Ringside is the last track and it kicks like a mule......Sonny Fodera, now available on stompy!!!Keep 'em jacking and banging!SEASONS GREETINGS from OPTIMUM MASTERING CLICK HERE for exclusive new Optimum USA offers!DJ DownloadClick on "The Dickslap Inn" to purchase on www.NYE is shaping up to be 1 killa nite!Nice work on the new mixes.I've got new beats for work tomorrow!!FFV003 ) IS OUT NOW ON ALL RECORD STORES NEAR YOU , LISTEN!Do you wish to continue your form submission?"SLC to LAX
Taking to the air...Signal Transduction in the Retina
SLC Photowalk 2.I've been working on the XML functionality and file formats in Office for about 6 years now.In this blog, I'll mainly focus on XML in Office and the Open XML File Formats coming in the 2007 Microsoft Office system.The result will be an even better spec than we had last year, and this really helps highlight the benefits of the standardization process.Of course there are a few folks out there who don't care about actually seeing the spec improve, they just want to see it go away (it's bad for their business plans).Rob Weir (IBM) on the recent batch of proposed resolutions to NB comments posted on Ecma's website, and while I rarely have the energy to read an entire Rob Weir post, I gave it a shot.Of course Rob knows that Microsoft has no say in this process at all.IEC, not to Ecma or Microsoft.Why isn't it doing this?It's an unfounded allegation that shows the typical Fox News style of sensationalism Rob is practicing (sorry if there are any Fox News fans out there).As I said in the past, I would love to have the comments and responses public.There is a lot of great work right now coming out of Ecma TC45 as we help the project editor pull together the proposed responses for each issue, and I think those of you following along will be very impressed with the analysis that has gone in to each comment.Also, check out the "Ballot Resolution Meeting FAQ", which gives the full picture of that part of the process.If folks want to compare the OASIS Technical Process to the JTC 1 Directives, go for it.The rules of JTC1 may be questioned, but that should be a debate, not an accusation.He provides with this link to the National Body Membership list.Nevertheless, National Bodies who are part of the process have access to the proposed resolutions and can start working on analyzing them, thus giving them more time before the actual discussion meeting in February.There are no roadblocks in the way to prevent them from getting access.This step of publicly documenting the responses ahead of the January 14th deadline is something that the editor and Ecma TC45 proposed early on to ISO and asked ISO if it was ok.We were told it was a good thing to do, but since the national body comments are considered to be internal documents, they wanted us to put a password on the site so they could control who got access.It's a bit annoying to see Rob trying to stir up more controversy in something that is actually a pretty big positive thing (but those are just my personal feelings).Again, if IBM wants to change the way it works, they should be in dialogue with JTC 1 about it!Ecma TC45 has been hard at work helping to come up with good resolutions based on all the feedback.There were some really good suggestions, and I think we'll see that this round of review will result in an even better spec than we had at the end of last year.But for now we still have a ton of work to do!Tuesday, December 04, 2007 7:30 PM by D.Why did the ODF process manage to be (or at least appear) more open than the current ECMA process?Gotta say, Brian, this process looks totally shambollic.Microsoft can see its gravy train (*ahem* criminal monopoly *ahem*) slipping through its fingers and is fighting tooth and nail to slow the descent.Spin only works if people don't have access to the truth.Internet's hostile territory for you, and your flock of chickens is coming home to roost.ODF ever pulled together responses to the comments.Any standard will have errata (usually a large amount).Just look at the history.ODF and OpenXML were developed in parallel.ODF had one set of goals and Open XML had another.If the ODF guys decide to change their design goals, then they are welcome to reference the Ecma standard and change ODF to also be compatible with the existing base of Office binary documents.Thanks for the response, Brian.Perhaps you could identify it for me.They will lose things from their files and they would then lose faith in the product.Like the workflow to publish mathematical and scientific papers containing mathematical formulae?What will cause this suffering?Obviously the binary formats could have been documented, including a usage and concept explanation guide.I'm pretty sure it did not end with ...Everything is analog until you get really small scales, where it looks binary again, but at tinier scales yet, physicists are trying to make it infinitely analog.It's common sense that ODF and OOXML were produced in parallel when you consider that they were both released about a year apart and it takes more than a year to develop a full document format.It should also be noted that Microsoft has had XML formats to hold their documents since Office 2k3, which was probably mostly coded in 2001 and 2002.ODF did not have a substantial number of comments for several reasons:
