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Romney Continues ODF Support With New Appointee
Andy Updegrove writes "There is a major new development in the ongoing saga in Massachusetts over implementation of the OpenDocument Format (ODF). Governor Mitt Romney has named a permanent successor to former State CIO Peter Quinn, utilizing the entire press release announcing his appointment to underline the fact that the new CIO, Louis Gutierrez, would not only be charged with implementing the ODF policy, but that his past experience was uniquely suited to that task. Moreover, the press release goes out of its way to note that implementation of ODF is still on target for an effective date of January 1, 2007."
A headhunter in Boston sent me an email today. In the past Boston has not ranked terribly high on the list of places to which I would consider relocating. With the apparent commitment to ODF, I am taking today's email more seriously. Being able to interact with the state gov't using my primary workstation makes a difference.
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Wow, the first time in a long time that a politician has done something that made me happy. I think I would vote for this guy for president, just based on this alone.
What does it say about him? He isn't blinded by special interests. He is not swayed by all the bad press and slander microsoft can pull off. He has enough moral backbone to make a stand, even in something relatively minor like this. In a political environment where any lobbyist with enough dough can get a law, that means a lot.
Qxe4
Poor me, living here in Virginia, where I don't necessarially have access to the algorithms used to encode state documents, even though all commercial algorithms can handle it.
It would seem like a bigger deal if there were a serious problem with document compatibility, but it doesn't feel to me like there is. The main reason given for the ODF switch is to ensure that documents will be readable indefinitely, and this is certainly important. But the major M$ formats have stabilized in the last half-decade or so, and we're not gonna see decoders for them disappearing anytime in the foreseeable future. Everyone who wants to write a good word-processing package is going to be decoding Word 97+ for the next 50 years at least, and most importantly, when they stop including that compatibility, why should we think they'd be including compatibility for a similar standard? And there will always be people implementing decoders on their own, for either standard. It just feels like we have bigger problems; it's good OSS PR, but not a huge deal. Though of course, I could be wrong.
And on a side note, Romney's presidental prospects are dismal. As a Virginian, let me warn you all about Mark Warner. He's gonna sweep y'all away. Romney, with this, is setting himself up as a pro-tech president. But I was working on a VR project at the NASA research center down here, and in one demonstration at the Southern Governor's Conference, Governor Warner tried out the equipment. He looked around in the simulator for a while, then took off the glasses and started asking some incredibly hard-hitting technical questions about the engineering behind the system. He really knows his stuff. So he's a moderate and charismatic southern Democrat with a strong fiscal record, and definitely strong on the technology front. I'd like to see Hillary run myself, but I think Warner's gonna take the nomination. And Romney doesn't have a chance.
xkcd.com - a webcomic of mathematics, love, and language.
This is getting out of hand. Mitt Romney is advocating Open Source software and shunning Microsoft. Wikipedia says that MA Democrat Marty Meehan is sleeping with Ken Mehlman. John Siegenthaler trying to discredit James Frey. I'm so confused. Bill O'Reilly, Please Save Me. Slashdot, I wish I knew how to quit you...
What are the taxes like in Mass., anyone know?
Seems like it might not be a bad spot to relocate to, unless, of course, your field is hardlinked to proprietary document formats!
I think Hillary is going to be drafted
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You have no idea what this is about do you?
.doc format. And not even that is complitely true, because of different versions. MS locks it's formats to it products and with it the user. Have to write a .doc document? Yes, OpenOffice can write one too, but it's not 100% compatible and might fuck up. Now if MS would open the specs that would be different, but knowing MS they'd do that only if they were made to do it and even than they'd probably give old specs (like in the EU incident)...
Only MS's office is 100% compatible with MS
Now odf is all about free market and competition. You want a very good word processing program and have money? Suite x is for you! 100% compatible with odf format. Looking for something cheaper? How about Suite y? 100% compatible with odf. Not good enough to meet your needs? Than consider Suite z... 100% compatible with odf. Get the point? More competition = more choice = better products.
And I bet you use a pirate copy of MS office...
