The lock-out begins for Office Mac users
,----[ Quote ]
| Microsoft is calling these "Microsoft Office Open XML Formats", but
| Office for Mac users will find them far from "open". In fact, they
| can't read them.
|
| Take Word 2007, for example. By default it saves documents in the
| new *.docx format. Trying to open one of these in Word for Mac 2004
| yields the following garbled mess
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http://apcmag.com/node/4755
This looks like another case of binary mess.
Related:
Publish And Perish
,----[ Quote ]
| Alexander Rose, the executive director of the futurist Long Now
| Foundation, worries about the impermanence of digital information.
| "If you save that computer for 100 years, will the electrical plugs
| look the same?" he asks. "The Mac or the PC--will they be around?
| If they are, what about the software? " So far there's no business
| case for digital preservation--in fact, for software makers like
| Microsoft, planned obsolescence is the plan.
|
| "The reality is that it's in companies' interest that software should
| become obsolete and that you should have to buy every upgrade,"
| Rose says. We could be on the cusp of a turning point, though, in the
| way businesses and their customers think about digital preservation.
| "Things will start to change when people start losing all of their personal
| photos," Rose said.
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http://www.forbes.com/2006/11/30/books-information-preservation-tech-media_cx_ee_books06_1201acid.html?partner=yahootix
http://tinyurl.com/yyjqoh
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