First, ODF 1.The review process was subverted to the extent that it became a form letter campaign.Seventh, many people are ignorant of what a voluntary technical standard is, and think that somehow it automatically becomes a regulation.West, was given as a reason why the standard could not be implemented: accessibility people concerned with fullwidth spacing minutae, give me a break!But this is a case where there is substantial reason to expect that people wouldn't be too confused.But as for the specific ballot comments, that should be a matter for each National Body to decide on their publication.As for specific dispositions of comments by the editor, they are targetted at the NBs not the general public, and the editors can keep their focus on the actual comments at this stage, not subsequent ones.It is up to the National Bodies to get their national public involved, and certainly anyone interested should have long ago tried to join their NB's committees and get up to speed.SC34 members, even those who do not care for either OOXML or ODF, will take a very dim view of any attempts at those kinds of dirty tricks.Thanks for your input, but a link or two to some source material to support your facts would've been more helpful.They'd rather that we argue the technical minutiae of the proposed standard rather than focus on the basic question of whether it should be considered for standardisation at all...Seems to defeat the whole purpose of standardisation if you have mutually exclusive competing ones...Microsoft subsequently tried it in places in hopes that it would pass through other national patent system unnoticed despite being rather easily overturned if anyone was paying attention.What does that say about Microsoft?We have learned over the past 20 or so years that you trust it at your own peril.ECMA did not choose the JTC1 rules...Microsoft did not review the options before JTC1 was chosen.Microsoft would end with translators to ODF and could drop all the work wasted on OOXML.If the ODF guys decide to change their design goals, then they are welcome to reference the Ecma standard and change ODF to also be compatible with the existing base of Office binary documents.You can not load the OOXML document to old versions of Office, can you?That claim is safe to tell the ignorant since it is vague enough that you can never be called to give evidence about why this ever would be a problem in the real world.Of course there are a few folks out there who don't care about actually seeing the spec improve, they just want to see it go away (it's bad for their business plans).You sound a bit like Fox yourself!Saying everyone who doesn't want this process to succeed has a vested interest is plainly untrue.ISO document format standard (*way* too much cruft).My perception is that there's a demand to save in open standardised formats, because those standards are meant to be neutral, clean, and easy to implement.Pushing an XML version of your internal file format through a process doesn't give it any of these qualities, and the changes needed aren't the incremental ones you can do during the ISO process.You can not load the OOXML document to old versions of Office, can you?Fiery)
makes it all the more important that Brian get his FAQ finished, so that he can just point to the correct information.Have any of you ever tried to write a full text processor?Can you point me to two applications that implement ODF in exactly the same way?Just want to add a note that I know nothing about ODF other than what I read here, nor do I have anything against it.OpenXML, and well aware of many of its annoying quirks, as well as the fact that Office itself doesn't implement the format right all the time either!Excel can store its dates in all kinds of weird and wacky ways, but trust me, it wasn't that hard to support.Now trying to draw the cell corners right so that the double border style joins perfectly, now that took time.Plain ASCII text is really easy to implement, but it doesn't really do all that much either.But it frustrates me sometimes when people pick on some little tiny thing in the format and claim that it will make the format hard to implement fully.Brian,
If you read my post in full you will see that I link to the ODF (DIS 26300) Disposition of Comments report.Also, you don't explain why the Ecma process lacks transparency.Why are the TC45 mailing list archives not public, for example.SVG with the help of a library, vs implementing VML + DrawingML to fully interop with MS office.If the answer is no, then it isn't an open standard.Yes, Office 2007 does it.Thanks for all the comments folks
Rick,
That's a great bit of background.A,
I think what you're seeing is that there are some comments from folks with geniune intentions, and then there are those with a malicious agenda.People that want to just get this format killed tried to come up with examples that would resonate with the public.As a result they picked some rather obscure things that don't really have much impact on the file, but that spun right sounded like a big deal.Rob,
Thanks for pointing that out.It's surpising how many of the comments you guys decided to blow off (especially the ones from China).Also, have you guys sorted out the international issues Israel and Egypt pointed out?David and BigAl,
Absolutely you can implement everything.If there is anything that you need to implement but cannot, please let me know.Brian,
Thanks for the response.How many will it obliterate by employing more lawyers and delay tactics?Microsoft's very good at that sort of thing.Some people call that good business.Dave,
