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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."
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.
The press release goes on to highlight the fact that earlier in his career, Gutierrez was chief information officer for the Massachusetts Executive Office of Health and Human Services (HHS), the largest state secretariat with 23,000 staff and more than $12 billion in annual spending. In that capacity, Gutierrez:
So, in other words, it's referring to the fact that he's a) overseen large deployments and large budgets, and b) that he's carried out a cost saving project relying on open standards.
He's good for this job because he's enough of a heavyweight and has had successfull enough projects that he and the Governor can respond to further attempts at power grabs from the senate by pointing out that Gutierrez has done similar stuff before, AND saved money doing it, so any politicians going against this project can much easier be painted as trying to waste taxpayer money to protect out of state corporate interests (Microsoft). It's a smart move...
Get it? ODF is about promoting freedom. To use YOUR document when YOU want, in whatever way YOU want.
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.
I'm waiting for their next generation operating systems with baited breath
Bated. BATED.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
More than once I've had more luck opening old Word document with OpenOffice than with a newer Word version...
Besides, if you'd bothered checking what they're actually planning to do, they've specifically made it clear that keeping current software around to handle legacy documents is ok, and that no document conversion is required.
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.
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.