Posted on 10/05/2005 7:42:38 AM PDT by N3WBI3
Opinion: It's not coincidence that after Massachusetts made it clear that it would support open formats, Microsoft is now going to include PDF in the next version of Office.
What is Microsoft up to, anyway, with its sudden plan to finally support PDF?
It wasn't announced by Bill Gates loudly to the world at the Professional Developer Conference a few weeks ago. It also wasn't proclaimed to the Microsoft faithful at its recent Most Valuable Professional Global Summit.
No, instead, Microsoft quietly squeaked out the news on a Saturday afternoon in Microsoft Office Program Manager Brian Jones' Weblog.
Could it be that it's because Microsoft is backing its way into ever so reluctantly supporting an open format after Massachusetts decided that it would only use office suites that supported open formats like PDF and OpenDocument?
It certainly looks that way to me.
For all of its talk about being an innovator, Microsoft is really just a follower.
PointerClick here to read more about Microsoft's decision to build PDF support into Office 12.
Sometimes, of course, the company is a very, very reluctant follower. It took Microsoft's leadership forever to live down the fact that they had initially dismissed the Internet. Now, I see Microsoft slowly and painfully embracing open standards.
Mind you, this move is just a beginning. I recently pointed out that it would be trivial for Microsoft to add OpenDocument support to Office.
I don't see that happening anytime soon now though.
With PDF support alone, Microsoft can still try for Massachusetts government contracts without having to add OpenDocument.
Well, until StarOffice, OpenOffice.org and WordPerfect's support for OpenDocument force Microsoft's hand anyway.
After all, PDF is much more of an end-result format than one that most people actually want to edit in. As OpenDocument and the applications that enable it gain more support, Microsoft will find itself forced into supporting it too.
Now, some might say that this is just Microsoft giving the people what they want. Many users have been asking for a PDF option from Microsoft since Adobe Acrobat 4 appeared in 1999.
eWEEK Special Report: Office Politics
But, if that's all there was to it, then why was Microsoft banging the drum for its own PDF substitute, Metro, only a few months ago?
Still others might say that is part and parcel of Microsoft's recent efforts to compete against Adobe in other ways: Sparkle vs. Flash, Acrylic vs. Photoshop and so on.
To which, I say, "Why now? Why announce it in such a subdued way?"
No, all those other things play a role, but at the end of the day, Microsoft felt that it must make at least a concession to open standards by adopting PDF.
After all, it's not like Massachusetts is the only entity that is seriously considering making supporting open standards a requirement for its software purchases. Massachusetts was just the first to make it official.
Microsoft would love it if it could make everyone stick to its proprietary formats. That forces customers to keep buying its products. But it can't. And, much as Microsoft may hate it, its executives know it. So it is that as quietly as the company could, Microsoft is, once more, making concessions to open standards.
eWEEK.com Senior Editor Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has been using and writing about operating systems since the late '80s and thinks he may just have learned something about them along the way. He can be reached at sjvn@ziffdavis.com.
other formats to try bzip, and compress..
FYI Alexa is the most commonly referenced source for this type of data. Check with Nielsen then, ever heard of THEM?
http://www.nielsen-netratings.com/news.jsp?section=dat_to&country=us
Hit weekly or monthly parent companies. Then suffer further denial.
Bzzzt! Sorry, but thanks for playing.
A number of applications currently support OpenDocument; listed alphabetically they include:
Scientific? You're funny.
Alexa is a quasi-spyware search toolbar. I would not trust it as a statistically meaningful source.
Plus, IE defaults to MSN, and many people don't even know how to change their default pages, so many of those hits to MSN are from people with default-config IE just starting their browsers. I personally NEVER use MSN, but I've caused many hits on it by starting up IE on a new install.
For personal stats, I can tell you that on our 5000+ hit-a-day site (aimed towards the general public), Google is the referrer three times as often as Yahoo, and MSN is even behind that.
They just announced a collaboration yesterday. You expect results too soon for even Google.
ROFL, what's all that crap? Other junk stuck down at 3% of users?
What a hoot!
LMAO, how hard is it to post a link? Not that they ever will, despite your claim, they like that big, white, worthless front page.
Something like that. What I was thinking of though, is that if you take a look an OpenOffice Document, you'll see that the file is actually a zip file...