Yes you can implement everything.Please tell me what you are blocked on right now, and I'll investigate.IBM just recently copied this approach as well (although they call it the ISP).Doesn't matter if you trust us or not, we can't take it back.Microsoft attempt to work with ODF rather than insisting on inventing its own standard based on what's easiest for it rather than what's best for the industry and the user.Why not simply say what everyone knows: Microsoft cannot afford to let its monopoly go, and will do whatever is required to maintain it.Is a corporation that publicly states that Linux and other open source software users owe them royalties for undisclosed patent infringements worthy of anything other than ridicule, much less trust?ODF was not some well established standard that Microsoft just chose to ignore.They were both developed in parallel.The first versions of Open XML were started almost 10 years ago.There was only one incident I've heard of and that was just a new field guy not understanding what was appropriate or not.ISO document for another country.If that's why you're against Open XML though, well...BigAl
I don't think you can implement all of ODF just using the specification.It leaves a lot more things unexplained than the OOXML spec does.OOXML is so open and tranparent should make you sit back from your keyboard and wonder!The hearsay comments about OOXML developed parallel to ODF is irrelavent.One would understand that a company indoctrinated with the culture by a huge contingency of IP lawyers and lawfirms can take time to change.ISO and open standards, because it gives them less work and hence, MS complete disgregard for the process.If OASIS was able to get ISO to recognise ODF as a standard then bully for them.Sorry to say it, Microsoft, you *missed the boat*.KOffice developers (among others) can not only reverse engineer undocumented binary Microsoft formats (to the point where my company's customers use OpenOffice to, among other things, recover corrupted MS Office documents) but also implement ODF, DocBook, and various other open standard formats, then surely all the brilliant coders at Microsoft could do it before breakfast, right?Microsoft has no standards for ethics, much less software.Microsoft more successful in its deceit elsewhere and managed to get away with it?If he says that Microsoft believes Linux and open source infringe on 250+ Microsoft patents, and then refuses to reveal which ones...How can an organisation run by a guy like that claim to be worthy of trust?Microsoft exhibited in the course of the voting process?What happened to your blog?Apologies, Sam, if I had anything to do with the feline spew.This comment form doesn't indicate what sort of markup is valid...It's funny that you think I get flustered having a discussion burried in the comments section of my own blog.You have a strong religious zeal, and that is what makes the discussion fun in certain ways.It's like arguing politics.Sure, we are members of OASIS, just like IBM is a member of Ecma.ODF was created by Sun, and then it underwent some minor revisions in OASIS.It wasn't until it was standardized that people started to pay attention (and by people I mean IBM).Either way though, we (Microsoft) do indeed support ODF.We've helped fund an open source project that translates between Open XML and ODF and we continue to work on ways to better integrate that into our product.It's qualified to be an alternative format, but most certainly not the default.Vijay about it a bit though and it sounds like it went well.You don't like the new look?It's qualified to be an alternative format, but most certainly not the default.Why is OOXML incompatible with ISO 26300 even in parts where it could be?Why cannot your company effort any changes to the format it submitted to ECMA.Open XML and ODF had different design goals.ODF was not designed with the legacy base of documents in mind, and for us that's something that is needed by our customers.We already had a format that was designed with this goal in mind, and based on feedback from various governments we decided we shoudl take that work and submit it to a standards body for long term maintenence.It's difficult to get a man to understand something if his salary depends on him not understanding it.With OOXML, Microsoft is try to prove to itself that it's influential.But for all the wrong reasons.Using ODF as the default format would not work for Office, so we do need another format.By all means offer OOXML, too, if you want.OOXML standardised to bid for those meaty contracts in places like Massachusetts, Paris, Vienna, etc.In fact, I believe that the US Constitution makes a few references to that possibility...I'll leave it to you guys to figure out the details...MS Office, I'd think you'd have a bit of margin to spare, eh), but I'm confident that Microsoft could actually do much better in the long run, and have a more sustainable business, if it had a bit more focus.Thanks for that, I feel cleansed.Currently the converter infrastructure doesn't go through Open XML, and that would need to be updated.So I think this is a reasonable request (not saying it will happen, but it's a reasonable request).Note that there are already a few options for folks that want to use ODF, and the experience is close (but not quite) what you describe.We submitted to ISO based on feedback from governments.Believe me, it would have made our jobs at Microsoft easier if we hadn't gone through standardization, as it means we no longer have control over our file format.So I don't really think taking the format away from ISO is even an option for us.I'm hoping they will take it (as it's better for the communities confidence in the format).As I said, Balmer is a number of levels above me, and all these things are really more at his level, not mine.Linux in our research departments...Again, that's not my call (although I have a number of friends in those groups who I have a lot of respect for, so I think I may share a beer with them, but pass on the sacking).Dave, I would like to know seriously though what your complaints with the Open XML spec are.Brian, this is what I want Microsoft to do:
