Slashdot Mirror
UK Government Solicits Advice On Open Source
Imran Ghory writes: "The UK government has put out a consultation paper on the use of open source software in government,background research into OSS commisioned by the government is also available, including a comparision of OSS office suites." Check out the formats in which the document is available.
The documents are available in Word and .PDF format. These are pretty industry standard at this point, and .pdf can be read a multitude of ways. What's the problem?
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
How about using the NSA's version of linux in the UK? Its secure and upto government standards. I would love to see the UK move all its boxes over to linux. Lets just hope they don't use NT sys admins!
There's little argument (well, I think so) over what constitutes a proprietary app, but a proprietary service?
.NET and Passport and all that, so my serivces will use that back-end. (Or something like that anyway). Is that too open or closed?
In other words: Is Passport proprietary, just because its MS? I have heard that, for example, I can write my own "plugin" services for
Sounds like they need to neaten up thier terms, else their whole policy becomes -1, Flamebait.
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
If you promise not to arrest him, Alan Cox might
tell you all about open source.
Just make sure you clap thrice, and shreik "DMCA"
in order to shut him up.
One thing I am interested in is a directory services solution for Linux. Novell has Linux binaries for their excellent NDS/eDirectory product, but I'm worried about Novell's viability as a company. Also, I would prefer to use an open source solution, but the only OSS directory services software that I am aware of is OpenLDAP, and it just doesn't seem mature enough yet for production use. The county has about 1500 client systems.
Thank you.
..get astroturfed by MS proxies?
I invite you to surf to Adobe's site. There is a free (as in no money involved) program available called "Acrobat Reader," which will allow you to read the file quite simply. It's available for every version of Windows, Mac, Linux, a slew of Unices, and even PalmOS. Now please explain your preoccupation with whether it is not open source or not.
Does it really matter? PDF is a copyrighted format (i.e., Adobe owns it). Releasing the source code to it would be absurd --- Acrobat is theirs, why should they not capalitize on it? Capitalism is the foundation on which the American economy is built. Remember our friend Dimitry? He was arrested because he violated that copyright for another Adobe software. Rights are treasured in American society... if we treasure our rights for the ability MP3s (ones we rip from discs we legitimately own, of course), etc... why should Adobe be denied that same right for their own software?
Are you saying that they should be forced to release all their documents in TXT format just because some poor slob can use /usr/local/bin/pico to view it? PDF is an Internet (dare I say industry) standard nowadays.
Should you choose to protest the PDF format, my friend, you can choose to do so. However, the fact that Adobe hasn't placed their company secrets (read: treasured source code) on the dinner table, is hardly a legitimate reason to release useless whining bullshit about Acrobat not being open source.
Grow up. Closed source software sells because it's a valuable, solid product. Otherwise, no one would buy it.
I think it's a good initiative, but if I'm not wrong, they've just switched www.royal.gov.uk from linux to NT. Also, the link on this story runs IIS.
At least there's an W3C icon and the HTML seems pretty good. Let's see what happen, it should change a lot.
It is quite costly; however, if you can afford the liscensing costs, it is worth every damn penny.
Never write another shell script again. Just point, click, and bam!, you've just instituted a change in the tree!
Just make sure you run your DS Repairs frequently and keep the tree healthy, or else you're asking for trouble!
Ah Timothy. dont make comments like th@ when you are obviously just trolling for blind M$ hating comments. Dont get me wrong - i'm no fan of M$ but .doc is just a standard. Comments accompanying stories should probably be slightly more impartial & subjective.
But on a more cheerful note, this is a gr8 move by the UK government and i hope that it will prove to be an example that other governments will follow, but i wont keep my fingers crossed here in Australia where the current government seems to have its head in the sand.
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
After discovering - with disappointment - that
South Australia's gov't has signed an (apparently
LONG-TERM) "whole of enterprise" agreement to
use -only- Microsoft software... (e.g. ALL new
servers -must- use MS server software, etc.),
I am happy to note that UK has begun to show
some serious interest in OSS.
Now, Australia's shiny-bums (i.e. civil servants)
can seriously consider OSS...
Still a colony... one way or another...
As it stands, they didn't. Babbage went to his grave as a failure despite his pleas for funding, and now the British Government playing second fiddle to some skinny rich geek in Seattle.
Some say that government ownership would have stifled innovation. Maybe there would have been little progress beyond Babbage's designs. Whiners would argue that computers would be saddled with compatibility constraints like the government regulated telephone system (which to this day remains compatible with 19th century handsets).
