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MA Lawmakers Question Move to OpenOffice
kcurtis writes "According to a boston.com article, senators in Massachetts are questioning the move to OpenDocument." From the article: "At issue is how the state government stores the millions of digital documents and other public records it creates. The Romney administration wants documents stored in a particular format that would allow the records to be read by a variety of software packages -- except Microsoft Office. The state Senate Post Audit and Oversight Committee is holding a hearing Monday on the proposed document storage standards after blind and other visually impaired state workers raised concerns."
The Romney administration wants documents stored in a particular format that would allow the records to be read by a variety of software packages -- except Microsoft Office. The state Senate Post Audit and Oversight Committee is holding a hearing Monday on the proposed document storage standards after blind and other visually impaired state workers raised concerns.
Except that the original concern was raised that MS Office was the *only* way to access most of the documents. There is nothing stopping MS from implementing perfect support for the OpenDocument format. There are many things stopping competitors from implementing perfect MS Office compatibility. Come to think of it, even MS can't (or won't) truly implement perfect MS Office compatibility between the various versions.
...to buy a state senator.
My God! It's full of Voids!
Even though I'd like to see the OpenDocument format tested in a government-sized scenario (I'm pro-Microsoft, but I'm still supportive of OSS), I'd put impaired government workers futures over the file format.
I'll subscribe to Slashdot when I see a month without a dupe, a typo, or an article the "editors" didn't read.
I am giving OpenOffice the benefit of the doubt by assuming the software is Section 508 compliant. I can see perfectly well so I cannot ascertain its compliance. I like to believe that Sun and whomever else backs OO.o understands accessibility.
I think these Senators have recently been in backroom talks with some unnamed software company from Redmond, WA. The alliance backing open document formats in MA should follow the money trail and see if any donations have been made to the senators in question.
If OpenOffice is, in the end, inaccessible and non-508, shame on the open source community.
My 2 cents: The less of these thousands of documents are stored in a proprietary format the better for everybody, including visually impaired. What am I missing?
On se Internetz nobody noes your German.
Headline: MA Lawmakers Question Move to OpenOffice ...are questioning the move to OpenDocument.
Submission:
You do realize OpenOffice != OpenDocument, Zonkyboy, don't you? And what the hell is a Massachetts?
Please sign the petition at http://www.opendocumentfellowship.org/petition/. We are trying to demonstrate consumer demand for OpenDocument. Thanks.
Jay | http://oldos.org
I've watched the MSOffice 2k3 Format != MSOffice '97 Format, and it turns out that Microsoft does have proper support between the various versions for MS Word at least, and I'm assuming Excel, Access and Publisher have perfect compatibility on account of the type of data they're using/the logical way to store it. Although I have seen first hand where Powerpoint 2k3 fails to set a few animation speeds incorrectly, I think that Microsoft has done a fair enough job in making Office interoperatable with itself.
I'll subscribe to Slashdot when I see a month without a dupe, a typo, or an article the "editors" didn't read.
It's called text only. Anything can read it!
~Donald / Just RTFM
It is interesting to note that concern for "blind and visually impaired persons" was also used to justify the lack of paper trace for voting machines.
It seems that the/some/most important/one ? civil society organisation for Blind and Visualy Impaired Persons has been taken over by some very dangerous persons.
If I would be a blind american I would be feeling very concerned on how my "voice" is being used.
-----------
Lobbycracy stinks....
Well we got a few blind users in our lug.
There argument for using Linux is that you can do a lot more from the command line.
So in that way is Linux more productive for the blind.
So, using OpenDocuments will only make the blind more productive.
With OpenDocuments the blind users can also go in and read
the XML code itself.
Complex Word documents often have layout/macro issues - pretty much the same level of compatability as the OSS filters, really - though the conversion is very good and the fast majority of users will see no problems, just as with OO imports.
I think it's pretty clear to everyone that this is MS pulling out its political guns - think we'd be having these sort of hearings if they were moving servers from UNIX or Linux to Windows? The accessibility issue is real, and I'm not disabled and haven't done an intensive study, but OO.o does have accessibility support, even if it's not as good as what Office has. Previous versions of Office (97 and the like) have worse accessibility, so if they were good enough for workers then OO.o should be too, especially if funding can be found to sponser accessibility work in OO.o. The quotes don't sound to me like any has actually reviewed the alternatives and is familiar with the level of support in OO.o. It's not 100% correct, either. Makers of screen reader software and braille readers have specifically supported Office at the expense of other applications - an example of the harm the Office monopoly causes - and screen magnifiers work with whatever software you use. I think we're seeing a lot of people with vested political interests, or even just people that MS and MS backers have political access to, trying to toss thier 2 cents in to break a project that means a signifigant loss of revenue for MS.
All of this wouldn't matter in the slightest is MS implemented support for OpenDocument, of course, and I imagine there are plenty of people in Massechusets who would simply jump all over the chance to give MS 3 times the money they'd otherwise spend.
Ok, let met get this straight: A few disableds complain because Word has better support for their specific disability?
Sorry guys, you are on the wrong train. Demand that the tools used by the state have proper support for your disabilty, that's ok with me. Stop the move entirely because the M$ lock-in, the exact reason it's all been done, raises its ugly head? Hurts just thinking about it. Maybe we shouldn't have introduced trains and planes - the first generation of those used to have stairs and wasn't exactly accessible to cripples (used literally - people with one or both legs missing).
I wouldn't be surprised to find M$ money involved here. Sending forth those with the big sympathy bonus is in the 101 if every astroturfer and lobby professional.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
If Microsoft wants to play let them use the format. How hard can that be for a company that practically owns the desktop.
The problem is that anybody recommending doing anything in Access should be shot, stabbing, burned, mutilated, killed, and have their body jumped upon by 10000 screaming monkeys... but that's only a personal observation of course.
Is your requirement? Most stuff I deal with won't come close to that except for rudimentary support at best. After 8 years, it's ancient. Three year support is closer to the "standard" in the industry with 5 years being a good company/product to deal with.
For instance; a KOffice preview noted many accessibility features are already going into the devel-version of KOffice. See; This Month in SVN
This is just the first sign that leveling the playing field is good for innovation.
Apparently, MS has begun searching for and applying pressure to the correct pressure points. Ordinarily, I wouldn't suspect lawmakers examining a major move like ODF, but in this case, I'm afraid it's not out of valid concern for the consituents, but because of heavy duty palm greasing by One Convicted Monopolist (TM).
C'mon MA lawmakers, fess up. Whose interests are you really looking out for, besides your own?
"Insanity is doing the same thing over again expecting a different result."
"proposed document storage standards after blind and other visually impaired state workers raised concerns."
Set font size+18 ????? font weight bold????
the difference being if they used ms office ?????
Perhaps... Hiawatha Bray is not a shill for proprietary software, but merely not fully informed of what the true issues really are.
I don't see what's stopping M$ from implementing this apart from the fact that it would be an acknowlegement that there is other software in the marketplace. And to do so would be to admit that their carefully constructed monopoly has a hole. A lot of people [low level users] are of the opinion that outside MS Word there is no other worthwhile piece of software. The more institutions that move to StarOffice/OOo the better. Microsoft win by contagious monopoly... people come home from work and think the MS Word is all they can use. A knock on effect is that, literally, no one i know who owns MS Office Pro legally aquired it. This is crime by ubiquity, thus making criminals out of millions around the world. I think the seemless compatability between all the products mentioned should be made more of.
Sun added many accessability features to StarOffice, including support for blind users a while back:
e ssibility/index.xml
http://www.sun.com/software/star/staroffice/7/acc
Hopefully someone decides to talk to Sun and ask them if StarOffice has these types of features before their meeting.
---------- Open Source is capitalism applied to IP.
There's support for AT tools in OpenOffice.org.
Read:
http://ui.openoffice.org/accessibility/index.html
http://ui.openoffice.org/accessibility/at.html
and might be a lack of companies supporting the Java Access Bridge
Ok except consider the following: If your developing for Windows, the JetSQLengine will be built in. For small databases that will always run on windows, Access is good enough. Add the fact that you can distribute the end app as a single exe, or an exe and a few custom DLLS, and MS access means no external dependencies. If you have to extend any product that stores its data in something ODBC accessiable, you can do a linked table in MS ACCESS and store all your data in your own database. I keep all the SQL for my access queries in version control with my code. When ever possible I try to wean my clients onto MySQL/PHP web apps. When I'm interfacing with a third party program I try to eventually rewrite said app or get a cleaner interface to it than access.
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
If MA does switchover, then those who have to share docs with the MA gov will have to use software that reads and writes OpenDocument. If MS Office does not support OpenDocument, then people will try other products, and MS may start to lose their stranglehold on the office software market.
Hopefully, MA is only the first of many businesses and governments that will switch to open formats. The fewer of these MS Office supports, the less useful it will be.
Hello I am new here, I am actually from linuxsucks.org as user, earthsnake.
:)
The thing about openoffice is that it is a great, powerful, open-source program that has many features that works much better than ms office (I am not going to go into detail). The thing is that people seem to have this common perception that what is more "commercially accepted" is the better product. Ms products have become engrained deep into the cogs of the entire IT industry. It is hard to find an average person these days that does not run a version of the Windows Operating system on their computer. Therefore I think that many people will check out openoffice ONLY if it is more advertised, I am the average customer, say, twenty, not interested in IT particularly. You get a nice advert up saying how much stabler GNU and open source products like openoffice are over ms products, the guy would probably at least download and try it, or at least go to the website! I think these things need more exposure. And also, for people with disabilities, open office is an open source product; I'm sure it'll develop to do these sort of things rather quickly
Have a good life, earth.
That's a good website you linked to, but unfortunately irrelevant, as Mr. Kerry is a United States Senator, not a state senator (someone who serves in the state senate). As you might be aware, most decisions like this, internal to a state, are not under the purview of the United States Senate, but are made on the local level. Hence "Romney administration" rather than "Bush administration," etc. On a side note, I'm happy that Romney, a Republican, is willing to push this issue, it seems that Republicans in a less liberal state would be unlikely to, though that might be making some assumptions . . .
Although the moon is smaller than the earth, it is farther away.
... but the 'Open Document' standard. MS basically are refusing to support it (it conflicts with their monoploy interests), and then crying *foul* because Mass. has endorsed it.
I see this as an absolute non-issue. There are so many ways to resolve this long-term and several short-term possibilities:
.. full access to accessibility tools. Once done, convert back. With a little creative hacking, it could be seamless (absolutely seamless if they were running KDE and created a kioslave .. :)
Short-Term:
1. Open document in OpenOffice.org, save as a MS Office doc, open in MS Office
2. Research non-Office suite specific accessibility tools (those that operate at the OS level) and evaluate. These might be satisfactory.
Long-Term:
1. Microsoft supports OpenDocument. Access to pre-existing tools still functions properly, no problems.
2. Third-party creates an import/export of OpenDocument for MS Office
3. Existing third-party accessibility companies provide support for OpenOffice.org, StarOffice, KOffice or any of the other suites supporting OpenDocument format. Perhaps funds saved from not buying MS licenses can seed this development.
4. Companies such as IBM already develop/maintain many accessibility tools. It seems likely that they would be a prime candidate for migrating these tools over to be OpenOffice/StarOffice compatible.
There was an oligopoly on food distribution for decades, with much higher prices than south, in the EU. One of the two big chains even had their own exception from monopoly laws! This was officially complained about by the politicians (but not too loudly), but nothing ever happened.
Despite that food costs is a larger part of low income people's expenses, something claimed to be close to the heart of the usual government party.
A few years after joining the EU, a low-price German food distribution chain started to open shops. They had a really hard time to get permits, since the towns decided that they wouldn't allow any more business centers outside the central cities (despite that those have been built for decades!). The central politicial parties didn't exactly intervene on the local political agenda, either.
All the bad press that the German shop got is besides the point -- we are talking about state/country level politicians here. (Swedish press isn't exactly NY Times in integrity.)