1.You know as well as I do do that that is simply a red herring to confuse the PHB's.NEW format standard is...Work with everybody else to make ODF better.And it will be VERY easy for you to do so; don't even try to argue that it is not technically possible.Does that not tell you people that there is something seriously wrong here?Open Office looks shambolic in comparison.I've been away for the weekend in the Alps north of Christchurch...Yes, I know your question was specifically about the spec, but I am allowed to dream, aren't I?I'm just sorry that you didn't comment on some of the more realistic options I threw on the table.HTML, and a few (now obsolete) MS Office legacy binary file formats are supported for both read and write, no?What makes ODF so different?Aren't there libraries in MS Office's well structured object oriented framework, with clear functional boundaries, to make adding this sort of thing fairly trivial?Nobody'd spend all that money just on hiring a huge army of people to test all the features in an office suite by brute force trial and error?OpenOffice or KOffice because those teams seem to be able to add pretty comprehensive support for new formats (e.ODF) in one or two open source development cycles...Microsoft development cycle)
2.Oh, and make sure that through your arrangement with the ECMA, you retain the right to alter the spec unilaterally in future, thus potentially breaking any other implementations.Open Document Format and Open Office seems to return a lot of hits for Office Open XML Document Format...Please, oh please stop this madness, and make your software conform to open document standards so that we can at least *start* to turn this dire situation around.Don't get me wrong on this one!Amazon (what else is in that category?Microsoft's only 2 real profit centres demonstrate significant *technical* innovation.Microsoft is starting to hint in the press that this is the case, in hopes of cushioning the stock market reaction when it becomes undeniable.If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today.William Gates III, 1991
5.Microsoft does, however, want to maintain a monopoly on the desktop, and leverage that to achieve a monopoly of the earbud, server room, cellphone, and everything in between, no?Yep, a cancerous tumor (unless, of course, you're asking Steve Ballmer, in which case it's Linux).Don't go all coy and bashful on me now, Brian.I'd be somewhat embarrassed for Microsoft if they weren't hedging their bets.Vista's a dud, Leopard is clawin' their asses, and Linux (with no handy sales figures to provide real evidence of uptake) with gPC, OLPC, Ubuntu, etc.Needless to say, if MS Office can run on OS X, then it's not a huge stretch to run it on a Linux desktop.Two weeks later, they bombarded the media with the release of Jade for Linux, version 1.Microsoft has actively tried to game (some might choose a more accurate and less charitable term) the ISO system.ODF is *the* ISO standard for office documents.OOXML is not, nor should it be.Microsoft wants to use OOXML, and that's great, go for it.ODF and OOXML server exactly the same functional domain.Two standards for the same thing means lost Mars Climate Orbiters due to one team inadvertently sending telemetry data in imperial units rather than the metric units the telemetry software was designed for...These same qualities make the format brittle *even should* competing implementations *want* to interoperate.If there is any error in assembling the end product, everything could come out completely wrong.With ODF, you always have a general idea of what the final file is supposed to look like and contain so that if a particular office suite wanted to throw the others off it would have a difficult time since it would basically have to produce the end product (unless it was a really twisted implementation).As Microsoft Office manager I would definitely prefer OOXML.On the worth of Microsoft unofficial marketing promises:
The short of my gripe is that Microsoft is not going to implement any real openness in their products.They are looking for marketing material (hence ISO approval) for bait and switch sales.On the importance of doing business with companies that have a record of trustworthiness and avoiding the others:
I think that companies doing business with another company need to consider the trust issue.Why going open source makes sense:
Again, with open source, there is nothing to argue over because all the relevant information is openly available and computer languages are much more precise than the language used to write contracts.Although I personally want Microsoft to remain on course trying to push OOXML through ISO, I feel I have to offer what might actually be useful advice to Microsoft given that Brian Jones bravely has allowed on his blog all sorts of openly critical comments against the company employing him.Dave Lane that Microsoft should back away from trying to make OOXML an ISO standard.Microsoft is playing the name game without regard to damage inflicted on ISO and others.This will not help Microsoft's goals of earning trust from many in the community or who have in the past bought Microsoft products.There are real alternatives now and more people than ever have had or will have the opportunity to look over Microsoft's dirty laundry.They would go back to using the binary formats, and that would do absolutely no good.INCLUDES the binary formats like a sausage wrapper without listing the ingredients in the sausage.Tim,