+1 Funny
Until I read your sig
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Not so much anymore. State income tax is currently 5.3%, though you can voluntarily pay 5.9% (I'm not kidding, there's a checkbox in the tax form for this). Romney's trying to get that down to 5%, however, but given the heavily old-boy Democrat leaning of the Legislature, it will be a tough fight. There's also a 5% state sales tax, but it's a short ride to "tax free New Hampshire", so that's generally not a problem.
we're not gonna see decoders for them disappearing anytime in the foreseeable future
If Microsoft decided to pursue it, they could "totally fucking bury" every single non-Microsoft DOC reader and writer if they so wished. They could do it tommorow.
I'd love to live in a world so bright and pink and fluffy as yours, but I tend to be a little more life-hardened and cynical. In the real world, you can't trust anyone to do the Right Thing, you sure as hell can't trust business to do the Right Thing and you sure as double-hell can't trust Microsoft to do anything.
For you and me, you're right, it doesn't make any difference. But for a company, buying a word processor that relies on a hack to read the accepted standard file format is not an attractive proposition, so they buy MS Word / Office which means that MS can raise the price of Word/Office and the competition have to lower the price of their offerings to compensate for the "hack" compatibility.
Sales droids at Sun, IBM et all must be over the moon. The ODF file format just became "the coming thing", "the future", "the smart choice". No longer the "brave choice", "trend setting choice". Nail biting in Redmond.
Massachusetts is a USD297billion economy with a population of 6.3 million people. Big deal.
The introduction says that Gutierrez is good for this job because of his past experience, what is his past experience and why does it make him the best candidate for this job?
Only MS's office is 100% compatible with MS .doc format.
Only if you're using the same version that the file was created in. And there are many different versions of Word, etc. still in use.
Please, it might be better than anyone else's, but don't try to claim 100% compatability in such a general sense.
Parent has not read GP post...
Arghhh!! How many times do we need to point this out. You may not feel like there's a problem with compatibility but for a government department who want to *guarantee* accessibility of documents, the MS formats are not currently suitable.
You say anyone who wants to write a good WP package will be decoding word. Sure, many programs do this, but they've all had to reverse engineer the format. This means they cannot guarantee that they're importing the document correctly. MA correctly take the view that they cannot afford to be giving out documents for the next 100 years that *may* be correct, they need to be sure.
That is why MA are insisting on an open spec. They're not anti-MS by any means, they are just clearly defining their requirements and inviting companies to demonstrate how they can meet them. That's a normal tender process. The fact is that MS don't like having to make their programs suit the needs of the customer, they'd rather the customer changed their requirements to suit MS.
This is not a MS / Open Source issue, it's a question of whether there's an open public standard for saving and reading documents. MS have options of making their formats public, or of making their software compatible with a public standard. Neither of these are things MS are keen on doing since they both open them up to competition, but both are quite possible.
PS. I'm not anti-MS, in fact I'm very Pro-MS. I run a domain of 100+ computers and 11 servers, all running MS software, and I wouldn't want it any other way. I think some of the work MS are doing is superb and I'm waiting for their next generation operating systems with baited breath. But despite all that, I can see the sense in the decision MA are making.
Current non-MS word processors already have a hard enough time implementing Word 97 import, particularly for any really complex documents. Why should time make it any better?
Let's look back to the most popular word processors from ~20 years ago: WordStar. According to Microsoft, Word can only import version 3.0 and higher. OpenOffice appears to have no support at all (that I can find). Nor does Apple's Pages. So if you come across a WordStar v1.0 or v2.0 document, you're SOL -- and that's after not even half the 50 year figure you quote.
How about WordPerfect? From the same reference, Word can import WP v4 and higher documents. So anything created in WordPerfect v2.2 (from 1982) or v3.0 (from 1983) is likewise not importable. Again, I haven't found anything about WordPerfect v2.2 or v3.0 support in OpenOffice (it does support WordPerfect import, but I can't find what versions this includes), or in Pages.
And that's just the two most popular PC-DOS packages from the 1980's, and doesn't include documents generated for other systems (like the Commodore 64 -- Paperback Writer anyone?), or from dedicated wordprocessing terminals.
And it gets better. Check out the entry in the above link for Word 6 and Word 95 support -- not even MS Office supports importing these anymore ("Retired - no longer available"). Word 95 isn't even 10 years old. And what about Microsoft Works format? Nada.
