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When I was in high school, I learned about a feature of Excel called "Conditional Formatting". It's a very useful feature, and it's pretty much self-described: it varies the formatting of cells based on which of a set of conditions the contents of the cell match.

For instance, when doing a budget, you can have any negative amounts automatically coloured red; any cell containing "John" could turn blue, while cells containing "Mary" turn pink.

8 years later, it's good to see that this tried-and-tested feature isn't considered old, stale or passe - no, it's still a new feature!

Is it false advertising to lead users to believe that a feature only belongs to the newer version, which they have to pay money to upgrade to, when it's in fact an old feature that they've been able to use for the better part of a decade?

A long time ago, I was reading a book containing (amongst other things) synopses of ST:DS9 episodes. The author made an observation at one point that the series never made much sense to ver until ve realised that ST:DS9 is in fact two completely seperate series, with common characters and storylines marketed under a single name. The author refers to the episodes which focus on Starfleet and their issues as ST:DS9, as distinct from the episodes that focus on the Bajorans and their issues, which are called Star Trek:Terok Nor.

I've lately come to a similar conclusion about Dare Obasanjo and his blog. I used to get confused about the quality of his posts; some are interesting, informative, and useful - for instance, his most recent post, or a post from my birthday about OpenID.

Others, though, are dreck. In posts like these, he goes off in long tirades, completely abandons common sense, and instead parrots the MS company like a good little market-droid.

I'm not confused any more though; I've come to the same acceptance of Dare as that author (note to self: must find name of that author) came to with ST:DS9. I now think in terms of the blog having two completely distinct authors, who happen to share some interests and co-brand their posts. The former are written by Dare the blogger, the latter are written by Dare the Voice of Microsoft.

(The pointless wikipedia tirades, in which he tirelessly restates basic facts about Wikipedia as though they were damning criticisms - I'm not sure of they're written by D:tVoM, or if they come from a third contributor).

(found via BoingBoing:

And it's lucky for Microsoft that prior innovators were willing to go out on a limb and fight for the freedom to innovate without asking permission first -- otherwise Microsoft would have had to ask permission from all the world's websites before it launched Internet Explorer (built on the backs of all the websites, without asking them permission, don't you know).
...
Remember, if Google wins the Google Library Project lawsuits, the fair use principle it establishes will benefit everyone, including those who want to scan books to compete with Google. Microsoft's "collaborate" principle, in contrast, will benefit only those companies who are big enough to get big copyright owners to answer their calls -- a world where Microsoft will have an unfair advantage.

So kudos to Google for standing up for fair use. And shame on Microsoft for suggesting that only those who "collaborate" are entitled to innovate.

(from the EFF)

What more needs to be said?

I've been away on holiday, so I've slipped behind in the blogosphere a little.

I only became aware last night that there's been a flap over a potential cannot-be-easily-disabled startup sound in Vista. People are in a tizzy over the thought that there might be a sound they can't control - although as arstechnica and Scoble, amongst many others, have pointed out, Macs have always done this, most gaming consoles do this - it's really not a new idea at all, so why the flap?

I personally think everyone is missing the point here.

Scoble has spoken to "Steve Ball, group program manager for the Windows Audio Video Excellence team (basically, the team that builds the stuff that plays audio and video in Windows)" who says:

The current plan ... is that there will be a pre-wired sound that plays when the system is ready for you to logon. This is the plan of record for quite a few months.

You can do other things with your attention and your eyes during cold boot without feeling like you have to watch and wait.

To me, the issue isn't that there's going to be a sound alerting me to the fact that the computer is ready to use. The issue here is that MS confiently expect that the Vista boot process will be so long that the vast majority of users will have drifted away and won't notice that it's ready.

Wow, talk about a quality product.

Tiger boots on my 4+ year old laptop, an old 866mhz jobbie with 512mb of ram, in around 60 seconds. On the newest Intel iMacs, it boots in something like 20 seconds.

Given the choice between an OS that boots before I can lose interest, and one that assumes i'm going to be away getting some coffee while I'm waiting and will need an audible alert to tell me to come back - I'll choose the former, thanks.

The first thing that jumped out at me when reading the press release were these words:

As a result, certain compromises and customer disclosures will be a necessary part of translating between the two formats.

That, to me, seems to be the thrust of the whole press release: Yes, we're going to help you convert your documents to ODF - but why would you want to? It's an inferior format, and everything is going to break when you try.

The most other significant thing was the amount of work that is going to be required in order to use the converter. It's not going to be the case that Office can just open and save and work with ODF documents just as easily as it deals with so many other formats; rather, it seems that opening an ODF is going to result in it being convereted to OpenXML, any editing will be done on the OpenXML document - and if you want to save as ODF, you'll have to re-export, and lose formatting information along the way.

I was going to write more about this, but I think it's all summarised over at Computerworld very well, particularly in the quote from Pamela Jones titled "MS: OK. OK, we'll set up an "OS" project to build an ODF killer. Er, we mean translator." (although, now that I think about it, that title in itself is a pretty good summary):

Here's the choice it is trying to posit: You will have to download their ODF translator yourself and install it. Or, just stick with Microsoft's one-stop competing solution that is built in to their software offering. Considering Microsoft's monopoly position, and my mom's and most governments' typical technical skills, guess what Microsoft hopes moms and governments will choose? I see a plan in not building the ODF translator into Microsoft's software. So truly clever. It looks open. But it's marginalizing ODF. I think the press release might better have been titled, "Microsoft announces what it hopes will be its ODF killer."