But so what? What would any true geek prefer to have: (A) a gleaming, multi-ton steam powered machine sporting thousands of shiny steel gears, or (B) a stupid beige box cowering under their desk? The answer is obviously A.
The economics of scale has been directed at the wrong target. Any nerd can easily afford lots of the ugly plastic boxes we call computers, but today even a version 1 Difference Engine would be beyond most people's means. It didn't have to turn out like this. It's a shame, because just like a fine car, chix dig that kind of hardware. (Ada Lovelace, for example. Not bad.) Chix cannot relate to tiny silicon gadgets. I had to expend a lot of extra effort courting my wife using my wits and personality because my computers meant nothing to her.
I place the blame for the current sorry state of affairs in computing technology squarely on the British government's shortsightedness. Right now, they are just trying to deflect attention from the fact that they dropped the ball.
I understand that the chick is your sister, but are you the white guy or the black guy?
A company wants a program that draws a triangle. Microsoft(tm) Triangle(tm) draws a triangle. You can specify what color you want it to be.
An open source program draws a triangle. In addition to allowing you to choose the color, you can specify whether or not it's a right triangle, and if not, the various degrees.
Company purchaser looks at options and says "Well, the open source one is way better, but who knows if they'll be around in a year or two. Hell, let's go with the company we know will be there."
The root of all evil is accountability. With the Microsoft(tm) product, there will be a corporate entity to blame for any problems. With the open-source solutions, there's no guarantee that the producer will exist in the future.
So they'll always choose the Microsoft(tm) option. That's just the way it is in the real business world. Even if there's no possibility of recovering losses from the vendor, at least there will always (?) be that vendor to blame/approach. And in the off (heh) chance that there are others with the same problems, the likelihood of finding a solution will be greater.
Look at the computer predecessor, the typewriter. Sure, there have always been cheaper, and probably better-feature-laden typewriters, but the IBM sold so well because the suits always knew there would always be a big corporation behind them.
Point being... there's no way open-source will work until there's an established set of software requirement standards. We should require that software meet standards prior to being allowed in the marketplace. Unfortunately, there is no such requirement. Hence, we have what we have.
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
you must be a karma-whoring nigger
you should swim back to africa
dude, you should just get another account if you're going to post legitimate comments
oh and don't even try and tell me i should give away my expertise for free to these lame chump projects, i'd rather just use something that works NOW *cough* opera *cough* internet explorer *cough* instead.
Why should i contribute my skills and talent for free to AOL by helping to actually make their busted ass excuse for a browser half-way usable?
Want me to contribute to crapzilla? tell aol to give me a contract, otherwise shut the fuck up, i'll be using opera.
I'd commend a read of the cited QinetiQ Report cited as background to the current consultation. In fact, I'm quite shocked at how well considered it is; I'm sure it will help readers seeking to convince their management to consider the adoption of OSS.
Its more than easy to diss Govtalk for its many failings - such as the failure to embrace text and RTF when it has the opportunity; hotchingly bad HTML on the website, &c.
But there's a great deal of good going on, too; not least the RFC process of which this consultation is a part; and the strong support for XML in the eGovernment Interoperability framework (itself a coherent position statement).
As food for further debate, here are the main recommendations under which the current consultation was predicated:
1. OSS is indeed the start of a fundamental change in the software infrastructure marketplace, and is not a hype bubble that will burst.
2. Within five years, 50% of the volume of the software infrastructure market could be taken by OSS.
3. OSS's position in large servers (e.g. those managing massive multi-user databases), such as those that underpin many large Government procurements, will grow from its current position of near zero penetration, to a position where OSS is a viable option, within 2 - 3 years.
4. Within the developed world, we as yet see no sign that OSS will become a viable alternative to Microsoft Windows, for user's (general purpose) desktop machines in the corporate or home PC markets. However, OSS on the desktop may soon become a significant player in the developing world. For these reasons we recommend against any preference for OSS on the desktop, but also recommend that this issue be reassessed by the end of 2002, by which time early trials of the use of OSS desktops may have generated sufficient evidence to warrant a reassessment.
5. We see no benefit that the Government would gain from expressing a general preference for OSS within server infrastructures.
6. The Government could clarify its position as to whether there are circumstances in which Microsoft products are to be preferred.
7. The Government could consider publishing policy as to how the risk of lock-in to proprietary protocols is to be managed.
