Microsoft

Once again the Register talks rubbish. They say 'copyright' when they mean 'trademark'; and they shoot their guy's case in the foot by saying that he 'registered the domain in August because he thought it would be cool to have a site that sounded like the famous company to show his Web designing skills'. What's that you say? He was actually deliberately trying to trade on the goodwill Microsoft had built up in order to promote himself? Yeah, a judge will look favourably on that. It's not exactly passing off, but it's not going to help his case either.

Idiots. --ChiarkPerson

(PeterTaylor) Since Reuters [also] say copyright, I doubt that's El Reg's mistake. (Linked article more recent - MS saying they took things "maybe a little too seriously").

Ok, you obviously didn't read the article.  It has become abundantly apparent that you perform every evil that you criticise others of.  Personal attacks aside - el reg criticises him for that very point, and readers' letters elsewhere ponder whether it was that bad in the email.  As well as wondering whether the whole thing is a publicity stunt.  He is, indeed, blatantly attempting to pass off.  You might also like to consider the role of the lawyer firms who scout the net for likely cases and then attempt to sell their services to companies when they find them.  --Vitenka

Is that what you make of 'And so he should. It would seem Microsoft has no choice but to back down as, legally, it doesn.t have a hope in hell of winning and there are plenty of lawyers out there who would love to get a win against Microsoft under their belt.'

I take it that you don't have much experience reading the register, and their usual style of sarcasm then?  The 'blatantly' bit was my addition though, not theirs - apologies for the confusion.  I don't see how they legally have a hope of getting the domain on the merits of "But it's his NAME for crying out loud" - but they certainly ought to be able to get an order making him slap on something disclaiming any relationship.  See the similar nissan case.  --Vitenka

Or possible irresponsible with the above.  The number of /Outlook-exploiting viruses springs to mind at this point

I'm sure this discussion has occurred elsewhere on the Wiki but I will point out that a good part of that is people looking for exploits in the most popular browser/e-mail client as opposed to any particular weakness on Microsoft's part.  That doesn't mean that Microsoft shouldn't take more care of course, just that problems with Microsoft products will be exploited faster and with more impact and publicity than equivalent problems in other systems. --K

That's true enough.  You could say that Microsoft were just the unlucky first people to put automatic scripts into their clients and get burnt by it, so of course now no-one will ever do that again.  Then again, if 'nix had been a bit more popular a bit quicjker, maybe we'd be seeing emacs lisp worms instead of visual basic ones.  --Vitenka  (It doesn't excuse the continual shoddy security, the slow response times for fixes and, until relatively recently the utter denial of any problems at all)

I'm surprised that it happened in the first place, given that I was predicting the class of problem about three minutes after enountering JavaScript... -- Senji

(emacs/vm did used to have a similar problem, now fixed).

True, but I have a feeling Microsoft aren't the only ones playing these tricks.  Many EULAs look extremely dodgy if glanced through... an of course you have the cases such as the Dell laptop report that MoonShadow linked a while back where it is physically impossible to actually read the agreement before agreeing to it... --K

Meh.  EULA? aren't legally binding.  It's no different from putting up a sign saying "We are not responsible for.."  If the law says you are responsible, then you are no matter what the sign says, and if you weren't responsible in the firts place, the sign is pointless.  --Vitenka

there is a college/schools version which is a LOT cheaper than the normal variation. All you need is a friend who can buy it for you who is a college student. Not illegal, a lot cheaper. --Tsunami

Get OpenOffice for free, or its commercial version, StarOffice; it's probably as good as you need. --Bobacus

Cheers... although am I correct in assuming that StarOffice has nothing parallel to Microsoft/PowerPoint??  I will need that... --MJ

magicpoint.

OpenOffice includes a presentation package (called "Impression") that replaces Microsoft/PowerPoint?, and can load and save in powerpoint format. I assume that StarOffice can do everything that OpenOffice can. --Bobacus

And probably better than MS Office can. I know Impression was able to open a 10MB slideshow that PowerPoint? balked at. As a direct result, my mum now has OpenOffice on her machine -- AlexLabram

I'll second OpenOffice. I use it at work to open mail from management, the non-programmer side of whom insist on sending it as Word and Excel attachments despite the fact that they won't pay to have Word or Excel installed on anyone else's machines; and I use it at home for similar purposes. It has yet to fail to cope with anything I've thrown at it, despite the fact that the version at home is from debian/testing and therefore probably a good few months old. It's free, works under Windows and is easy to download, so don't pay for stuff until you've at least tried it. - MoonShadow

The "not replacing selected text" thing is an option, which in some versions of Office defaults to on. In a rather silly and confusing fashion. It's buried somewhere in the options dialogs, probably Edit, called something like "Don't replace selected text with typing". The delete/backspace issue may be a consequence of the same option or a similar one - that would be my first guess. Take a magnifying glass to the options dialogs, which is always a worthwhile and rewarding diversion anyway. --AlexChurchill