What?

Uncle Fester says: "When all's said and done, a bunch of those PHP applications will be running at high scale and in production for a long time to come."

Oh yes, come on, don't make me laugh! Let's see how quickly they can replace all the PHP scripts with .NET and Silverlight. Because that's what this takeover is all about in the first place, pushing Silverlight down people's throats, wether they like it or not.

Silent Steve knows it, the 'pull' days for Microsoft are long gone, what's left is 'push', 'push', 'push'.

I'd really like to have an icon with Steve doing the 'monkey boy' dance. Would have been appropriate here.

Excel was always a target

It's laughably easy to write a 'virus' in Excel. Writing a vb macro and calling it 'autoexec' will do the trick - open the file and the code executes. People should always have macros disabled by default.

I'm still using Office97, works fine and whatever function was missing that I needed, I've already written and added it to it. We use for instance a complex calculation for adding a check-digit to our codenumbers, so an add-in with the function does the trick.

Microsoft has a habbit of always breaking previous functionality and/or file formats - good example is Access. I have never had a valid reason to upgrade from 97 to a newer version. Anyone can think of one?

The one thing that really ticks me off is people always using excel for other stuff than spreadsheets. You wouldn't believe what it's used for! Designing standard letters for printing, using it for storing translations, using it for configuration files for websites. To top it all, I once saw a stupid bint at the office use a pocket calculator to fill in the values in an excel-sheet... give me a break. Some people shouldn't use a computer really. And then we're surprised they open any file they receive by mail?

Thanks for that, I needed cheering up this morning

I wasn't in a very good mood this morning, didn't have the best night and then I open Firefox and find this little gem. Hehe, that brightened up my morning.

"users of its new service can only create or edit online documents if they have Office software already installed on their machines" --> that is going to keep me chuckling all day for sure. Come on, what aboslute king of the morons came up with that one. The whole point of having documents in an online app is because it gives you the freedom to create and edit, WHEREVER you are and INDEPENDANT OF THE OS. You get it? That's exactly why Microsoft is never going to be a serious online player, because it clashes with their monopolistic business plan. The freedoms you get from online apps is exactly the freedoms they do NOT want you to have.

But, as someone said in an earlier comment: one born every minute... so this kakamimi plan might of course work for those people.

Thanks for the laugh, I needed that.

Chris.

@ Antoinette Lacroix

The problem would not so much be the fact that car radio's would already be built-in in every car, but that the manufacturer would make sure that no other car radio would function properly in the car. THAT is the main problem. Microsoft will not ever cough up the necessary interoperability protocol information because it would mean that their vendor lock-in wouldn't work anymore, and that's their main business tactic. It is also true that 99% of people using computers haven't got a clue/don't care about this. When you walk into a computer shop and you see 25 screens working, all with Vista on it, and NO other choice, THAT is the problem. I am amazed every day that people can walk into that shop and see this as a normal situation. Baffling... the brainpower of spider-monkeys, just like Bill Gates said.

It's like going to the butcher's for meat and the butcher is saying: what would you like to eat today? We have everything as long as it is pork-chops you want. So, pork-chops it is then?

God people, wake up from time to time, look around and try to use some common sense!

So?

You choose to use Windows, so stop whinging about it already. Get a Mac, or just install a free OS over it, there are many to choose from. Oh, and ask for your money back, there are a lot of better uses for it instead of helping to maintain an illegal monopolist.

Works?

Has anyone ever used this monstrosity anyway? I've been using computers since the 80's, and I have never even met anyone that I know used MS Works...

Want a nice working alternative? Use an easy Linux distro like for instance PCLinuxOS and use openOffice.org. That's probably more than you're ever likely to need. I have that combo running on my old Thinkpad T23 with 256 Mb ram and it works like a charm.

No no no and no

No software patents! There is not a single good reason to have software patents. On the other hand, there are bad ones enough (patent trolls, corporate types engaging in patent blackmail, FUD, market monopolies, ...)

In case they lobby this into existence anyway (and as usual they will), patents should be non-transferable so they cannot be used as a commodity, which is not the purpose of a patent anyway - you know: "protect the original inventor"... yeah right!

Nothing but old-fashioned greed.

Great stuff, and so right

That was a good ranting article that made my day actually. Just tell me, when did you come to Belgium and had a snoop in the company I work for??

While reading, I could constantly hear the sound of hammers hitting nails on the head ;-)

Dear oh dear

I have to agree with Conrad here, what a waste of my time reading this article. Not worthy of the Reg.

not exactly true

You say:

>>Another good example: Google automatically detecting the user’s country from the IP address, automatically serving up the right language page for that country<<

Well David, that is one of my biggest annoyances with websites. I always to prefer them in English, and without being asked, a lot of sites switch to 'my' language. Most annoying and definately 'sucky'!!

Hypocritical EU

Politicians are also hypocrits. They're being lobbied like mad by the music industry on this subject.

What needs to be done is let all music be DRM-free, end of all discussions. What the RIAA hates is that they have to talk to Apple now, and it's Steve Jobs that tells them they can't put their prices up like they would like to do. That's why they would like everyone to use Fairplay, so their influence gets a lot bigger and Steve Jobs' influence gets so diluted they don't have to listen to him anymore.

The same thing would happen with no DRM on the songs, but then the RIAA control-freaks are no longer in control, and then they can't see the difference between a copied song and a 'genuine' one. That means they have to stop their hobby of sueing innocent and hardworking people. They're screwing their customers and their artists, so enough already.