8. As yet it is not possible to predict that OSS will make a major contribution to the software applications market.
9. Many of the Government's risks that arise from over-dependence on proprietary protocols and data formats for interoperability can be controlled by the selective use of open data standards.
10. The existence of an OSS reference implementation of a data standard has often accelerated the adoption of such standards, and we recommend that the Government consider selective sponsorship of OSS reference implementations.
11. The rise of OSS, offers the possibility that non-US players will find it easier to influence the future direction of IT infrastructure technology.
12. The Government should consider using OSS as the default exploitation route for UK Government funded software.
13. The differences between OSS and proprietary software are not a major factor in either improving or degrading the vulnerability of a nation's IT infrastructure.
14. We recommend that the Government obtain full rights to bespoke software that it procures - this includes any customisation of off-the-shelf software packages.
15. The Open Source model offers a new paradigm for funding software in communities-of-interest (e.g. Health and Education). The Government could consider running pilot projects to test the viability of the OSS approach to such software.
16. We recommend that the Medical Records data standard be examined by appropriate domain experts for possible inclusion in the e-GIF.
Anyway, basically they say that OSS is a viable alternative already and that they continue monitoring it. Shifting to OpenOffice should be done gradually by the end of 2003, a complete Linux-workstation is a longer term goal.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Aren't there open-source apps that can read Word documents and PDF files (Ghostscript and StarOffice)?
And more to the point, why should we expect someone presenting an open-source alternative to a predominantly Windows-based audience to present it in non-Windows formats? Are we really that zealous, that we expect organizations to convert completely to open-source alternatives before they can even mention Linux on their website? And didn't we just cover this subject?
I grew up in the rural South, and I remember folk who considered it acceptable to use racial slurs when in a whites-only group, because it was safe to assume that most everyone would agree, and those that didn't would remain silent. Thankfully, times have changed—now I have to read Slashdot to find that kind of intolerance.
If we're going to act like a bunch of militant fundamentalists, I think I might just sit this year out. Please wake me when the zealots stop screaming in the hallway.
http://access.adobe.com/simple_form.html
will automagically translate any PDF document into HTML. It uses a perl engine, too! :)
tiny silicon gadgets."
Hrm, the last time I check my ex couldn't get enough of here tiny silicon gadgets. At least I think they're silicon.
Hey you fucking idiot, it's 2002, Get with the god damn program - it's Troll Tuesday 2002! God damn, you're bashing Slashdot and you can't even pull off a calendar-accurate troll.
Fucking amateur.
".doc is NOT a standard. It is a format that is determined by one group with no regard for compatibility or interoperability. Standards exist to INCREASE interoperability."
.DOC extension for its Direct Optical Correlation files, this wouldn't cause confusion, because .DOC isn't really a standard?
.DOC isn't really a standard?
.DOC isn't really a standard?
So if I my new Windows 3D rendering package used the
And if Microsoft issued an 'update' that changed the format of files created by Word 6.0+ in such a way that StarOffice could no longer read or write them, it wouldn't be a problem because
And if for the same reason, I suddenly can't use Documents To Go on my Palm OS device, I shouldn't be inconvenienced because
I think you're referring to industry standards, and not to de facto standards. The moment other companies began writing software which was dependent on the structure of a Microsoft Word document (.DOC) file in order to operate correctly, that structure became a de facto standard.
I'm not saying you have to like it. I'm just saying that it's the way things are.
Nobody has ever sued MS because one of their products was faulty. No software from MS comes with any guarantee of usability whatsoever. If there is a CIO someplace in this world who thinks that they can hold MS accountable then by all means let us know who this collosal idiot is so that we can sell our stocks.
The idea of a CEO or a CIO commiting shareholders money to sue MS because of a defect in one of their software is just too funny. It has never been done and it will never happen.
Please people this kind of fud is old hat and stupid. Think of new ones.
War is necrophilia.
So they'll always choose the Microsoft(tm) option. That's just the way it is in the real business world. Even if there's no possibility of recovering losses from the vendor, at least there will always (?) be that vendor to blame/approach. And in the off (heh) chance that there are others with the same problems, the likelihood of finding a solution will be greater.
But that just not how it works (in certain cases):
Apache ~ 60%, Microsoft ~ 30% [netcraft.com]
And i suppose you think all those apaches are running on linux right? Ya right there's probably some monster sun servers with 50,000 virtual hosts on em accounting for most of those numbers.
