Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Blasts IBM Over XML Standards
carlmenezes writes "Ars Technica has up an article discussing Microsoft's latest salvo against IBM. Microsoft's open letter to IBM adds fresh ammunition to the battle of words between those who support Microsoft's Open XML and OpenOffice.org's OpenDocument file formats. Microsoft has strong words for IBM, which it accuses of deliberately trying to sabotage Microsoft's attempt to get Open XML certified as a standard by the ECMA. In the letter, general managers Tom Robertson and Jean Paol write: 'When ODF was under consideration, Microsoft made no effort to slow down the process because we recognized customers' interest in the standardization of document formats.' In contrast, the authors charge that IBM 'led a global campaign' urging that governments and other organizations demand that International Standards Organization (ISO) reject Open XML outright."
Help! I just bought a ThinkPad (yes, IBM, not Lenovo). I run Windows on it. Which side should I take?!
c++;
It does not take a rocket scientist with a good look at the spec to figure out it sucks. The fact that it sucks has little to do with IBM.
Got Code?
He who deceives himself deceives a fool.
Perhaps IBM's actions are based on the format qualities, not on its favoritisms. About those, since when IBM was in bed with Sun any more than it was with Microsoft?
This "Open Letter" is nothing than another piece of FUD and whining.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
This might be true, but when Massachusetts decided to adopt this standard they raised holy hell, and used every trick in the book to make Massachusetts take it back.
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
Besides being an open standard, the standard needs to be usable by people other than Microsoft. Why would any document standard need specific tags for Windows 95? IBM lobbied against it because it was a bad standard, not because it was made by Microsoft.
I'm not a fool, you insesitive clod!
Living With a Nerd
Is it really an open standard if they are the only ones that developed it? It reminds me of a quote which I will paraphrase:
Reusable code is not truly reusable until it has been used more than once.
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
This is similar to convicts trying to get jobs once out of prison. There is no longer an assumed trust due to prior actions. Who trusts MS to NOT pervert any of their documentation or standards if they see an economic benefit in doing so?
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
So what Microsoft is really saying is that because we didn't block ODF (as there was nothing wrong with it anyway) you should not block OpenXML accordingly (irrespective of any reasons)
Boring Boring Boring. More posturing as per usual
Be alert the world need more lerts
'When ODF was under consideration, Microsoft made no effort to slow down the process because we recognized customers' interest in the standardization of document formats.'
Yeah... are we supposed to believe that? If anything creating there "open" format looks to me like a blatant attempt to prevent the one thing that open format people are trying to accomplish, namely having one open format that can be used by everyone and can't be arbitrarily obsoleted by any one company. Or maybe I missed something.
I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.
Mark Twain
Billions in revenue all due to file format lock in. And IBM is trying to fuck that up. You'd be pissed too.
Even a modest loss of that revenue would bring dramatic changes to Microsoft as a company and how it operates.
And it performs brilliantly with any product you want: MS Office Ultimate 2007, MS Office Professional 2007, MS Office Enterprise 2007, MS Office Standard 2007, or MS Office Small Business 2007.
Details here.
Given Microsoft's amazing track record at standardization!
09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63
This little blurb just kills me...
"When ODF was under consideration, Microsoft made no effort to slow down the process because we recognized customers' interest in the standardization of document formats."
Yep you bet no effort to slow down the standardization process because they refused to be involved. However they have made every effort possible and will continue to do so in the future to slow
the adoption and deployment of this standard by any means necessary.
Got Code?
Their heads are so far up their asses they cant even see that the problem with Open XML has less to do with Microsoft being the one who created it (which in MY mind is a problem in it's self) and a lot more to do with Open XML, which as a format, makes baby kittens cry.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
I thought the main objection to OpenXML was that it fails to define a number of things, essentially saying "render like WordPerfect 1.0", making it an incomplete standard. Making it not impossible but very difficult for anyone other than Microsoft to implement it so it's fully compatible with the MS version.
Hey Microsoft! We don't just hate you: fact is, your OpenXML spec is an appalling dump heap overflowing with the most disgraceful assortment of deplorable rubbish imaginable, mangled up in tangled up knots! I mean, we at IBM know a brain-damaged document format when we see one (heck, we invented plenty of them ourselves) and trust us, this one takes the cake. Ratification of this garbage could set the word processing industry back about twenty years. So don't give us the "customer's interest" line. We know what this is all about: this is about YOU.
Disclaimer: I don't work for IBM (anymore|yet) and these ain't IBM opinions. Well, not official opinions, anyway. ^^
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
After all they had to create a 6000 page document without releasing any information on how to make their "open" standard work. There are so many statements like "functions as per Word 95" without explaining what that means. They must have worked long hours creating a specification that doesn't actually specify how to implement it.
IBM is being a big bully and not allowing Microsoft to screw the public and private companies of the world as Microsoft wants to.
Naughty Naughty Big Blue.
While it is clear the so-called Open XML is owned, controlled, and licensed by MS, is ODF actually owned by OO.org. And, if so, will OO.org use it to limit users ability to migrate data? The reason why so many people are against any MS format is that MS will actively limit the ability for the user to use the data. For instance, it could be that a user that does not license a copy of MS Word does not have the right to use a particular format.
In fact the ODF format appears free of any such encumbrance, and SUN, which contributed much of it, has pledged it to remain unencumbered. Therefore, this seems like simple marketplace economics. If one has two products, and one is somewhat better but has a high real cost of acquisition, and the other is slightly worse but has a significantly less real cost of acquisition, the the market will choose the later. MS understands this, as cheap products is why people bought MS instead of IBM, and why MS continues to pay huge sums of money to create favorable TCO reports. There, this MS rant is simply an attempt to distract technical staff from the real issue, which is that future growth will be limited for benefits that are not always clear.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
1: Pot => Kettle = "black";
2: goto 1;
Microsoft seems to have it backwards. When it comes to standards, they advocate choice. When it comes to software, they advocate monoculture.
The questions I ask are rhetorical - I know the answer, and so should most people. The open source community (among others) have blasted Microsoft for years for trampling choice in software. Now they are seeing that open source (and competition in general) has a real chance of making significant headway with a well documented, open standard that anyone can implement, that will interoperate, and isn't controlled by themselves, so now they use the community's arguments, but in an area where it's not appropriate. They use the words the community has used to attack their software monoculture to attack a standards monoculture. It's calculated, and a smart move on their part. Utterly contemptuous and underhanded, but very very smart.