If you think that in 2056 you'll still be able to import Word 97 documents in popular word processing applications, you're living in a fantasy world. It's not going to happen. Will they be able to read ODF? Perhaps not -- however if necessary someone could write whatever sort of importer or converter they want, as the official recipe for such documents will still be around.
Less than two hundred years ago, Egyptian Hieroglyphs were virtually unreadable. It took the finding of the Rosetta Stone to make it understandable again. ODF is the Rosetta stone we get to leave for future generations. We already have unreadable document formats, and we're not even 30 years into the Personal Computer revolution. Thinking that we're going to be able to read modern day Word documents 50 years from now is overly idealistic, and seems highly improbable.
Yaz.
I live in Washington State, you know, the land of Redmond. It's nice of our Eastern fellow state to take a look at ODT format. However, you must pitty us. We're never going to see the light of OSS in our lifetimes...
I guess the sun sets in the West and rises in the East. I guess evolution obeys time zones too.
That's the best summary I have ever seen on why ODF is so important!
But the major M$ formats have stabilized in the last half-decade or so, and we're not gonna see decoders for them disappearing anytime in the foreseeable future. Everyone who wants to write a good word-processing package is going to be decoding Word 97+ for the next 50 years at least, and most importantly, when they stop including that compatibility, why should we think they'd be including compatibility for a similar standard?
Visual Studio 2005 format is incompatible with 2003. It doesn't even seem to have an export function. That's just a 2 year separation. Do you really think Microsoft formats will remain stable for 50 years?
It's precisely because you have to decode -- reverse engineer -- M$ formats that the push to ODF is being made. At the very least, it's a major reason. ODF is a public standard. If we need to read 50 year old docs in 2056, the worst case is we write a new reader, but the format spec will still be available.
Excuse me, wtf r u doin?
and if something delays or complicates the process, the whole world will hear about it.
if groups in the MA govt. start complaining that they are losing documents, having problems with maintaining multiple versions of the documents, etc.,
then this effort will be known as the biggest boondogle in history.
and anybody who recommends this path in the future will be sharply reminded of this failure.
i give the initiative about a 1 in 20 change of success.
So he's a moderate and charismatic southern Democrat with a strong fiscal record
There are no moderate and charismatic southern Democrats...well there were, until he enacted the largest tax increase in peacetime history and then was impeached 3 times.
But I don't see what this has to do with ODF. Are you that blindly partisan that you're afraid of a Republican getting mad props just this one time?
Are you his son or nephew or something?
The opposite of progress is congress
Well, it's not quite that bad from an archaeological point of view: many word processor files contain text encoded in a standard character set in roughly the order it should be read - the text just has extraneous mark-up. I'm sure future civilisations can do without knowing exactly which bits of the text were originally rendered in Comic Sans. From a legal and administrative point of view, though, it's worse - you'll need an accurate and reproducible record of the contracts you've made for the lifetime of those contracts and any liability arising from them. I wouldn't want to find myself in court arguing about who had to pay for the consequences of a collapsed bridge on the basis of "the most likely reconstruction of the original contract we can come up with"... Or indeed the blueprints, which are another aspect of the same problem.
Get it? ODF is about promoting freedom. To use YOUR document when YOU want, in whatever way YOU want.
Moreover, the press release goes out of its way to note that implementation of ODF is still on target for an effective date of January 1, 2007
They got on a horse and rode through town and declared, "The ODF are coming, the ODF are coming!"
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
The reason that Massachusetts has insisted on a Free and open document format is not just because other software isn't 100% Word-compatible. Another big reason is people who -- for one reason or another -- can't use Word. For example, blind people. Screen readers for Office uniformly suck, partly because they have to hack Office and reverse-engineer the Word format to work (just like OpenOffice). ODF's free spec will allow people to build screen readers that actually work properly.
And yes, this is important -- it's the government we're talking about, so using Word effectively disenfranchises people and turns them into second-class citizens. That's just not acceptable.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
From the archaeological standpoint, DOC is worse than hieroglyphics. MS DOC format is not a text format, it's an obfuscated binary format that is, in reality, a memory dump of the OLE objects that Word was working with. You have huge amounts of data in that file that is not text, and you can't guarantee that the text is stored as actual text.
