Live data from Hacker News

Office 2000 is good to go

hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com

151–160 of 160 posts

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#151
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My biggest beef with Sinofsky is that he was apparently the one heavily pushing for JavaScript as a high-level ".NET replacement" for end-user apps running on top of all that COM API in Win8. So much effort spent on dev tooling around that, when it could have been spent on improving .NET instead.

To be fair, that’s precisely what Electron is, and Microsoft now uses it heavily. Mind you, they’re using Electron because they couldn’t make a .NET GUI framework live for more than two years. MAUI is due to die around 2025, mark my words.

It is quite telling of the ongoing mess when Blazor steals the show, they keep talking about React Native for WinUI, and a third party (Uno) was able to deliver when Microsoft own teams can't.

Also why on earth did they decided to go with Catalist for macOS, when everyone knows it is only good for porting iOS apps?

I agree with the death expectation for MAUI.

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#153
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've given up on reporting it so here you get another for free: if you use the information protection feature in SharePoint, be sure to test it extremely carefully. We evaluated it for a project two years ago and what we luckily realized before putting it into production was that there was a simple and straightforward way for an end user to download unencrypted versions of all the files they had access to, and no way…

If I understand your scenario, it is pretty silly anyways and probably meant as a checkbox to tick for procurement to agree to purchase Office 365. It does not make sense to me to say I can view a document but not download it. If I can view a document, I can do screen capture. I think this used to be called the analog hole or something.

No, that's not what I'm talking about. To try to secure against the analog hole you have to increase background checks, only open documents in secure areas etc.

What I'm talking about is a light way to secure documents that are sent with trustworthy technicians out in the field, to prevent against consequences from honest mistakes, not intentional spying.

This worked pretty well in first tests and for the clients demands (but every company should make sure to verify it for their own requirements).

What Microsoft tried to sell us on was that SharePoint should be able apply this lightweight protection automatically to these files.

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree except the MDI (Multiple Document Interface) was a really dumb idea. Having windows inside of windows. Now that I see the double window controls I remember how bad and confusing that was. And so much work moving all these scroll bars trying to reach other scroll bars inside them. Yuck. Besides for MDI which a lot of MS apps suffered from, it was great.

I loved MDI, and was actually frustrated with the somewhat watered down Office 97 version of it. It's like tabs, but you can also put dialogs side by side.

Well it did have its benefits yes. However it was a total PITA if you wanted to work in 2 documents on 2 different screens. You had to stretch the window across both screens and then position the sub-windows manually. You couldn't just plonk each on a display and maximise.

And scrolling regions within scrolling regions really are awful IMO.

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#156
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I understand your scenario, it is pretty silly anyways and probably meant as a checkbox to tick for procurement to agree to purchase Office 365. It does not make sense to me to say I can view a document but not download it. If I can view a document, I can do screen capture. I think this used to be called the analog hole or something.

No, that's not what I'm talking about. To try to secure against the analog hole you have to increase background checks, only open documents in secure areas etc. What I'm talking about is a light way to secure documents that are sent with trustworthy technicians out in the field, to prevent against consequences from honest mistakes, not intentional spying. This worked pretty well in first tests and for the clients dem…

> What I'm talking about is a light way to secure documents that are sent with trustworthy technicians out in the field, to prevent against consequences from honest mistakes, not intentional spying.

Isn't this what Azure Information Protection is supposed to be?

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that's not what I'm talking about. To try to secure against the analog hole you have to increase background checks, only open documents in secure areas etc. What I'm talking about is a light way to secure documents that are sent with trustworthy technicians out in the field, to prevent against consequences from honest mistakes, not intentional spying. This worked pretty well in first tests and for the clients dem…

> What I'm talking about is a light way to secure documents that are sent with trustworthy technicians out in the field, to prevent against consequences from honest mistakes, not intentional spying. Isn't this what Azure Information Protection is supposed to be?

Yep. And somehow SharePoint was supposed to apply either AIP or something similar automatically.

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I loved MDI, and was actually frustrated with the somewhat watered down Office 97 version of it. It's like tabs, but you can also put dialogs side by side.

Well it did have its benefits yes. However it was a total PITA if you wanted to work in 2 documents on 2 different screens. You had to stretch the window across both screens and then position the sub-windows manually. You couldn't just plonk each on a display and maximise. And scrolling regions within scrolling regions really are awful IMO.

Well, you've got a point about multi-display. Once that came around, it lost its appeal.

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#159
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The native Word file format is so complicated because it was basically a filesystem in a file, designed for extensibility scenarios such as embedding documents into other documents via OLE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COM_Structured_Storage

The structured storage part isn’t the problem, because Word doesn’t actually use it much except when you use OLE (the seemingly builtin things that use OLE are images, the abominable Equation, and maybe WordArt). IIRC the Word 97 format is essentially the previous Word format (whatever it was called) changed to use UCS-2 throughout, packed into a single stream in OLE storage, plus a bit of frills such as \005SummaryI…

OpenOffice Writer and LibreOffice Writer have their proper bugs of their own, to the point that it's very frustrating to work with a non-trivial document. Many of these include some aspects of formatting not being saved to file and not restored when re-loading the file. And this is saving to .odt and not .doc or .docx. The Calcs have many bugs too. I have reported some but have since given up. For serious work I return to Word.

The other alternatives are not better. A couple of weeks ago I needed to create a catalog of products that is just a few pages long. Calligra couldn't even show the image I added; there was bounding box which could be moved around but no images were shown. Abiword got glacially slow when adding a ~4MB image.

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Office will use whatever fonts you have installed. Calibri is already dated, it hasn’t aged too well.

When people talk about fonts being "dated", they just mean "overused". Virtually every mainstream font out there is a riff on some design that's been around for a century or more. Calibri replaced Times New Roman as Word's default font, because TNR had become ubiquitous (and because docs were starting to be read on-screen more than in-print, so switching to a sans-serif default made sense). But TNR is an absolutely b…

> And only the most pretentious of font snobs (…) could tell the difference between a Helvetica and an Arial specimen.

Everybody with a passing interest in typefaces can tell Helvetica and Arial apart—that’s hardly a hallmark of pretentiousness. Judging Arial as a Helvetica clone might be pretentious, especially given how Helvetica is itself a clone (of Akzidenzk Grotesk).

> TNR is an absolutely brilliant font for its intended use case (i.e. dense body text).

Being optimised for denseness makes it a bad default choice for Word though… Especially for the page wide one column layouts that 99% of Word documents are. I think it works much better in the narrow newspaper columns for which it was designed, and where space is at a premium.

Times and Times New Roman get used often in scientific publishing, I imagine because the fonts default-looking-ness makes things look undesigned and unfrivolous. Also here it looks off in the single column designs most books use. I have a hard copy of SICP, which is typeset in LaTeX, and it really bums me that it’s set in Times. Especially since LaTeX’s default font Computer Modern works better for readability IMHO.

> Virtually every mainstream font out there is a riff on some design that's been around for a century or more.

For sure! https://i.liketightpants.net/and/no-one-starts-from-scratch-...

Post reply on HN