"...because we recognized customers' interest in the standardization of document formats"
"Microsoft has determined that it is important to shine a bright light on IBM's activities that will have a negative impact on the IT industry and customers, including taking concrete steps to prevent customer choice, engaging in hypocrisy, and working against the industry and against customer needs," said the spokesperson. "Microsoft will continue to be public in identifying the ways that IBM is trying to prevent customer choice."
Is there a class in Business School that teaches this stuff? That transparently stupid statements are ok to make because only your "reality" counts?
On day one of this class do you walk in the door and the professor says "The sky is blue. Unless you don't want it to be."
Wow.
Sorry, the "open letter" is just a bit too familiar to anyone who's raised children.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
I just read thru the whole pile of shit, and all I've got to stay, standing here in front of you in great astonishment given all this impudence, is: BIG FUCK YOU, Microsoft. You can only feel ashamed for what this pathetic company of well-organized assholes is trying to pull of once again with this "open letter".
In XML-based file formats, which can easily interoperate through translators and be implemented side by side in productivity software, this exclusivity makes no sense except to those who lack confidence in their ability to compete in the marketplace on the technical merits of their alternative standard. This campaign to limit choice and force their single standard on consumers should be resisted.
Yeah, right. I hope you die.
as in; payper liesense hypenosys stock markup FraUD felons are on their way out? what a revolutionary concept.
from previous post: many demand corepirate nazi execrable stop abusing US
we the peepoles?
how is it allowed? just like corn passing through a bird's butt eye gas.
all they (the felonious nazi execrable) want is... everything. at what cost to US?
for many of US, the only way out is up.
don't forget, for each of the creators' innocents harmed (in any way) there is a debt that must/will be repaid by you/US as the perpetrators/minions of unprecedented evile will not be available after the big flash occurs.
'vote' with (what's left in) yOUR wallet. help bring an end to unprecedented evile's manifestation through yOUR owned felonious corepirate nazi life0cidal glowbull warmongering execrable.
some of US should consider ourselves very fortunate to be among those scheduled to survive after the big flash/implementation of the creators' wwwildly popular planet/population rescue initiative/mandate.
it's right in the manual, 'world without end', etc....
as we all ?know?, change is inevitable, & denying/ignoring gravity, logic, morality, etc..., is only possible, on a temporary basis.
concern about the course of events that will occur should the corepirate nazi life0cidal execrable fail to be intervened upon is in order.
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consult with/trust in yOUR creators. providing more than enough of everything for everyone (without any distracting/spiritdead personal gain motives), whilst badtolling unprecedented evile, using an unlimited supply of newclear power, since/until forever. see you there?
Microsoft's format in and of itself is an attempt to sabatoge OpenDocument. Their refusal to support it, despite having the most popular Office Suit is another clear sign of their contempt for it, and the customers they claim to care about now.
God forbid IBM promotes their own standard. Jeez, that's almost like having competition! We'de hate to have to make MS actually compete with anyone. On top of all that, why in the world would IBM trust MS not to tweak the standand and make it MS only? Why would anyone who actually cares about an open format trust MS to touch it?
Here's what I wrote :o)
of the 21 members, IBM's was the sole dissenting vote. IBM again was the lone dissenter when Ecma also agreed to submit Open XML as a standard so long as you don't count the twenty assorted countries that registered comments and objections to our fast-tracking proposal.
When ODF was under consideration, Microsoft made no effort to slow down the process because we were too busy trying to kill it completely.
This campaign to stop even the consideration of Open XML in ISO/IEC JTC1 is a blatant attempt to use the standards process to limit choice in the marketplace for ulterior commercial motives and is in no way whatsoever similar to our own campaign to stop the consideration of ODF in Massachusetts for our own commercial interest.
It is not a coincidence that IBM's Lotus Notes product, which IBM is actively promoting in the marketplace, fails to support the Open XML international standard in the same way as all other office software (other than our own) does, because we deliberately designed it so nobody but us could use it.
If successful, the campaign to block consideration of Open XML could create a dynamic where the first technology to the standards body, regardless of technical merit, gets to preclude other related ones from being considered and that's one of our tactics, dammit! Or do you actually think all those people out there using Internet Explorer do so because they tried out Opera and Firefox too, but decided IE was the best browser going? No, they use it because it was the first browser they ever used.
The IBM driven effort to force ODF on users through public procurement mandates is a further attempt to stop us forcing Open XML on them instead through our usual blatant monopoly abuse.
XML-based file formats, which can easily interoperate through translators can easily allow Open XML documents to be imported into Lotus Notes, and there are two such translators currently in existence - one of which we ourselves initiated - so we're being blatantly two-faced here by saying that Lotus Notes not supporting Open XML will be a significant barrier to people using Open XML for their documents.
This campaign to limit choice and force their single standard on consumers should be resisted so that we can limit choice and force our single standard onto consumers. Don't you know how important lock-in is to us??
We have listened to our customers. They want choice. They want interoperability. They want innovation. But we don't have to give it to them, because we're Microsoft! Bwahahahahah! Give us money or you'll wither and fade into the limbo of incompatibility.
What do you mean, that tactic doesn't work any more? It's got to, our whole business depends on it!
Damnit. . . hand me another chair. . .
So.. it has come to this
If logic in public discourse is the crucible of refined ideas, why not let the arguments stand on their own merits without questioning the implied rules of the game?
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
Having looked into both formats, I realized that they're both trash.
The major problem is the use of XML. At least with HTML, the tag names were kept short. But both standards use rather long element names, often in excess of eight characters, plus eight or more namespace characters beyond that. For some of the XML element names of each format, we're looking at over 16 characters overhead! When such tags are used repeatedly, especially in a large or heavily-formatted document, a lot of space ends up being wasted.
Another major problem is that they don't really solve any problems that LaTeX or GROFF haven't already dealt with. Both LaTeX and GROFF allow for far more compact document files, and they easily allow for output in a wide array of formats, from DVI to PostScript to PDFs to HTML. The HTML that is generated, for instance, is actually human-readable. OpenOffice.org and MS Office's HTML output is garbled and insane.
