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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."
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.
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...
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.