If you feel like living dangerously, you can download the Office 2007 [*] beta code here. If you don’t already have the .NET Framework 1.1 installed, you’ll have to download and install it first.
[*]Yeah, I know that’s not the official name.
Author: Ed Bott
Tech journalist. Author of 25+ books. ZDNET Contributing Editor since 2006.
Contact info: https://edbott.com/contact-me/
Yoda would be proud of the Office team
I missed this two weeks ago when it first appeared on Inside Office Online, but it appears the official name of the next version of Office has changed:
The next version of Office is officially known as the 2007 Microsoft Office system. Little ‘s’. Year before the product. Exactly 32 characters. Naturally, Office Online editors balked. When newspapers, trade journals, bloggers and even company executives are saying Office 2007, you assume that’s going to hold muster with branding. It’s not. When even SteveB himself gets flame mail (OK, maybe only a flicker mail, but still an e-mail) reminding him to use the proper wording, you know it’s serious.
I predict this will go exactly nowhere. Unless you’re a salmon, swimming upstream just wears you out, and this attempt to change the established convention for naming computer software is most certainly an upstream swim.
Windows 95, Office 95, Office 97, Windows 98, Windows 2000, Office 2000, Office 2003, Windows Server 2003.
And they want to break that string with 2007 Microsoft Office? It’ll never catch on.
How not to publish a correction
Over the weekend, a blog I had never heard of before (msblog.org) got a lot of publicity for passing along an unsubstantiated and highly questionable rumor that supposedly listed the retail prices that Microsoft is going to attach to Windows Vista.
According to this list, the prices of Windows Vista were going to be obscenely high, with typical prices of $500–1000. The list originally appeared on a German site and was picked up with no questioning by author Dennis Fraederich. Trouble is, it didn’t pass the smell test, with obvious errors and some internal problems that should have been obvious to anyone who looked at it for more than five seconds.
And now, the folks at msblog.org have simply deleted the contents of the original post, changing its headline to read “Post pulled due to public flaming.” The comments from readers are gone, too, available only to administrators of the site.
Now, there’s an interesting strategy. Get something wrong? Don’t correct it. Don’t retract it. Don’t apologize. Don’t respond to your critics. Just pull the post, hide the comments, and pretend it never happened, even though a few dozen other sites have already reprinted the bogus information and posted links to the original article.
Look, anyone can make a mistake. And it’s easy to get caught up in the frenzy to post something that appears to be a juicy scoop. But if you want to be taken seriously as a news source, you have to be willing to take your lumps when you get it wrong. Deleting the post is gutless and a complete disservice to your readers.
Am I going to listen to anything else these people have to say? No. Their credibility is now in negative territory.
Maybe the American Idol vote wasn’t so close after all
A disclaimer upfront: I don’t watch American Idol. I only see little snippets of the show on other TV programs, which is where I learned, involuntarily, about the incredibly close ballot last week to determine which of the three finalists would be booted back to obscurity.
This morning, thanks to Andrew Tobias, we learn that the balloting may not have been that close after all. Commenter M.I.T. Howard explains:
The whole country has just been subject to voting fraud (well maybe only the half who care). Yes, last week’s American Idol vote tallies were meaningless. Remember the percentages for the three finalists: 33.68%, 33.26%, 33.06% Was America really this closely divided? Unlikely. The close percentages are a tribute to the quality of the phone system. The phone lines for all 3 candidates were saturated! The lines were open for a fixed period of time and the pipeline of people voting was enough to saturate the system. The phone system did a marvelous job of accepting almost identical vote tallies for each candidate. Now that’s good engineering.
Makes sense to me.
Today’s word of the day…
… is expletive. Note that some people spell it “explitive.” They are wrong. One could even call them “ignorant.”
Tomorrow’s word of the day will actually be a phrase: ad hominem.
Not sure what I did to set Mr. Thurrott off this way, but we’ll just have to consider the source, I guess.
Too bad I won’t be at WinHEC next week. It might have been amusing to talk to Paul directly and ask, WTF? (Oh, wait. Is that an expletive?)
Oh, and Paul…
Why computer security matters
Professor Ed Felten passes along the best summary I’ve seen of this week’s report of serious Diebold Voting Machine Flaws:
The attacks described in Hursti’s report would allow anyone who had physical access to a voting machine for a few minutes to install malicious software code on that machine, using simple, widely available tools. The malicious code, once installed, would control all of the functions of the voting machine, including the counting of votes.
Hursti’s findings suggest the possibililty of other attacks, not described in his report, that are even more worrisome.
In addition, compromised machines would be very difficult to detect or to repair. The normal procedure for installing software updates on the machines could not be trusted, because malicious code could cause that procedure to report success, without actually installing any updates. A technician who tried to update the machine’s software would be misled into thinking the update had been installed, when it actually had not.