BTW - contracts are still typically printed, signed, and stored, all on wood pulp paper.
"Stop Press! (2 March 2005) The HABiT WordStar Converter has been updated. The new version 3 converter supports all DOS versions of WordStar with conversion to either plain text or to HTML. Read more here."
Googling for "Wordperfect conversion" gives tons of results, several of which can do all old WP formats.
Paperback Writer ROMs and amiga emulators to run it on can be downloaded from lots of places online.
What was your point again?
I'm a dreamer, the world is my playpen. But hey, I'm a serious person, I can't dream all the time.
I'm waiting for their next generation operating systems with baited breath
Bated. BATED.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
And I bet you use a pirate copy of MS office...
You were doing great up until that point, then you had to go and spoil it with a pointless ad hominem. It just cheapens your whole argument - even if it's true, and the GP does pirate Office, what does that have to do with document format compatibility?
It's official. Most of you are morons.
>You have huge amounts of data in that file that is not text, and you can't guarantee that the text is stored as actual text True, you can't. But if I open a random selection of .DOC files with a text editor I can see the contents of most of them. Archaeology doesn't necessarily depend on being able to decode every word of every document: most historical documents haven't survived or have survived only in a damaged form. That's partly why archeologists have jobs.
>contracts are still typically printed, signed, and stored, all on wood pulp paper
A significant number of contracts which I have seen or been a party to are deemed on signature to incorporate "standard terms and conditions" which are supplied electronically. Typically, there's no real mechanism for ensuring that both parties to the contract actually are in possession of the same electronic document, never mind a process for identifying specific revisions or being able to recover them in the event of a liability claim in 20 years. Of course it would be wise to print a copy, but this wouldn't prevent someone arguing later that the document had been amended without authorisation before printing.
While what you say may be true for your typical inter-office memo, it may not be true for complex documents.
.doc file, it doesn't usually screw up on which bits have what fonts. It does tend to screw up on things like pagination and placing text boxes or images correctly. This could result in reference figures being put with the wrong text for example, or in pieces of text being transported to the wrong parts of a document. This not only obfuscates the original document's meaning, it may actuall alter it. I've actually seen this happen when working with other people who had different versions of Word, when preparing proposals that had to be submitted in .doc format. Nothing like staring down a deadline and finding that your proposal has been thrown into a cuisinart and randomly pasted back together.
When Word reads and old
There's a reason universities require that theses be submitted in LaTex.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Considering how the GOP is pushing this, the Dems must be pretty angry. In the end though, you need to keep in m ind that MA is a one party state. Dems genreally dont need to be elected since no one runs against them and they have an overwhelming majority (super majority?) in the legislative body.
My prediction, this is a Repblican project and will be DOA.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
Balmer throws chair.
"The ferrets, they're every where I tell you!"
It's a poor choice to enter into a contract that you don't have the full terms for. I've never been happy about contract terms that allow for a party to amend the contract after signing. Generally this only occurs for policy contracts, such as credit cards, bank accounts, or utilities. I would never enter into an important contract where the terms could be changed without all original signatories accepting the new terms. You shouldn't either.
The right answer is to print the document, and have all parties sign the printed version. You either have every sign each copy, or you sign one and make notarised copies.
In my line of work, the only terms that are acceptable as part of a contract, but not supplied with the contract, are those that are specified in law.
Mitt Romney, as governor of my home state, has been somewhat ineffective as governor, only because Massachusetts is about 80% has a union-funded Democrat state legislature. He is, however, a savvy and smart businessman who has surrounded himself with some very smart people. He may not be a techie, but he has received good advice from his staff about ODF. Any good business person should know the pitfalls of a single supplier of anything. It's good business and hopefully, more states will adopt the standard. Most already use PDFs for downloadable documents, and, while not quite open source, at least there are a few other applications that can create and open PDFs.