Are you really a developer?Do you work on office productivity software?They basically just tell Word to use an old buggy layout behavior that was fixed.We thought it would be better to at least put them in the format so folks who understood that behavior would know what flag to use.OpenOffice has the same type of settings, they just kept them all (even the more useful ones) out of the spec completely (which I don't think was the right decision from an interoperability point of view).So, do you think it is still important to provide the documentation?If Microsoft is concerned with all those legacy documents and people not being able to open them in the future, why doesn't it open all old .That would be the best assurance those people will not lose their old formats.I'm sure a whole developer community would be created around legacy Microsoft Office file formats if Microsoft were to release them under an open permissive license, lots of 'conversion' applications would be created while not even costing Microsoft a single dollar.OOXML is 'compatible' with those old legacy documents, except for vaguely describing in OOXML terms what is in binary form in those formats.If OOXML is not an ISO standard the alternative is worse.You sound like your opinion is choice is a good thing.When it comes to standards however, choice is a bad thing.Though I'm interested in both open source software and open standards, I work as a technical drawer though, and I can tell you, when it comes to standards, you don't want to have choice when choosing a standard.Multiple interoperable standards cost and have costed business billions, and those costs could have been prevented if multiple interoperable standards didn't exist.The metrical and imperial system are interoperable and indeed provide a choice.To give a software example: there's plenty of choice when it comes to video and audio standards.If there were only a few standards life would be easier, and less time would be wasted on supporting all those different standards.So, choice of different standards is a bad thing for business and consumers and costs them billions of wasted dollars, like proven in the engineering field before.EN standards, instead of having to support British, American and German, Swedish and French standards.It will again cost Microsoft's customers billions of dollars.Mozilla Firefox to you, it includes spelling checks in comment boxes (even in different languages), and it has prevented me from several spelling errors (though you might see it didn't catch all spelling errors of course) in this comment already.It would certainly be better for Microsofts customers; their money would be better spent if you were trying to save them money instead of being paid by Microsoft and explaining them why Microsoft standard policy is costing them more money.The PDF support will be built into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Publisher, OneNote, Visio, and InfoPath!Open XML formats in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.People now have a couple options here, with the existing support for HTML and RTF, and now the new support for Open XML formats and PDF!We realize that this is a really important scenario, and that's why we're making the move to default XML formats that are fully documented.This is true on the client and the server.I've been trying for the past couple months to explain the process we use for deciding what features to invest in.The former is the type of investment we have made with the new user interface.We looked hard at how people get work done and what they want to do that is too hard and figured out an easier way.In the case of PDF though, it was a really simple straightforward problem.Currently, on our OfficeOnline site, we are seeing over 30,000 searches per week for PDF support.Of course we get requests for other formats too, but not nearly to this scale.This is to be expected, because every customer has unique views that we want to respect; but it's work and cost to build and support a format...Another example would be the new XML formats we're building which have taken a huge effort on the part of the PowerPoint, Excel, and Word teams.Why does our software suck so much that we have to support PDF?So in Microsoft's view will you still be in business in Massachusetts, even with all this Open Document kerfuffle?Why put this into Office, when this really should be in Windows?!?Office 12 will be light years ahead of the competition now!Is it similar to OpenOffice, where you edit either MS Word or OpenOffice document which can be exported to PDF but you can't just edit the PDF?Acrobat free as the reader is!!Is OpenDocument the next in pipeline?Well, time to retire Adobe Acrobat Professional.Saturday, October 01, 2005 7:15 PM by A.At least O12 will include it natively.Channel 9 about an EDocs file format that looked a lot like PDF and was metro based.Are y'all going to support that format also?Nice, now take another feature