Taxes are always the highlight of my year, a couple months of dreading having to get them done - followed by a couple weeks that are dedicated to sorting credit card receipts and phone bills. Stacks of papers covering every flat surface available. This year our accountant thought it was an April Fools joke when I delivered the folder to his door yesterday. When we lived in Ithaca getting the taxes done early meant getting to the post office before 10 PM on April 15th.
So this year went pretty smoothly until Excel decided that AtariAce-Books-2007.xls was "unable to open". I went through all the normal fear and rage. Shutdown my computer cleared my cache and tried three different ways of opening the file. I took the file to Carrie's computer and crashed her Open Office with the file (which crashed the file she hadn't saved after an hour's work). Sorry again ;( After doing a little research online I found out that there is an entire industry that has written programs to recover crashed Microsoft Files.
I understand data recovery services, hardware fails and people don't do backups enough, but known file corruption recovery is just wrong. We are so captive to Microsoft that they don't have to give us products that actually work. If there are 10 competing products that can repair a file that Microsoft Excel failed to save correctly than the problem is well known and Microsoft should give this service away for free. I'm not a Google worshipper, there are serious privacy concerns with their software, but at least we are starting to have some options.
Comments (3)
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Anonymous (10:46 PM on Tue Apr 8, 2008)
I too am concerned about google's efforts to be the everything in computing. But there are other alternatives, too, such as the companies who specialize in the support of open-source software--they may charge for the installation of the software, even if they can't charge for the software itself, and they may make a good living providing the users of open-source software with the instructions and other support needed to make sure they are getting everything they need and want out of the software. Forget Red Hat, go with Canonical, for example.
Anonymous (4:01 AM on Sat Jun 21, 2008)
My sympathies to you as I can completely relate to the feelings of rage and frustration when something as innocuous as opening a spreadsheet causes the computer to hang/crash/spawn-a-trojan/etc. Maybe you would agree that it's a special sort of rage like when you stub your toe really hard on a chair that some fool has carelessly left in your way. It's the sort of thing that can provoke irrational and crazy-destructive fantasies such as throwing a bunch of dry ice on your lawn just to watch it sublimate and release massive quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere.
In your case it seems to have provoked an irrational conspiracy theory whereby Microsoft maliciously forces hapless noobs into purchasing and using their defective office "productivity" software. What's more, it was intentionally designed to randomly make it appear as though certain files have become corrupted in order to foster a booming underground cottage industry of expensive file recovery services. In reality these services are being provided by a loose ring of Russian and Chinese programmers on behalf of a shady Nigerian investment firm.
The ill gotten loot gets laundered via a complex network of PayPal transactions and eventually sunk into petroleum futures contracts on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange using a terminal in Bolivia. The futures contracts get sold to speculators in exchange for convertible e-derivatives wired directly to Japanese currency traders who swap the instruments for Australian dollars which are then dispersed across multiple electronic retail channels.
Thus, the money you paid to repair your "corrupt" spreadsheet was routed all over the world in a complex financial web that eventually shows up as record sales of Windows Vista in Australian retail outlets. A small portion of the money is also "donated" to Greenpeace as payment for their continued media campaign against ExxonMobile which keeps attention distracted from the real cause of high gas prices.
Your theory is interesting but I'm skeptical.
gttymail01 (9:15 PM on Sun Aug 8, 2010)
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