For those who think living here might be close to nirvana, keep in mind housing costs. It's true, the taxes here have been brought somewhat under control, but they are by no means low. The town next to where I live has a property tax nearly double what I pay, and they are still struggling financially. The cost of a basic 2- or 3- bedroom house, anywhere inside the Interstate 95 (Route 128) beltway is staggeringly high. The lowest price is around $350K, where the hight end is nearing $1MM! And, if you want to live in anything bigger or newer, expect prices in the high $500s to $800s; in a few places, over $1MM.
Massachusetts has a lot to offer in terms of history, geography and business, but my wife and I agree, that when our kids have completed school, we're outta here. The politics of this state are an embarrassment. Remember, it's the two Ks that represent us in the Senate - Kennedy and Kerry. The Mass congressional delegation is a collection of clowns and the state politics are rife with corruption and cronyism. I'm not sure where we'll go, but almost anyplace with a two party system would be better.
I'd like to see Mitt make it to the White House, but he has a tough road. It's not unlikely that he'll accept the VP nod if the 2008 Republican candidate is someone like himself.
== First cross river, then insult alligator.
... Not because of the whole ODF thing, but because I'm a resident of Massachusetts, and have seen all the crap that Mitt has subjected us to (my wife is a schoolteacher ... need I say more?)...
Now I have to cheer for a man I loathe? Oh, the irony...
I agree that current screen readers suck, but it is not because they have to reverse-engineer a proprietary format. Freedom Scientific, the largest maker of Screen Readers in the world, is a close Microsoft partner and has full access to the Microsoft Windows and Word specs to develop their product. Screen readers suck because turning a 2-dimensional graphic interface into 1-dimensional speech is practically impossible, not because the document structure is proprietary.
ODF's free spec will allow people to build screen readers that actually work properly.
I believe it may be possible to build a better screen reader with ODF, but where is it? Where is the robust screen reader for ODF? Saying that something may be better than the Microsoft solution some day is no different than the vapor-ware claims that Microsoft makes all the time. Bad as it is, at least Word has a screen reader right now, ODF doesn't.
If you think you can build a better screen reader, then do it. The ODF specs are fully available, and Blind people the world over will thank you. But the problem with screen readers is not the availability of specs. The problem is it is impossible to squeeze two dimensions into one.
Thanks! If I had mod points, I'd mod you up. This irks the hell outta me! I wish people would get it right.
Here's a good description
Well, so far, most Microsoft supporters (mostly programmers, users, etc.,) I've met don't actually -pay- for Microsoft software (well, besides getting a Dell system that bundles Windows).
One way or another, nearly -everyone- of the Windows users I know, still somehow manages to run MS Office, Visual Studio, Photoshop, etc.
On the other hand, the government -does- pay for software; with our freaking tax dollars!
Now, how would folk's support for MS Office change if they had to pay for it (or even realized that a good chunk of their local gov taxes (city/state) goes to installing Windows and MS Office on all the gov workstations?). I'd imagine most wouldn't fork over $400 per copy every few years and would seek alternatives.
this is why the MA initiative makes sense.
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
nonsense. he just ate a big fish sandwich and his breath smells a lot like chum at the moment.
hence, waiting with "baited breath".
I'd say the fact that Microsoft is pouring a lot of money and effort into stopping this proves that they think it's a huge deal. They've spared no effort, from heavy lobbying of politicians, to generating a smear campaign via the Boston Globe, to get this stopped. Is there anything which they haven't done?
They well realize that once one state falls, others will go along. And they will start to lose their exclusive vendor tie-in for their core Office business.
I salute Governor Romney and his efforts here. May this new CIO continue this effort, and not end up side-tracking it.
The best way to predict the future is to create it. - Peter Drucker.
but my wife and I agree, that when our kids have completed school, we're outta here.
Might I recommend my home state, Louisiana? No problem with corrupt politicians down here. No sir. We got the finest politicians who can buy... I mean money can buy... err.. ah hell... Bienvenue Louisiane!
PS. We use old fashion voting machines with swing down levers/arrows for voting. We sold our old voting machines to Mexico... boy were they suprised when they elected Edwin Edwards to be President of Mexico!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
MS DOC format is not a text format, it's an obfuscated binary format that is, in reality, a memory dump of the OLE objects that Word was working with.
I'd love to know where this rumor started. A Word document isn't just a "memory dump" of the what Office had stored in it. If it was, Word 2003 wouldn't be able to open Word 97 documents, but it can.