from OpenOffice.The very idea that I might be able to post a simple HOWTO on the website with three or four simple screenshots is delightful.I'd *love* to get hold of a few sample PDFs from the exporter, so I can run them through my test and preflight tools.Did the Office team implement their own PDF export, or did you license the Adobe PDF libraries?Sometimes, I guess, these poor folks just can't win.James: PDFCreator from SourceForge.Anand Katkamwar: It'll almost certainly be export only.Stop (it costs more than Acrobat Pro its self!Even that tool doesn't give you the same sort of flexibility of editing that you'd expect from the most basic and primitive word processor or desktop publishing program.To cut a long story short, expecting anything but basic PDF export (hopefully somewhat configurable) is probably asking a bit much.PDF in Office would be at least as much work as a whole additional Office application.Even working with text in PDF is complicated.How is the font encoded?Don't even start on text layout variations like columns.Word 2003 to make sure that the thesis document I submit will survive printing on A4 (the University is in the UK, I am in Seattle and have everything set up for our provincial letter format).Just having my advisor in North Carolina markup directly in one of my Word documents completely messes up the TOC and headings in the round trip because of normal template and option differences between our setups.That and how styles get mangled depending on the setup.You simply haven't given us enough information.What version of PDF are you exporting to?Will you import as well as export?Far more important for accessibility is an answer to this question: Tagged PDF or not?Next thing you know, MS will be forced to support open document formats.MS's thick corporate hide.So, we Word12 will support PDF format.Real innovations happen always outside of MS campus.Recent example is GOOGLE with a lot of new fresh ideas.Stac or Netscape) but MS is not capable to be really innovative..How come it took so long ???But I know that one day I'll be __requiered__ to present OpenOffice xml documents.You're quite correct with regards to the latest version of Acrobat Pro.PDF production, it would indeed be silly to buy Acrobat Pro if all you wanted to do was produce basic PDF documents from your applications.Unfortunately but understandably, the low end version is very carefully cut down to make it largely useless for anyone generating jobs for prepress.On the PDF export functionality, I saw some screenshots recently that showed a CMYK colour option in the save dialog box.This surprised me, since Word doesn't seem like the sort of app that'd care about CMYK.Given this, though, will the PDF export from Office support CMYK PDF ...That'd be something, especially for Publisher users.I'll have an excuse to get rid of those awful lingering win98 boxes from work...Openoofice might have given a good scare to catch up with them on pdf, and this is good for competition.Since there is obviously massive customer demand for this mandated through the EU and the state of Massachusetts it seems that MS should be resonsive to its customers or risk isolating itself.Perhaps YOU should lead the way for that change!Is there any chance of incorporating the Open Document format, as used by OO and others?Seems like a good deal, too bad that we're only getting NATIVE support tho'.OpenOffice does that already.Brian: I like the outlook of Office 12 supporting output to pdf.The only reason Microsoft is implementing PDF export is because of gouvernments wanting open formats now.BTW: What about Microsoft's PDF alternative ?Sunday, October 02, 2005 11:45 AM by Rob S.I'm too am very much looking forward to this new release of Office.Often I work on documents and formatting changes on me when I don't want it to change when I'm trying to delete returns.Putting that aside, I'm very much looking forward to the new UI, and I'm also looking forward to having good PDF export from within Office applications.My first reaction is: That's great, it's about time!!!!It's taken 5 years, and it's only one application suite and not the upcoming OS, but the wait is well worth it.Now, why doesn't Vista support this feature?Apple has done it; why can't Microsoft?Windows Vista, aka Mac OS X Tiger is already available from an apple store near you.Let's make few things clear.OO never said that they are the innovators in the field of Office Tools.The alternative must be similar to the UI of the MS WORD ...OO did it so it isn't innovative?There are many implementations.BTW: is MS WORD format known ?Ask yourself a a simple question: Why is MS WORD format known ?Including native PDF creation into OO was innovative...Like many times in the past.IP stack from the BSD Unix and ported it to WINDOWS.So, you can clearly see, that (again) MS is NOT capable to innovate.They realised that PDF is well established format and they could not find another well established similar format on the marked ( to buy it, license it, just plain copy it, or steal it ...Anybody can write another text processor and compete for the business from the state of Massachusetts.Who will, at the end, win ?Customers and tax payers !!Market will decide who is better and cheaper at the same time.Somebody said:
Let's see if OO copies MS's new UI...Might as well make sure that PDF printer driver is there as well...TOCs' titles (List of Appendices, List of Figures, etc.TOC, that generate bookmarks...Note that Acrobat doesn't do this.SLOW, much slower than Word's own TOC generation or updating fields, and that's as slow as it ought to be.Joel Finkle, PMP
