There's an update for 2003 that enables it to open OOXML files (used by 2007 and 2010).

the saving grace of PC gaming is that developers are free to develop and publish as they see fit.

I'm drunk, so .... yeah, I guess. or something.

The point is that no matter what Microsoft decides to release, it's still up to the developers and customers as to if they want to support it.

if the shit don't offer anything worth a damn, don't buy it. XP, Vista, win 7, and now win 8 are all just Graphical User Interfaces layered on top of the NT operating system.

Win XP was actually win NT 5.1, win 8 is NT 6.2.

MS runs around banging drums about it's UI features because it's trying to distract users from the fact that it's selling them what amounts to patched up versions of the same damned thing.

Microsoft is, and has been, wanting to kill off the (windows based) PC market for years because the Xbox market is more directly profitable to them than the PC market and the PC market is draining interest and potential profits from the Xbox (not to mention all the other game boxes). they can't actually kill it off because they don't have control over what gets developed for the PC.

so, no: they can't kill off PC gaming, and even if they get too aggressive with trying to control, suppress, and/or mold the PC gaming market people will just jump ship to develop games on another "Personal Computer" platform (the Android OS is a capable hand held gaming platform and is just a hacked up version of Linux, and it's probably only going to be a few years more before the Linux and Android branches get reemerged at which point Gaming on Linux should take off like a rocket).

I'm gonna go wwatch Farscape before my drunkness wares off.
or you can just use open office, it's much better now that Apache is running it's development.

That's what revision control is for. You get all the intermediary stages saved into one file. The downside is you get a larger file, but they're all there neatly for anybody that receives the file. Not sure how many revisions it can store though.

I think most office suites allow that these days.
IIRC there's also an ODF plug in that's available for it as well. OOXML is an abomination and just there so that MS can claim to support an open standard. Just look at the shenanigans they had to go through to get ISO support.
Libreoffice, despite the stupid name, it's where all the actual development is being done and it's the one that has better support for MS Office files.

This one always makes me laugh. Not just when Microsoft is mentioned, but most other software developer / publisher. Do you really think the thousands of researchers, developers, geniuses working at Microsoft / Apple / whatever company play around Halo all day?
The desktop / laptop OS market is worth 10+ billion dollars every year. The console market is bellow or around 1 billion. Why would they want to do that?
Abomination because of what? Its huge documentation? Because some FOSS guy said so? Oh, I know, because Microsoft developed it, and FOSS people cannot handle that. :p

I use both formats, haven't had problem with either of them a long time now.

EDIT: I haven't read into the politics part of it, and probably never will, as I've never been interested in it much. Was talking merely from a consumer's point of view.

no, they don't sit around playing Halo all day.

they sit around in meetings all day, being told by the marketing division how visual flair is more important than actual function.

then they have meetings about how to implement that flair in a manner that the general public will think that they are actually paying for something functionally improved from what they already own.

then they day dream about actual work that would improve and drive the boundaries of what computers can do.

then they mention these ideas during the marketing meetings, and get bitched out for it.

then they go to actually do some work, think about implementing those ideas that they had without marketing's approval, remember how much they get paid to esentually sit on their asses and pretend to be actually listening, then say "fuck it, I'm just gonna cash the checks and retire early" before going home with out putting more than three fingers to the keyboard.

OOXML should never have become a standard, MS was late to the party after ODF was approved and managed to push it through with the help of new voters from firms that had never participated in the process previously.

What's more, I'm old enough to remember MS' embrace, extend and extinguish method of doing business, and I'm exceedingly wary when MS pulls these sorts of stunts as it's done a tremendous amount of harm in the past.

Perhaps abomination was a strong word to use, but ultimately the whole situation was abominable, ISO is a standards body, if we're going to let the free market make a selection then why do we need ISO?

no abomination was about right; MS forced it through and then all but discontinued it, just to damage the use of ODF.

There's a slight bit more to it than that. They needed to be able to claim that they were supporting an ISO approved "open" format for when they go bidding on contracts. But, AFAIK it was never really that open and always had the risk of having extra stuff crammed into it so that they could read OOXML files from everywhere, but that allowed people to make ones that couldn't be read by other software.

Touchscreen UIs have to become a heck a lot better than today to surpass the ease of use of mouse and keyboard. Anyone can try to write to e.g. GOG forums with a mere touchscreen tablet to try it out. True PITA. As said, the best feature of my ASUS Transformer still is its keyboard, which even accepts USB mice.

Maybe at some point we're all accustomed to using (only?) touchscreens for everything, but in my mind it is probably the same as console FPS games: sure we can all eventually get used to the inferior controls (compared to mouse + keyboard FPS games), but they still are much inferior, period.

As for voice controls: good for e.g. car navigators where you need hands-free, stupid idea for using your device in a library, open office or even a bus. I'd hate to have to write this message now by speaking it out loud, I don't know how my gf would feel about it, and I just don't want to talk to myself hours and hours in end. Heck, I don't want to use voice controls even for PC/video games.

Just because some new UI inventions became successful does not mean all of them did.


Oh yeah, as for getting rid of Aero: if it finally means I can get rid of the fuzzy-looking semi-transparent "superbar" of Win7 that makes my eyes bleed without affecting the performance negatively (e.g. by simply switching off Aero), I'm all for it. I don't know who was the SH*THEAD in Microsoft thinking it is such a cool idea to have white text on top of grey or light-blue background.

:-(

thanks man it's just that I grew up with windows since windows 98 back when I was a kid everything I love about desktops/laptops is about to change their OSes just to work on tablets/smartphones and I do not like them so it's only natural that I got scared

What do you mean they discontinued it? It is the default format in 2010 (and with SP2 in 2007, I think).

The only good change I see here is that they've brought back the 'up-one-level' button.

The OOXML that got accepted in ISO is not the same OOXML that Office 2007 and 2010 writes. Third-party applications that implement the former cannot reliably read the latter (they can to some extent, but not good enough for slightly complex documents), and since the latter isn't open, anything other than MS applications that try to support it will have to rely on the same processes that got them to support the classic MS Office formats in the first place - reverse engineering or guesswork.

Is this what you're referring to? http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dmahugh/archive/2010/04/06/office-s-support-for-iso-iec-29500-strict.aspx

If so, it would appear that they are slowly adding support for different parts of OOXML into Office, with Office 15 to feature both read / write capabilities of the Strict version.