$ unzip -v deleteme.sxw
Archive: deleteme.sxw
Length Method Size Ratio Date Time CRC-32 Name
-------- ------ ------- ----- ---- ---- ------ ----
30 Stored 30 0% 10-05-05 22:56 3931a5e1 mimetype
2687 Defl:N 744 72% 10-05-05 22:56 dee7ce21 content.xml
5933 Defl:N 1389 77% 10-05-05 22:56 cf2bc5bc styles.xml
1059 Stored 1059 0% 10-05-05 22:56 0e965d63 meta.xml
6274 Defl:N 1145 82% 10-05-05 22:56 ba33e42c settings.xml
752 Defl:N 254 66% 10-05-05 22:56 11144701 META-INF/manifest.xml
-------- ------- --- -------
16735 4621 72% 6 files
$
Let's say you want to do this in a cryptograpically sound manner. Here's how I would do it: when saving the file, you create one more file called "sigs.xml" that contains detached PGP (or GPG) signatures of each file. When you sign a document with PGP, the created signature contains not only a hash of the signed file, but also a signature that is tied to the key that created it as well. In this way, Alice can create a file that can mathematically proven to have come from her, provided she keeps her private PGP key secret. Her public key could be inserted as another file as well if she wanted. Since keys and signatures can be encoded as ascii data, they are extremely well suited for use as xml blobs.
When Bob recieves the document from Alice, he opens it, and his software checks both the key (if it is included), and the signature. If it all verifies as o.k., then he can be sure that the file has not been tampered with. Similarly, if he does so much as change a single letter of the text, Alice (and anyone else for that matter) can prove that the shown text was not what she sent because the cryptographic checksum would fail.
If Charlie intercepted the message, changed some text, and inserted a key and signatures that says it is Alice's, then when Bob gets the file and looks at it, the software would flag in an obvious way that the key does not match previous correspondence with Alice. If there is any question about it, Bob can call Alice on the phone and they could verify the fingerprint of the key. If they don't match, they know something is amiss.
So far I've only discussed signatures, which are extremely useful for authentication, but not so much if you want to keep Charlie from even seeing the contents of the message. Public key cryptography could be employed there as well very easily, especially if you design the infrastructure to be moderately seamless.
Perhaps if people became used to using cryptography to authenticate and/or encrypt their files, they'd be less hesitant to use it in other settings where appropriate as well.
I'm big on crypto, and have been for more than a decade now. I wish more people could see the benefits of it and would be willing to make a little bit of effort to spread its uses wider. Privacy and authentication are more important than most people seem to think.
One more thing... the scheme I outlined above describes signing the objects in the container because it gives you more flexibility than you otherwise would have, and is also more transparent to the user. Imagine being able to sign the content of a message, but signing the formatting that may surround it. I can see other variations that would be useful as well.
SHA-256 and SHA-512 are your best bets now. The freeware HashCalc will calculate them on Windows. BTW, Microsoft was nice enough to include all of these hash classes in the .NET framework if you're a programmer.
Easy, if you already have a finished product and plan. They just announced the beginning of a collaboration. If you want information, check Google news.
Doesn't Adobe own the rights to the PDF format? I know that they give the reader away for free, but not the writing software.
Yea what a piss poor interface who would copy that for a search engine...
http://search.msn.com/
You might mention this basic provision to AntiRepublican, who has been arguing mindlessly on another thread that obscurity and security are incompatible.
I wasn't aware of that. But then I don't pay as much attention to this stuff as I used to.
I already got the news, off a site called "news.com":
Google and Sun deal: That's it?
http://news.com.com/Google+and+Sun+deal+Thats+it/2100-1012_3-5888798.html?part=rss&tag=5888798&subj=news
The announcement left many bloggers less than thrilled, and blog entries with titles such as "Big whoop," "That's it?" and "Google and Sun announce yawn"
I've gotten comments ranging from "lame" to "underwhelmed," describing today's Sun-Google announcement.
Some people are scrambling to find the meat of the deal, but there really isn't any there--Google doesn't even think it's big enough to warrant putting out their own press release.
That's it?! You held a press conference and generated all that hype to announce that at some unnamed point in the future, the Google Toolbar (which is already on practically every computer out there) will be optionally available when people download the Java Runtime Environment?! What a letdown! To say nothing of the fact that bundling is bad. Can you think of an instance where products are bundled together like this that doesn't annoy the heck out of you?
ROFL
Notice I didn't offer it as proof as you did. Anyway, I'd trust why my logs say more than what a spyware toolbar says, because this site is visited by a very broad spectrum of the general public. You've probably visited it.
Apples and Oranges from you, no surprise. Deal with reality:
http://www.yahoo.com
http://www.msn.com
http://www.google.com
I know if I was stuck on a desert island with only one to choose which one it WOULDN'T be. Hell I'd take http://www.aol.com over google, ROFL.
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