Sure, it might just be total incompetence. But since this hit low income people disproportionally, left wing politicians, always talking about the poor man's lot and "solidarity", should at least have talked seriously about doing something in the 70s.
I don't know if/what kind of lobbying was behind all this. I just note that 10% of the total cost for food in a year is a lot of money. And that left wingers love talking about the evil corporations, but never mention the big distribution companies that really stole the poor people's money.
IMHO, the win with the EU membership, is serious laws against monopolies.
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
The Commmonwealth can accomodate disabled workers by continuing to use Microsoft Office by buying licenses for their computers. The documents can be saved as, lets say, an .rtf file. Then converted to odt. And vice-versa. What about converting the .doc to .pdf? Am I missing something here?
It strikes me that some of the feedback/discussion on /. ought to be fed back to the Romney administration - help them to defend their position. Can someone in the USA/Massachusetts do that please.
If money went into the pockets of these senators, it would probable be more than enought to pay for developers to fix any shortcomings that OpenOffice or other OS suites may have with respect to accessibility.
Bert
Who believes that is irony
We need to get on the phone with these lawmakers.
Listen: The example of Blind or Visually Impaired access is PRECISELY why an open document format should be used. OK I admit it, I didnt RTFA, but it sounds like blind + visually impaired people are complaining because their microsoft software that enables them to read documents doesn't support the open document format. Well guess what, that'll take about a month for the free software community to fix, and by fix I mean, support whatever reading mechanism these blind people have.
Imagine if the situation was reversed, and we were asking microsoft to add support for the visually impaired. Or asking microsoft to give out a free reader so poor people could get access to the state's documents. Or asking microsoft to make a Linux, OSX, and Solaris port of that reader for people who exercise their right to choose. Or some brand new ailment appears where people need to read their fonts in dayglo rainbow colors or they have seizures. The FOSS community will be able to handle that situation _much faster_ than Microsoft.
This is the _reason_ mass is switching to ODF, so as needs change, the community can change the software. This is a safer bet than asking microsoft, crossing fingers, and hoping they decide it will be more profitable to do what we ask then to ignore us.
Maybe they caught us with our pants down on this one?
PERFECT OPPORTUNITY TO DEMONSTRATE WHY F/OSS IS THE RIGHT CHOICE.
Why stick up for big business?
In brief, the two houses of the legislature came up with different version of the bill, then handed over to a committee comprised largely of lawyers who have done DUI defense work, who watered it down badly before the legislature passed it overwhelmingly and the legislative leadership literally fled the country. Only after a public uproar, they rushed back and demonstrated their conviction by passing a much-strengthened bill by even a larger margin.
The only thing that gives me some hope on the OD issue is that there aren't any MCSE's in the Mass. legislature. I hope.
Not to mention the fact that in the Linux world, nothing comes close to Access as a [programmable] frontend. When you need to add business logic to a database, Access does a pretty good job. Kexi, while promising, does not cut it yet...and phpMyAdmin is worse...Navicat is not so bad but still does not cut it. as the saying goes.
Sadly with access you lose more work-time minute for minute while waiting for the slow database than you save when writing the frontend. A few years back the IT department where I worked used Access to store their PC database (who is the user of which PC and where is that PC located, which Hardware is in that PC,...). You often had to wait minutes to get the page for a single PC from the Access Database with a few thousand (below 10000) PCs when you accessed it through their 6 MBit/s Link across town. I don't think any Open source database would have been that slow.
Linux is not Windows
blinux
"emacspeak the complete audio desktop"
Orca
"Sun's StarOffice 8 (based on OpenOffice.org) was released earlier today. In fact, already one University campus has standardized on it! There are many new features, including improvements to Microsoft Office compatibility, support for the new OASIS OpenDocument format (which the State of Massachusettes is adopting - see pages 18-19 of the Massachusettes Enterprise Information Technology Architecture version 3.5 [available in OpenDocument format too of course]), support for the W3C XForms standard, and new migration tools to help convert the Visual Basic macros in MS Word and Excel documents to StarOffice Basic."
But the new features I most want to highlight are the accessibility enhancements. To my mind, the key accessibility improvements in StarOffice 8 (and the shortly-to-be-released OpenOffice.org 2.0) are:
1. Dramatic improvements in desktop theme support. StarOffice 8 (and OpenOffice.org 2.0) now do an excellent job of conforming to things like the High Contrast theme in MS-Windows, or the High-Contrast-Large-Print theme in the GNOME desktop on Solaris and GNU/Linux systems.
2. Numerous improvements to PDF export support. StarOffice 8 now supports Tagged PDF documents. Tags in PDF files are how the new Adobe Reader 7 exposes all of the accessibility information to assistive technologies and via it's own "self-reading" functionality.
3. The usual collection of accessibility bug fixes (including one that allows Gnopernicus to properly read spreadsheet cells).
You can get a copy of StarOffice 8 right now for Windows, Linux, Solaris x86 or Solaris SPARC; in English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, or Swedish!
It's nice to that at the same time that StarOffice accessibility improves, acceptance and adoption of StarOffice goes up. Some might question an implied cause and effect relationship between those two facts, but I'm content to know we're clearly on the right track in both of these areas. (2005-09-27 13:55:00.0) Permalink Comments [1]
Plenty more at Google where I found these if your interested. Interesting reading, maybe some of you will even find something you want to contribute to. Considering it regards Americans with disablities, you might even be able to get a grant to do some of the work.
I think the issues around open document formats used by governments and in the public sector is too important that lawmakers should be discouraged because of accessibility issues. Such issues can and will be fixed - there is no technical reason why for instance OpenOffice can't provide the same functionality for these users as do MS office. The same goes for support of the OASIS OpenDocument format in applications spesifically crafted for these users. It should not be more difficult to parse these documents than .DOC files.
There are also a number or countries this side of the pond following Massachussetts very closesly, and IBM last week invited the new Norwegian government to follow Massachussetts in standardizing on OpenDocument in the public sector.
Microsoft has also been very active on Norwegian discussion boards lately where Microsoft employees have been operating under nicks posing to be normal discussion partipants rallying against the OpenDocument formats and promoting the openness of the MS XML formats. Repeated questions to Microsoft on the fact that this "openness" is only Windows deep remains unanswered. Microsoft's own Office:mac 2004 is unable to read the Word XML document formats produced by Word 2003 on Windows.
The future is in beta
Be great to have a simple plug-in that worked for office on all platforms to simply read an open document formatted document.
The thing is that generally these sorts of things tend to have limited ability such as the ntfs mount kernel extension for Mac OS X in which you can only read from an ntfs volume.
In general, my point is that microsoft like limiting people like how they limited kai from working at google full-time.
Have a good life, earth.
Ah, I see: x > 0, z > x, z > y, y > 0, therefore x should be "good enough" since y was good enough.
The argument is fallacious and shows total (or intended) ignorance of figures. Openoffice does have some accessibility support which however is almost not insignificant when compared even to Microsoft Office 95. You see, Microsoft has invested real money to support those people.
especially if funding can be found to sponser accessibility work in OO.o
That would be great. Microsoft, however, calls this funding "payment", charges it to end users only and not on the general public and has come up with a better product 10 years ago.
It's amazing what lobbying ignorant senators can do for you. And we've also got these blind and disabled users who always seem to creep out of the woodwork from apparently nowhere to raise concerns, even though most workers in any organisation will just accept new changes and raise concerns as they go along so they get solved.
It's a well worked Microsoft pattern, and the kicking and screaming only gets worse from here on in. For some reason I seem to remember a scene from Robocop where that large robot is stuck in a stairwell and is kicking and screaming like mad.
They doesn't limit Microsoft Office, they are just moving to an open format.
This mean moving away from the closed formats, Microsoft can support OpenDocument if they want the fact that they don't support it now doesn't make it permanent, the problem with closed formats its: they'll remain closed.
It's all they need to figure out about.
I agree; and I have seen a flurry of activity around KOffice, including a cool screenshot for better accessibility in the upcoming release. See this page; KOffice preview
And yes, if Y was good enough then X should also be good enough. Thats not to say that theres not a reason to work on improving what we have, or that Office isn't better, but if disabled workers could work with Office 95, then they can also work with OpenOffice. Bear in mind that Massachusetts is only legally obligated to the extent of section 508 support.
I know it's not exactly politically correct, but there is a limit to the extent of accomodation for disabled users. They should have the best tools available, yes, but within the limits of reason - if OO.o is sufficent for work, even if it's not the best, and there are other reasons to use OpenOffice, then the simple convenience (as opposed to neccesity) of individual users should not hold up a migration with other pressing reasons. Its exactly the same reason why we don't give every office worker 23 inch hi def plasma displays and $10k workstations, or why everyone doesn't have thier own office.
OpenOffice as well as GNOME are stellar in terms of accessibility for blind and visually impaired citizens. If anyone may raise objections to using open standards it would be the mentally impaired.
Can't the MA government use the cash it would be saving by not upgrading from MS Office X to Office X+1 to fund the creation of all the software tools it would need?
How true, how true.
Seriously, and I've done it--
Most businesses have use an Access database in the past because it is fairly easy to start it and build on top of it. Hell, I've had one that grew past it's 1Gig limit (when we migrated it to SQL7 with the same front end).
Personally, I've found that if you build the frontend in an HTML interface and use PHP/MySQL as the backend, you have a much better chance of being accessible and don't have to worry about updrages with the Access front end.
My case had Mac users and where the remotes were using Terminal server, now they can login to a website and make updates.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
Nonsense. I have a client who has a mixed Office 2k3 and office 2k environment. For some reason Powerpoint slides from Office 2k won't open on the Office 2k3 PCs.
Also, the nefarious TNEF encoding bug is the most ridiculous thing in the history of email. Even Outlook Express won't open those nasty Outlook TNEF encoded attachments.
MS has only one reason for deliberately breaking compatibility between their own apps (and they regularly do). Do I have to spell it out ?
Stephan.
I have to agree. We've lost more time dealing with Access issues than we've ever saved by using Access over a real database (not neccesarily open source) implementation.
I've watched the MSOffice 2k3 Format != MSOffice '97 Format, and it turns out that Microsoft does have proper support between the various versions for MS Word at least,
This might be true considering you edit every document and save/update it with every version upgrade since Word 1.0 for DOS came out. But not true if you have not done so. And given the quantity and age of government documents it is unlikely they have. Even when it does work, content and formatting loss, even minor can happen.
Government senators think with their personal pocket books and alliances before common sense, it is common sense for governments to keep their documents iin an open format to 1) reduce costs of copy type when technology changes and 2) to maximizing the viewing audience.
Now if Microsoft wants to participate in this, there is nothing to stop them from doing so but their own desires to "lock out" competition. Which in this case will not be allowed. Mind you, knowing Microsoft they will do their best to hinder the effort in whatever way they can.
Now imagine how television and telco transmissions would work if they couldn't agree on standards.
So your experience is that Microsoft's new word processor pretty much processes words the same as their last word processor?
Your assumptions on excel and access, IME, are incorrect as well.
Microsoft has gone through several iterations of both VB and MSSQL. That which you open in 97 excel will cause 2k3 to puke and vice-versa. Not only that, but clippy will help you convert from the old format to the new, but I've really only see that work flawlessly for simple SUM()-type arithmetic spreadsheets. It's a good idea to back up both your raw data AND keep a copy of your macros handy. Then go drop 80 bucks on their latest "working with the new VB" book and do the conversions by hand.
I have a database right now that is asking me if I want to "block unsafe expressions" because my version of JET is NEWER than the one running on the host box!
MS Office is an unsecure dinosaur that needs to be rebuilt from scratch, not just have the code "tweaked" to create compatibility issues that force downstream users to upgrade or lose access to data.
Use the 'americans with disability act' to your advantage for a change.
Anything to make a buck and keep the monopoly going.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
and then hamstring everyone after getting in. I'd do a cost analysis of how much loss they're causing to how much it'd take to pay the lawyers after firing their asses.
