Rants

Why the mandatory IE7 upgrade was a bad idea

For anyone who keeps their Windows XP machine set to automatically install updates, a few weeks ago they would have been surprised to see their Internet Explorer look different. The reason for this was that Microsoft set their new web browser, IE7, to be pushed out via Windows Update as a security fix / upgrade, which meant for anyone with their updates set to automatic that it happened without their knowledge.

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Subversion's one problem

I've used the document revision management system Subversion for a few years now and find it to be an excellent tool that has never given me any problems. Until this week, that is. I was helping to set it up on a web server that has Fedora Core 4 as its OS - we wanted to have a central code repository for the various projects we worked on and it was a logical step to place it there.

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Reasons why Microsoft's OpenXML standard is junk

Here's a wonderful explanation of why Microsoft's "open" OpenXML "standard" is a wolf in sheep's clothing: http://www.robweir.com/blog/2006/01/how-to-hire-guillaume-portes.html In short, the specification is littered with little tidbits which say that to properly display a file you must understand details of how 12 year old software (Word 95) worked, or reverse engineer it.... And that, folks, is why I don't use Microsoft software and stopped buying their junk several years ago. Update: Just to better explain why this is a problem, there is no guarantee that Microsoft is using its own specifications in its own software, namely Office 2007.

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Why Vista is a 10-year-old history lesson nobody has learned

Microsoft's upcoming Windows Vista operating system is a perfect example of why people should stop supporting this useless company: it doesn't have most of the new features it was supposed to have, it is more expensive than it needs to be (the feature-complete version costs $400, versus $130 for Mac OS X), and will cause a great deal of headaches both short-term and long-term due to its poor design. Here's a great article which explains why the public needs to realize this is the second time Microsoft have done this and they shouldn't be let get away with it:

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