On Sep 23, 11:58 pm, Chris Ahlstrom <lino...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> After takin' a swig o' grog, Matt belched out this bit o' wisdom:
> > I don't doubt that MS and others still try to attack and subvert
> > standards, but they are having a lot less success with that strategy
> > nowadays.
Sure they have. When they couldn't kill off ODF by getting standards
bodies and corporate directives mandating OOXML instead of ODF, they
just shoveled it into their MS-Office 2007 suite, and made it the
"default" save format. Furthermore, attempting to save in the .doc
format resulted in warnings of loss of information.
This was an attempt to "force upgrade" into OOXML and Office 2007.
When acceptance of Office 2007 was still slow, Microsoft offered a
patch that converted OOXML for use on Office XP and Office 2003, but
didn't do it well.
The bigger problem is that OOXML documents are triggering virus
warnings when the attachments are sent via e-mail, because the trusted
antivirus software fires of a warning when there are over 25 embedded
binary files in a zip file. It turns out this is a very legitimate
warning, because many OOXML documents can be trivially infected with
viral agents (code that pulls in the virus and gives it administrator
rights).
> It's often the developers themselves that subvert their own code.
In Microsoft's case, subverting standards is a key business strategy.
This has been going on since the days when MS-DOS decided to continue
the practice of putting the carriage-return and line-feed at the end
of each line instead of just using a line-feed as a record delimiter.
I assume it was because Microsoft was too lazy to put line-feed to CR-
LF filters in their print or editor programs.
It's a minor alteration, but has frequently corrupted files
transferred via FTP when the user forgot to specify a "binary" copy.
Nothing more frustrating than finding out after you've lost the
original, that you can't restore valid copies of the files because the
file transfer has inserted or deleted carriage returns and corrupted
your archive.
But then again, Microsoft doesn't WANT you using anything other than
their products. This includes attempting to view Unix generated files
with Notepad.
On the other hand, some of Microsoft's little "deviations" have had
much more serious consequences. DHCP is a deviation of RARP, that
thwarts attempts by law enforcement investigators to track computer
trespassers.
Trespassing into a computer is a federal crime punishable by 5 years
in federal prison (per entry), but law enforcement has to have a
reliable and verifiable path from the perpetrator to the victim.
DCOM, COM+, and ActiveX were deviations of CORBA, but the Microsoft
version leaves open a huge door through which perpetrators can trick
client programs such as Internet Explorer and Outlook into pulling in
viral agents (programs that download, install, and launch a virus),
that have the ability to give hackers complete control of the
computer.
There are dozens of other little "deviations" that have resulted in
vulnerabilities, incompatibilities, and even put national security and
global financial security at stake.
> Getting a team to stop using things like OpenFile(), for example, is
> amazingly difficult.
Just look at how long it has taken to get people to stop using gets()
and switch to fgets(stdin, buffsize)
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