Yes, it uses serialization to store the objects. HOWEVER, object serialization is NOTHING like a "memory dump" - it's a proprietary binary format, that's all it is.
Your rant would be more believable if you had at least used accurate information to bash Romney's religion.
Dont forget microsoft's trojans for 'phoning home' that are in that 'memory dump, and the stats 'offish found on your machine that are also being sent to micro$$$ with every letter you create on 'Ofpfish'.
Visual Studio 2005 format is incompatible with 2003. It doesn't even seem to have an export function.
.Net 1.0 or 1.1 application using VS2005, nor can you develop .Net 2.0 applications with VS2003. VS2005 can upgrade your solution and project files to the newer version if you want to move your code to 2.0.
Wow, you just seem to want to jump on the bash MS train don't you?
First off, lets be clear. Its only the Solution and Project files that are incompatible, and there's a very good reason for that. You CANNOT develop
All the other files however are compatible, and if you really wanted to, you could create a new project file and just add the existing code files.
"But the major M$ formats have stabilized in the last half-decade or so..."
Oh, is that why it is changing again in their new, up-comming release of Office 12?
Microsoft does not want to offer you a modern document file format that you can share with anyone of your choice; only those they want you to so their products do not become a commodity. It is all about control. That's why they are fighting tooth and nail over it and why they will not fully open up their new file format.
Think about it. It's suppose to be your document you authored but the sofware vendor wants the final say who you can share it with. That is, only paying members of their club. Just plain silly, IMHO.
It would seem like a bigger deal if there were a serious problem with document compatibility, but it doesn't feel to me like there is. The main reason given for the ODF switch is to ensure that documents will be readable indefinitely
No.
The primary immediate and future reason for the switch to ODF is to be able to find pertinent documents in the archives using search techniques that are thorough and efficient. The archives of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts are not static things: there is a constant need to refer to old legislation, case law, and agency policies and procedures when evaluating new situations or considering policy or procedure changes. A deliberately obfuscated and proprietary set of formats like the Word .doc formats do not serve this function well, especially when the owner of the formats insists that they remain black boxes. An open format like ODF will allow MA state agencies, and people who have to deal with MA state agencies, to develop efficient and thorough search techniques with tools that already exist. Such as Perl, Python, etc.
Going to ODF will result in an immediate decrease in the costs of accessing the MA archives when you don't know exactly which documents are pertinent to your current need. That is a savings for MA government, and also for every citizen or business that needs to deal with MA.
Except for one problem: Word has more features than the current ODF supports.
Let's take your example and think of it another way.
You have the three good word processors that all do task X very well. Now you're going to do task Y, so you pick up SuperMegaPlus with Auto-Y feature. The problem is that the Auto-Y feature requires saving some data that the ODF format doesn't support, so while SuperMegaPlus can read ODF files, the files it saves are not quiet compatible. But feature Y is so important to you, you have to trade some compatibility.
That's closer to what the actual situation is. Now it's a non-issue if the MA government doesn't use those features that Word supports and ODF doesn't, but if MA *does* use those features, you're gonna end up in a world of trouble.
Comment of the year
Hmm, and I thought WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS only read WordPerfect 4.x documents... could be wrong though, I've only run into >5.x documents myself.
Just transfer the floppy over the cable (which may prove troublesome - I only personally have a cable that plugs to a printer port, and it won't work on an EPP port, and my ol' Pentium 166 and the cable + my 1541 drive are on different sides of the country).
After that challenging task is done, extract the file with c1541, and convert from PETSCII. End result is a file probably full of funny control codes - I'm not familiar with your app, but at least MiniOffice II kept the codes pretty minimal (and you could also save an unformatted "ASCII" file, which wasn't ASCII actually), which should be fairly straightforward to clean out - you've lost the formatting in any case.