MSFT "supported" the ODF standard then goes out and invents their own standard anyways? And now they question why IBM is agianst it?
Me thinks MSFT should look up the definition of standard.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
This article reminds me of the south park episode of Cartman vs Scott Tedderman(sp)
MS is crying because IBM is returning a dose of their own medicine.
After reading the Open letter, it's very clear that Microsoft claims IBM's want to stop Open XML stems from their ODF format making it through the standards group first and being adopted. MS claims that people should be able to choose their open standards...
Call me crazy but having two different standards doesn't really capture the idea of having Standards at all. I thought the point of standards was to make it so we (the developers) only have to implement one thing. I can fully understand IBM's reasoning here. The only thing it seems MS wants to do is create more vendor lock.
Whats that Microsoft? IBM did what? Uh huh... uh huh... You sure? uh huh... Quick Somebody call Whine-1-1, and request a Whaaaaambulance!
If IBM was doing anything, it was informing the public and standards board about how OpenXML is a poor standard for reinventing the wheel on everything.
ODF had a long open development period. Microsoft could have participated in this if they really cared about standards and a backward compatibile feature set. Instead they chose to develop their own format. So why should I have sympathy if they cry about IBM saying ODF is better?
Nevermind that customers are rejecting Microsoft Office because they are trying to get out of the lock-in of Microsoft's proprietary document format. Nevermind that Microsoft is into "Open" only to fudge the line between "Open standards that are documented and that anyone can implement and use" and "Proprietary with an open wrapper". Heh ... if I embed an MS-Word file into an XML document and compress the result using the Open Source program Gzip, does that make the resulting file "Open"? No? According to Microsoft's own logic, this would be the case.
And all this just to disguise the fact that their proposed "Open" standard allows them to put their their (totally proprietary) Office format into a document that follows the standard and then call it "Open". It's squarely aimed at fooling manager types into ticking a box labelled "Open Standards compliant" on their checklist.
Of course it's a fine example of complete intellectual dishonesty on Microsoft's part ... but whenever did Microsoft ever care about honesty? Intellectual or otherwise? Microsoft didn't become big by using such stupid tactics ...
Take that video demonstration for example. You know ... the one that showed Windows "crashing" when Explorer was removed. Any ordinary person would have gone to jail for perjury on that "testimony" ... but large companies are exempt it seems. "A regrettable communication error sir." Yeah, right.
As many people know ... Microsoft's OOXML is a blatant attempt to perpetuate Microsoft's proprietary standards through a selection of backdoors in a 6,000 page standard proposal that Microsoft is trying to rush through. Just see the "criticism" section in this link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML
Since the trailer park boys are hosting the ECMA's this year maybe they could get approval by some carefully placed bribes of Donairs and cigarettes.
"Luck is a tag given by the mediocre to account for the accomplishments of genius." -Heinlein
yeah, the people who brought us Jscript, their proprietary version of Java, and who have failed to document the Windows registry for more than a decade are bitching about open standards.
This emphasis on ODF is to strengthen the parent post's claim on the importance of ODF being unencumbered.
Think global, act loco
Okay - the subject is probably overkill. Standards change all the time. Or rather, standards gain extensions and new features all the time. I work with DRDA (a database networking protocol to encapsulate data passed from client to server and back) and it is constantly being added to to cope with new situations and requirements. That's not to say it's a bad standard - the core is solid and does (mostly) what database people need it to do. When we need it to do something new, we make proposals. The DRDA review board takes a look at it. Other people who use DRDA get an opportunity to make changes or block it entirely. We make changes to the proposal and it goes around again. Eventually, once consensus is reached, it gets formally written up and becomes a part of the next iteration of the DRDA standard.
When a standard stops evolving, it is because people no longer need it to do something new. That can be for entirely good reasons (it does everything one could conceivable need) but it does mean that that standard has reached it's natural limits.
ODF continues to evolve because people keep needing documents to do new stuff. Collaboration, equations, macros, formulas are all areas of change. A good standard recognizes that change will happen and builds that change right into the core structure. ODF has an extensions mechanism for precisely this reason. You will still be able to open an ODF version 1.2 document with an editor that only supports ODF version 1.0. Any features that are not supported by the ODF 1.0 editor won't be usable, visible or editable but that won't stop you getting at the rest of the data.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
Reusable and portable have the -able morpheme stuck at the end. There's a reason for that.
Code that's been used more than once is reused (in the second instance). Code could be
reusable and never have been reused. Reusable indicates the ability to be reused.
Similary, portable indicates only the possibility of movement across platforms, not any
actual history thereof.
And, yes, IAAL (I am a linguist).
Since ECMA is willing to recognize crap as a standard, I'm just going to stop recognizing ECMA as a standards organization.
"...today consumers have been conditioned to think of beer when they see a bullfrog..."
Some randomly selected points from TFA.
True but irrelevant since the others are rarely used and everyone (but especially Microsoft) knows it is the default format that matters.
Billions? Maybe that is technically true but Microsoft's record on backwards compatibility isn't great even within their own product suites. I'm pretty dubious that with OpenXML all my old Word documents will convert with perfect formatting. I'm even more dubious that OpenXML will be be read/write with perfect formatting in other applications. It's a 6000 page specification after all and I'm quite sure there is plenty of ambiguity even if the attempt to specify everything was a good faith effort. And with only 30 days to review all 6000 pages I'm not confident it will be evaluated with a satisfactory level of scrutiny.
OK. Let's assume that IBM is being a bad guy here. It's possible. Wouldn't be the first time. Is there something about ECMA International" that prohibits competing standards? Honest question, I don't really know. If not Microsoft is entitled to complain. But on the other hand the process is moving forward and there is little doubt it will be approved in due time. So I'm at a bit of a loss as to why I should care if IBM was obstructive, even assuming they were? IBM is one of the few companies that really isn't especially beholden to Microsoft's monopoly power so I'd expect them to be a bit more prickly. Let me be clear, for me to trust Microsoft I will need to see a lot more than a format approved by a standards body to believe they are going to compete openly and fairly in the marketplace. This is a company convicted in a court of law of abusing their monopoly power to the detriment of consumers. Implicitly trusting them is foolish.
