mypapit gnu/linux

Nothing actually happened today so I lazily start up my yahoo messenger after i got home from a tiresome ride around the town to shop things that i need. As the yahoo messenger popped-up, It shows most of my friends are offline with a few labelled as “idle”…

After a short while, i got a “pow” sound from my shiny new Yahoo Messenger 7 Beta “You got 1 unread message”. “Who could be emailing me to my yahoo account? Another spam?”, I clicked on Yahoo Messenger’s cute email icon, and i’ve been ushered to Yahoo mail website…..

i have hard time to get my eyes up, suddenly i noticed this :

Please concentrate your eyes in these lines, specificly for the first and third line.

? You are using 1% of your 1.0GB MB limit
? Go to Inbox or Check Other Mail
? Yahoo! Mail gives you 1.0GB MB for free!

Apparently somebody at yahoo.com forgot to clean up the MB (notice the “1.0GB MB limit” line )after yahoo have succesfully upgraded it’s account limit to 1GB. I hope that yahoo.com is going to fix this thing soon, because this cosmetic mistake is really noticable when you are using any type of browser that is “not fully supported by Yahoo” like Netscape 4.8.

Note : I really dont use Netscape 4.8, i accidently switched my Mozilla Firefox user-agent to Netscape 4.8, some coincidence huh?

p/s : i did not fake up the screenshot… :p

The next version of Microsoft Office codename “Office 12” will have a new default XML file formats instead of proprietery binary format as previous versions. If all things goes well, the new default formats for Word, Excel and Powerpoint will change, respectively, from .”doc,” “.xls” and “.ppt” to “.docx,” “.xlsx” and “.pptx,” Microsoft said.

Unbelievable but true. Microsoft has once envisioned the idea of creating an XML document format for it’s popular Office product even back in 2000. However, the final product of Office 10 or Microsoft Office XP seems to drop the idea altogether. Maybe it got to do with Microsoft business strategy to lock down its user in it’s own proprietery binary format.

The proprietery format not only confine users to Microsoft products, but makes it hard for users to exchange documents between platforms, limiting its usage. Not to mention that the Microsoft Office format have been kept secret all this time making it hard for people to write a compatible word processor/reader on other platforms.

The office binary format also have been a pain in ass for certain power user where they can’t transform the documents into other format. They are most comfortable and often rely on other office product which uses XML such as OpenOffice or Staroffice for that matter.

It is uncertain that whether Openoffice and abiword move to adopt OASIS open document format (odt) that permits even broader documents have its influence on Microsoft’s decision. Microsoft which also one of OASIS sponsor, has made available under royalty-free license the XML schemas of its Office file formats. The new Microsoft Office 12 suite will ship sometime in 2006.

“Open file format continues our policy of providing our XML schemas in an open, royalty-free license,” said Microsoft’s Numoto. “That’s an important element of facilitating partners and developers to use that schema to integrate the format into their solutions.” – Microsoft

References :
1. Washington Post
2. Openoffice.org
3. OASIS Open Document Standards