What a relief to hear that Word can't read ancient Works shit either these days! That cuts down some of the options. =) I have a CD-R full of old documents I copied from a stack of floppies. Stuff dating from 1992-1997 or so. TEKOplus/Teko 3.1 was easy, that was just cp437/cp850 text with wacky formatting codes. Ditto with this funny Amersoft word processor. WordPerfect 5.1 opens right up in Abiword (and I think OpenOffice.org too, these days). I can probably find some solution for Lotus Word Pro if I try hard enough. I expect TeX documents still run through the thing, too. =)
But Works! Man! I used 1.0 and 2.0 for DOS at school, 2.0 for Windows a bit, and I had 4.0 for Windows at one point. (I think I have a shrinkwrapped "newish" Works here somewhere too... along with a shrinkwrapped Word 97. Might try those.) Nothing else seems to open all of these old Works word processor documents. Interestingly, all Works spreadsheets open right up in OpenOffice.org.
Now, another format that does prove to be somewhat of a headache is Windows 3.x Write... Ummm, would be fun to know what opens this stuff. Word apparently supports that, but I haven't yet found many apps in open source side that would touch those. =/
Good idea! Looks like there may be some prime property in New Orleans once the Nagin's nitwits knock down all of the abandoned houses.
== First cross river, then insult alligator.
No commercial or free software exists to decode MS Office documents except for MS Office. I've tried everything and tested and tested. There's always something that screws up the import. ODF is a way out of this MS quagmire and you can still keep using MS Office - all they have to do is add ODF to the mix. They can hobble ODF a little by not implimenting some ease of use features, but in the end this law could set us all down the road to owning our own data and being free to use whatever office suite we like the best. It could be wonderful for end users. That said, I still continue to submit bug reports for open office and try to help them decode MS Word documents.
It's interesting that you mention this. Back in the early 90's (from 1991 until 1993) I published an online magazine called "The Sound Blaster Digest" (which, in my stupidity I eventually renamed after getting lots of complaints that the title showed a bias that never existed). For the first two years it was an all ASCII production (as this was started before the rise of the World Wide Web), but later is was published simultaneously in ASCII and Windows Write format. The latter format embedded graphics, multimedia, and used nice fonts, making it easier to read.
At the time, it was fairly radical. I was getting recognition from Creative Labs, Microsoft, and BBS and Internet users world-wide. America Online gave me a free account to upload new issues each month, CompuServe sent me everything I needed to get on their network to do the same, and letter mail rolled in from all over the world. My name was known at trade shows, and free stuff rolled my way. The whole thing was even the subject of a story on CityTV's Media Television. At one time, I was approched to be interviewed for Wired (something I regret not following through on). I was considered a pioneer by many, publishing a monthly magazine completely in digital format. I did it before any of the big magazine publishing firms did.
Unfortunately for me, I was young and had other things I wanted to pursue. I never made much money at it (although people did subscribe to both a diskette subscription and a BBS uploading service I ran), and it took quite a bit of my time to produce. Other pressures in life eventually took over, and I stopped publishing. Which I do somewhat regret -- back in the day, my name alone was a free pass to a lot of good stuff. I was ahead of the curve, and considered a pioneer, but you probably won't read about it in any history of the Internet.
(The issues are still online in various places. I have every issue here, and have considered putting them up in an "online museum" on my website, perhaps along with some supplimental materials. I still have a box with every piece of mail anyone ever sent me when I was still publishing, including lots of 5.25" diskettes people would send with things they wrote, or sometimes the digital audio of their greetings to me :). I also have a tape copy of the Media Television interview which perhaps one day I'll digitize and put online).
Anyhow, to get away from wandering down memory lane and back on topic -- as mentioned above, later issues were available in Windows Write format, and used Microsoft's Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) to include MIDI files, digital audio samples, graphics, etc. And unless I find myself a copy of MS-DOS and Windows 3.1, AFAIK there is absolutely no way for me to read them.
So, the most popular online magazine in the world from only 15 short years ago is already unreadable (at least in its Windows Write form). Windows Write was available on every copy of Windows, and at one time was a really easy way to share decently formatted text with other Windows users. But today documents created in it are nothing but a pile of bits.
Admittedly, I was a few years too early for the rise of the World Wide Web, which is a more natural medium for such documents. Sometimes one of the dangers of being on the cutting edge is that a better solution to the same problem crops up, eclipsing the solution that was best at the time you started. If I had continued publishing for another year or two, I probably would have moved to HTML, but timing wasn't on my side.