Great minds think alike ;)
So far we have seen a futile debate about open source document formats. Get it into your head, these guys are not looking to go the hair shirt, I shall not use closed source software route.
The real issue is whether HMG should start adopting procurement guidelines that require the code they have written for them to be made available as open source. In some cases this would be a very bad idea, in others very good.
The issue for the UK is that they can have a much bigger influence on the development of OSS than they can on the development of Windows.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
ASP pages..hmm.site seems to running microsoft's ISS....thoughtprovoking... -vikas
If anything shows the degeneration of the UK government into an MS lackey, it's the .asp attached to that page.
Time was, it would be Perl on a Solaris box. Now, it's VB on a fucked up NT system. MS already has its dirty feet in the UK door... posting rfcs about Open Source is just to divert attention away from the real game.
Guys, reality check here. This is a consultation document written by a civil servant. At the same time we have Tony Blair schmoozing with Bill Gates in order to look good. Hell, the National Health Service recently announced a huge (hundred of millions IIRC) deal with Microsoft for a "unified buying scheme", and one of the sweeteners was that Gates would come and address a conference on IT in the NHS. You have to remember that the UK government is motivated largely by vanity, and that a lot of excellent civil servants have been sidelined because they upset that vanity.
During the last election campaign Blair paid a visit to Gates, who was in the UK promoting XP. It was very hard to see who was exploiting who for their own purposes.
Although this is a significant bit of consultation from within the government's paid service, there are much weightier reasons why we might end up with a government here which embraces free software - like Gates forgetting Blair's birthday or something. While govenment agencies require submissions to be in "industry standard" formats (i.e. Word or Excel documents) we've got an awfully long way to go.
Obligatory disclaimer - I'm a British Conservative, which influences my view on Blair's Britain a smidge.
Dunstan
The last scintilla of doubt just rode out of town
Whilst it's good to see serious discussion of open-source benefits to UK govt, one wonders if a related discussion could take place to explore the benefits to the UK economy of reducing the lengthy 125-year term of govt copyright which currently prevents open-source projects from using and adding to 100-year old Victorian map data produced by the Ordnance Survey. The nearest open-source projects can get is ancient pre-125 year map data which are quite interesting as historical data but are seriously deficient for mapping because they are missing large areas of development from the late 19th century. By contrast, in the US, it seems the USGS has a more favorable policy of open-sourcing their data. The result is open-source mapping projects and software that use and extend the USGS datasets, in many cases also leading to commercially successful products.
Scroogle
If Babbage had offered the Pru or Norwich Union an accurate way of accessing Insurance risk, he would be alive today :-)
The truth is, we developed Colossus, a real computer, and shared our secrets with the Yanks. At the end of the war, we kept our secrets secret, while the yanks sold out for cash. They sold our secrets with theirs, to IBM, Sperry, Univac, Burroughs, etc, and leaked them via MIT to DEC (MIT Whirlwind later became PDP8).
We had a computer industry, but thanks to the marvel of government intervention (Harold Wilson's "White Hot Technological Revolution" & Thatchers "We don't need manufactirubng, we can pay the rent by washing our own dishes") our computer industry was trashed.
Briain's computer industry lives (staggers) on we probably make more PCs than anyone else apart from taiwan, and don't forget Arm is British. And all the RF parts of your mobile phone were probably designed in the UK, or by British Engineers on contract overseas.
Sure Britain doesn't own much, but thats because of our tax laws. Ownership is punishable by horrendous levels of tax.
Of particular interest is the recommendation that if there is a value case, government departments should be free to go with Free Software (as opposed to being tied to software from "real companies"). This hard-headed value-for-money analysis the only way to check the political and marketing muscle of the software corps. The truth is that much of the corporately-developed software available offers very little additional value over the corresponding open source equivalent.
Banging the drum for Open Source is great, but it's when procurers say, "show me the added value or give me a discount", that people like Microsoft pay attention.
"Well, put a stake in my heart and drag me into sunlight."
I tried to read the link with my SoooooooooZuh box running that open source reject Netscape. Whudduyuh get? Blank page.
Cool, an RFC for open source that can only be read with MS branded software. Koooooooooooool.
Fine, they'll consider OSS for new stuff. Remember the UK's existing "e-government" that is only accessible via Windows? The policy should mandate the revision of all existing facilities to use open standards.