Director, Product Strategy
Image Solutions, Inc.PDF files, so Office for Mac automatically supports PDF output.Corel, Sun, OpenOffice etc.If you can't admint innovation in any of MS products, you are blind.Let's not forget that there are MANY other benefits to moving away from MS Office that Massachussets will benefit from here.Faster, less bloated office suite making older machines useful again that could never run MS Office 12
5) Better security and stability
6) Competition for contracts will now reside on who has the best technology
7) A future of choices that will ultimately save Massachussets Billions!Brian Jones, I ain't buying it.You only show your true colors.PDF image files in word.If you'd read any of the discussion on said formats, you'd know they in fact already satisfy all three of the criteria you mentioned.They're not representative of anyone but the crowd of zealots at slashdot.Someone was also concerned that the PDF would only look good if opened by Office, but that of course isn't true because we aren't even building a viewer.So of course we are going to focus on these files looking great in non MS viewers.For those folks wondering about the timing of this announcement, believe me that we could not build in this kind support overnight.The timing of the announcement itself may seem a bit coincidental, but the actual work to support the format definitely isn't.We've been working on it for awhile now, and it's very far along (Steven demo'd it to the MVPs on Saturday).Most recently we announced a lot of the Office '12' functionality at PDC but we didn't want this to be missed while talking about all the other new stuff.PDC, this news didn't really make sense to talk about there so we held off on talking about it until now.For those folks that have signed up for Beta 1, you'll see the functionality for yourselves in the next couple months.Like I said, some things we do based on customer demand, and believe me there has been a lot of demand for this functionality for quite a while now.There has to be a combination of the two.At the beginning of every project though we consider doing work for things like this since we get so many requests, and this time we decided we should just build it in directly.Or just keep posting the questions and I'll try to get to them!This is how Adobe makes money out of PDF's and how they can supply the reader free.So you will still need Acrobat Reader in addition to Office 12.This is how Adobe makes money out of PDF's and how they can supply the reader free.For example:
1) they included 'double_space' utility for free into DOS6.Stac was innovative with their compress utility, MS was NOT.PDF marked via 'metro'
MS 'metro' is another catch up for the technology developed by others
3) now, they are after GOOGLE
GOOGLE is a leader (and very innovative)in search technology, MSN Search is NOT.MS is again playing catch up.Whenever MS feels threatened, they start with unethical steps to kill the competition.We will not support opening the PDF files, just generating them.They would make their unknown and undocumented WORD format obsolete within a year or two.Do you support JavaScript within PDF?Do you support interactive pdf documents with embedded JavaScript programms just like free pdf readers?Although there are alot of illogical posters on Slashdot it still doesn't change what Slashdot itself is about.You seem more like a paid MS shill than a constructive debater or an OSS advocate.If you really were in favor of a constructive discussion regarding Office 12 and the issues at hand then you would take seriously, with an open mind, the events that occurred in Massachusetts and the constructive criticisms here.Read the Halloween Documents.If you want to be taken seriously, have your arguments be valid and not based solely on attacking others.True, Microsoft have from time to time tried to get a share of a market that is already more or less established.No, if you want to do that, just provide your converter to Office 97 as well.Who freaking cares about a .Xml licensing changes that occurred a while ago : previously a third party application would only be granted the right to READ such Xml file.XML over binary formats.All in all, FUD FUD FUD.It'll take a long while for this new version to filter through the market, though, and it's only Office.I'd be shocked if Acrobat Pro was even affected in the slightest.Your implications about my involvement and reasons are, however, entirely inaccurate.Microsoft would have to be very, very stupid to pay me to poke at their licensing arrangements.As for credibility, I have only what I've written and what I do to stand on.OSS in all the wrong places and all the wrong ways.I've seen some very interesting, useful, and informative discussion on slashdot, and even constructive criticisim.InfoPath, etc rather interesting, for example.Yes, I know there are tools to do it.Most of what I'm seeing, however, is ranting and raving.Fuming about innovation or who did what first doesn't gain anybody anything.Office, but it's hard to claim it's late when it was never given a planned date.Asking about OpenDocument is really just repetitive, and something Brian has already said he'll address.Lucky we Apple and Office 2004 users.We can enjoy native PDF support today and for a many days.Will it be Office 12 only or available for other windows apps as well?Will the format be customizable at