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Comment Compatibility is always going to be a problem... (Score 4, Interesting) 131

..Because MS Office has been designed from the ground up to be challenging to be compatible with. It started with a file format that was in essence the internal memory state of the program written out to disk. When they went to XML, all they really did was record that internal memory state in XML

Anyone wanting to be compatible with Office 'properly' need to implement pretty much all of the office program to render the document, and then convert the resulting render to their format.

What we need to do is to somehow make this Microsoft's problem. Make the cleanest open source office renderer the standard, define that rendering as the correct one, and if Word or Excel renders it differently, then that's a bug in Word or Excel. Or even better, make ODF the standard, and judge Office on its rendering and creating ODF formats.

Comment Worse is how they are pushing it onto Android. (Score 3, Interesting) 87

Microsoft is selling business onto their software stack in the name of security. Making it so in order to access emails you have to use the outlook app, and making that app block copy/paste, and refuse to open links in anything but Edge.

Of course, people will instead access their mail through a secure browser, because no one wants Edge, so MS is trying to push businesses to lock other browsers out of outlook.com.

Comment We can do most of the work with hydrogen. (Score 1) 250

Most of the carbon used in steelmaking is consumed reducing the iron oxides to iron in the smelting process. That job can be done with hydrogen, if you have excess energy to electrolyse it from water.

Then you can use a small amount of carbon as an alloying agent - likely from coal but it could be from CO2 of we were working to capture it at the time.

This all doesn't make sense now, of course. Iron smelting is one place that coal use remains logical.

Comment With mosquitoes? Nothing. (Score 4, Interesting) 106

One specie of mosquito means nothing - there are just so many other ones.

That said, this does not even do that. Mosquitoes with wolbachia still survive and breed - but they don't live as long, and when the mosquito infected the dengue virus can't survive in the mozzie, so it doesn't get infected and so it can't spread the disease.

It is done pretty much everywhere - I'm a little surprised it isn't standard procedure in the US too.

Comment So complex there are no obvious problems... (Score 2) 83

... Or so simple there are obviously no problems. It seems we have lost the ability to do the latter.

I mean, a computers Bios should be an exceedingly simple thing, with only enough smarts to initialise storage, copy bytes into ram, check that those bytes are properly signed and then pass execution to them. Instead it is a full environment that never gets patched. This means that no one can build a secure system, because it's built on series cheese.

Comment Re:Ribbon, No. (Score 1) 235

Alt-key, key works in Libreoffice, and any app with a menu.

The letters you use are underlined whenever you hold down the alt key, and the shortcuts are there in the menu too, on the right hand side.

The only difference is that Word's ribbons overlay the key's letter over the button, and libreoffice (and any other menu-driven program) underlines them. Programs used to always display the underlining, which made things more discoverable, but I guess it did look slightly messy.

Comment Re:Ribbon, No. (Score 1) 235

Yes, Base doesn't get a lot of love. The main audience for Libreoffice, and certainly its developers, would prefer to implement a database directly on their choice of SQL server and use whatever scripting languages and graphics libraries they are familiar with for an interface, instead of learning things like Access or Base.

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