I have saved the PDF of the report as PostScript with xpdf for printing or download here (100k).
http://www.fibrespeed.net/~mbabcock/mirrors/ukgo vt oss.ps (300k) for people who don't have compressed file support.
http://www.fibrespeed.net/~mbabcock/mirrors/ukgovt oss.html (170k) for HTML converted by Star Office from the MS Word document.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
The problem is that there's nothing to be seen
if you access that URL with netscape 4.77-linux and do not accept cookies.
That doesn't follow at all. If one implementation is good enough, there is no need for a competitor. Acrobat Reader is free, perfectly good enough for what it does, produced by the people who define the Acrobat format, and has no glaring missing features. What would be the point in producing a "competitor"?
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Bah. Like it or not, .pdf is an industry standard. If you want to play with non-standard setups, you have to accept the price, which is that you won't be able to do everything the standard-conforming people can. This is your problem, not theirs.
Do you also think the government should publish this paper translated for Chinese and Indian audiences? There are millions more of them out there who can't read it than there are people using the systems you mention. But the simple fact is that they are not the target audience, so there's no reason for someone to spend large amounts of effort catering to them.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Use common sense on the desktop - people can still use Windows and get the power of linux off the server - ssh client tools are available for secure access.
Don't try replacing Windows on the desktop...you will find that the vast majority of people aren't nearly as obsessed with monopoly politics as they are with using their favorite plugins.
So let me get this straight. The UK government takes a genuine step toward investigating Open Source, and the best /. can do is carp on their publishing formats? And we wonder why the Open Source community is treated with contempt or disdain by so many professional/government outfits...
You might try actually reading the article before you make such comments. It wasn't an RFC, it was a detailed, objective and well thought-out analysis of the state of OSS today, and its potential uses within UK government. Its most significant conclusions seem to be that there is potential there for some applications, but it isn't viable yet, and for other applications, there's no particular likelihood that it will become so.
Moving on, I find it strange that so many people here seem to feel that because this discusses OSS, it should be published in an "open" format, and that PDF format is not open. Now, first up, PDF is about as open as you can be without going to absurdly low levels. There is at least one good, free reader available for all major platforms, and the specification is published by Adobe, as has been detailed elsewhere in this thread.
Furthermore, given the target audience for the paper, using an "open" format is pretty irrelevant anyway. They have no obligation whatsoever to spend large amounts of effort converting it to a format for the 0.01% of people out there who can't already read Acrobat format because they use very unusual systems. If you don't like it, switch to a better system, and quit complaining. Your whole argument supports another of the major conclusions in the paper: the OSS world isn't yet compatible enough with the rest of the world to be practical as a routine alternative.
And yes, Acrobat format is a standard used for publication, because it's popular, reliable, effective and useful. That is currently more than can be said for any of the alternatives being proposed on this thread (ASCII and HTML variants aren't anywhere near up to rendering that document accurately, and XSL:FO is a technology that won't be widely used for several years). In that context, the UK government (and many others who publish papers on-line) have adopted PDF format as a de-facto standard, and as far as I can see, no-one has yet suggested a better idea.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I wrote:
Sorry; I screwed up big-time there. I read both documents about half an hour before posting that and had forgotten about the original RFC by the time I'd read through the background and the rest of this thread. The swipe quoted above about reading the article was out of line. My apologies.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Contrast with Linux. If you call Red Hat about Sendmail, for example, they can only go so far before they say, "Well, you'll have to call sendmail, Inc. This is a bug in their app." Oh no, there's a problem with Evolution; now I have to call Ximian. And so on. Although it is my personal opinion that 98% of Unix/Linux problems you'd call about are wacky configuration issues and honest bugs. Those happen a lot, but not in the "stable" versions of apps. Who knows, the same might be true with WIndows. Anyway, a company like Red Hat is hindered because they provide integration of the apps, but not support on the apps themselves. Although I belive one of the jobs of Alan Cox is to provide a "strike force" for kernel fixes, should someone call about it.
My answer to businesses: shut up and get use to it. Just because Red Hat installed your OS doesn't mean they are responsible for every app on it. If it's a Sendmail problem, call Sendmail!
I work at tech support for Insight@Home, and I get these calls from former AOL users wanting to fix their AOL, or some other app. I think this is the same idea here. We don't fix AOL; we fix your internet connection. If you have a problem with AOL, !@$%ing call AOL!
