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Here's the official list from ISO:

http://www.iso.ch/iso/en/stdsdevelopment/tc/tclist /TechnicalCommitteeParticipationListPage.Technical CommitteeParticipationList?COMMID=4767

There are 32 participating countries, and 15 observers, a little short of the 123 claimed.

Both C# and CIL are ECMA standards, and are also approved by ISO/IEC here and here respectively.

There are also a few companies working on projects that use these standards in their products. So even if you don't want to use Microsoft products, you can still use C# or any other language that compiles for .NET with something like Mono on most of the popular desktop/server operating systems today.

Both C# and CIL are ECMA standards, and are also approved by ISO/IEC here and here respectively.

There are also a few companies working on projects that use these standards in their products. So even if you don't want to use Microsoft products, you can still use C# or any other language that compiles for .NET with something like Mono on most of the popular desktop/server operating systems today.

text/plain isn't a format. text/plain plus an encoding is a format. Which encoding would you like? Latin-1? That's defined in ISO/IEC 8859-1:1998, which costs ~50USD to buy. UTF-8? That's defined in ISO/IEC 10646:2003, which costs ~90USD to buy. Want text/html? On top of the character encoding issues, you'll also have to refer to the ISO 8879:1986 standard, which costs ~170USD to buy.

What you claim are "truly open standards" are built on top of for-pay standards. You can't implement them fully and properly without paying for the details. Why do you think virtually no browsers got HTML comments right in the Acid2 test? It's because it's an esoteric feature of ISO 8879:1986 that you only find out about when you pay for the standard.

text/plain isn't a format. text/plain plus an encoding is a format. Which encoding would you like? Latin-1? That's defined in ISO/IEC 8859-1:1998, which costs ~50USD to buy. UTF-8? That's defined in ISO/IEC 10646:2003, which costs ~90USD to buy. Want text/html? On top of the character encoding issues, you'll also have to refer to the ISO 8879:1986 standard, which costs ~170USD to buy.

What you claim are "truly open standards" are built on top of for-pay standards. You can't implement them fully and properly without paying for the details. Why do you think virtually no browsers got HTML comments right in the Acid2 test? It's because it's an esoteric feature of ISO 8879:1986 that you only find out about when you pay for the standard.

text/plain isn't a format. text/plain plus an encoding is a format. Which encoding would you like? Latin-1? That's defined in ISO/IEC 8859-1:1998, which costs ~50USD to buy. UTF-8? That's defined in ISO/IEC 10646:2003, which costs ~90USD to buy. Want text/html? On top of the character encoding issues, you'll also have to refer to the ISO 8879:1986 standard, which costs ~170USD to buy.

What you claim are "truly open standards" are built on top of for-pay standards. You can't implement them fully and properly without paying for the details. Why do you think virtually no browsers got HTML comments right in the Acid2 test? It's because it's an esoteric feature of ISO 8879:1986 that you only find out about when you pay for the standard.

I call for an open source tea standard. BS 6008 and ISO 3103 restrict my acess to tea. (Yes. They actually exsist.) Here is a pdf of the actually standard http://ftp.ee.surrey.ac.uk/papers/AI/L.Gillam/bs_t ea.pdf#search='BS6008' and a place where you can buy it. http://www.iso.ch/iso/en/CatalogueDetailPage.Catal ogueDetail?CSNUMBER=8250

Yuck! Slashdot's machinery cut up those links. Here they are again:

The official 4217 list of currency codes is at here

The official ISO 3166 Country codes list is at:
here.

Yuck! Slashdot's machinery cut up those links. Here they are again:

The official 4217 list of currency codes is at here

The official ISO 3166 Country codes list is at:
here.

attempted electronic transfer of UKP13.9m

Sorry if this is in any way pedantic - just FYI since I used to work in a capital markets trading environment...

The abbreviation in most currency markets is not UKP, it's GBP, for Great Britain Pounds.

To quote from a handy refernce page:
ISO 4217 (Codes for the Representation of Currencies and Funds) defines three-letter abbreviations for world currencies. The general principle used to construct these abbreviations is to take the two-letter abbreviations defined in ISO 3166 (Codes for the Representation of Names of Countries) and append the first letter of the currency name (e.g., USD for the United States Dollar).

A non-official site's list is at: http://www.jhall.demon.co.uk/currency/by_country.h tml

The official 4217 list of currency codes is at http://www.iso.ch/iso/en/prods-services/popstds/cu rrencycodeslist.html

The official ISO 3166 Country codes list is at:
http://www.iso.ch/iso/en/prods-services/iso3166ma/ 02iso-3166-code-lists/list-en1.html

attempted electronic transfer of UKP13.9m

Sorry if this is in any way pedantic - just FYI since I used to work in a capital markets trading environment...