One of these days I'll revisit this history somewhere, as it probably should be recorded. The Internet seems to have a poor record of things that were happening on it 15 years ago and earlier, and somebody somewhere might find it interesting (or might even remember those halcyon days :) ).
Yaz.
It's interesting that the Town of Saugus, Massachusetts has been successfully using open formats for years. Not just the government there, either. Even the Saugus Chamber of Commerce is using open formats successfully.
With smaller test cases like that in place, I suspect that Massachusetts itself will be right on time with the switch.
Well, the "rumor" started from Microsoft basically telling everyone that it was how they did it.
MS Office documents are stored as OLE Compound Documents, and have been since Office 97. The way this works is to take the OLE structure that you're working with in memory, and save it to a file. Office stores these as serialized structures representing different OLE objects.
This enables Office to embed many types of other content, as long as it can be represented by an OLE object. The method of saving the OLE memory objects to disc also allows Office applications to quickly load and save complex documents, however it carries the penalty of large file sizes. It also makes it incredibly difficult to load an Office OLE document without access to the format specifications.
While the OLE Compound Document format is documented, the ways that Office stores the data within its specific OLE containers is not officially documented *at all*. This means that you can fairly easily open an OLE document and see the OLE containers in the stream, but you can't manipulate most of them, for lack of documentation.
As an aside, Word 2003 can *usually* open a Word 97 document, and less often, Word 97 can open a Word 2003 document. You will usually get an intact document in the former case, but you will often lose formatting in the latter. In other words, Word 97 and Word 2003 aren't actually fully compatible, in either direction.
PDFs always look the same.
Yep, they generally suck for a blind person using a screen-reader.
This is why the blind community usually refers to PDF as "Pretty Dumb Format".
The blog and the /. intro are enthusiastically hyperbolic, but the actual press announcement is no manifesto. It merely says that the ODF project will be delivered as scheduled, on the new guy's watch. No more about ODF. "Open standards" is mentioned later in the announcement, but tied to what they are really interested in, their new web portal. Government loves open standards. At least, the Feds do. They don't like being dependent on one vendor, who might pull the rug out from under them somehow. Government loves web portals even more. Every department has built one now, so this year, they are trying to add "web services", "blogging", "IM", all that stuff their kids have told them about. (For their internal sites, that is.) If that sounds great, come on down to Washington, DC, and they'll pay you to do it. After you've been cleared by the investigators.
No, it is that bad.
Whether people are aware of it or not, Word can store all of the changes made to a document. There may be old, out-of-date, and replaced content inthe document that no longer displays when loaded in Word.
So if you just run "strings" against a Word document, it may contain items you weren't supposed to see. This isn't to say that the information may be secret -- it might just be out-of-date. And you'd have no way of knowing whether a piece of text you're seeing this way was from the latest version, or from an old edit. This extra information can be useful to archeologists, but it requires context -- you need to know when certain edits were made and to what, and Words binary format doesn't make this apparant if you don't know how to interpret the binary data.
So I don't think it's as easy as some people are trying to make out. A Word document can contain a lot of text which isn't part of the most recent revision of the document, and without being able to parse every bit of binary data to get the context out, the data may be significantly less than useful.
Yaz.
Peter Quinn will be speaking in LA on Feb 10th at the Southern California Linux Expo. There will be others from IBM, Sun and the OpenDocument Fellowship speaking as well.
Who actually needs embedded video in their document?
Why is it that when you believe something it's an opinion, but when I believe something it's a manifesto?
Thanks, paiute. For the rest of you, d'ya know why it's "bated"? Because it means "restrained" or "moderated" -- like you are waiting to exhale, waiting to breathe a big sigh of relief. You still see a cognate of this in phrases like "The storm abated" or "Best Buy offers a price rebate."
So, y'all are going to remember this from now on, right??
$META_SIG_JOKE
they don't have to be any worse than any other document type. even setting aside fall-back measures like on-screen OCR (which i agree is a pretty abysmal fall-back), most currently-produced PDFs have the text in them, rather than just vector instructions (which is why you can copy/paste from them). if a screen reader can read a Word file better than a PDF (in the general case), it's a design or implementation failure in the screen reader.
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.