Heh...AOL lamers and PHBs both need to realize that there shouldn't be one global progrem for everything. Sure, you only have to remember one tech support number to call, but you don't have a choice on anything else. If something isn't working right, you can't threaten to go to some other product.
OTOH, OSS allows you use anything you want, but you'll have to be sure to contact the right person. However, it's a good chance that you'll contact somebody that KNOWS the software, instead of some global tech support dunce. Again, I've talked to real programmers before to get something fixed (like people talk to me to get my products fixed).
Sometimes, you just have to beat things into people, in order for people to see it.
Zodiac Survey
Still a colony... one way or another... ;-)
Yeah... a penal colony.
That's why you always call each other 'mates'. It's short for 'inmates'.
The author seems to confuse Open Systems with Open Source. Lock-in to a proprietory vendor only occurs if that vendor uses proprietory standards. There is a world of difference in adopting Solaris and adopting Win32. With Solaris, if you want to move to a new platform in a year, you won't have a problem, because it is based on Open Standards, with win32 you are locked-in.
Microsoft may learn the same lesson that IBM and DEC have learned. Proprietary standards only work when you control the market. Once a contender takes a reasonable bit of market share from you its a fast road to hell. Nobody wants a computer that doesn't integrate well with other computers unless they only have to support only that one type of machine. VAX/VMS was great until people wanted to integrate them with cheap Unix work stations.
Maybe in 2002 people will start to say, Win32 is great but it doesn't integrate too well with our Linux web servers and our Solaris database server.
The site seems to work fine to me. Even if it is not "as fast as Perl". If you want more speed than Perl and ASP/VB provide, you should use Java, Resin Benchmark
That's what I use, but not for the speed, I use it because I like a clean OO language, and I am familiar with Java, so coding takes me less time than if I were to use perl or ASP/VB.
Bull. I have a current version of Acrobat on every machine I use at home and at work, and I don't think I've ever downloaded a 5MB install. I certainly haven't done it once a year for every machine where I use it. For a start, the current version is on the cover disk of almost every PC magazine I've ever bought.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Rubbish. The PDF format is well documented by Adobe and the information is publicly available. The details have even been posted in this thread. Non-Adobe software that both renders and creates PDF documents is available, too. I can't see how your quoted statement above could be more wrong.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I was able to view the DOC file using StarOffice 6 BETA and the PDF file inside my Netscape 6.2.1 Browser using acroread from Adobe.
It took a little work to get acroread to work properly - 15min - but now it's working great. I prefer PDFs. heh
At any rate, it looks like the UK is going to save alot of Pounds and get great software to boot.
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
Might explain some things.
Happy new year, you troll bastard, you!
Use HTML. It helped the Web get started and get popular.
For you high-level high-paid government policy makers (over 200K Euros a year likely): the Web is the clicky mouse part of the Internet, with the http:// and the links etc.
>For a start, the current version is on the cover disk of almost every PC magazine I've ever bought.
:-D LOL, ROTFLMAO, et al.
Please mod the parent as Funny, it really deserves it! You accuse me of FUD and use a ZD net publication to support your accusation! The irony is delicious!
>Bull. I have a current version of Acrobat on every machine I use at home and at work
Some of us don't pay $6.95 a month to stay up to date with Acrobat Reader by buying PC Magazine. Seems to be a very expensive way of staying up to date. Well, that and in Canada when American magazines come with CDs they usually end up costing $10 a month. I don't even pay $120 a year to Microsoft so why would I even consider paying it for a file viewer that often prevents me from saving and printing?
>and I don't think I've ever downloaded a 5MB install.
Yup, that's because it is actually larger. Go ahead and try downloading it yourself, FUDmeister.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
.doc is not a standard.
.pdf, then it wouldn't be a standard either. As it is (because there are independant ways to create, edit, and view them, and because Adobe isn't a monopoly) the .pdf is a standard. So being a proprietary API doesn't prevent something from becoming a standard.
.doc extension to all of them. This can create as much, or more, confusion as your example of an independant product using the same extension (which has also happened). And the latest MSWord can't necessarily read the older formats. This was broken for a period back around the release of ?? was it Word 97? I believe that this was quickly patched, but we got one of the broken versions, and it caused considerable confusion. But it was their right. Nobody can accuse them of breaking the standard, because .doc isn't a standard. It's just a file spec. A proprietary file spec.
Proprietary API's are not standards, and neither are proprietary file specs. Sorry. They just aren't. They are API's (or file specs). And they do cause random amounts of confusion. And that's part of why they aren't standards.