On election day, malicious software could refuse to function, or it could silently miscount votes.
A voting machine is just another computer. And those of us who study computer security know that there are some immutable rules. Like, for instance:
Law #1: If a bad guy can persuade you to run his program on your computer, it’s not your computer anymore
Law #2: If a bad guy can alter the operating system on your computer, it’s not your computer anymore
Law #3: If a bad guy has unrestricted physical access to your computer, it’s not your computer anymore
And when your computer is a voting machine, that last rule needs to be edited just a little bit: If a bad guy has unrestricted physical access to your computer, it’s not your government anymore.
Scary stuff.
Everything you wanted to know about User Account Control
I’ve got a pair of posts up at ZDNet that deal with the controversial User Account Control (UAC) feature in Windows Vista. Due to an unfortunate editing error, a big chunk of the second post was inadvertently left out of the original post (which was Slashdotted). So if you read that second post and found it a little fuzzy, well, go back and take another look.
- A fresh look at Vista’s User Account Control shows the dialog boxes you’re likely to see when you try to install a program or configure a system setting in Windows Vista.
- A fresh look at Vista’s User Account Control, Part 2 explains why you may encounter UAC consent dialog boxes when you perform seemingly innocent file operations. (This is the one that was inadvertently munged in its initial posting.)
The conclusion to this three-part series lists ways you can work around UAC (some safe, some stupid and – alas – already widely publicized). I’ll also offer Microsoft some suggestions on how to make this feature work better in Vista’s final release.
If you’re thinking of playing with evaluating Windows Vista Beta 2 when it’s released to the public (maybe sooner than you think), be sure to save a link to this page.
Good news, bad news about Office 2007
There’s an annoying bug in Outlook 2007 that causes it to crash when opening or previewing certain messages. That’s the bad news. And, I hasten to add, it’s not unexpected. This is, after all, beta software.
The good news is that the program closes itself, sends a quick ping to Redmond, and reopens in seconds. And this helpful message appears:
OK, I’m ready for Beta 2.
Those geeks in Houston know how to eat and drink
Dwight Silverman passes along the agenda for the monthly Technology Bytes Geek Gathering in Houston. Now, I’m sure it will be extra-geeky fun (free WiFi too), but my favorite part of the announcement is the location.
It’s at Tropioca. A coffee/tapioca bar.
Coffee and tapioca. Together. Coffee is my favorite non-alcoholic beverage. Tapioca has been one of my favorite desserts since I was about this high. Now, if Dwight tells me there’s a joint that serves good barbeque ribs brisket [thanks, Brad!] within walking distance, I’d say they’ve hit the trifecta.
Corel completes destruction of WinZip
Sometime in the past few years, I stopped using WinZip. That’s after ten years of enthusiastic use of what used to be an essential utility. It helped that basic support for the non-proprietary and widely used Zip format was built into Windows Me and then Windows XP.
But WinZip also lost me because somewhere along the way they turned from a scrappy little underdog that sold a necessary product at a reasonable price into a faceless corporation that tried to maximize its revenue stream by squeezing its longtime customers. First they bundled Google’s toolbar. Then, after years of offering free upgrades to paying customers like me, the company started charging for upgrades last year. In fact, the new, $29.95 license (the pro version is a mind-boggling $50) doesn’t include any upgrade rights unless I pay an extra $6.95 for upgrade assurance. (I think that’s close to what I paid for my original WinZip license 10 years ago.) As a longtime customer, I get a paltry five bucks off the single-user license price. Gee, thanks, WinZip.
It’s no wonder that WinZip’s revenues have been plummeting in the past three years.
And now the transformation is complete:
Corel Corporation Acquires WinZip Computing
Corel Corporation (NASDAQ: CREL; TSX: CRE) today announced that it has completed the acquisition of WinZip Computing, makers of the world’s leading aftermarket compression utility.
So long, WinZip.
Update:
A commenter at PC World’s Techlog says:
[A]fter 15 years in this industry, I have to say that I don’t know of ANYONE who has EVER actually paid for WinZip.
I paid for my copy of WinZip back in the day. I know others who did as well. But individual users are the exception. The real revenue stream for a product like WinZip these days is from corporations, which dare not have dodgy unlicensed evaluation software on their users machines. So because they know that some of their users will try to sneak WinZip in, they buy site licenses that cover the cost for every seat in the organization. It’s cheap insurance against lawsuits.
I would bet those licenses are a buck or two per seat, rather than the $29 or $49 that WinZip wants. Those prices may have made sense in 1993, when a computer cost $5000 and a copy of WordPerfect was $299, but they don’t make a lot of sense today, when free and cheap alternatives are widely available.
Ed Bott 