You might want too add some qualifiers like today, and if they run Windows on an X86. But the lack of an open format for document storage means that this support might not be there tomorrow. What if Microsoft goes out of Business? Think it could never happen? Well Eastern Airlines and AMC are no longer around. Those where both large companies that just don't exist anymore. Even if Microsoft doesn't go out of business they could drop the Office product line or just not support old file formats at some point in time. The requirement that all goverment documents be stored in a format that is NOT the property of company seems to so Logical that to have it be any other way is just dumb. Not only that but you are then making the choice of office software a no bid item! Microsoft will have a goverment enforced lock on goverment software contracts for a very long time. This would then become a goverment backed monopoly. Disabled people are not defined just by their disabilities. Everything that effects a none disabled person also effects disabled ones. Well I did have a blind friend tell me that one advantage she had was that she didn't have to see teenagers running around with their pants hanging half way off their butts and showing off their boxers. She is a very interesting person she was working on a book called "Why it is good to be blind".
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
the only precedent we have for long range storage has been books. ( I will leave out stone tablets, etc, I mean semi modern historical precedent) Stored properly and made with good quality paper, they last quite a long time, and the only requirement for data retrieval is the ability to read. Electronic media has a more dismal track record so far, precisely from evolving hardware and software abandonment. Instead of centuries like with books, it is mere small number years, and poof, hard to get access unless one maintains a computer and software museum.
There really *does* need to be a guaranteed open access document format, especially for public governmental documents.
The willingness of most business to voluntarily get locked in to a forced upgrade cycle, and government the same, based on ONE monopoly's dictates and profit concerns, is mind boggling. It's contemptuous really, beyond idiotic. Imagine the discussion if books were similar, write something, ten years or so later, after you paid for an eyeball upgrade because "everyone else does it", you could no longer view the decade old book. It's ludicrous but that is what the closed document format people want with electronic records.
I've disliked Microsoft for a long time. But it did have a sort of internal consistency. They avoided fighting things through the courts and pushed to have their solutions adopted for reasons of argued practicality. Usually it was skewed, as in the case of J++ (which was a nice tool but tied you to their platform) or ActiveX (which was a handy API but tied you to their platform) or Internet explorer (which was a powerful browser but decreased the likelihood you'd be able to migrate to another platform later) or Access (which sucked as your system expanded but did give you productivity increases right now) or SQL Server (which was really rather good after 6.5 in spite of the nice but unusual informix syntax and bad user tools not that Oracle have ever been anything but worse). No longer. They've turned into the sort of suit company they used to outrun - big-picture suit trickiness rather than embrace and extend geek trickiness. It's not entirely new - the screwing they gave Be was bpst, but even back then in this situation, old Microsoft would have had some new twist in their platfrm - something you could do with their software that you couldn't do with OpenOffice.
.net right up, focus on developing the best tools in the industry and try to use their existing talent base and head start in technology to push for the next permeter and carve out territory there. Some honest, talent-driven, value-creating business. It might hit its worth in the short term, but if they want to be something more significant than SCO in fifteen years they should think about it.
They used to be great at that stuff. What if they'd found a way to make really easy developer tools available and a means of centralising office documents in a way that was secure. So your company could store stuff in a distributed, entierly secure way, and work on it in a distributed way, much like the web browser... but only with nasty, dirty Microsoft proprietary tools. VBA was sitting there ready to go - allowing you have your old visual basic audience develop a new world of tools on top of office.
Or what if they had a source control system that didn't completely, completely suck that they could integrate with office installs. So that every time one of your employees started up office it would start keeping track of the document versions via a daemon running on the domain controller or similar.
Hell - knowing office this stuff is probably already there and they're just not pushing things in the right direction. Also, those ideas are all a bit complicated. There's a simpler one sitting there waiting to be found and streamlined into the platform, and there are a lot more people working for them now than there used to be who should have found it a long time ago.
Whatever it is - it would probably have been a useful technology that gave people quick productivity increases now, but screwed their descendents in the same job in five years time. There would have been huge efforts by Sun and slashdot readers to discredit it, IBM would have sat on the sidelines and then jumped in once they knew it was a winner, and the fanboys in suits would have pushed for it. Maybe. Of course.. the fan boys in suits are really pissed off these days because the current generation are the one that have been screwed around on licencing and visual basic. Tut Tut.
Best thing Microsoft could do for its own survival now is to split. Sack the bureacracy, preserve the core teams of talented hackers and unshackle them from the corporate cruft. Open
Believe with me, my saplings.
I have a Linux application, and one user is visually disabled and generally needs a magnifier. I changed the screen resolution from 1280x1024 to 800x600, and he's able to read the screen better. Trivial fix.
While I realize the importance of this issue, the Senate should NOT overturn the policy for just this. This change over will take time, and as long as these people are respected in the process (and I'm sure vendors will be happy to assist in making products available to the state), software and tools will arrive in time. Savvy vendors and software developers will see this as a potentially rapidly expanding market and be willing to compete. Microsoft, as usual, will be a late-comer to the party, and possibly far too late.
Until you've seen someone run a pc all day with the monitor off, you don't fully understand the concerns of blind/visually impaired people using computers. I've seen it, and it changed the way I look at human-computer interaction forever. You can't even imagine how different the experience is when you don't have visual cues like windows, close boxes, command prompts, etc.
stuff |
**sarcasm**
Execpt that this isn't about Linux vs. Windows remarkable as that may seem. It's about Open Standards vs Vendor Lock in. Windows users can use OpenDocument as well.
And then there's always OpenOffice Base which is reckoned to be a pretty good Access workalike - an aknowledged weaness of OOo 1.x, now addressed in 2.0.
When you need to add business logic to a database, Access does a pretty good job.
That's debatable; at best it's a matter of preference. Personally, I'd use a proper database (Oracle, PostgreSQL, Ingres, or Informix by choice) and add the front end using Perl/Tk. Or if you insist on using windows, use ODBC and the developement environment of your choice.
But right at the moment the argument is about who you can buy your office software from if you want to talk to MA government offices. Is it going to be Microsoft, or is it going to be everyone in the world plus Microsoft too (if they decide to stop sulking)?
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
It was plain obvious even two thousand years ago that this is a basic flaw in democracy, those jacks of all trades, corrupt and up for hire, and voicing their opinion and judgment on all things they don't understand.
http://www.mass.gov/portal/site/massgovportal/menu item.2231afa58be831c14db4a11030468a0c/?pageID=itdu tilities&L=1&sid=Aitd&U=itd_contact_information
if you're to lazy to click the link:
Email: Web.ITD@ITD.State.Ma.US
Please provide as much detail as possible in your e-mail.
Telephone: Mon.- Fri. 7:00 a.m.-6:00 p.m.
Toll-free
Nationwide: 1-866-888-2808
FAX: 617-626-4516
Attn: ITD Web Services Group
Mail:
Information Technology Division
200 Arlington Street OR
Chelsea, MA 02150
Information Technology Division
1 Ashburton Place,
Room 1601
Boston, MA 02108
But the left's love of the poor is surpassed by their obligation to their trade union constituency to oppose any large business that doesn't pay union scale. They focus their ire on the alleged shoddy treatment of Wal-Mart employees. And I suppose by their standards, it is so. But somehow they find people who want to work under those conditions. I assume it's because they can't find anything better. I always tell people who hate Wal-Mart so much that they can get together and each kick a few bucks into the pot to form a corporation that will offer low prices to poor customers and still pay high wages to the workers, if they believe so strongly in the idea.
What does that have to do with the topic at hand? It's this: People who don't like MS Office have gotten together to make and improve software that implements the OASIS OpenDocument standards. What MA has done is not to prevent MS from selling to them, (analogous to the communities that won't allow Wal-Mart to build a store) but to allow competition.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
The fact is, keeping .DOC is an undefendable position for a government. You are willfully locking yourself in to one vendor not just now but in the future. How can you possibly defend this? I would suspect that the blind have been pitched this from Microsoft or their defendors. Someone sat around and thought, "Hey! What if we get this group to come out against it? Who can argue with the handicapped?" This is a sign, people, of the depths to which Microsoft will sink to make a buck!
The possibility of M$ going bust or failing to continue to support its file formats wouldn't be spo great if the US government hadn't recently made reverse-engineering illegal. How hard can it be?
Chris
Maybe the OS community should take a page from the X contests... you know, create a fund as a prize for the first team to meet certain objectives that are needed for adopting open source software in various areas of use.
This is a perfect example. Gather up $100,000 and give it to the first team to develop a working screen reader for Open Office.. one that meets the same capabilities as what is currently available for MS Office.
Call it an OS-Prize contest or something. It could be an annual contest or set of contests.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
"You got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em,
Know when to walk away and know when to run." Kenny Rogers, The Gambler
Call their bluff and give me a shot of whiskey.
"Ev'ry gambler knows that the secret to survivin'
Is knowin' what to throw away and knowing what to keep.
'Cause ev'ry hand's a winner and ev'ry hand's a loser,
And the best that you can hope for is to die in your sleep."
As opposed to whom, pray tell? And while we're at it, how does the public get charged, precisely? Funding targetted for OSS development tends to come from corporations, or by private fundraising rather than the taxation you suggest. Perhaps you were not aware of this.
Of course if MA adopt a Microsoft controlled format, then the general public will end up paying, whether they wish to or no, particularly if MS move to the subscription model they've been threatening. In fact the public will pay twice - once for their own software, and again for the that used by the MA state goverment.
Then we have
Let's be charitable here and assume you meant to add "... for disabed users ..." at this point. Maybe you meant us to infer it from the context? Personally, I read it more as a an assetion that Office95 was better than OOo 2.0, but that would be a stupid thing to say, unsupported as it is and contrary to the experience of many of us who have indeed used both.
In fact, it's far from clear that MS Office is the superior product at all, since your point is supported with little more than hyperbole. Still, if MS offer superior support for the disabled, then hooray for Microsoft. I'm sure they will continue to enjoy strong support from that sector of the marketplace - just as soon as they get off their high horse and support the OpenDocument format that is. Otherwise, I'm sure some other vendor will be only too willing to meet their needs. That's what capitalism is all about, after all.
As far as I can remember in 1995 MS Word has about the same support for disabilities as did Vi and Nroff. Windows did a little better, with high contrast colour schemes and large fonts for the visually impaired, but that's not an Office feature and nothing in the proposal stops anyone using Windows.
Still, I'll admit it wasn't a matter that much concerned me at the time. Perhaps you'd care to refresh my memory?
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
"Secretary of State William F. Galvin, who oversees the state's public documents, also opposes the new storage standards, although his office has not explained why."
One point to note is that these are Massachussets state senators and secretary of state (not national as the summary implies).
Another point is that while the overseer of public documents would be an extremely important voice in deciding the format of public documents, his failure to explain his opposition is totally unacceptable. He's not some corporate CIO who can delcare whatever policy he whims. He's got to explain to the public, his employers, why proprietary formats are necessary, and open formats unacceptable. Until he does, he just makes the argument for openness that much more obvious.
--
make install -not war
Here's a chance to get Microsoft proprietary formats the hell out and someone wants to get in the way of this, even though clearly any shortcomings of OO can and will be fixed in the short term? How representative is this of those with without sight or with visual impairments? I find it hard to believe a majority would be so short sighted (no pun intended).
OpenOffice.org demonstrably reads and writes documents in far more formats than MSOffice. Small details of formatting occasionally suffer (but who is going to claim that never occurs between different computers with MSOffice?) but that is hardly a show-stopper.
OOo is now a mature product, and well able to stand comparison with MSOffice.
>Access 2003 can't open 97 databases at all,
thats just completely wrong.
Access 2003 *can* read Access 97, 2000 and 2003 Formats. (and i think even 95)
But you have to convert an Access 97 File to at least 2000 to be able to manipulate it.
it can even convert everything to everything (e.g. 2003 back to 97)
I'm sorry, it seems you meant to write "a steaming pile of monkey shit." but it seems you accidently wrote "good enough" instead. Hope that clarifies things!
