The joke's on all of us: "choose your own adventure" =P Your knowledge is much-appreciated, Marbux!
ben On Nov 29, 2007 6:27 PM, marbux <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > On Nov 29, 2007 6:01 PM, Ben Barrett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > Thanks Marbux, > > I was [partially] surprised that they said Excel was the biggie, I heard > > from a CCC conference, albeit a while back, that Vista had all their old > > known issues, at least at the outset, that they had identified about 90% of > > the most-buggy DLLs were identical to XP on the inside :) > > > > I wonder whether that part is accurate. It used to be that around 50 per > cent of the known malware out there was embedded Word scripts. And Word has > a much larger user base than Excel. > > On the persistent of bugs in Windows DLLs, it's much the same story with > MS Office. Its major apps were designed back in the days when Bill Gates > used to brag about not fixing bugs. Now they're in the spot 15 years later > where it's too late; gobs of spaghetti code on top of the original bugs. > There's a study I did in 2000 of all the published bugs in the Word footnote > and endnote features here, < http://www.llrx.com/features/word.htm>. If > you skim the tables, you'll see a lot of bugs, even data loss bugs, that > have persisted for many versions. And you can infer from the version numbers > for some of the persistent bugs that Word still has its original 16-bit page > layout engine. (Some of those versions ran on 80086 and 80088 processors.) > > I haven't studied bugs in Excel and Powerpoint so closely, but I strongly > suspect it's much the same story there too. E.g., at ISO, Microsoft is > lobbying hard to be allowed to keep the Excel leap year bug in the OOXML > specification. I doubt if they'd be defending the bug so vigorously if they > could repair it other than by using pre- and post-processors, which would > give them a big performance hit in loading large spreadsheets. > > Best regards, > > Marbux > > _______________________________________________ > EUGLUG mailing list > [email protected] > http://www.euglug.org/mailman/listinfo/euglug > >
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