If Adobe could at will change the specs of the
Microsoft uses several different Word formats, and gives the
.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
See section 2.7.3 page 15 of the QinetiQ regarding the failure of the W3C to properly establish HTML standards!!!!
The W3C tools can't tell the difference between what is mark up language and what it marks up, regarding URLs. But most browsers can (if not all).
You are so right. Not only is it NOT a standard -- just a proprietary file spec -- it's an UNDOCUMENTED file spec. So nobody but Microsoft knows how to read and write the damn files in the first place. Besides, given a Word document file, it's trivial to generate the HTML, PDF, and RTF versions. So the folks complaining about the government releasing only the proprietary version are justifiably irritated.
Guns don't kill people -- people kill people.
But the guns seem to help a bit. (apologies to Eddie Izzard)
Those last two sentences from MrEfficient on Tuesday are very important.
.pdf or .doc file that the UK published as solicitation for comments. The British government is fond of assertive interoperability requirements. It smells vaguely like the pleasant aroma of POSIX years ago in America. It might be called "flypaper remover".
"It's a real barrier to innovation." What is a real barrier to innovation? MrEfficient did a good job of introducing the topic, but I think it a worthy task to expound upon it.
At the heart of the issue is the United Kingdom, trying to do what is wise. As a means toward the end of serving the citizens, i.e., the general interest within that country, the government takes a serious look at open source software.
All of this happens within a context. Let us consider something about that context. The economy/economies of the wealthy countries is/are in a funk. No. It's not just the WTC bombing. It's more than that.
Doing my best not to indulge too far in digression, please draw your attention to a British American almost 70 years ago, Joseph Schumpeter. For brevity, let us use unfair stereotypes.
The courageous entrepreneur tries something daring. It works. He gets rich. He gets conservative. He gets a thing that Schumpeter almost used as a technical term of jargon in economics: a lounge suit. The bourgeois Siren songs sing too loudly, and the guy covers his butt.
When too many of the "newly rich" get scared like that, the whole economy finds itself in a glut, i.e., either a recession or a depression. In fact, that was Schumpeter's explanation for the root causes of the Great Depression.
Now consider the "vice" of the formerly courageous capitalist in the sense of a corporate executive beholden to the interests of shareholders in the modern world. If, say, he or she plans strategy for the development of software (or perhaps even firmware and definitely hardware), he or she will almost invariably try to minimize future risks to shareholders by figuring out a way to get the customers to step on flypaper. There is an ongoing piecemeal conspiracy against interoperability.
You see it all the time, and you see it from even the tiniest and hungriest of companies. Remember the ubiquitous noninteroperable greeting card programs for PCs in about 1995? All they became were dead ends and weird graphic file formats, but at least the hardcopy could be produced with minimized user training.
By the "jealousy" of those software vendors/developers, collectively, they almost assured their destruction, collectively. Rightly or wrongly, I call them "Microsoft Wannabes".
Microsoft Wannabes dream with fondness about the flypaper marketing. In a nominally rational strategy, they try to secure the interests of shareholders by a vaguely predatory scheme, but so many such schemes from so many companies make a sort of Tower of Babel, and if there were not as much diversity in the whole economy--i.e., if we relied on these ridiculous greeting card programs to create most of the jobs and wealth--then economic disaster would result.
Now let us look critically at the story of that Tower of Babel. What was the problem? The problem was that people could not interact meaningfully because meaning could not be exchanged, person to person. There was a language barrier.
Barrier--that is the key.
In a country like mine (U.S.), policy debates often become issues of international commerce. Whether buying TTL chips from Mexico or Jaguars from Britain, we can be sure that, on average, the velocity of commerce will increase when the size of each barrier decreases. When that happens, in American fashion, politics becomes less contentious. Huge revenue flowing almost everywhere means that modest rates of taxation garner large government revenues. Then politicians debate about rebates, tax breaks AND more government generosity to the poor.
That's where Adam Smith meets Joseph Schumpter. Well, not quite.
Smith wanted what we might call "liberal materialism" to increase the overall velocity of wealth, to persistently tax commerce at somewhat low rates, and to let the Invisible Hand (greed, for lack of a better term) be the fuel for the whole system.
When companies get too jealous and "conspire" to erect too many barriers, the velocity of wealth slows down. This is a viable explanation for business cycles of expansion and recession.