A few days ago on OSNews I noticed this following news article to No MS won't, Yes MS will, No MS won't.. http://o3.phase-n.com/index.html Microsoft is irrevelent as to if it want's to add support for Open Document Format. We, the Open Source community CAN add it ourselves..
1. Most screen readers and such work within the Windows environment, not just Microsoft Word. If the concern is that keyboard shortcuts or accessibility features won't work, these things are easily adapted to OpenOffice 2. The idea that government documents are designed for accessibility is absurd. Anytime you hit embedded tables (or worse, nested tables), columns, etc., it is that much harder for screen magnifiers/screen readers to deal with. Which is why... 3. An open document format is actually better for people with visual disabilities because custom document readers can be created that are more friendly to screen readers and magnifiers.
Those readers from Microsoft only work on Windows and maybe macs. If the specs Microsoft published where any good then OpenOffice would have 100% Microsoft compatibility by now but obviously that isn't the case. By 2007 there will be at least OpenOffice/StarOffice, Corel Office, Textmaker, and Koffice supporting OpenDocumnet, not to mention whatever comes out of IBM. Furthermore, Microsoft or a third part may add support for ODF. Standardizing on ODF gives you the most flexibility in moving and manipulating your documents around. Not only does it ensure that people will be able to read the documents on as many different systems as possible, but it makes all kinds of automation happening in the 'back office' easier when you have many tools do so with. Like automatically converting the documents to html. Don't come back and even tell me that works reliably for anything but the simplest of Word documents, I've seen the horrible results too many times.
Now don't confuse this meeting as anything other than Microsoft having bought off those senators to spread FUD. The switch is two years off but on Saturday a meeting is announced to discuss this the following Monday to discuss something that StarOffice has been capable of for quite some time? Not to mention the extremely few people that actually need all those features, if they must use Office I'm sure the IT staff could accommodate that handful that do.
---------- Open Source is capitalism applied to IP.
Our installation of Access 2003, as configured by our corporate IT department, cannot do this. So I suppose it might just them being retards (it's happened before).
> Add the fact that you can distribute the end app as a single exe,
> or an exe and a few custom DLLS, and MS access means no external
> dependencies.
Hee hee hee, until the person/persons* who are developing the GUI use a feature or three that are all in external DLLs that just happen to be in their environment, and then BANG, you find yourself hunting down these other DLLs that aren't documented but for which access complains it needs to function for your database queries.
(*) Person is typically management, and once they've put in functionality and come to depend on it, no way in hell can you rip it out.
The problem with saying "Deal with it blind people!" is that it's illegal and will get you sued. Unlike the other feature deficiencies in OpenOfice, this isn't one you can wibble-wobble out of.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Oh noes, he doesn't like Microsoft. What could have provoked that?
Maybe seeing how much better, cheaper, and easier the alternatives are.
He might be biased, but for good reason.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Accessibility is important. Therefore, the State of Massachusetts should require that the state agencies move to a document format that is open and that is supported by some software that satisfies accessibility requirements. Both are sensible requirements, and they are technically compatible at no extra cost. Companies can decide whether they want to bid on that kind of contract or not, but they should not tell MA to change their requirements because it is convenient for them.
One could for example choose RTF files, but the main issue is, MS Products continually bug people for not saving to its newest format, so eventually people will get tired and succumb to the proprietary MS format.
MS needs to add a "Don't bother me again" checkbox in that "Some format will be lost" dialog box before complaining about being excluded.
I would be concerned that if MS supported OpenDocument, they would be "infringing" on the territory of the only real word alternatives (OO, etc), and would be opening themselves up for even more lawsuits.
It seems like with support for pdf and OpenDocument, they would be expanding their territory even more.
The problem with using Oracle, Postgresql, etc is that mere mortals cannot manage it. Many people with varying degrees of knowledge can throw together an Access solution that gets something done without getting corporate IT involved.
Once corporate IT gets involved, everything takes 6 months and costs 5x more.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Seconded. Because of our (overly-rigid) production processes, not to mention the condescending attitudes that the DBAs have towards the "power users" (engineers w/out DBA certificates), many departments in my company use MS Access rather than go through the 4 month process to get things built in Oracle.
.mdb file types to itself). Everything else is directly upgradable, you can copy and paste tables, forms, etc from one version to the other and it will convert automatically.
/flame on
I have Microsoft Access 97 files that I routinely often with 2000 (you get a popup if you wish to convert, if you say no, it opens in read-only mode). My laptop had Access 97 and 2002 both installed, and with trivial registry work, you can add Open methods to open the right file in the correct program (each version, when run, likes to reassign all the
I'm banking that your IT staff is just retarded. Either that, or Linux advocates who can't be bothered to learn how to use Microsoft apps correctly.
MS seems to be ignoring the fact that this is largely a grassroots movement in Massachusetts. Look at the Sauguses and the Billericas, not the State House. What's going on now at the state level is the result of the prior activity of the individual communities.
Well, that's true, though one did come from the other according to the FAQ:
OpenDocument previously was called Open Office. What is the relation to OpenOffice.org?
When the OASIS OpenDocument TC was founded, it chose the OpenOffice.org XML file format as the basis for its work, because the OpenOffice.org XML file format had already proven its value in real life. The OpenDocument format, therefore, is an advancement of the OpenOffice.org XML file format. It us usable and used by OpenOffice.org, but also by other office applications like KOffice.
By realizing the difference, we realize the concerns raised on behalf of the blind are pure FUD. The move to OpenDocument has nothing to do with the faults of one or another application used to read it. In fact, it allows for competition in presentation not possible with Microsoft's closed formats. It is already happening, and we can be sure the results will be better than anything Microsoft has to offer.
Microsoft FUDsters will exploit this confusion as much as they can, but it all rebounds on them. No one is pushing a specific application but Microsoft.
This is typical Microsoft and hopefully their reputation is catching up to them. They have focused on something few people know about, confused terms and tried to project the weaknesses of their own softare onto others. We've seen it again and again: Linux costs more than Microsoft, Linux is less secure than Microsoft, Microsoft is better than anything. You can insert Word Perfect, OS/2, DRDOS, Netscape and a host of other "competitors" into the above formula. It's been bullshit all along and it's bullshit today. People have caught on and it's not going to work forever.
You can fool some of the people all of the time and some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
You would be wrong. Access in particular has absolutely shitty backwards compatability - we're currently in the middle of a huge effort at work to upgrade from Access 97. If you even *open* an Access 97 db from Access 2000, it can't be accessed from 97 anymore (which is why we never did a full migration before). Access 2003 can't open 97 databases at all, and Access 2003 refuses (or at least corp. IT can't figure out how) to co-exist with 97 on the same machine the way 2000 can.
Just a tip that may help out a little here. Although Access 2000+ won't let you directly manipulate Access 97 databases without converting them, the Jet DB engine is perfectly capable of R/W access to 97-format databases. One way to have them co-exist is to create a blank database in 2000, then link all the tables from the 97 format database in. By opening the special compatibility database, Access 2000 users can have full read-write capability without having to convert the database.
You can also go the other way (open 2000 format MDBs in 97) if you have a new enough MDAC version installed. A simple linked table won't work, but you can route it through an ODBC data source.
It's an ugly hack, and you still have to manually copy over reports / macros, but it works.
Corel WordPerfect and, to a lesser extent, Lotus SmartSuite, are both mature products that are already being using by blind and visually impaired users. Corel supports the transition to OpenDocument. IBM/Lotus supports the transition too. Now is the time to actual implement OpenDocument. Both suites already have XML support & using a new schema shouldn't be a hard feature to add. Either or both companies could then contest the claims (and increase sales of their product(s) to boot).
I do realize that Sun's StarOffice and OpenOffice both support various 3rd-party tools to aid the visually impared (including some of those which ship with MS Windows), but Corel's support is almost as strong as MS Office's support. Having a few more companies pushing this would help against the Redmond political wing. It is ridiculous that MS is the only major office suite vendor that has no plans to give OpenDocument support.
this is the part where recognizing the reality of monopoly becomes relevant and advisable. Let's use an analogy, shall we?
State IT Dept: These railroads are unfair and not open, because the train manufacturer's cars have 5-foot-wide axles that only work on their proprietary 5-foot-wide tracks. We're going to switch to the new magical adjustable railroad cars that can run on any track. Well, any track except the existing 5-foot-wide tracks, that is. Everyone using the new train cars will have to transfer their stuff to the old cars before they can use the old tracks.
Lawmakers: That's a fine idea in theory, but how are we going to replace all those tracks that already exist? And how much of the old stuff are we going to have to keep around for interfacing with the rest of the world?
State IT Dept: No problem, we've got a systems management package that will take care of everything.
Lawmakers: Nice, but does it retrain users and maintain compatibility with the existing 5-foot-wide infrastructure?
State IT Dept: Look, you want to make an omelette, you gotta break some eggs.
Screen-readers, macros, plugins, forms, database front-ends, workflow automation, blah blah blah. Remember converting people from WordPerfect to MS Office? It's gonna be even harder this time. The benefits of an open office document format are clear, but let's not sweep the cost of conversion under the rug.
"Nothing was broken, and it's been fixed." -- Jon Carroll
How true. I recently migrated an Access DB with only a few hundred thousand records to PostgreSQL. We haven't even optimized the queries yet (just linked tables to the PG backend) and the weekly reports are already 10x faster. And this is over a gigabit LAN -- I'd hate to think of how slow it would be from one of the frame relay sites.
Proceed, sah.
Obviously you have never tried to read a really old tape or you would know why you need open formats which are unemcumbered by patents and well documented. DOC format is not well documented outside MS for a well known reason, lockin protects their market. If you only need read access PDF is probably fine. MS can break your access to their file formats and will anytime it suits their purpose. If you can't control the format you don't own your data.
You must have had complete morons working in the IT department or at least the people who created that Access database. I have a forum running on Access with over 80,000 posts and a search of them only takes a few seconds even over dialup with a dozen other people hitting the site.
Access isn't the fastest db around, not by a long shot, but if it's taking minutes to return results from a query on a db with fewer than 10,000 records, or fewer than several hundred thousand records, someone screwed up the code.
You would be wrong. Access in particular has absolutely shitty backwards compatability - we're currently in the middle of a huge effort at work to upgrade from Access 97. If you even *open* an Access 97 db from Access 2000, it can't be accessed from 97 anymore (which is why we never did a full migration before). Access 2003 can't open 97 databases at all, and Access 2003 refuses (or at least corp. IT can't figure out how) to co-exist with 97 on the same machine the way 2000 can
Wow, Deja Vu. While I suspect that running Access 97 and Office (Access) 2003 on the same machine can be accomplished, my company is currently facing the same dilemma. Corporate IT hasn't come up with a solution yet, other than to convert all of our Access 97 DBs to Access 2000 (Many users still don't have Office 2003). I don't have a '97 DB handy to attempt to open in 2003 but I am fairly certain that it can be opened. However, you will encounter the same problems as opening/converting it to Access 2000. We have literally hundreds of Access 97 databases scattered among users in many groups in our office. Most, if not all, of them are incapable of converting these databases themselves so my group must now take time away from our usual tasks and priorities and convert these databases for them.
Geez. It's like Murphy's Law -- you never had moderator points when you want 'em.
Who knew Mitt was a closet penguin fan? Go Mitt!
== First cross river, then insult alligator.
It's OASIS OpenDocument. OpenOffice.org is an office suite. OASIS OpenDocument is an open document format. One is not the other, unless you're a Microsoft shill.
SQLite is lighting fast, tiny, and public domain. No external dependencies required. It also supports a pretty full-featured SQL (maybe not so "Lite" anymore, except for its small footprint in RAM)
It's obvious that he doesn't like MS, and wants to give open format a boost. Right or wrong that is his motivation. And he is lying about it.
Uhm... no. As was stated in the meetings leading up to the decision, Microsoft may participate by supporting an open standard. There were (at the time) two ways of doing this: submitting their document format to a standards body, and enencumbering it from any patents. Simple and straightforward.
The second way (now the only way, since MA has decided to go with Open Document) is to support the open document format. Considering MS supports *other* formats (WP, Lotus 123, etc), it's not much of a stretch for them.