The abbreviation in most currency markets is not UKP, it's GBP, for Great Britain Pounds.

To quote from a handy refernce page:
ISO 4217 (Codes for the Representation of Currencies and Funds) defines three-letter abbreviations for world currencies. The general principle used to construct these abbreviations is to take the two-letter abbreviations defined in ISO 3166 (Codes for the Representation of Names of Countries) and append the first letter of the currency name (e.g., USD for the United States Dollar).

A non-official site's list is at: http://www.jhall.demon.co.uk/currency/by_country.h tml

The official 4217 list of currency codes is at http://www.iso.ch/iso/en/prods-services/popstds/cu rrencycodeslist.html

The official ISO 3166 Country codes list is at:
http://www.iso.ch/iso/en/prods-services/iso3166ma/ 02iso-3166-code-lists/list-en1.html

Until someone comes up with an Internationally Recognized symbol that you can paint on the wall, put up in the window, or otherwise make known, which means "WI-FI ACCESSIBLE HERE ... USE DHCP TO GET AN IP ADDRESS", and by 'recognized' I mean on the same order as that of other major international symbols ... then, WI-FI is forever going to be a 'fringe' service.

I'd use WI-FI, everywhere it was available, and I'd pay for it too, if only it was really easy to see where WI-FI was going to be accessible. Someone come up with a good WI-FI branding strategy first and then we'll see successful WI-FI economic models come into place ... but until then, users of WI-FI are still going to have to be experts of the ether in order to 'know' when and where they can get on the 'net ...

Until someone comes up with an Internationally Recognized symbol that you can paint on the wall, put up in the window, or otherwise make known, which means "WI-FI ACCESSIBLE HERE ... USE DHCP TO GET AN IP ADDRESS", and by 'recognized' I mean on the same order as that of other major international symbols ... then, WI-FI is forever going to be a 'fringe' service.

I'd use WI-FI, everywhere it was available, and I'd pay for it too, if only it was really easy to see where WI-FI was going to be accessible. Someone come up with a good WI-FI branding strategy first and then we'll see successful WI-FI economic models come into place ... but until then, users of WI-FI are still going to have to be experts of the ether in order to 'know' when and where they can get on the 'net ...

To avoid political controversy, ICANN *specifically* chose to use ISO country codes. This should be specifically a problem for ISO, and if the ISO standard is updated, ICANN can use the new country codes.

They haven't done that great a job of sticking to this in the past though - note it is .uk rather the .gb as it should be.

If you think about it, paper is relatively high tech in comparison: read/write, random access to pages, zero energy consumption, and it last at least 750 years (if it carries the little infinity symbol -- see International Standard ISO/IEC 9706 (1994) Information and Documentation-Paper for Documents-Requirements for Permanence).

Ooh, I know this from working at CENTR...

As any fule no, the country TLDs are the two-digit country codes from ISO3166 with a couple of exceptions, including the United Kingdom who were already using .uk when this agreement was reached (IIRC there are a few legacy .gb domains, but I couldn't get a zone transfer working to check).

The ISO working group in charge of 3166 was mostly comprised of Europeans, especially French engineers, which is why most of the country codes are biased towards the European names for the countries.

For the record, ccTLDs have been sucessfully dissolved before: .cs in 1995 and .zr in 2001.

Note, however, that .yu is supposed to be replaced by .cs (ISO 3166-1 changed from yu to cs), but the progress is rather slow.

(Also, I'm told .dd was dissolved when the two Germanies unified, but I'm not sure .dd was ever active to begin with.)

According to this Usenet posting (in German) there were a few .dd domains in 1989, but only a year later there was the German reunification, and .dd went away.

Slashdot doesn't let you enter the pound symbol

Not that I'm sticking up for the quirks in Slashcode, but haven't you ever seen the common three letter currency codes? Most of them aren't hard to guess -- GBP, USD, CND, AUD, EUR, JPY, CNY etc -- and they're very handy for typographic situations where you don't have access to "funny" characters like the British Pound symbol, the Euro symbol, or the Yen symbol, and you also don't feel like typing out the whole currency name, including discriminators such as "American" vs. "Canadian" vs. "Austrialian" Dollar.

This set of three letter currency abbreviations is so useful, in fact, that the list of codes is an ISO standard.

Granted, having access to the actual symbols is better, but these abbreviations are widely used, familiar to many, easy to interpret ...and portable to any typographic system that can represent the Latin alphabet. It's a workaround, but it works.

+++

...not that this has anything to do with El Nino, wildfires, or global warming, But then neither did the parent post, but it was still a fair observation... :-)

I suppose you may have been trying to be funny but I'm not sure...

The OSI which approves the GPL is the Open Source Initiative.

OSI, as an OSI 7-layer model, stands for Open Systems Interconnect and the standard is set by the International Organization for Standardization (I guess IOS was already a Cisco trademark or something...).

Don't you hate it when people writing articles make up their own units? Whoever heard of measuring pollution in "humans"? This is pure bunk. Most useful units are standardized and published by ISO, and "humans" sure aren't listed anywhere I can see. And anyway, what's the symbol going to be, "hm"?

Standardized units are essential when doing studies which claim repeatability. Anything less is simply not science. I shudder to think what useless arguments this will produce, when a swedish team checks their pollution readings in scandinavian humans, while an italian teams does the same in latin humans. At sufficiently high readings, the difference could be several percent! Then there are issues of hair colour and hair style, which could even change the results of the experiment years after the fact! And don't get me started on the problems every time bell bottoms get back into fashion.

If you ask me, shoddy science begins with the wrong units. And humans are definitely the wrong unit to use in this case.

37.99 BPS (british pounds sterling?)

Nitpick: it's GBP, Great Britain Pounds. The codes are defined in ISO 4217. (They usually start with the same code as the ISO 3166 country code, which is GB for the UK.)

Check it out:

ISO 3103:1980
Tea -- Preparation of liquor for use in sensory tests

"The method consists in extracting of soluble substances in dried tea leaf, containing in a porcelain or earthenware pot, by means of freshly boiling water, pouring of the liquor into a white porcelain or earthenware bowl, examination of the organoleptic properties of the infused leaf, and of the liquor with or without milk or both."

What's this world coming to?

C++ is a super-set of C

*sigh*, common myth. The standards, which are available for a small fee from the ISO, say otherwise.

C++ is absolutely, postively not a superset of C. It is quite easy to create valid C code that a standards-compliant C++ compiler can't digest, even by accident.

Even your own statement shows it, in that International Organisation of Standardization would be IOS

True, I should have looked in to it a little further - I had assumed that the order of the letters was due to the order the words are written in French. Evidently I was wrong.

Oh, and you have a bit of a typo in Organisation up there.

Actually, I took the spelling directly from the ISO website. Normally I would spell it with an s.

No, it should tell you if you have to go through that much work to perceive the difference that you shouldn't bother. Just enjoy the music.

That software is used by engineers who need to be licensed to be in the business of building things. They have oversight over the use of the software much as they have oversight over the construction workers who are doing the riveting and welding. The state doesn't need or want to micromanage every little aspect; it simply wants to know that individuals in certain key positions know what they're doing. Apparently geologist is one of those positions, while software engineer and cement mixing guy are not.

Besides -- and I don't really know much about this -- wouldn't engineering or other "mission-critical" software generally be developed to ISO standards, thus obviating the need for additional special government certifications?

Presumably this is because of ISO.

Where does it say that on w3's website ?
all i can find are reccomendations

unless they have suddenly become ISO

big fucking difference

Wine is based upon a preexisting work

Wine is a piece of code. No code from any Microsoft implementation of the Windows API has entered the Wine CVS repository.

Wine is based upon a preexisting work

Define "based upon". The statute fails to define based upon; can you provide any elaboration in case law that supports your position?

specifically the Windows APIs, which are protected by copyright.

"In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work" (17 USC 102).

If re-implementation of a standard were forbidden by copyright law, then every BIOS publisher would be in violation, all the way back to the first PC clone, and the International Organization for Standardization would control all implementations of its standards.

The way these standards work (or are supposed to) is that everybody who owns IP related to them agrees to license without-fee for implementers of the "baseline". They (usually) also agree to licence on RAND (reasonable and non-descriminatory) terms any nifty extras (optional features not included in baseline).

The one catch is that it's only free if you follow the standard. Using JPEG2000 technology in something that isn't JPEG2000 can get you in trouble, because the free license is only for ppl. who follow the standard.

You can purchase a copy of the standard directly from ISO, or from various local standards bodies. In the US, that would be ANSI. You can buy from ANSI here. They recently dropped their price (it used to run ~$140), probably because of price competition from ISO and Standards Australia (note that prices from ISO and SA are *not* listed in USD, an that the Australian price includes a 10% tax that will be waved for foreigners). And electronic copy of a standards document is about as fungable as you can get.

Other than the requirement that you stick to the standard, it's totally free (barring submarine patents). You don't even have to notify anyone that you're implementing it. And the JPEG people have worked really hard (even harder than with the original) to ensure that J2K is unencumbered, so even the threat of submarine patents is small.

The way these standards work (or are supposed to) is that everybody who owns IP related to them agrees to license without-fee for implementers of the "baseline". They (usually) also agree to licence on RAND (reasonable and non-descriminatory) terms any nifty extras (optional features not included in baseline).

The one catch is that it's only free if you follow the standard. Using JPEG2000 technology in something that isn't JPEG2000 can get you in trouble, because the free license is only for ppl. who follow the standard.

You can purchase a copy of the standard directly from ISO, or from various local standards bodies. In the US, that would be ANSI. You can buy from ANSI here. They recently dropped their price (it used to run ~$140), probably because of price competition from ISO and Standards Australia (note that prices from ISO and SA are *not* listed in USD, an that the Australian price includes a 10% tax that will be waved for foreigners). And electronic copy of a standards document is about as fungable as you can get.

Other than the requirement that you stick to the standard, it's totally free (barring submarine patents). You don't even have to notify anyone that you're implementing it. And the JPEG people have worked really hard (even harder than with the original) to ensure that J2K is unencumbered, so even the threat of submarine patents is small.

I'm not rusty on the JPEG algorithm.

I read through the legalese wording of the first 40 claims and even though it describes an algorithm that uses run lengh coding and huffman-like coding (more generic), the algorithm that is described in this patent is not part of Baseline JPEG as standardized in ITU-T T.81, ISO 10918-1, and MIL-STD-188-198A

Sony never should have paid. I guess that's what happens if you let lawyers run the world and bluff their way around court rooms. IANAL and I feel sorry for those who are.

I'd sell my Forgent stocks asap.

Also, we have hopes that it's a lot easier to make governments pick a standard and stick to it, collectively (as in ISO), although it can be hard to get them to agree, say, ANSI vs CSA standards and so on...

By the way, T-Ranger, my Canadian confrere, most of the Yanks on /. don't know what WHMIS (Workplace Hazardous Materials Information System) is, and that's OSHA (Williams-Steiger Occupational Safety and Health Act).

Interrobang, tech writer in OSH&E

ZA is the ISO 3166-1-alpha-2 designation for South Africa.

It is from the Dutch, Zuid Afrika

SA is Saudi Arabia

I'd love to check out this ISO book to see what they say for display readability ... but the ISO charges 104 Swiss Francs for a 28-page electronic version.

That's US$63.18. I'll pass. Anybody know of where to get these documents free?

I'd love to check out this ISO book to see what they say for display readability ... but the ISO charges 104 Swiss Francs for a 28-page electronic version.

That's US$63.18. I'll pass. Anybody know of where to get these documents free?

MPEG is an ISO activity, not a W3C one. As far as I can tell, ISO (International Organization for Standardization, not an acronym, www.iso.ch) doesn't have a patent policy a sfar as I am aware.

Since I work at W3C, and since this is public information, I can tell you that no, the W3C has never wanted to publish specifications (recommendations) that are encumbered by patents or royalties. However, we don't have any authority over the MPEG committee.

(I am Liam Quin, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin; I am in the XML activity and not directly involved in the patent policy group, so send comments about that to the public list not to me.)

I agree in principle, but then therell be an even worse schism between MSIE and the OSS browsers than now. At least the two sides try to implement the same standards now. If the OSS browser coders intentionally decide to start using their own standards, it will only get worse. We have to be able to implement the same stuff the commercial browsers do unless were trying to marginalize ourselves.

FYI, the IETF and ISO have been standardizing on proprietary standards for years. POSIX, for example (ISO 1003.6). And, UTF8, 16, 32 are all standards but are owned by Unicode, Inc.

A list of changes and some drafts of the standard are available online. Please note that these might differ from the final version.

ISO: International Organization for Standardization. www.iso.ch.

"ISO" is also a common term used for CD images in ISO-9660 format.

Of course, I can't seem to find the same info online, but I hope it is at least a start.

Well, since the article seems to be a rerun, and we're on the subject of better user interfaces (or lack thereof) . . .

I've been thinking of some alternate user-interface ideas, and one possibility I picked up from reading Tog (or was is Nielson?) was that of using "official icons"-- namely, ISO standard international symbols-- as a good, consistent visual supplement to the interface. (These symbols, I believe, are seen a lot in European countries. I don't think they're used a whole lot in the U.S.)

Problem is, I've looked everywhere, and I can't find any references for such symbols. The closest I've come to is this site detailing IEC 417 (which is why e.g. the "Play" and "Pause" buttons on media players are all marked the same), but that's about it. The ISO site helped, but not by much (their search engine sucks rocks).

So, would anyone here know of any links detailing said standard international symbols, or at least some relevant ISO numbers?

(P.S.: I already have ISO 7000 - "Graphical symbols for use on equipment")

Date formats like MM-DD-YYYY and DD-MM-YYYY are ambiguous and confusing, especially for the majority of any calendar year. I really wish people would start using International Standard Date and Time Notation, which is YYYY-MM-DD (see ISO 8601). They're much less confusing, can't mean something different in another notational system, and put units from largest to smallest. Adding in the time continues the trend with YYYY-MM-DD-hh-mm-ss.

Please, please, please? With sugar on top?