"I'm not your monkey."

I find reading about Chu kick ass at Jeopardy far more entertaining then Jeopardy. Maybe if he keeps it up, new audiences will like jeopardy.

I just choked on a slice pizza after reading your comment. Hilarious! *and painful*

I remember it also. What you stated in your last comment does not dispute what I'm saying. Additionally Microsoft was far from monopoly back then. I was using OS/2. They had no obligation to be open. What Microsoft did back then pales in comparison to the current closed garden stuff that Silicon Valley companies have been pulling for the last few years.

Rob Weir is that you again? ;)

When Word 95 came out there were many people still using WordPerfect in business environments. In fact even today there are legacy record systems that still require WordPerfect format for archiving purposes. Like many people today, people were not just jumping to the latest and greatest OS and office suite. Businesses would require many more years before they left DOS and OS/2 at the time.

so just double-click on any of the ribbon tabs to hide the entire ribbon.

if the document was generated or originated using pre-Office 97 formats, and were converted to Office 97-2003 formats, then there is still a chance that Office 2007 or Office 2010 can render differently. I would like to see an example where a native 2007 file looks different when opened in 2010. Yes, such examples exist, but I've only seen evidence of this produced by Microsoft in public disclosure to showcase a hypothetical. In practice 2007 and 2010 are effectively the same, with 2007 being pre-ISO OpenXML, and 2010 being ISO OpenXML.

Its not something that a typical developer can just decide to do on a weekend. To take an honest stab requires a foundations understanding of the specification and the terminology, structures, and special cases that go along with it. To use an analogy, to randomly jump to "AutospaceLikeWord95" is the equivalent of a first-year law student critiquing complex legal contracts without understanding the framework of contract law. Contracts, even complex ones, do not fully define and cite all legal authorities from which the clauses derive its legal standings.

Sure you can argue that an engineering specification should be written like a law, but consider the fact that the ISO Office OpenXML file format spec is over 6000 pages long. There are bound to be areas where quality gaps remain. In this case, consider the fact this particular class exists. It means that even Microsoft didn't properly document Word95 so that it could be re-implemented in a future spec. The guy who probably wrote the actual spec is long gone and it is left to a junior program manager straight out of college to decipher the re-implementation and new documentation around it. There is a reason why document fidelity between Office 97 and Office 2003 was good, because it had better documentation and planning. Pre-Office 97 formats were engineered for another era when competition was high and deadlines were more important than perfect documentation.

if you read entire link, you'd see the part where it says,

"Characters in the following Unicode ranges should be treated as ideographic, even though those characters are full-width forms of non-ideographic text: U+FF10–U+FF19, U+FF21–U+FF3A, and U+FF41–U+FF5A. [Note: This results in the unnecessary addition of space. end note]

Characters in the following Unicode ranges should be treated as non-ideographic, even though those characters are ideographic: U+FF66–U+FF9F. [Note: This results in the omission of the intended additional space. end note]"

Apologies for the shit grammar, typed this on my phone while on a train.

*disclaimer: former Msft office guy here*

The standard of use for MS office is Libreoffice, then it is obvious that the government will save on licensing costs, however those who use MS office in an enterprise environment as large as the government do not use Office simply as a suite of applications. Office is a software platform that connects with many line of non-MS business systems. Think plugins and addons on steroids. The engineering effort by vendors, in house IT, and analysts to convert all these things would be hugely disruptive.

Sure it fine to introduce choice for less sophisticated offices, but to mandate LibreOffice or any other product, commercial or otherwise is bad procurement practice. Licensing is chump change relative to the larger personnel & ecosystem costs.

Actually there is no such thing as preemptive pardons. Yes even presidential authority must be defined in law. What Ford did was neither legal nor illegal. If you read how pardoning powers work, a person must be charged with a crime before being pardoned from it. To this date, Nixon has never been charged with any crime. What Ford did was short-circuit the legal process.

The promise a console is that games will be playable and fun throughout the life of the console. Microsoft and Sony have indicated that they are shooting for a decade, if I'm not mistaken. Whether you believe this or not is left to individuals decide. Looking back at my ownership experience with xbox360, I believe game quality will get better over time versus PC gaming, and that I'll have better social & gaming moments from a dedicated console.

Sure, I will have a PC to game on, but it will unlikely be my primary device because I'm an adult now and my PC is for serious tech work. I don't have time to deal with all the shitty DRM and rootkit issues of the future. Nor am I interested in dealing with poorly optimized games, I just don't have the time I had 10 years ago.

Don't use virtualbox if you have to option to use Hyper-V. VM management will be much easier and will debugging any issues.