At issue isn't a like or dislike for Microsoft; it is Microsoft doing what they always do-- they are trying to force their control on the citizens of the commonwealth of Massachusetts.
So let me ask you this: do you prefer corporate control of our government, or citizen control of our government? The crossroads is before you. Choose wisely.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
For pre-XML MS Office formats, yes. They have to reverse engineer the format.
For the XML format, everything necessary for perfect compatibility is publically documented.
I worked in a computer lab at a university years ago, back in the Win3.1 days. We had Macs that worked pretty damned well for the time.
What's your point in the context of this article? One of the things the article doesn't mention is that this issue was brought up during the standardisation discussions. As it turns out, there are plenty of options for visually impaired persons, options that support the Open Document standard. (WordPerfect, for one.)
This is a strawman. The issue is being pushed by a state senator just days after a Microsoft representative met with this state senator. It is a strawman built and deployed by Microsoft.
At stake is the rights of all citizens to control their government. On the other side is some incorrect assertions that citizens with impaired vision are going to be adversely affected. So, to sum up: openness and transperancy, or lies and corporate agenda.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
That's one of the most assinine comments I've read this morning. I don't claim to know any of the politics behind this, but it sounds to me like you're saying that disabled users shouldn't ask for improvements simply so the anti-MS Slashdot crowd can continue to put anything related to Microsoft in an evil light.
Forget the politics, the monopolies, and everything else. There are real people that are missing out. Today. You can whine all you want that the companies that make the products only make them Office because Office is a monopoly, but that's not the blind person's fault and they shouldn't be forced to not getting improvements in their life simply because some nerds want to "get the man".
Jesus. Why not accept there is a problem and take advantage of the fact that OpenOffice is open: fix it. Today. Then you can cry about MS strong arming everyone. But until that happens, I can't really blame the blind for not wanting to go with something with questionable support for them. Jesus, I can't even imagine how they hold up with all the "AJAX" apps being pushed out these days...
Don't matter. There is no law about document compatability. But there is about disability. My mother uses Microsoft Word. Not because its good, but because while the Screen Reader people claim to support wordPerfect, etc. their support is laughable and full of bugs. My mother is legally blind.
So while fundamentally the issue of Accessibility is probably best solved at the OS level, MS has not but solved it at the Application level. Or at least they have made it smooth at the app level. And only MS apps receive true testing by these 2nd party application screen readers and dictation programs and screen zoomers, etc.
Its a tricky issue but one that has the laws on the surface fully in support of MS since MS does support this and the others really do not. Open Office should implement Accessibility, not just 'accessibility support' and not depend on a 2nd part to do it, if they want to fully compete. Especially with Government.
"I'm glad you're in the minority. " /., but the rest of society hasn't
even heard of it, never mind thought of using it. So you are wrong. An unknown
is not the majority.
Actually, the opinion not to use open format is NOT the minority. Maybe on
I didn't state my opinion was to not use open format, so that implication is wrong as well.
As far as my stated opinion that he made a bad case, I haven't heard anyone else argue my perspective so I can't conclude it's the minority opinion. I'm sure fanboys like yourself will jump all over it, but I'm not sure I would call you the majority. But if you want to say so to make yourself feel better, I'll go along with it.
"Oh noes, he doesn't like Microsoft. What could have provoked that?"
If you read what I wrote, you would see that my statement was in respect to the fact he was lying about his reasons. Since you didn't refute that, and tried to make an irrelevant point, I can only conclude you agree that he lied about his reasons.
"Maybe seeing how much better, cheaper, and easier the alternatives are."
This answer is irrelevant. It has nothing to do with his stated reasons for the move. His job is to make a case for the move, and he hasn't made it. You can do it for him, but that won't stop Open Format from being rejected in MA by ELECTED officials. And it won't change that fact that it was accepted by arbitrary decision made by an APPOINTED one.
"He might be biased, but for good reason."
Again, his bias is irrelevant. It is his stated reasons that are at question. HE DIDN'T MAKE A GOOD CASE FOR THE MOVE (a.k.a refer to my first post)!
You are a typical fan boy that doesn't refute arguments, but spews mantra. I said he was dishonest about his STATED reasons. I choose not to believe the CIO of my state is a complete idiot (he may be, Romney has done lots of dumb shit, and appointing him good have been another). I don't think he genuinely believes the new MS format will not be available in 5-10 years. I think he is using a bad argument to avoid saying how he really feels. He is promoting the Open Format agenda (which is his prerogative as the cio), but not making a good case for the move.
If the latest Office can open a document from older Microsoft Word versions and save it in XML format then it is trivial to script the conversion of your existing documents.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Well actually, the argument I made is correct. The CIO stated his concern was that the format would not be available. That is absurd.
9 3&cid=13909350
As far as open format comments;
http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1667
Let me remind you, the MA CIO is APPOINTED. The democrat senators that are going to hold up/stop this are ELECTED. Democrats historically have been anti-ms, so this is a bigger deal then you realize. Especially in our state. However, the reality is MS is offering a better solution.
As far as your FUD, corporate control or government control. I can only believe you were trying to be dramatic or cute. I don't see how you could be serious. But just in case you are, it is not the job of the government to promote software formats. The majority of people in society have spoken, and they overwhelmingly choose MS Word. Now the elected officials in the state are going to choose it as well. You may not like it, but they were elected to represent the people, not some appointed CIO with an agenda to promote Open Formats at any cost (e.g. the handicap).
Of course not. But the desires (not needs) of blind people are *not* the only factor to be considered. Catering to disabilities does not mean that you drop everything and make the convenience of the disabled person the only priority - you make reasonable accomodation to enable them to do thier work. Wheelchair ramps aren't as good as powered lifts, but both are acceptable. The needs and wants of a disabled person aren't any more important or special than the needs and wants of any other person doing their job. I need a chair to sit at my desk, so I get a chair. I don't get a $2000 hydraulic customized chair. I need a workspace, so I get a cubicle with a desk, not an office. Now, if the accessibility features in OO.o are simply *incapable* of supporting blind workers, thats a different issue, but I'm working under the assumption that it's acceptable but not ideal. Nobody bats an eye when an IT decision or upgrade or change or whatever inconveniences (without actually incapacitating) regular workers happens. Screaming "oh noes the blind people" is just patronizing.
They shouldn't forgoe improvements just to "get the man". But on the other hand, the very real concerns of document access and retention, not to mention the budget savings, of the entire state shouldn't hinge on thier convenience either. Blind and disabled people aren't any different than any other user - they find something that works for them and don't want to change. I haven't seen anywhere, not here, not in the article, any list of areas or features that OO.o is missing, that Office supports, and what the problem with the difference in features is missing. Until and unless someone can provide that, I think that all the assumptions that this change will neccesarily screw over blind people is greatly overrated.
Ok except consider the following:...
Ok, now consider this: MS Access is a strong contender for the Worst Ever Forward Compatibility Prize , no matter what criteria any panel of judges might decide to use. It doesn't look like Jet improves the situation at all-- it appears that the Jet technology is just extending the compatibility issues to the other MS Office applications that have now begun to rely on it for some functions.
The basic problem seems to go back to some of the earliest issues in software design. If I remember my studies correctly, one of von Neumann's contributions in the 1940s was the concept that the program and its data should be separated. If you don't maintain a clear separation between data and procedure, you are going to end up with a system that is impossible to maintain or improve without breaking compatibility, among other problems.
It seems to me that Microsoft has been violating this basic principle of computing for at least 10 years now. MS likes to tightly cross-couple its data with its programming, apparently for marketing reasons (there certainly is no engineering benefit to this practice). Whether you look at Microsoft office products through historical practice or through the rosey lenses of computing theory, you see that they are deficient in providing for long term compatibility.
> I don't think any Open source database would have been that slow.
An Open Source database that relied on network file locking would have been just as slow. It's the nature of the beast.
Your IT dept was completely incompetant if they had a few thousand users in a single file-based database without looking at a client-server solution, much less something with middleware.
Paying for an assload of MS Office licenses vs paying someone to put the required accessibility into OppenOffice.org--free software, you pay for what you need, not for an annoying "assistant."
Unless of course Access is an acceptable solution and would maximize return on investment. Then again, this is slashdot, where economics, beyond the purchase price of software, are irrelevant.
It shouldn't be all that difficult to support blind people: give them a text editor and guidelines how to format the documents in pure text (something like wiki-syntax) and write a converter to Open Document format. Might even be better then what they have now.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
"Sadly with access you lose more work-time minute for minute while waiting for the slow database than you save when writing the frontend."
Depends what you are doing. Access is not a client server database, using it in your scenario was obviously a poor decision. It doesn't mean Access is bad.
And illegal to implement, without their permission. Although in the case of a state government this doesn't really matter.
English is easier said than done.
(and you wonder why MA's techies don't trust them)
In the meantime, Microsoft is threatening to take their marbles and go home from South Korea because that country has the temerity to continue an anti-competetive investigation against them.
And, of course, there was Microsoft's attempt to force the country of Israel to abandon Macs by refusing to properly support Hebrew (or any other right-to-left script) on Office-OS/X. They failed, because Israel decided to pay a group of local geeks (a fraction of the money that Microsoft had refused to fix office) to port Open Office to OS-X, and then announced plans to cut off all their contracts with Microsoft.
There are some signs that Microsoft intends to lock their customers more irretrievably into Office with patents and other tricks. That's one part of the reasons why MA may want to walk away from vendor lock-in.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Mod parent Informative please.
The MA senators have a point, though. People with disabilities SHOULD be considered. The thing is, Sun along with the Gnome project have spent copious amounts of time researching and developing accessibility technology. If there are hardware (like braille readers) which can't be accessed for lack of drivers or documentation, this only makes it another case for 1) opening up specifications for using these technologies on other operating systems and 2) government allocating money to opensource software developers so that the people whom they serve would benefit the most.
I can't stress that last point enough. The government should spend its money on people who develop software that would help them be free of the lock-in they've found themselves in. It's like giving money to Alcoholics Anonymous. Why would you give more money to cocaine or crack producers, for instance, just because people are hooked on it and they make it easy for people to buy and use their stuff?
you don't see the irony in your statement there, do you?
It is not MA's fault that Microsoft have chosen to attempt a lock-in, nor is it their responsibility to support Microsoft's business plan by allowing themselves to be so locked-in.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
No it was not. What the fuck is it with you and MS anyway, or rather how much are you?
Interesting. I followed the links to the govt web site, with a large number of hearing documents. In the response from Microsoft, this caught my eye: Det bør derfor stilles krav til åpen og vederlagsfri dokumentasjon og lisensiering av leverandørenes formater for presentasjon av XML. "Therefore, open and unremunerated documentation and licensing of the vendors' formats for the presentation of XML should be mandated". Puzzling. Perhaps it boils down to what the meaning of "open" is, we already know that MA and MS disagree on this point. Oh well. I guess they were just in a hurry, After all, such a glaring typo as dating the document in 2001 slipped through.
At the time of this post, this message has moderation of:
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Although I am squarely in the OSS corner I don't believe in using moderator points to silence a valid opinion even if it is personally objectionable to me.
The Microsoft argument includes the premise that if their products are not able to have access to government markets, a great expense will be incurred by all. Microsoft currently has a monopoly share of the market so I guess their argument is that lot of folks will have to replace their office software.
People like myself who believe in open formats for the sake of sovereignty point out that EVERY upgrade has expenses and indeed you must upgrade even if you're using a Microsoft product because there is not good compatibility between versions.
The point of the parent post is that Microsoft has done a fair job in backward compatibility. I assume implying that you don't really have those upgrade expenses if you stick with Microsoft's products.
This is a valid counter point that should be addressed rather than buried through moderator abuse.
With my moderator scolding over, let me address the parent's point.
You're right. Microsoft did a fair job of backward compatibility. But it isn't perfect. For example. If you used the Access 97 application builder wizard to generate the asset tracking application then later ran it using Access 2000 you would need to fix the switchboard management code for one thing. As a developer I could do it but for businesses that don't have IT staff and used that wizard, parts of their application are broken.
