A deal from Microsoft??

[Ancient Observer]

Like many others, I am v. suspicious of microsoft.
However, there's a "return to studies" deal that I came across that others might be interested in. It is restricted to EAME.

I know we don't do commercials here, but I asked a mod, and s/he said post it.

In summary, it is full MS Office 07 for UKP 35. (£35). With a license!! In the UK, pc world would charge more than twice that.

I ordered a copy and it came in 3 days. It works, as does the license. You can use it on 2 p.c.s

To get it, you have to be either a student, or the guardian of a student. I imagine that most of the world is guarding a student.

URL - go look there if you are interested.

If this link doesn't work, the offer is on software4students.co.uk

Microsoft Office 2007 Home and Student Software UK at Software4Students.co.uk (http://www.software4students.co.uk/?gclid=COPp96zRqpwCFWIB4wodCWYdlQ)

[lomapaseo]

My box says made in Puerto Rico and is for qualified military personnel *(dependents, retirees, guys with license plates that say support our military, etc.)

US $50 in the PX

[Mac the Knife]

My, my........MS really IS desperate to keep people using their Office software (and locked in to their proprietary formats).

:ok:

Mac

[Saab Dastard]

Flogging off stock they are not allowed to sell in the US (see patent infringement thread)?

SD

[Loose rivets]

Yes, that was my first thought. Totally amazing to think someone can order MS not to sell their flagship office WP.

[Keygrip]

I've *always* known them to sell a package which, over here (USA) is called "Students and Teachers" edition.

Been over the counter box since launch and was valid on THREE computers.

No idea of a price.

[Jofm5]

My, my........MS really IS desperate to keep people using their Office software (and locked in to their proprietary formats).


Not sure what your trying to say (is this just MS bashing), which bit of the new office XML format that office 2007 uses is not published in the public domain ?

You may wish to have a read of Office Open XML - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML) where it not only discusses the openness but where to get the specifications.

[Ancient Observer]

Keygrip,
yup, they do the same Students/teachers edition in UK, but via retailers/resellers, who want about UKP 80 (£80) or more for it.
That's why the MS sponsored website offer of 35 is worth posting.

[Mac the Knife]

....is this just MS bashing...?

No. OOXML as a "standard" is only so because MS rammed it through ECMA and later ISO against numerous objections (not the least of which was that the specifications had not been finalised or even properly reviewed).

The specifications for OOXLM are so prolix and Baroque (over 6000 pages versus 867 for the long ISO accepted OpenDocument specification) that even MS admit that their own software cannot create compliant documents and probably never will.

(Personally I find the choice of the title, "Office Open XML" offensive, since it is an obvious attempt to produce confusion with the Sun's popular OpenOffice suite, but that's MS for you)

More specific criticisms (culled from your beloved Wikipedia) are

* ECMA-376 1st edition does not conform to ISO 8601:2004 "Representation of Dates and Times." It requires that implementations replicate a Lotus 1-2-3 [63] bug that dictates that 1900 is a leap year, which in fact it isn't. Products complying with ECMA-376 would be required to use the WEEKDAY() spreadsheet function, and therefore assign incorrect dates to some days of the week, and also miscalculate the number of days between certain dates.[64]. ECMA-376 2nd edition (ISO/IEC 29500) does use 8601:2004 "Representation of Dates and Times".[65][66]

* ECMA-376 1st edition "Embedded Object Alternate Image Requests Types" and "Clipboard Format Types" in the standard refer back to Windows Metafiles or Enhanced Metafiles – each of which are proprietary formats that have hard-coded dependencies on the Windows itself. It should instead have referenced the platform neutral standard ISO/IEC 8632 "Computer Graphics Metafile".[64]

* Office Open XML (ISO/IEC 29500:2008 Part 4 - Transitional Migration Features) contains specific compatibility settings used when converting existing office documents to Office Open XML, most notably: autoSpaceLikeWord95, footnoteLayoutLikeWW8, lineWrapLikeWord6, mwSmallCaps, shapeLayoutLikeWW8, suppressTopSpacingWP, truncateFontHeightsLikeWP6, uiCompat97To2003, useWord2002TableStyleRules, useWord97LineBreakRules, wpJustification and wpSpaceWidth.[67]. The compatibility settings are fully documented in the ISO/IEC 29500 / Ecma 2nd edition specifications".[68].

* Office Open XML uses unique tag for each compatibility setting. Currently, the only application’s compatibility settings are the applications that the standard’s authors have decided to include. For other application’s compatibility settings to be added, further tag names would need to be defined in the specification, potentially creating thousands of them, each having nothing to do with interoperability.[69]

* Use of DrawingML and the transitional-use-only VML instead of W3C recommendation SVG.[70] VML did not become a W3C recommendation.[71]

* Use of Office MathML instead of W3C recommendation MathML.[72]. MathML[73] is a W3C recommendation for the "inclusion of mathematical expressions in Web pages" and "machine to machine communication" that has been around since about 1999. However, most mathematicians continue to use the much older TeX format as their main method for typesetting complex mathematical formulae. TeX is not an ISO standard, but is fully documented and is the de facto standard for typesetting mathematical expressions.

* Office Open XML does not define a macro language, leaving this aspect to be application-defined.[citation needed]

* The standard is long,[74] with the version submitted to ISO comprising 6546 pages. The need and appropriateness of such length has been widely questioned. Google remarks that the OpenDocument specification is 867 pages long and achieves the same goals.[75] If ISO were to give OOXML with its 6546 pages the same level of review that other standards have seen, it would take 18 years (6576 days for 6546 pages) to achieve comparable levels of review to the existing ODF standard (871 days for 867 pages).[75] Considering that OOXML had only received about 5.5% of the review comparable standards (ostensibly ODF) have undergone[75], Google sees "reports about inconsistencies, contradictions and missing information [as] hardly surprising."[75]

So no, this isn't MS bashing.

:*

Mac