Real World Computing

And at the end of the day, none of it matters a damn. Microsoft felt it needed ISO approval as a tickbox item for winning government contracts, and now it has it. Does this make the standard any more useful or usable? Of course not. It's still riddled with errors, inconsistencies, poor thinking and sloppy coding. I've covered this subject ad nauseam in past columns, so I'll just say it's a bad standard and one that doesn't deliver on the grand claims that Microsoft made for it: "Because documents stored in the Open XML Formats are machine-readable and editable by any text editor or XML processor, solutions need not use Microsoft Office programs to view or edit content within the documents. Enterprise business solutions can access document contents easily and efficiently. Technology providers can utilise the Microsoft Office System and Office authoring applications within their solutions, reuse Microsoft Office documents as other Office documents, or open and act on Office documents on other platforms and in other applications."

All that's flannel: Microsoft has achieved its goal of removing an obstacle to winning government contracts, and what we've got is a half-baked mess of a so-called standard. So it's business as usual then for Redmond.

Partner programme

I recently wrote that the excellent Microsoft Action Pack Subscription (MAPS) for authorised partners in the Microsoft Partner programme had changed its rules for subscription renewals, and that now you had to sit an online exam to qualify. I was surprised, then, to receive an email stating: "On 30 November, 2007 Microsoft implemented an assessment requirement for new Action Pack subscribers. The same requirement was scheduled to take effect on 1 March, 2008 for renewing partners that have a subscription expiration date of 1 March, 2008 or later. Due to unforeseen system issues, we are extending the assessment deadline for renewing Action Pack subscribers until 19 June, 2008. This means that all renewing partners whose subscription expires on or after 19 June, 2008 will need to pass a qualifying assessment with a score of 70% or higher in order to renew their Action Pack subscription."

I tried to find out what those "unforeseen system issues" were, but to no avail. Suffice to say that if you're on the MAPS programme and are due to renew, you can avoid the tedious exam process providing you get in there before 19 June.

Disc speed utility

I have a visceral distrust of utilities that test part of your hardware setup and then, after the obligatory "Ping!", spit out a number that purports to tell you just how good your graphics card or hard disk is. Most are calibrated in undefined "units of goodness", under which a rating of 27 is obviously better than a 21, and that a 15 is a cause for concerned sucking of teeth: "Only 15 eh, that'll be yer problem with Vista then..." says The Pundit leaning against the counter in his computer emporium.

But I've recently been playing around with one such tool, called HD Tune Pro 3.00 from www.hdtune.com, which tells you the transfer rate across your disk surface and also does a useful random scatter test for access time and tells you the CPU usage. Maybe I'm just being swayed by the pretty pictures it shows, but this certainly seems useful when I'm trying to work out how quick a new USB hard drive actually is, and whether I'm better off connecting it over FireWire or eSATA. Registration costs a few pounds, and I think it's worth it.

Continued....