I confess that that was pretty sloppy, but try to fill in the cracks with your own thinking and even your own bias about political economy. It's "compatible" with liberal and conservative views at least here in the U.S.
When did information technology commerce go hog wild? Roughly 1993 to 1995, right when HTML thumbed its nose at proprietary presentation formats of every kind of text and imagery.
Roughly 1994 was when the barriers exploded. With the bratty behavior of both Microsoft and Netscape more recently, and with the self-sustaining desire for "empire" of each pathetic flypaper marketing scheme, the Smith/Schumpeter magic became eroded.
If only due to the ridiculous overhead of unnecessary development and authoring time (despite the "helpful" Web tools), what looked open behaved as if it were closed. Little by little, people realized that the party was over.
Who knows? Maybe when Microsoft decided to dump even the common plugin API--IE vs. Netscape Navigator et al--it became clear that the hope for interoperability was beginning to wane. That chased capital away from the brave upstarts; in a sense, it signalled the closing of a frontier.
Open Source became famous nearly at the same time, but FUD dampens what would otherwise be phenomena as giddy as roughly 1994 with the explosion of the World Wide Web.
If this looks like rambling, then perhaps it is because you haven't read the
In my opinion, a (seemingly) unintended consequence of British IT procurement policy would be to catalyze what Schumpeter said that capitalism craves for growth: innovation and a weird sense of "security" that emboldens upstarts to push the envelope instead of sitting on butts and covering them at the same time.
Thank you for your patience as I unfolded these ideas somewhat loquaciously.
file format for word proccesisng on the desktop. It is the format for the #1 word processor and all of it's sub versions (Word v. 6 through XP). That word processor is dominant on the desktop, capturing over half of all desktop users on all platforms.
.DOC.
That means that if you want to trade files with another user you must use the standard --
Quit your whining and get over it -- if you want to challenge the standard make a good choice. If you want to buttress the standard then make your software work with it.
If you want your software used by the majority of users out there then you need to either make it work with the standard or make it good enough that they will use it anyway.
How the fuck is this flamebait? I'll see you in metamod.
No, I didn't. I did not refer to "PC Magazine", which I assume is a specific publication where you are. I referred to "every PC magazine" (note the lowercase m), which in my case covers at least five or six publications over the past couple of years, from a variety of publishers. Pretty much every cover disk I've seen in that time had the latest version of Acrobat Reader on it.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Ambiguous statements. Fair use. UK law. You. Have. No. Case. So sue me.
I'm sorry, but that is completely and utterly irrelevant. Acrobat is widely accessible, simply because the vast majority of people who want to read it can do so. You can use any other metric you like, but that doesn't change the fact that everyone I know, from my co-workers to my parents, can read an Acrobat file trivially. And that includes people running PCs, Macs and Linux.
Of course it's targetted at printing; that's what most people are going to do with it. Very few people read long documents on-line.
HTML is little more than a poor cousin to a man page. It is a bastardised mark-up language, based on ill-planned roots, that's grown beyond its usable potential. XML is a vastly superior approach for genuine mark-up of structured data. PDF, PostScript, and newer technologies like XSL:FO are better choices for representing formatted documents. HTML is stuck somewhere in the middle, carried along only by momentum, as it has been for several years now.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Yes, I'm afraid that's true. It always has been, and it probably always will be. If you try to break away from contemporary standards, you will face an uphill battle; such is the price you pay for being on the leading edge. There is a reason most people stick to standards, and this thread is a prime example of it. (And yes, it does mean that technologies with potential can get left behind, but if they aren't compatible with the rest of the world, that's the risk they run.)
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Subject :
:)
ADODB.Field error '800a0bcd'
Either BOF or EOF is True, or the current record has been deleted. Requested operation requires a current record.
/e-gov/consult_subject.asp, line 103
nuff said
Accusing someone who took the time to read your reply of being unable to do so is more than a bit outlandish.
FYI: This is PC Magazine the publication.
BTW: Not every PC magazine comes with Acrobat reader. In North America very few magazines come with CDs (or at least so I have witnessed), and, more importantly, the majority of PC magazines I'd buy would more likely come with the latest revision of XFree or PC Burnin software than Acrobat.
Or do you mean magazines about Windows specifically (the bulk of which, over here, are published by ZD), and not magazines about PCs in general? Either that or I see you're from the UK, where experience has told me you pay 4 times our price on magazines but you get a CD stuck to the front of every issue. Seems like an expensive way to get Acrobat, but each to their own, I suppose.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC