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2 years ago in one of the banking centers in Denmark 12 new IT-candidate were educated in ... COBOL, CICS, mainframes, etc. The older generation were anxious about how the younglings adapt, but it appears it turned out well. They were excited about the robustness and scalability of the mainframes, not so much about COBOL, but could see it didn't make business sense to rewrite old software. New software is being developed in more modern programming languages.

source (Danish only): https://www.version2.dk/artike...

Really?

What about that little update to the openSSL that caused Debian deriviants to only have 32.000 possible keys (http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2508864)? NSA has their grubby little fingers in everything, who cares that it's open source, if it's unreadable?

PHK has a nice post about this also:
http://www.version2.dk/blog/nsas-gennembrud-eller-noget-53787
It's in Danish, but scroll down a bit for an example of openSSL source code, having it in binary would only make it slightly less readable...

Here's an article on recovery of overwritten data. Ibas' "recovery expert" Henrik Andersen states that if the data has been overwritten, it's gone.

Ibas is a Nordic data reconstruction company. They're not a super-secret intelligence agency, but I would assume they know what they're talking about.

http://www.version2.dk/artikel/3521

Sadly, the article has been overwritten by Danish, so it's extremely time-consuming to recover any information from it unless you can read the language already.

Irregularities and political decisions in ISO DIS 29500 March 2008 votes:

Germany

In a steering committee of 20 people a vote was taken to answer this question: "did the process run according to the rules and without irregularities?"

6 answered no and 7 abstained!

http://www.noooxml.org/forum/t-49525/limited-choice-at-german-din http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=2008032913190768

Norway

21 members of the committee voted NO to fast-track this DIS but it was decided to vote yes anyway.

http://www.noooxml.org/forum/t-50031/oil-fire-in-norway-microsoft-buys-another-standards-body

Denmark

The technical committee didn't agree to change the disapproval vote but it was "decided" to vote yes anyway.

The committee S-142/U-34 under Danish Standards could not agree to change their vote from No to Yes.

A couple of hours later:

http://www.version2.dk/artikel/6718 says that the announcement from Danish Standards will not be made until Friday and that the Chair of the committee has been barred from speaking about the result of yesterday's meeting.

After some Microsoft political intervention to revert this ( the Prime Minister of Denmark is a Microsoft friend ), we have this: http://www.en.ds.dk/4227

Another political decision, influenced by Microsoft lobbyists.

Malaysia

The Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation decided on Malaysia's final position on OOXML ("abstain" ), overturning the 81% "Disapprove" position by ISC-G and TC4.

http://www.openmalaysiablog.com/2008/03/the-minister-of.html http://www.openmalaysiablog.com/2008/03/malaysian-indus.html

Poland

On March 20, 2008, Technical Committee (KT 182) of PKN was supposed to either accept the recommendation (which was to vote YES for the proposed standard) or not accept it, and thus recommend PKN to vote NO or abstain from voting. Of 45 members, 24 appeared on the meeting. And the votes looked like this:

• 12 votes supporting the reccomendation,
• 10 votes rejecting it,
• 2 abstaining to vote.

No consensus has been achieved concerning the recommendation. Thus, the chairman of KT 182, Elzbieta Andrukiewicz, decided to allow the missing members to vote by e-mail during the next 10 days (till the end of March).

The email vote was taken, counting a "no mail sended" as an "approval" !!!

Clearly, there was no technical consensus in Poland, but the chairman forced the rules to favour an approval.

http://www.noooxml.org/forum/t-49455/polish-chairwoman-distributes-microsoft-propaganda http://polishlinux.org/poland/possible-manipulation-around-ooxml-process-in-poland/ http://polishlinux.org/poland/poland-confirms-its-approval-for-ooxml-in-iso/

Croatia

Out of 35 members of TO Z1, 17 sent a vote, and there were three votes for, and fourteen against fast-tracking OOXML, which is relative rejection rate of 82%. Members who voted were individual experts, IBM, CLUG and HrOpen. However, since there were less than 51% of votes, the voting process was declared invalid, and the previous vote holds ( "approve" ) !

M

(Danish link for the Scandinavians) http://www.version2.dk/artikel/6756

Five watts spec is bullshit.

Five watts spec is bullshit.

Five watts spec is bullshit.

Five watts spec is bullshit.