I'll be siding with IBM on this one. You gotta watch Microsoft like a hawk, cause once they get their "Open XML" going, there ain't gonna be nuthin OPEN about it.
If I didn't have absolutely NOTHING to do, I wouldn't be here.
You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.
Can you even use the words open and Microsoft together?
I lost my sig...
If you were smart you would realize both organizations have a lot invested in this. With the adoption of ODF, open source software will get a big advantage, and considering that ODF does not support a good chunk of features in Office 2007 (Excel etc.) Microsoft will be on the losing end if governments adopt it. IBM will be very glad if Microsoft goes down in importance, so will other technology companies, but they both have lots of money residing on this, so without reading the spec, and knowing what really is going on i would not trust either of the companies. Frankly they are all(MS,IBM,APPL,SUN etc.) FUD spreading, cash hounding corporate entities, there is not much you can do, that is capitalism.
If for some reason you think the big guys opensource stuff, just to feel better trust me they don't, they do it because they get more money out of it, so they are willing to sink money into it.
Oh, I expect they can see it perfectly well [1], it's just convenient for them to pretend that they can't.
[1] After all, what do you expect to find up somebody's ass? Yep, Open XML fits the bill neatly!
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Any way that the open source community could embrace and extend Open XML?
"In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is." - someone, at some time
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
There should be only one standard. You need competition among the vendors. That is the way to have level playing field. Microsoft is playing with words and fudging the issue by creating competing standards. What if every tire manufacturer proposes his own standards? The market is not served by fragmentation of standards. One standard. Not owned by any vendor but under the control of users, consumers and the marketplace. The standards should promote competition among the vendors. If it does not promote competition then it is not worth having a standard.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Does Microsoft not do the same in not supporting ODF? A little hypocritical to me.
The article's uninteresting, but did you read the discussion? There are some people who spent a lot of time posting, who quote Microsoft documents, and keep steering the discussion back to Microsoft's talking point, and away from technical points, whenever they're raised.
I don't know the people involved, and I don't know where they're coming from. But I suspect something. That suspicion colors everything I read in it.
I cannot read a discussion of my peers and believe what I read today. Every peer is possibly specifically paid to market and lie. Therefore, I have no peers.
We need a law against astro-turfing.
ODF already exists as an ISO standard. Why is Microsoft pushing so hard for its own ISO standard rather than just writing an import/export module for its Office suite to support the ODF standard?
The answer (obviously) is: Microsoft sees an advantage to supporting their own "open" standard versus anyone else's. I put open in quotes because my guess is, based on past observances of Microsoft's behavior in very other case where they supposedly supported an existing standard, that it will quickly become a standard that nobody but Microsoft can support.
If IBM is indeed blockintg acceptance of a Microsoft standard then perhaps it is because they have looked at the same history I have and drawn the same conclusions I did. Microsoft has no right to be indignant about it; they brought it on themselves with their own past behavior.
In this letter they talk about choice? Since when? MS is about choice, I guess. Mainly the choice about being locked in to their product like a complete fool, or not.
Don't get me wrong. Office it really nice. I think as a product it could compete just fine, but MS is never going to allow that. They want you locked in. That's just good for the stock. What's good for the stock is often bad for the user. With Open Office I just don't see the need for MS Office. I don't. I'm sure someone can think of a good reason to have, but I'm guessing most can do without and save a good amount of money.
What really gets me about people and MS has nothing to do with the battle of free(as in freedom) vs pay software. If you are the CIO/CTO or other officer of a company and you don't, at least look into free software like Linux and Open Office, might be turning your back on your stockholders. This assumes you are publicly traded. I've worked for a few publicly traded companies and they never seem interested in doing more with less(money, and hardware). They are always more interested in purchasing the brand name of the moment. There is rarely a goal in mind when purchasing.
Maybe I don't choose the best places to work. I current CIO and CTO where I work at the moment seem to be going in the right direction. But that has only come about lately.
If I was a stockholder in a large company or sat on the board I would want them to explain using costly locked in software. I really can't understand why there are not more shareholder suits about this subject.
-- Prepared at the direction of, or to be sent to Legal Counsel, in anticipation of litigation. Attorney Client Pri
...go over to http://openxmldeveloper.org/default.aspx and fill up their forums with lots of direct questions about how to implement the OpenXML "standard"?
Tell them you're developing a cross-platform application with Linux and OS X versions, I'm sure they'll love that.
Insisting on "correct" English is like saying that there is only one, definitive recipe for chili.
We should have a Celebrity Death Match!
MS intends to release the complete implementation details as soon as optical disc technology catches up and 8 Terabyte quad layer discs become commonplace and the drives are available on all Compaq and Dell computers; MS will open source its BlakDeth-Ray(tm) technology to speed the development process, however, the BlakDeth-Ray(tm) SDK requires an NDA, a per-seat license and a DRM dongle compatible with Windows Vienna. It must also "function as per Microsoft Bob".
MS also needs to locate a programmer named Karl to produce his code comments for the Word 95 spec, but they have been saved in Multi-Tool Word format and are currently unreadable in Office 2007.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
What about future microsoft products?
Or, were you being sarcastic?
Billy boy! Open up that microsoft filled arse of yours and make room for my incoming army boot! WHAM!!
In the end, there can be only one!
Having looked into both formats, I realized that they're both trash.
... OpenOffice.org and MS Office's HTML output is garbled and insane.
So (assuming any legitimacy to the complaint) then use a different tool to convert OpenDocument to HTML. Geez. It's XML and there are quite a few ways to make the transition, many of which are quite good.
You do realize that the article is about the format and not the applications which use them, don't you ? Yeah. I thought so. There are something close to three dozen applications which support OpenDocument, of which OpenOffice is only one.
MS shills seem to be working over time to try to confuse the issues regarding OOXML vs ISO/23600 aka OpenDocument. Two of the main themes are here.
Crissakes, even the government of China is trying to harmonize with OpenDocument. You also have the 5000 or so participants in OASIS representing 600 or so organizations, companies, agencies and universities participating in OASIS, which is responsible for OpenDocument. You also have about 2 billion MS Office users tired of being forced into a new office suite and/or operating system purchase every the vendor decides to change its undocumented, binary formats.
The whole thing seems to be MS doing the only thing they're good at, waging a PR war, to try to 1) bring focus away from the technical issues being discussed at ISO, and 2) try to hide the groundswell of support for a universal file format.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
1. Microsoft is probably, as they say, investing considerable effort/expense to figure out what
customers want in a document format and that's probably a good thing.
2. Since their stock is publicly traded, Microsoft has some responsibility to
make a profit on their investment in document format research.
3. Microsoft's history of success consists largely of establishing de facto proprietary standards
and parlaying effective control of those standards into enormous profit
(congratulations to them and may we all be so successful in life)
In this context the letter from Microsoft to IBM is a "blast" of humor.
What I always do is buy an Apple keyboard. Reason? I'd rather look at a Apple key than a Windows key. Plus, Apple keyboards are quite nice (built-in usb hub, etc).
Does anyone know where I can get a keyboard with a penguin or gnu in place of the Windows key? That would be even better.
There can be only ONE!
(sorry, had to be done)
What the heck kind of open document format requires a rocket scientist to figure out it sucks? Most rocket scientists know more about you know... rockets and stuff.
True, and you could probably earn a PhD in ME from a good university before you could finish reading all 6,000 pages of M$ spec. So there, as the OP stated anyone can tell you which is better. Confronted with a 700 page volume or three feet of shelf space that do exactly the same things, most people would go with ODF. As is the usual case, the only person who will ever read M$'s soon to sink standard are it's authors. Something makes me think a majority of the spec was written by scripts, so that no human being will ever have read it.
All of the human being who have read parts of the M$ "standard" have quickly found out it's not a standard at all. It's incomplete and contradictory. The would be implementor is left to find ancient implementation details from older secret formats. Those details were different from version to version and even on different "platforms" within the same version. "Make it look just like the Apple Version of M$ Word from 1995" is hardly a specification and the M$ proposal says things just like that, though you might think that they could fit exact measurements into 6,000 pages. That kind of bullshit has little to do with a formatting implementation, and properly belongs to the exporter that M$ themselves should author because they are the only party with knowledge of all the previous versions. Mostly, their so called "standard" is an admission of past non portability.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
As I understand it, Microsoft was already successful in getting ECMA to accept their XML format as an ECMA standard. Now they want ISO/IEC JTC1 to accept their OpenXML as an ISO standard too, which IBM is opposing.
Read the open letter linked to in TFA, for all its marketing speak it will give you more insight into the facts. The open letter does, however, omit one important detail:
ISO has a bit of prejudice against releasing multiple standards for the same purpose, because that tends to defeat the purpose of a standard. As ODF was an ISO standard first, this does of course work against Microsoft's OpenXML. Now Microsoft tries to malign this as an attempt to "take away choice".
C - the footgun of programming languages
How is poor, beleaguered Microsoft, with their paltry billions of dollars, supposed to come up with the resources to support ODF? IBM is obviously using their vast resources and clout in the industry to advance their own agenda at the expense of smaller, less powerful companies.
Hey, wait a minute...
I'm not sure which is more amazing, that they made Hell holy, or that they raised it.
10 GB footprint, "cursing for weeks" comments by it's advocates, broken drivers ... but no sales and a plunging stock price. That non free software would bloat that way and make users so happy is not so amazing but they have not managed to raise it by a long shot. The repetition of the M$ "we've already won" argument and missrepresentation of M$'s attitude takes articles by this AT author way down in my estimation.
"M$ is big" does not translate into technical merit. Crappy specs deserve to be shot down.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
-- Please enter your password to confirm your password confirmation.
X as in eXstensible. So, yes, it's going to be extended.
Sigh. Only suits could, or would, twist openess into ownership.
In case your good conscience tingles, that won't be a lie.
Except for Asus and MSI, nobody makes their own laptop. Usually Dell, HP, etc... buy barebones from original design manufacturers like Quanta, fit in accessories (CPU, Disc, RAM, mini-PCI boards) and put their brand on it.
You could have genuinly cut the middle men and directly have bought a barebone and equipped it yourself, for a fraction of the price that big-names sell them.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
M$ft made their company out of sabatoging competitors products and called it 'free market competition' - they will just have to eat it when others get the upper hand and give them a taste of their own medicine.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I thought the main objection to OpenXML was that it fails to define a number of things, essentially saying "render like WordPerfect 1.0", making it an incomplete standard. Making it not impossible but very difficult for anyone other than Microsoft to implement it so it's fully compatible with the MS version.
The author dissmisses such concerns as "groundless":
Sun is a big backer of Open Office which has been decoding M$'s secret formats for a decade, so their continuing is a non starter. How successful they will be is another matter and one M$ loses either way.
Slashdot pointed to a review that proved these issues back in July and Ars Technia forum members quickly pointed to other detailed and credible criticism Anyone who would confuse this as an IBM vrs. M$ story has taken the M$ party line without critical thought.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Is that there are so many to choose from! :/
Remind me why this is news. Microsoft Complaining that IBM is being competitive. They are competitors.
What bothers me is that enough people thought this was important to hit the front page!!
Internet Retail spaces are wonderful. Get over it!
Last time I checked, your brain didn't increase in size. Since we're talking about human interfaces with documents, or should be, 16+ character tags become odius to decipher. Bold = , Italics = and so forth. Easy to comprehend formatting commands. Fonts, styles, etc should be equally simple. Why obfuscate a workable system? Layout should be equally simple.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Then it would probably work.
if you are testing the comments feature thing, it is a text link in that little toolbar thingee they keep changing around. The default color setting is rather *dark* and hard to see.
Sun chairs the technical committee for ODF, and the Open Document Foundation has the plurality of the membership. IBM is one of the medium-sized players. Most of the organizations that Microsoft claims were part of ECMA's work on OpenXML were actually working on ODF, too. Now, it is true that there's a global campaign against OpenXML, because everybody who Microsoft doesn't specifically fund hates it and can list a dozen reasons that ECMA shouldn't have touched it before getting bored. But I don't see any reason to single out IBM as leading the global conspiracy.
IMHO this is is the crux of the "Microsoft Problem" in entirety.
First: They have no idea how to document file formats, this is mostly because of their file format model. I worked as a contractor, indirectly, for Microsoft a long time ago. Their file formats are not "documented" per se'. They are program structure based and can change on the whim of a developer, their name at the time was "chunk format." This works well if you don't expect anyone to use your document format or you supply the access library.
At its core it is because they do not design formats, they code them as needed. Need a feature or special case? Just add a struct, an ID, and a chunk of read/write code and it works. How the hell do you document the outcome of that process? This isn't a bad methodology for internal state or temporary files, but it is a disaster for any sort of long term accessibility and interoperability.
Microsoft develops software like a small company because as long as they have the monopoly, they don't *need* to supply document format information in order to compete. Everyone else has to understand their formats and they aren't going to help at all. Their 'XML' format shows they have not changed one bit. Rather than "design" the document format, they are merely documenting what they have which is just a bunch of special cases.
Second: A true open office document format, usable by everyone, will spawn amazing amounts of innovations. Everything from document searching to intelligent document processing. When anyone can read and create documents on any platform or programming language than everyone else's programs can use as well, just think of what people will come up with. If that's going to happen, Microsoft has to make sure that they are the only benefactor, because except for the monopoly, Microsoft has no inherent value in the face of Linux and OpenOffice.org. At least Apple makes a nice computer.
Anything "Standard" from M$ must be regarded with suspicion bordering on the paranoid.
M$ historical behavio(u)r makes this approach the only sane alternative.
An M$ Open Standard is always so riddled with proprietary and mandatorily buggy kruft that
to call it "Open" is to make mock of the English language.
M$'s standard could be repaired but then it wouldn't be condusive to paltofrm lock and THAT
would never do would it.
Need I say whose side I'm on in this one
IBM(me not the biz)
OOXML is NOT open, so please do NOT use it. Read the articles recently on Groklaw, the standard submitted to ECMA specifies that only THAT version of the OOXML is open and has the covenant 'not-to-sue'. As soon as another vendor (or Microsoft) decides to extend the format or change it (eg. in the next version of Office), the whole OOXML is closed again and subject to patent litigation.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
The following is a comment taken from Groklaw because I can't say it any better myself. All I can say is that (hopefully) the rest of the world is finally moving out from underneath Microsoft's thumb. I hope that we all continue until we're free (as in freedom, not beer):
g /011607/2000/PX02991.pdf
Authored by: schestowitz on Friday, February 16 2007 @ 09:42 AM EST
,----[ Quote ]
| From: Bill Gates
| Sent: Saturday, December 05, 1989 9:44 AM
| To: Bob Muglia (Exchange); Jon DeVaan; Steven Sinofsky
| Cc: Paul Mariz
| Subject: Office rendering
|
| One thing we have got to change is our strategy -- allowing Office
| documents to be rendered very well by OTHER PEOPLES BROWSERS is one of the
| most destructive things we could do to the company.
|
| We have to stop putting any effort into this and make sure that Office
| documents very well depends on PROPRIETARY IE capabilities.
|
| Anything else is suicide for our platform. This is a case where Office has
| to to destroy Windows.
`----
http://www.iowaconsumercase.or
Share the knowledge, folks.
Double standards and product specific formats like OOXML will preserve status quo - ie. lockin and MS monopoly.
Support ODF in actions - see http://www.anyofficesuite.org/
Similar to an above comment.
... etc
Why dont they just break out the dang "standard". Hello? Arch/Design Priniciples? - Layered the Standard?
1. ODF 1.0 - The simple basic 1.0 way of doing things. Not alot of bells and whistle but we can share hte basic structure of letters, words, sentences, paragraphs, images
2. ODF 1.0+ - The not-simple bloatware feature-mad vendor-locked solution. You know the useless paperclip. Macros that do simple things with small amounts of data well, but choke when you actually want to leverage the repetition of doing the macro on large amounts of data.
#2 could be sold as "Advanced ODF" or "WOW ODF" or "ODF for the clinically insane"
#1 could be sold as "ODF Foundation" or "ODF when you want to actually get something accomplished"
Wouldn't it be sufficient to stick with XHTML and a decent implementation of CSS2 (or above) standards? I reckon it'd be enough for a large majority of documents.
Microsoft blasting IBM over standards is another paranoid delusion of MS. IBM and 20 countries did not object to the its OOXML standard because MS proposed it. They objected because the standard is fundamentally flawed. The arstechnica article doesn't go into depth about the objections but Groklaw had a better analysis.
My personal opinion is that MS did a poor job of the standard on purpose. They propose their standard so that technically they are working towards interoperability if anybody asks. However, they do it so badly that it could never be adopted. Then they can point to that reason as why they chose not to open up their format.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
When ODF was being standardised, there was no existing standard, nor was there anything else competing to be standardised, there was no justification microsoft could have used to claim it should be rejected.
Now on the other hand, ODF is already standardised, having a new incompatible standard will simply fragment the industry, which is precisely what standards seek to prevent. What microsoft should do, and what ISO should tell them to do, is either use the existing standard, or go through the proper channels to propose updates to it.
Any deficiencies microsoft believe ODF to have, are entirely their own fault... microsoft have long been a member of OASIS, and were more than welcome to contribute to the original drafting of ODF, they made the decision not to in the hope that it would never get anywhere and be forgotten about.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
OOXML is supposed to be a *standard*, something that others can read an implement by reading the spec. Tags which simply say "do it like Word95 did" are completely useless to everyone *except* Microsoft since Microsoft is the only one who actually knows what what is means. That alone should disqualify it as an international standard.
"I would think that you could load one of these old docs, and save it as DOCX and it would look and print the same as before."
It might, but *only* if you are using Microsoft Office since only they know how it actually works. This is, of course, the intent. They want to appear to be open when in truth no one but them can effective implement the "standard".
(Score:-1, Flamebait)
What?
The autoSpaceLikeWord95 flag is *not* for Word 95. It is for all subsequent versions of MS Office and it translates to a set of special case, undocumented format attributes.
Here is how the flag is used today:
1) Open Word95 document containing full-width East Asian characters in Word 2007+
2) On open (import) Word 2007+ sets the "autoSpaceLikeWord95" document property in the new document
3) On display, Word 2007+ displays the document using the special case formatting rules.
4) On Save as OOXML, the document gets saved with the "autoSpaceLikeWord95" flag set
So the problem for non-MS OOXML implementers is: WTF does "autoSpaceLikeWord95" mean? The only way to determine this is to reverse engineer the behavior by studying Microsoft Word 95 in detail. That is completely inappropriate for an open standard.
If MS was sufficiently motivated to produce a true "open" standard they should have translated the "autoSpaceLikeWord95" into a set of document presentation attributes whose meaning does not reference the behavior of any particular implementation. (Something like: autoSpaceLikeWord95 in a Word document translates to "allow 2px of space on either side of the character, except in years evenly divisible by 3, in which case allow 3px.)
So, the MS argument isn't that they disagree with any of IBM's issues with Open XML, but that MS didn't impede ODF? What a hoot...
It also makes baby jesus cry. ;)
I didn't know it was closed... Why is M$ trying to take a good thing and corrupt it?
Nothing to see here. Move along.
ODF is *implemented* by Openoffice.org and is used as the default format. ODF is controlled by Oasis and the ODF technical committee.
Now, let's contrast OOXML and ODF:
Goals:
OOXML: "The goal of the Technical Committee is to produce a formal standard for office productivity applications within the Ecma International standards process which is fully compatible with the Office Open XML Formats"
An odd statement, yes? Produce a standard compatible with itself? ?!? To understand this you have to go back to the formation of TC45 (the ECMA technical committee who created the ECMA OOXML standard). That goal refers to the formats used in Microsoft Office 2007. Note that *NO* other software is given consideration at all. Only Microsoft's.
ODF: The purpose of this TC is to create an open, XML-based file format specification for office applications.
The resulting file format must meet the following requirements:
1. it must be suitable for office documents containing text, preadsheets, charts, and graphical documents,
2. it must be compatible with the W3C Extensible Markup Language (XML) v1.0 and W3C Namespaces in XML v1.0 specifications,
3. it must retain high-level information suitable for editing the document,
4. it must be friendly to transformations using XSLT or similar XML-based languages or tools,
5. it should keep the document's content and layout information separate such that they can be processed independently of each other, and
6. it should 'borrow' from similar, existing standards wherever possible and permitted.
Note that compatibility with any particular piece of software, not even OpenOffice.org is *NOT* a goal. Software should implement the standard, not the other way around like OOXML.
All of the ODF TC minutes are publically available to all. This is not true of the OOXML TC.
Anyone, even regular individuals, can join Oasis (and indeed they have) and participate in the evolution of ODF. Only companies can join ECMA.
Which do you think is more open? I think the answer is pretty clear.
This is a pavlovial response to your history of underhanded, sneaky, outright dishonest, unethical behavior. You are not honest or ethical in your business dealings with the world.
You are not trusted or trustworthy.
Go pound sand.
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
Microsoft has strong words for IBM, which it accuses of deliberately trying to sabotage Microsoft's attempt to get Open XML certified as a standard by the ECMA.
Quite deliberately, in fact. And quite justifiably so.
The only decent thing for Microsoft is to either withdraw the submission, or... no, that is the only decent thing to do. Even if Microsoft put their patent into the public domain, the fact remains that Microsoft Office XML is a piece of shit.
I tried running Windows on the fridge. It kept freezing up on me.
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
Did ECMA accept Java. No that is because Microsoft virtualy owns ECMA. ECMA is a joke. Its ratification of C# is a joke. The only member of ECMA that will not bend over every time MS drops the soap is IBM. You dedicated OS guys need to find out more about these so called standards bodies. In the case of ECMA, that is going to require some regular visits. That is because the webmaster spends most of his time deleting and changing ( re-interpeting) the past, very orwellian in a double-plus not good sence.
Hold your horses a moment. Isn't it the _JOB_ and _PURPOSE_ of participating companies to sink bad "standards" when they are part of the standards setting process?
The world of politics has basically poisoned the mindset in this planet. In politics it is business as usual to suggest something horrid and be "negotiated back down" to merely squalid and grotesque. We call this "compromise". But it isn't the compromise your great grand (progenitor) had in mind.
See, we are only supposed to compromise the "somewhat overreaching but still reasonably based on ideas that are workable or understandable" into something that is "workable".
Once something is not "workable" "understandable" or "reasonable" it isn't supposed to get any slice of any pie anywhere.
But in politics it does...
And since Microsoft's #1 products are now "political perceptions" and "lobbyists" they think their "technology" "ought to be" given a "politically fair treatment."
But technology still remembers what politics has forgotten. Everything that passes into law/standards has to actually be implemented by someone somewhere to have any meaning.
See... Bad law still at least gets good press in a target audience within the unvarnished popularity contest that is politics... Bad standards get people killed in the real world that is medical software and defense software and legal software and embedded systems software (and so on).
You can ignore bad law, and even our enforcers do so every day.
You can not ignore bad software because when you turn your back on it, it eats your data, and sometimes your children.
So standards setting isn't supposed to be fair, it's supposed to be "kill the malicious, weak and stupid" lest they kill us all.
So to translate TFA, Microsoft whines that IBM did its job by trying to kill the malicious, weak, and stupid Office XML anti-standard.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
However, unless your ODFs are getting ridiculously big, it's pretty irrelevant. They're stored as a zipfile, and any images are stored in their original, native format (I think -- or are they converted to PNG?) in the zipfile. And zipfiles are at least randomly readable. Not sure about writes...
Besides, we're not talking about a database, we're talking about office documents.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Did I spell that right? Because that whole site seems to be password-protected now! WTF??
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
As it is, we have one relatively extensible form of HTML, which receives incremental improvements. Even XHTML is designed such that you can often pretend an XHTML document is HTML, and it will render properly.
Would you still feel the same way if there were 15 different flavors of HTML, and everyone using their own?
I would much, much rather have diversity of implementation around standard exchange protocols than diversity of the protocol itself. We have ipv4 and ipv6 -- everything else is built on top of that. We mostly end up with TCP and UDP. When writing a new network application, you generally pick one of those, rather than flinging raw IP packets back and forth.
Remember, it's two words: Open standard. Open means everyone can actually read, understand, and implement it. Standard means there's only one, or at least a reasonably small number that any implementation can be expected to support them all -- and a good reason for the differentiation.
Look at email: We have SMTP for sending and receiving, IMAP and POP3 for mailbox access -- IMAP for online access, POP3 to download and be able to read offline. Within the message, we have MIME to handle attachments and different types of messages. There is no reason to replace these unless we end up with a completely new need -- like, say, Instant Messaging, for which we have Jabber. When PGP came out, they didn't replace SMTP/IMAP, they just inserted stuff into an email message -- or, in newer clients, we implement PGP as a separate MIME type.
Oh, and what's much more short sighted is to regard Microsoft's "Open" XML as a standard. It's not. I don't care what EMCA says, it's not even close to what a standard needs to be.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
There are 52 work weeks in a year, if you don't take vacation. 40 hours/week x 52 weeks/year x 60 minutes/hour is 124,800 minutes, or 24,960 pages by your insane estimate of five minutes per page. Someone could read it in a three months or so, but it would be an exercise in cruelty with no reward much like reading the phone book.
You claim to be a grocery store employee. I hope you get a promotion to implement this.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Sure, Open XML was designed to address the need for Microsoft to maintain control over desktop office suites, while ODF was actually designed to be an open standard.
No, really, WTF is this supposed to mean? Would Microsoft mind pointing out some part of ODF that's insufficient? Better yet, offer a suggestion as to how to improve it -- they were, after all, part of OASIS for awhile...
Anyone who's been on Slashdot for awhile should remember how much lobbying Microsoft did to try to prevent ODF from taking root in Massachusetts. So, technically, Microsoft didn't try to slow down the standardization process, they merely tried to slow down the implementation process.
Yeah, note the copyright notice at the bottom of the page. Astroturf, anyone?
And from Ars Technica...
And ODF has to support all the features of:
(ripped off directly from a post by this comment.)
So there you go. I suppose it's possible Word 2007 could have more features than ALL of those, but somehow, I doubt it. The spec isn't bloated because Word is so great, the spec is bloated because Microsoft is afraid of interoperability.
The fact is not that it's impossible -- it could be done, if you want to reverse engineer about five or six generations of Word. It would be difficult, but not impossible, to support enough of the standard to be liveable -- after all, we've done that with the binary Office formats for years.
No, the problem is that it's prohibitively, deliberately difficult for third-parties to implement perfectly, since it references specific quirks on specific versions of Microsoft's products, and the products of others, and doesn't even try to explain what those quirks are, only that you should support them properly. I would say that Microsoft is being deliberately unhelpful here.
If you're going to make it 6000 pages and unhelpful, why not make it 12000 pages, but actually spell out what we're supposed to do? At least then, we could not only duplicate the features in ODF, but we could do them better, the way they were meant to be done. For example: Instead of saying "Emulate Word 95 Full-Width Character Spacing", Microsoft could actually specify how Word 95 implements full-width character spacing. Then, we'd implement specifications that allow the implementation of any kind of spacing you want.
Let me put it this way: In HTML, we could've had, for example: <slashdot-link story_id="07/02/16/1334234" />. That would've been pretty damned convenient for the Slashdot people, but annoying for everyone else, who would have to go to Slashdot to find out how they did it, and in any case, it's much more limited than our current <a href> style which lets you actually link to anywhere. Standards are not about coddling sp
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I last used it for an academic paper several years ago. It was functional but still using the ancient XForms toolkit.
The software is undergoing a major overhaul with Qt4 being used as the toolkit. More info here.
I question whether your reluctance to recommend it to anyone was due to the clunky toolkit (mine), or the paradigm shift from traditional word processors. I still shake my head when ask to do tech support for relatives who struggle with the complexities of MS Word when editing the simplest of documents. I wonder if they'd had a clean modern interface such as LyX 1.5 as their first computerized typewriter application they'd have coped better.
The "Blasts" word in the title is a dead giveaway. It presupposes that IBM has done something wrong, and that people actually give a crap what MS thinks about the subject.
I suppose when you have a monopoly that forces much of the Western world to fork over a few hundred dollars for dubious "improvements", you can afford to pay off a journo or two.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
I remember hearing the whining about IBM's monopoly when I was a child, with Microsoft the savior. IBM changed its practices only because it was kicked out of the top spot. IBM is no different from Microsoft philosophically - their current attitudes and actions are a simple reflection of their market position.
When Microsoft falls back in favor of Apple or IBM, don't expect the "newcomer" to be any better.
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
You should try googling around with "barebone" and "laptop" keywords. :"Quanta", "Compal", "Wistron", "Inventec", "ASUS", "Uniwill", "FIC", "Arima", "Mitec", "MSI", etc...)
(you could try also "odm" or "original design manufacturer". You can also try using ODM names
Specialy ASUS and MSI often sell barebones.
You should land on website selling non-brand barebones, and the corresponding pieces you need (Pentium M, Core Mobile, Turion, So-DIMM RAM, 2.5" HD, etc...)
You may also try looking on websites dedicated to running Linux on laptops, because in that situation, the actual design (and therefor the ODM) are much more important than the brand written on the hardware. They usually have lists of ODM (and corresponding OEM that brand and sell them). You could subsequently google for shops selling those brands.
Or, you can go crazy and built it yourself from ground up using lowpower ITX mainboards. But you'll have some difficulties building a good battery/charger, so I won't recommend that route.
Site found with google with photo : http://www.directron.com/laptopdiy.html
Site with a list of manufacturer : http://www.laptopworldwide.com/laptops.html
Site found through google with reviews : http://laptoping.com/category/barebone-laptops/
Seller found with google : http://www.xoticpc.com/index.php/cPath/95_51_174
Another solution would be to ask your usual low-cost DIY shops to see if they can order it thru their channels : they'll charge you a little bit more, but on the other hand you won't have to pay for the shipping and handling (the reseller will bring new stock to the shop anyway, regardless of if you made an ordered).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
First I worked for Microsoft, and now I'm jb.hl.com?
That you know which of those troll accounts claims to work for a grocery store, is pretty good evidence that you or a team you work with owns all of them. I don't bother to keep the fake personalities separate because they all deliver the same stupid message: Slashdot sucks, you suck and M$ rules. The message itself is good evidence of it's origin.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Title should be Microsoft whines about Lotus owner's lack of support for its Office XML standard Really does MS think it can whine after what it did to Lotus? Remember the old MS slogan "Windows doesn't release until Lotus doesn't work!"? Especially since OOXML is dependent on MS Windows specifics?