Yule is almost here and Mrs Elbeno and I have been writing the letter, which means that once again I get to figure out how to do a mail merge from the address book spreadsheet to a sheet of labels. And every year it changes slightly. This year it was quite easy though, despite the documentation being questionable (it told me to click on menu options and dialogs I didn't have).
The only tricky part of the affair this year is the same as always: how to attempt to munge everything into a common format that fits on a label, when there are so many different address types. USA, UK, Europe, Japan, Australia, single line and multi-line addresses, zip codes, post codes, states, counties… but as long as it all fits on a label and all the info is there, I'm going to trust the mail to deliver it.
The other thing that caught my eye this morning was an essay by Cory Doctorow about How Vista Lets Microsoft Lock Users In. I'm not looking forward to this upgrade at work, which will doubtless come sooner or later. I've said it before and I'll say it again: if you want what you write/draw/compose/otherwise create today still to be freely viewable/usable to you in 10 years' time, don't use Microsoft products.
From the article:
Disingenuous bullshit. Nothing forces you to lock your documents into Word. You have all the interoperability you had before, plus new abilities which you can use if you choose to make your document Word-only.
(http://livejournal.com/users/editor)
Nothing forces you to lock your documents into Word.
YET.
What do you think MS is, a real person with morals or something? It's a company. A company with a monopoly. And it is not in their interests to have interoperability. The moment you have open document formats, you have the possibility that other office suites/mail clients/etc will handle the documents better than yours. You have erosion of the monopoly.
The only reason this hasn't happened so far is that the .doc format isn't documented. 3rd party software fails at edge cases, and MS is continually inventing those edges cases under the heading of new features.
If that argument isn't enough, just look at the empirical evidence in their historical behaviour and their current behaviour regarding the EU wrangle.
(http://livejournal.com/users/elbeno)
I've been using Office 2007 for a few weeks now, so I can assure you from personal experience that by default it saves all files as plain XML.
(http://livejournal.com/users/editor)
Without CDATA sections? Would you be willing to bet your data that this will remain completely open for the working lifetime of your data? I suppose you would, since you are.
In another scenario, what will you have to forego in the way of functionality and/or system security updates if MS tries to lock it down in future and you refuse, assuming you are still able to refuse?
This may sound like paranoia to you. But if I were an MS shareholder, I'd hope that they would do everything in their power to preserve their OS and office suite monopoly and therefore their revenue stream.
(http://livejournal.com/users/elbeno)
The XML is completely transparent, and I really cannot imagine any realistic scenario in which I might lose the technological ability to read it. And thanks to this transparency, should MS annoy me in the future, I can easily move to another platform, and (at worst) all I lose is some formatting.
Of course companies are motivated to maximise profits, and MS doesn't have a good record of ethical behaviour, but this particular issue is simply not a concern.
(http://livejournal.com/users/editor)