output (aka embed all fonts, not JScript, ...Acrobat PDF might be fine for a tax return, but the shortcomings of Adobe when it comes to gamut such as AdobeRGB (D65 fiasco)and dynamic range unsuitable for HDR applications, I would rather stick to an application that's scRGB capable, and does not degrade originals.Craig Ringer: About Microsoft Office XML licensing.Thank you for bringing that to my attention.What if Microsoft goes bankrupt or the license site goes down?Why restrict it for government documents?It seems to imply a certain lack of good faith on the part of Microsoft to my untrained eye.Before Microsoft Word was around, there was Wordperfect.Microsoft Word was inferior to Wordperfect at a time.I've been trying for the past couple months to explain the process we use for deciding what features to invest in.It would seem that a customer, the state of Mass, is explicitly saying that they need the ability to store documents in the OpenDocument format.Stuart McKee and Bryan Berg.Listen closely for the exchange about the legality of body that wrote the mandate.Another example would be the new XML formats we're building which have taken a huge effort on the part of the PowerPoint, Excel, and Word teams.In Word there was the benefit of having a head start with the WordprocessingML format from Word 2003.What it's saying is that our XML is good because the average customer won't notice the difference.We had to make sure that for the average end user, there was no effect.No annoying conversion layer.On top of that, we're providing this for free to all users of Office 2000, XP, and 2003!I'm writing up replies and hope to have a new post later today.My intentions are not to get off topic here, but since I do not believe that there has been a valid topic established yet, I will address the following issue first...Brian,
Please stop the cheap salesman tactics!PDF support in Office 12 when this is about a technical issue and the ability for everyone to have access to information through an Open Document format.Something MS has never cared about until they got a spanking from Massachusetts.Now yourself and Microsoft expect us to believe that this is an exciting new feature for Office 12 that we all should embrace?MS can neither take credit or claim innovation here because it's simply false and misleading.People are not stupid and we are waking up to the alternatives such as Linux and OpenOffice.The ability to generate pdf files from any application has been available in MAC OS X since it's debut.I've always said that the Open Source movement will send us into bankruptcy!After all, it's been in Open Office for at least five years!Wow, do you want a pat on the back for being able to export into PDF format and not adding in support to actually edit PDFs?If you were a program manager in my company I'd fire you.Zeon DocuCom PDF Driver for years in PDF converting from Office.Seems it has much better creating speed than Adobe Acrabat.Whilst direct support for PDF output is certainly nice, it's also available as a workaround using Adobe's PDF generators, disguised as ...Microsofts arguments that their format ought to be the standard have failed to gain acceptance, and this time round the users decided on a standard instead of the manufacturers.Albeit in a somewhat more competitive market.Governments today are under increasing pressure to manage well and control costs.The Open Document Format adopted by Massachusetts brings an extremely attractive ROI to the table for the citizens of this state.Microsoft for choosing to withold support for the Open Document Format adopted by the state of Massachusetts.Massachusetts (and any other states that adopt the Open Document Format in the future) would then have the tried and true Office suite available to them as they always have in the past.We've had accessible formats for a long time (RTF, HTML, etc.For many years, the Microsoft RTF standard was the most reliable way to share formatted text documents between platforms, including Word for Windows and Word for Mac.Sadly, RTF is not a reliable standard.As it happens, the specification documentation is a minefield for anyone outside Microsoft who dares implement RTF support:
* The latest version of the specification documentation, 1.It is not available online in any other format, including HTML.License Grant for Documentation.RESERVATION OF RIGHTS AND OWNERSHIP.Microsoft or its suppliers own the title, copyright, and other intellectual property rights in this Software...To the extent the terms of any Microsoft policies or programs for support services conflict with the terms of this EULA, the terms of this EULA shall control...Adobe has done with PDF.This is so funny it borders on stupidity.MA gambit failed and they are trying to get in the back door.Who do you think you are fooling?Its not perfect but then neither is MS Office.This selfishless act of embracing PDF is solid proof that Microsoft really cares about its customers needs rather than its customers money.They can openly choose which file format they want to author in and share with others and not be so rude as to force others to spend money on a product they may not want in order to read, edit and exchange documents.I've put up another post answering the first few questions that folks have been asking.I'll try to get to all of those over the next week or two.There are so many comments on this specific post at this point that it's hard to keep up with them all. |
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