My point is that "a fair job" isn't good enough and there is no guarantee that future versions of Microsoft's products will even do a "fair job."
The Massachusetts decision was not about procurement it was about sovereignty. They simply must ensure that public records are available to the public for as long as the public wants them. Even if that length of time turns out to be a very long.
The fact that Microsoft has threatened to withdraw its products from South Korea if the South Korean government continued in its anti-trust case against them proves that Massachusetts is right in their sovereignty concerns. If Microsoft withdraws their products from South Korea any data locked into Microsoft's proprietary formats will become very hard to access in the future. It would require maintaining obsoleted versions of Microsoft's products. And if Microsoft gets its way and starts selling software as a service God help anyone who gets their data locked into their proprietary formats!
Microsoft should just do the right thing and admit that they can compete on a level playing field and start supporting the Open Document format. They can support plain text, rtf, pdf and other formats. If they want to meet the needs of Massachusetts and hopfully the entire world, they needs to embrace and NOT extend open standards.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
At the time of this post, this message has moderation of:
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make that:
At the time of this post, the parent post has moderations of:
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10% Informative
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
Ahh, the old "Vendor Lock-In!!! Run for Your Lives!" argument. The policy Massachusetts is proposing is a lock-in, it's just a standard-based one.
If the state ONLY saves documents in that format from this point forward, then they will be unable to take advantage of any newly developed tech, be it standard or proprietary. ie, if Massachusetts 'locked in" on wax cylinders for playing sounds, it would make it hard to get my CD, cassette tape or futuristic crystal cube device into the state's procurement process.
Instead of making pronouncements about which standard will be used forever more, how about deciding what goal you are trying to achieve (lifetime access to the data, easy interoperability with different vendor solutions, no unlockable DRM technology) instead of picking permanent winners and losers based on a static moment in time. This plan should have laid out WHAT they were trying to achieve, not name a permanent solution to a temporary problem.
Of all people, slashdot-ers should know that there is something newer and cooler coming soon, regardless what the technology is.
We shouldn't let the desire to see Microsoft impaled blind us to the reality of government types who abrogate their responsibility, and instead say "whoops, can't use that, we standardized on the other one back in ought six".
The commonwealth's decision is a meaningless whack at Microsoft - I can't get excited when the underlying myopia is so technology unfriendly.
A sig?!? I don't think so.....
Some are speculating that Sun may not have offered much in the way of support to disabled people in OpenOffice.org, and that Sun may have absolutely no experience in that area. The truth is that Sun actually supports OO.o more than the Gnome desktop. Further, this award doesn't mean that OO.o is the very best in disabled worker productivity, but I find it highly unlikely that a company that wins an award like this would suddenly turn it's back on people (and I don't seem to recall Microsoft winning any similar award). Take a look at the link.f lash.20020924.1.html
http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/2002-09/sun
Yes, they won the Hellen Keller award in 2002. I suspect the problem isn't support in OO.o for visually disabled people. Perhaps the real problem with OO.o is politically disabled politicians that Microsoft bought and prostituted, and those base polititians and convicted monopolists getting into bed together to play on the disabled for their own (greedy) intentions.
"The Romney administration wants documents stored in a particular format that would allow the records to be read by a variety of software packages -- except Microsoft Office."
I would state that a little differently - they want documents stored in a format for which *any* developer is free to write software that can fully support, read and write, and for which there already exists software from more than a single developer/vendor which supports it. *Nothing* in the standard prohibits MS Office as an option, so long as MS is willing to supply a version that meets the requirements.
Government standards should absolutely avoid speciying particular brands of products, incluyding software, or specifying that data formats which are not 100% publically documented and free to implement. Then individual providers of software including MS, each have their choice as to wether to supply software that meets the requirements or not.
It is absolutely backwards to specify a particular brand of software, which uses proprietary formats that are both not 100% public, as well as to which patents may apply that would form a financial barrier to a small or startup organizations.
That was a joke? I doubt that Walmart wants the population to be poor. If the general population got richer, Walmart might change the exact product mix, but they'd still sell to the general population.
USA is too big and has too open borders with poor countries. It wouldn't work with a West European style of welfare state. (It is debatable if it works even here, in the long run. :-( )
Henry Ford was a bit strange and a fanatical anti-semite. Don't take him as an example of anything you want to support! :-)
The advantage with Sweden is that there are very few really desperate people around. The main problems stems from that not even the world's highest taxes makes the social system work well (which even ministers in the government says, if they believe no one listens).
You can't transplant political opinions from one place to another, because they doesn't map exactly. And I don't know that much about the US political scene. That said -- IMHO, the US right seems at least as crazy as the US left. I just hate true believers which, IMO, are the main fault with humanity.
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
That's debatable; at best it's a matter of preference. Personally, I'd use a proper database (Oracle, PostgreSQL, Ingres, or Informix by choice) and add the front end using Perl/Tk. Or if you insist on using windows, use ODBC and the developement environment of your choice.
... she can spend 6-9 months learning Access, and create the reports her boss and coworkers require; she can implement a system that many people can use, and 90% of her skills will translate to MS SQL Server when they outgrow Access ... oh, and they can still use the same front ends.
Mwahahahahahahahahahahahaha!
I'm sure Suzy the business analyst will just jump all over that. You'd have her learn Linux, I'm sure; then learn PostgreSQL, then how to program with Perl/Tk? Right.
Or
Yup, I can see clearly how Open Source is saving people money *every day*.
"which got to be as big as it is by offering their customers consistently low prices"
People keep saying this, and every time I go to Walmart, I don't see these good prices on anything.
If you compare Game/Video prices to even Amazon, they're higher.
If you compare TV/Radio prices, they're cheaper at Costco/Best Buy whatever
Food prices seem to be the same as the grocery store.
What Walmart has, is a decent selection located in rural places that tend not to have choice or who don't know any better (maybe because of lack of choice?).
That's not a criticism; they're serving people who otherwise would not be; but low price? No.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
It's all a bit of a non story isn't it? Even those afflicted with blindness can get around the problem easily enough I imagine.
What I read of the story seems to indicate the state has a choice of everyone buying Microsftware or just the blind buying it. Where is the story in that?
And for the price of buying licences for distributing Microsoftware to the blind, a small quorum could be paid to produce the needed facilities in Open Source.
Am I wrong?
Ai donteen-so.
All I require is the (est.) $45 million MA is going to save by moving to OOo
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
>>after blind and other visually impaired state workers raised concerns.
Translation: after MSFT's PR people dragged out some blind people, called Senators, called the media.. and yeah.. "raised concerns."
This whole argument that you won't be able to retrieve information from office documents in X years is rediculous. The text of the document is easily recoverable, and always will be so. Who really cares if you can't get the formatting pixel perfect in 100 years? Do you really think any format invented today is going to still be around in 100 years? My guess is that it's more likely that parsers will still be around for MSOffice documents than for any open standard. But in either case, the actual data in the document will be easily recoverable. This is just political bullshit. Mass is still pissed off that they were unable to break microsoft up into the Baby Bills in the anti trust case and they're hurting themselves in order to stick it to MS. Did i mention that OOo sucks?
Well, if you need data management for "mere mortals" then use a spreadsheet. If you need true relational data management, then use a pro database and build a WEB gui (cheapie: do crappy PHP/MySQL, enterprise solution: consider Java/Oracle, Java/MySQL, or do MySQL/PHP but hire an expensive PHP guy who truly knows OO development. We do Java MVC GUI on top of Postgres, but its all web based and accessagle from any browser. Ever try to run a wedsite with an access back end? In summary: 1) If you need complex data management, and want it "free" (no techies in your project) then you are dreaming. 2) When you "throw something together" and start depending on it, your Total Cost of Ownership skyrockets in the maintainence cycle 3) Serious development cost a lot LESS than trying to manage many dozen half-assed solutions like Access apps developed by non-techies.
Horns are really just a broken halo.
man, just ain't no pleasin some folks. Just commenting generally. books are data packed, a tremendous amount of data contained in a relatively small manufactured and mass produced package. That's why I used the book/printed word analogy, because it's still in use today in a widespread manner and is still used in a legal sense with official documents on paper that anyone who can read may access and understand. It doesn't require any upgrading to grok a book. You don't need to pay some company for your book upgrade to continue to access a book you already have. The "format" remains viable across centuries. Your book doesn't go obsolete and become impossible to access as long as it physically exists still. Sure, clay or stone tablets last a long time, too,but it might take you a room full to contain what is in one small paperback, and there is no large scale production or use of them any longer except as curiosities. Modern society is data rich, so we need a way to store and use data that is compact, concentrated, portable, and easy to use and in some manner be able to withstand the sands of time. Paper is an outstanding invention! if we are going to try and replace it, it needs to be thought about. this effort in mass. shows at least some people are thinking about it, not being lead around by the nose by some goofball billionaire crook who's good at sleazy marketing.
Chemical film is not lasting, older movies are in a lot of cases gone because of the fast entropy with chemical based films. Electronic tape degrades quickly. Hard drives fail easily. Optical disks are proving to not have the shelf life originally claimed. And document "formats"? Closed source, something that exists and remains accessible only at the whim of some company, a company with a track record of destroying as much as they create in order to force profits? For OFFICIAL RECORDS? SAY WHUT??
If we as a society are going to electronic storage, we BETTER be smart about it. An open document format is the MINIMAL requirement to accomplish this task, if we want our progeny to be able to access this information hundreds or thousands of years from now. Heck, we need this _now_ just to cover small single digit year spans!
This is one of those deals you either "get it" immediately, or you most likely never will. Not going to get bogged down into minutiae of old cuniform tablets or not, although I will say I certainly appreciate scholars in the past going out of their way to provide an "open source" long range solution for document archival to the best of their technical ability at the time. That shows that at least some human nature was good and remains good over the years and centuries and millenia, and that intelligence and logic can beat out "this quarter's profits" greed mentality in some situations. I enjoy and use modern tech, just wish to see it used WISELY, and paying tax money to insure that you WON'T be able to access important documents in the future short of mortgaging your economic reality to a single monopoly company is *not wise*. Corporations who do that are nuts and not looking at the longer term,so they'll pay for that mistake, over and over and over again, and governments that do that are guilty of short sighted and ill-advised malfeasance and incompetence, IMO.
All you need is text, pure text - a small file of little hexidecimal thingys that can be translated on anyones fly to a huge and strange monstrosity of formating and flying and spinning boxes.
I have seen the future and it is the ability to see changes before they take place....Moooooooohaaaaahaaaaaa....hack cough , Where was I!? oh yes I have no idea why it looks that way in print preview but prints out with the margin cut off, just cut and paste out of the old document and into the new one. It just looks purple it prints out black. Why am I naked?, why am at school?......
No more pizza before bed
Added Pressly: "Oh, and by the way, milk is nothing but liquid meat."
Even with 6 to 9 months of training I have my doubts if Suzy can use Access. Truth is there is only one database app that some people can wrap their brains around and that is the common spreadsheet.
Yeah, I know that feeling. I once wrote a clientside Perl/Tk interface to an Oracle DB and was told not to tell IT, since they'd make everyone stop using it.
But really, this is all a bit of a red herring. I mean, how often does Joe Citizen have to mail an access database to the MA state govt? There's nothing to stop anyone to carrying on with Windows (if that be their preference) nro from using the database of their choice. I'd recommend looking at OpenOffice.org's Base personally, but you don't have to use it and you can still use Access.
So much as Access may have it's userbase, and loudly as MS may choose to shout "Foul!" this isn't about MS or about Access. It's about using Open Formats.
Which means that the only ones keeping Microsoft out are Microsoft.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
With MS Office you have to pay this every three years or so, in order to make sure that everybody can read the same set of documents, including those written by people with new computers.
The advantage of going with OpenOffice is that (1) you only have to pay once and (2) in this case, blind and partially sighted people everywhere benenfit. Seems like a no-brainer to me. The OpenOffice options means that the MA state adopts the most cost effective decision and also helps out blind and partially sighted people who use computers.
Microsoft's meaningless marketing trolls just make their supporters look stupid, attempting to prop up the patently false arguments with vapid marketing jargon. Any weak argument you have attempted to used could be applied far more strongly against microsoft previous and current behaviour and a record of costs that have been borne by customers in the past could readily be used to forecast future costs of vendor lock with that particular monopoly abusive vendor.
You know how pointless their arguments and marketing drivel is becoming when the best they can do now is attempt to shift slashdot comments off topic and that in reality is just admitting what microsoft have become offtopic and redundant (to current and future computer and software standards). Who cares whether they support open document standards or not, they lose whether they support open standards or not.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Dude, the standard has a steering committee. It can evolve the standard to cope with new tech. Heck, Microsoft is even on the committee.
If your argument had merit, then the format used by Word97 would lock everyone out from using OfficeXP. Silly, isn't it?
We shouldn't let the desire to see Microsoft impaled blind us to the reality of government types who abrogate their responsibility, and instead say "whoops, can't use that, we standardized on the other one back in ought six".
The only people keeping Microsoft from joining in are Microsoft. It's an Open Standard. Say it with me: "Open Standard". I knew you could.
I can't get excited when the underlying myopia is so technology unfriendly.
I would't get too excited, either. Once Microsoft get over their current hissy fit, maybe throw a few chairs around, I expect their myopia will fade and they'll agree to support what's looking like an emerging world standard.
Just like they could have done all the time.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
Could this be the first crack in the "vendor lock in" for MS-Office?
Microsoft changes/keeps secret/obfuscates the office document formats on a regular basis to prevent inter-operability with any other office suite - you're stuck continually upgrading to stay compatible with everyone else.
Opendocument is a documented "standard" - if they start supporting that, they're throwing away their leverage with office formats...
If they don't support it - chances are that they'll lose at least this, and possibly a hell of a lot of other government contracts... which will encourage selection of the alternatives for everyone else.
Interesting times...
smash.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Companies are for optimization of economy. It is not their job to consider anything but profits. It is the state that sets the rules for how society works and makes it humane.
My point was that I couldn't see the west european system working in the US, since it is more of a continent than a country. Control problems don't scale linearily with the population. The last fifteen years, I've begun to doubt the w.e. system is stable at all.
My point is that I doubt that the Swedish system is stable. Sure, for now it is probably better to be poor in Sweden. Note that if Sweden was a state in US, it would be the poorest. And the gap isn't closing. Sigh, do I have to do this? You are quoting a good business leader on national economy. It is like quoting a physical chemist on biochemistry (sure, some metal enzyme functions or some membrane specifics, but the main questions are of a different scale). Sigh, if the health care is bad and you can't afford private after paying taxes, you will complain. My specific example was that in private, even ministers of government didn't think it works (in that case, it was police).I've heard Canada described by a couple of Swedes that lived there for a while as a Sweden that works. Might be your (or mine) cup of tea.
etc.
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
Would it be illegal to make an XSL document to translate OfficeXML to OpenDocument or AbiWord or [insert other XML format here] outside of their explicitly allowed licenses?
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
ring ring....
Gates: "Hello Senator, its Bill. How are you?"
MA Senator: "Well, Hello Mr Gates".
Gates: "Senator, I'm thinking of a number, a large number. Would you like to play guess that number?"
One week later the media reports: Blind and Deaf people are mad about open document.
OpenOffice.org Base is the OOo equivalent of Access, and what's more, linking to external data sources is far easier (for the average user) in OpenOffice.org than it is in Microsoft Office.
Base supports ODBC, forms, basic, and everything else you'd expect from a desktop database platform. What more do you need? Or, are you basing your argument on data that is a year or more old, before Base was introduced (e.g., OOo 1.2.x)? Your statement would have been 100% accurate 18 months ago, fairly accurate 12 months ago when OOo 1.9.xx/2.0 was not ready for use, and totally untrue six months ago, let alone now.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
> Or asking microsoft to give out a free reader so poor people could
> get access to the state's documents.
That's another issue that could be solved by the OpenOffice.org team -- how about creating/promoting cross-platform, small document viewers similar to Microsoft's for people that would be put off by a 300MB download of the full office suite?
--Muzz
Sure they could. Oracle comes with GUI-based management tools, and if they're too complicated for your users, there are plenty of third-party alternative management utilities which put Access' GUI to shame.
PostgreSQL, I'm not so sure, but there have got to be GUI apps out there for it.
Likewise, if you want to take MySQL into consideration, there's webmin, phpMyAdmin, mysql-administrator, and mysql-query-browser.
Even if the above weren't true, it is unlikely end users would be doing any actual maintenance, but just running queries. The data sources can be linked to from any OOo suite application and queries can ve very easily run from OOo itself. Most of the time you won't have users dropping tables or databases so I fail to see what the problem is.
Lastly,The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Dang it I was mixing HTML and UBB tags. Sorry about that!
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
You're confusing gui-based management with gui-based application building. That's what access can do. Someone who is stricly a power user, not a programmer, can build a simple access application. Whether they should or not is another story, because IT dept. usually gets called in when it can't scale beyond 10 users and it's become completely critical to the business.
Of course, it's possible to just like the Access front end to a real relational DB serrver on the backend, but this usually isn't done.
Of those you listed, I would say only Oracle has similar tools (I forget the name), and they are nowhere near as easy to use.
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
the power of a corporation with 40 billion dollars in their checking account.
Umm, no, sorry. OpenOffice works on Windows too. Perhaps you missed that in the larger discussion? Perhaps it's worth repeating: OpenOffice works on Windows too. Obviously I think Linux is a better solution, and the barrier to entry for informix or mysql or PostgreSQL is lower than you might think. But the easy solution, on either platform is to use OpenOffice. Did I mention that OpenOffice works on Windows too? Just checking.
It's got this Access workalike called Base, which would suit Suzy down to the ground. Well assuming she's OK with Access. A few folks have suggested that Suzy prob'ly uses spreadsheets, and I'd go with that myself.
But the most important thing is: How often do yu have to exchange databases with the government via email? I'd guess that if you do, you probably work for the NSA in which case arrangements have already been made.
If not, at the risk of getting repetetive, OpenOffice works on Windows too. Thank you for your time.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
Wouldn't that be true for any lockin? At least OpenDoc is an open standard, ie anyone can write software to read and write to it. Using MS Office is using a proprietary file format and to read or edit it you have to use Office. If a person can't afford the $400 for Office then they can't read an Office document.
We shouldn't let the desire to see Microsoft impaled blind us to the reality of government types who abrogate their responsibility, and instead say "whoops, can't use that, we standardized on the other one back in ought six".
You or others might but I don't see it as impailing MS, I see it as a bid to make sure government uses a file format that allows anyone to read and write documents without having to have MS Office. If MS is really concerned about Mass or any other government not using it's product because it doesn't support open standards then it can support those standards itself. And it's not enough to say Office supports XML because if it can't save or open OpenDoc documents then it doesn't in fact support XML seeing as how OpenDoc is an XML file format.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I'm sure Suzy the business analyst will just jump all over that. You'd have her learn Linux, I'm sure; then learn PostgreSQL, then how to program with Perl/Tk? Right.
Access isn't the only database available for Windows. The computer I'm using now has Windows ME and I've had MySQL and Firebird Relational Database installed on it.
Should there be a Law?
"Blind and disabled people aren't any different than any other user - they find something that works for them and don't want to change."
In other words you don't give a rat's ass about any of the workers, disabled or otherwise. I guess it's just all part of the great benefit to humanity of the F/OSS movement.
Ahh, the old "Vendor Lock-In!!! Run for Your Lives!" argument. The policy Massachusetts is proposing is a lock-in, it's just a standard-based one.
If the state ONLY saves documents in that format from this point forward, then they will be unable to take advantage of any newly developed tech, be it standard or proprietary. ie, if Massachusetts 'locked in" on wax cylinders for playing sounds, it would make it hard to get my CD, cassette tape or futuristic crystal cube device into the state's procurement process.
You seem to be very confused about why vendor lock-in is bad, and why open standards are good (and important). You see, with an open standard like ODF, you aren't locked into anything. First, you aren't locked into any particular software product or vendor. With an openly documented and freely usable document format, any vendor, commercial or otherwise, is free to implement software to compete in the marketplace. Secondly, and just as important, it will be trivial to write automatic translators that will "upgrade" all of the stored documents to any new openly documented free document storage format.
Thirdly, but definitely not least, you also seem a bit confused about the fact that data formats and storage media are two completely different things. If the filesystem format for storing data on all those wax cylinders and other strange proprietary storage media were openly documented, and if the design of the original machines were openly documented, it would be a fairly trivial matter for modern engineering to build a reader to move that data onto newer storage media. And again, if the document format of those old files were openly documented it wouldn't be too difficult to translate those documents into ODF or any future open document format. Or at the very least to develop software to read the files, which is the most important thing.
Please note that document format (the internal structure of the files themselves) and filesystem format (the structure of how the files are stored and read from the storage media) are two very different things. In a perfect world every level from the physical machine specifications to the filesystem to the format of the document would be openly documented. Perhaps then our government wouldn't have nearly as many data storage fiascos where they lose warehouses full of data that nobody knows how to read anymore. That sort of situation should be unacceptable, and open standards will help keep that from happening.
I really can't fathom where you might have given yourself the idea that open standards are somehow limiting or in any way comparable to a single-vendor proprietary, secret, patent-encumbered document format. If you thought things through you would realize that open standards are extremely important to the future of our data (no matter what storage media it is stored on), and to the ability of the people to access their government's data or send data to their government without being restricted by not being able to afford an expensive piece of software from one particular vendor. Open document standards also encourage competition in the marketplace, which is of course good because competition lowers prices and is necessary for a healthy capitalist economy.
Responding to your other point, of course there will always be something newer and cooler coming along every other year. What exactly are we supposed to do, wait until 3237 A.D. when everyone finally settles on one perfect file format? Ain't gonna happen. But as I've stated already, with an open format we are free to "upgrade" our data to take advantage of new features and data formats in the future because we can look at the open specifications and build nearly perfect software translators, and plugins to let new software read old files and probably vice versa. There is no "lock-in" with open docuement formats. And there is nothing stopping any commercial vendor from building software to implement these open document formats and selling it to the public or
If all you need is a row/column semi SQL-92 compliant database, then Access is pretty okay. If you want to build applications using Access + VBForms, you should be shot.
I got paid to write some last year, and I'll never do it again. The pain of a simple Office upgrade breaking all your apps is too great. I mean, Office 2000 -> 2002 removed the DateTimePicker control. That alone cost me quite a bit of time to fix.
Wow, you took the bait hook, line, and sinker. YHBT. YHL. HAND.
MS to be around to support anything past a few years from now is taking the wrong end of a sucker bet. MS's anti-OO FUD campaign is just an attempt to put the deathspiral off for a year or two.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Saying the MS format might not be available in 5-10 years might be a stretch, but stranger things have happened. The point is that the workings of Word are out of the control of Massachusetts, or the control of a free market (since Microsoft is a monopolist). On the other hand, the OpenDocument format is truly open. But with Microsoft, at any time Microsoft raises the price of Word, or forces migration by making the software change to new formats, things become available to fewer users.
I've just started work for a government agency (not US), where there's a legal requirement that all documents have to remain accessible for a minimum of 25 years. The solution to this appears to be to keep them stored in a central repository (we use WorkSite from Interwoven).
The problem I see with this, which I intend to comment on at an appropriate time, is that everything stored in the repository is stored as a Word document. Even if the documents are available in 25 years, we're still relying on Microsoft to keep its products backwardly compatible for that long. You're absolutely right that the industry moves quickly, but unfortunately that's not an acceptable answer for us with file formats.
25 years before today, there was no standard platform, Windows didn't exist, IBM had only recently hired Bill Gates and Paul Allen to create an operating system for their new design of PC, and VisiCalc and WordStar had only recently been released and were in the process of becoming relatively popular.
I have personal Microsoft documents that are only 12 years old (notably MS Works 2.0) that are impossible to open with any modern software. Especially as I don't run Windows any more (just as I didn't 25 years ago), I have no way of opening them short of scraping out the text strings. The format was closed in the first instance, and Microsoft decided to drop support. Relying on old software really isn't an option, because it won't be available in any supported form in the future. (If the software's available, supported, and not coded to expire, the platform and API's that it requires probably won't be.)
If we even occasionally had to open closed format documents from 25 years ago as a legal requirement on our modern Windows/Office platforms, we've be having an awful time. The only thing letting us off to date (in my organisation) is that we've only been keeping electronic documents since the late 1990's. Open formats are tremendously important, because at the very least, they're documented. There's no more relying on a closed source vendor to access your data.
I don't know, but somehow I imagine Microsoft is willing to pay lawyers more to look into it than any open source developers.
English is easier said than done.
I hope the Swedish press is better than NY Times.
FalconShould there be a Law?
The major issue as i see it, is that M$ can move to office 13 XML in 18 month and stop supporting the office 12 format in 8 years or so.
If on that day there is no finiacial reason for m$ to impliment support for handicap people and there is no copetition that day will the senate stand up and have a hissy fit to make sure that no one moves until m$ supports handicapped people ?
How about if you answer and give a good motivation why other sources are better. Please be serious and don't write something that sums up as "NY Times has been shown to not be perfect".
So, motivate what makes you reach the conclusion that NY Times is below average.
You miss the parents point: as long as you already have a dependency on Windows, a dependency on Jet is not an additional one, as Jet has been packaged with Windows since Win95/NT4 (?).
I'll grant that its SQL feature set is probably better than Jet's, but Jet is adequate for at least 90% of applications. Therefore, why bother packaging the additional code rather than using what the platform already provides?
Those sound like the words of someone who speaks from experience. :-)
Access databases do all sorts of utility work in corporate and gov't entities. Comparing MySQL to it is missing the whole point... the ability to program little applications without knowing anything about programming is why Access is so important.
And when you show me how to translate VBA into whatever OO Base is using, I'll agree with you.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
The campaign for governor and state legislative seats in 2006 has already begun, of course. My sense is that much of this debate is fueled by potential gubernatorial candidates positioning themselves in the upcoming election cycle. Isn't it striking that the pressure for OpenDoc is coming from a Republican administration (Romney), while the opposition is coming from Democratic legislators? Mass. Secretary of State Galvin and Attorney General Reilly, both Democrats, have their eyes on the "corner office" now occupied by Romney. Reilly in some way is cornered on the question of how Microsoft is treated since it's his office that pursued the Massachusetts case against Microsoft after the Federal case was settled. One can see Galvin thinking that he can position himself against both Romney and Reilly by questioning their support for "anti-Microsoft" initiatives. The disabled users issue strikes me as an especially effective wedge here. Nobody can be in favor of making it harder for disabled state employees to do their job. Moreover raising this issue suggests an insensitivity on the part of the Romney administration. One might think they would have considered the impact of this decision on the disabled before making it. Finally, I'm really tired of how this issue is always portrayed as a fight between MS Office and OpenOffice. The proposed Massachusetts standard also includes the Portable Document Format as an acceptable standard because it too is open though proprietary. Remember that one of the state's most compelling arguments is the need to preserve access to official documents for decades to come. My guess is that this role will be filled more and more by PDF, not OpenDoc. In fact, it seems to me that state agencies can claim compliance with this policy by using Microsoft Office to create official documents and then saving them as PDFs.
My only point is that the local system isn't stable. If you want to discuss irrelevant theories of world politics, do it with someone else. You started a humongously long rah-rah speech because you didn't have answers?? (Do you really claim that Ford was big enough to be more than 10% of GDP? Never mind.)
If you want, I'll give examples re Sweden and what doesn't seem to work.
(And re USA, they are probably better to have around than the Chinese will be, unless they democratize...)
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Jolly good. Luckily both groups are free to continue their usage of Access should they so choose. No one has made Windows illegal, nothing will stop you from using the software of your choice.
All the Massachusetts Decision means is that if you want to send documents to the MA state govt, you'll need to use software that understands OpenDocument. Since the software in question is already available, (and free to boot), I can't see this being much of an imposition on anyone.
Can you?
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
As far as your FUD, corporate control or government control. I can only believe you were trying to be dramatic or cute. I don't see how you could be serious. But just in case you are, it is not the job of the government to promote software formats.
I was trying to be cutely dramatic, thanks.
But I was also quite serious. Microsoft has already demonstrated a willingness to cut of their nose to spite their face; this was most recently demonstrated by their threat to withhold MS-Windows from South Korea. If you don't see this as corporate control, then no amount of evidence will convince you.
Well actually, the argument I made is correct. The CIO stated his concern was that the format would not be available. That is absurd.
In what way? I cannot now open MS-Works documents. At all. And old MS-Word (say, 1.0 - 3.0) are not easy to open, either; the office's copy of MS-Windows 97 cannot open any of them.
And this is the most vital, the most important, point of all. A proprietary format is in no way acceptible for long-term storage; in 20 years, who's to say any program can open that format? Whereas with an open standard, at least the format is documented, so someone can write a conversion utility.
My FUD is not FUD. It has been demonstrated time and again that, given the opportunity, a coproration will use its clout against anyone it can, *including the government.*
And finally, this is also about maintaining a free market. You know, this whole free market thing you seem to like so much? Using a proprietary format keeps many otherwise-viable competitors from bidding on software contracts.
The answer to the problem is easy. Instead of fighting an open standard, Microsoft can instead embrace the standard. But they won't until they have to.
They are the ones who choose to eliminate themselves. It's not about MS-Word or not MS-Word; it's about open standards for the preservation of documents. To say otherwise is disengenuous.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
But just in case you are, it is not the job of the government to promote software formats. The majority of people in society have spoken, and they overwhelmingly choose MS Word.
Sorry about that. My last reply was rather rushed, and I forgot a very important fact:
The decision isn't selecting a document format for the entire government, nor for the people of Massachusetts. They are selecting the format to be used by *the executive branch* of the state government. That's it, that's all. It's like a CIO of a company deciding which database on which their corporation will build their data infrastructure. It's their decision to make, by their own guidelines.
As far as the rest of your argument goes, it's a matter of political philosophy. I believe a state's soveriegnity trumps corporate interest any day. The group responsible tasked with coming to this decision did so in a very open, very public, very participatory manner. In fact, their procedure was significantly more democratic than this end-run by an elected official, who is acting unilateraly, and not at the request of their citizens; but rather, he is suspiciously taking action after a visit from Microsoft representatives.
You tell me which group is acting consistently with the principles of democracy, and which is acting like a special interest group.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Whouldn't cracking that binary key at the beginning of the documents be in contravention of the DCMA? Not to mention patent law..
A waist is a terrible thing to mind
My point was that if e.g. a big new resource opens up which allows lower prices, companies that doesn't use that resource will die. That is the reason competition works. No reason to blame the companies better at using the resource.
You claim that this is wrong? I am not an economist, but from what else I've read, it seems to be the prevalent opinion in their field.
Can you show that the argument is wrong? Or that it is unusual for economists? It contradicts your position.
Otherwise you are arguing that most economists are idiots or in a conspiracy, which is more or less what the creationists argue about palaentologists.
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I got paid to write some last year, and I'll never do it again. The pain of a simple Office upgrade breaking all your apps is too great. I mean, Office 2000 -> 2002 removed the DateTimePicker control. That alone cost me quite a bit of time to fix.
I feel your pain on that one. I had to go download said control from Microsoft. I didn't consider that painful at the time because I auctually did alot of research regarding what date/tie picker to use and evaluated several MS and non MS provided solutions. I've also seen queries simply disappear from my database if I ran them in different versions of access. There's a reason I keep all my sql statements in CVS.
I think you put it best though, access is ok, VBA, and to a lesser extent VB6 introduce alot of problems.
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
Moderation of this entire thread (including its parent) is a shame to Slashdot.
It is quite obvious what is going on here. Any anti-Microsoft comment will get random moderation bonuses while any argument to such comments will be considered flamebait; facts will be considered overrated. Apparently some people think (maybe they are right) that in Slashdot any argument against such comments is a flamebait, considering that anti-Microsoft fans will immediately try to flame the critic. Just as they have.
Please don't tell me that metamoderation is not going to solve the problem. It is part of the problem.
Is there any reason to participate to any discussion that relates to an MS product in Slashdot?
That's why you need , OK it's a dead project now but if you want to provide backwards compatibility I can restart the project and provide full read-write and conversion between and access file formats.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
>For the XML format, everything necessary for perfect compatibility is publically documented.
:-)
I call you on bullshit.
Good FUD -- that which takes a total lie and spins it to something else (usually a strawman argument) -- needs an element of truth.
In your case, the truth part is:
* Office supports XML
* Office documents (somewhat) their XML.
The context here is Microsoft stopping competitors from reading 'their' (not yours..) documents?
The answer is yes. Microsoft encumbers XML with patents. Additionally, Microsoft simply WRAPS binary objects and references to executable objects. It also does not address the issue of Microsoft OWNING the format and doing whatever it can to stave off independent implimentation (or if that happens, to kill off the format for a new one, like MS has done several times for video).
If you find this suspicion of Microsoft's intentions to be paranoid fantasy, you are too young to remember what Microsoft did when they gained control of the RTF format. (Or, maybe you know better and you are a paid shill). Besides, an XML file that references OLE/ActiveX objects is HARDLY a portable format.
The XML Microsoft generates is NOT sufficent to impliment a compatible reader... not one that can nail down readability, formatting, internationalization, reference COM objects that DO NOT EXIST on systems without Office installed... and simply exist and be legal.
Now, Microsoft can claim to NOT WANT to impliment OpenDocument. In fact I hope they fight this so everyone realizes just how Microsoft maintains their monopoly. When the defense department or businesses in general outline REQUIREMENTS, most vendors shrug and say the CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS RIGHT. Not so with an illegal monopoly.
But the times are a-changing. Open standards are a reaction to Microsoft.
After 8 years, it's ancient. Three year support is closer to the "standard" in the industry
On what planet do they implement your "industry standards"? It's certainly not Earth. I have all my financial records since 1993, and the Canadian Revenue Agency can demand up to seven years of records in its tax audits. Many people report that Office 2003 has a lot of trouble with Office 97-formatted documents. Hmmm....2003-1997=6... seems to me that Microsoft already falls short of Canadian government requirements. I'm guessing they fall short in most other juristictions as well.
5 years being a good company/product to deal with
The customers of my employer would beg to differ. We are contractually obligated to offer at least 15 years of compatibility, and some of our current products can and must still interoperate with data and devices produced by equipment we sold 20 years ago and earlier. Eight years is only "ancient" to gerbils my friend.
Those with your mindset are what peeves me off about the PC and consumer electronics industries, really. Microsoft is but the biggest offender of a large number as well--almost all proprietary software vendors share this fault. It takes more effort to preserve compatibility but it CAN be done effectively--just look at what is done in financial and industrial systems.
I note that you haven't answered my question if you were arguing like a creationist or had some integrity?
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What are you talking about, 300MB? When I downloaded OO 2.0 a week or two ago, it was 75MB. Still not tiny, but only a quarter of the 300MB figure you claim.
Sorry, yea I was getting mixed up. Even so, 75MB is still a lot for most people, and I could see a use for portable viewer applications.
--Muzz
So people with accessability needs should be happy about getting WORSE features than they have? Why should accesibilty features always be unimportant.
To expect economists to answers that, is like expecting economic wisdom from me... or you. :-)
Seriously, you don't even argue against that your opinions as conspiracy theories that needs all economists to be idiots. I have read enough on the subject to know that is complete bullshit.
So let us stop this now.. I have better things to do in life than argue with religious people. (-: At least, I should. :-) My honest opinion is that you guys are no different from Bush' religion.
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