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Sun Asks China to Merge its Doc Format With ODF
christian.einfeldt writes "Sun's Chairman Scott McNealy has asked the world's most populous nation to merge its Uniform Office Format with the Open Document Format. Tech lawyer Andy Updegrove thinks that McNealy would not have flown to China and taken this chance of rejection if McNealy didn't think that there was a good likelihood of success."
Heil Hitler!
Playing the numbers game, if a country as large as China were to adopt ODF (via harmonizing with it), it's game over, and ODF wins. That wouldn't spell the end for Microsoft's XML standard, but it would be a major setback, globally speaking. I wish him luck.
This could be an awesomely smart idea and all the power to all parties involved making it work. I really like open source software, but i could really care less in the big picture. There's more to stand for in open formats than software. The illusion of openeess that OpenXML is needs to go away. I hope MS office continues to grow and improve but their strong hold on document formats need to go.
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Apache/1.3.36 Server at www.consortiuminfo.org Port 80 Stupid fuckers! I'm not a robot! I'm not pretending to be one! FUCK!
(Posted Anonymously Because.)
Firstly I have read the article. But only 'cause the webmaster is a stupid fucker. Hear that webmaster? YOU ARE A STUPID FUCKER!
...
Onto the thingy now
As has already been mentioned, it would be good if China did adopt ODF over their own format. Numbers numbers numbers. However, don't think that Sun are doing this out of the goodness of their own hearts. They want to open up a market for their own products (Star Office).
The fact that Uniform Office Format is already an open XML format doesn't make this a high priority though. It can easily (relatively speaking) implemented into OpenOffice.org and using XSL you don't even need to do that I would imagine.
I wank in the shower.
i.e., a suitcase of US dollars, then I predict success.
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
I live in China. All I see is Office 2000 or 2003 with windows 2000 or Windows XP, and it's all free for them so nobody is going to change. Except perhaps they'll change to Windows Vista and Office 2007 in 2010 when enough schools buy new computers with it installed already.. and no, don't think for a minute they are legal copies.
China will ask for IT concessions from Sun et. al. for this, and they'll promise that they'll keep them all secret, and only use them for in-house stuff. Then, you'll find them on the clone market in 3 months, and we'll discover that the next (in a long series) egregious human rights abuse was made possible by Sun's "shared" technology.
Sun seems great at giving away the store, getting farked over, then crying foul, while their market share and relevance dwindle.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Tech lawyer Andy Updegrove thinks that McNealy would not have flown to China and taken this chance of rejection if McNealy didn't think that there was a good likelihood of success.
Yes, only if he was that sure of success would he brave the several weeks journey via galleon across the mighty Pacific.
Post is very insightful and well-worded
If China adopts ODF thats a good thing.
If China 'harmonizes' with it, thats a bad thing, it creates yet another format.
Wrong:
A merger would not cost anything to China, but allow them to share development cost with others and compete on a broader market than their own.
It would seem China can only benefit from a wider adoption of open standards. At least for now. In a couple decades they may be able to impose their own on the rest of the world.
As an enlightened, modern parent, I try to be as involved as possible in the lives of my six children. I encourage them to join team sports. I attend their teen parties with them to ensure no drinking or alcohol is on the premises. I keep a fatherly eye on the CDs they listen to and the shows they watch, the company they keep and the books they read. You could say I'm a model parent. My children have never failed to make me proud, and I can say without the slightest embellishment that I have the finest family in the USA.
Two years ago, my wife Carol and I decided that our children's education would not be complete without some grounding in modern computers. To this end, we bought our children a brand new Compaq to learn with. The kids had a lot of fun using the handful of application programs we'd bought, such as Adobe's Photoshop and Microsoft's Word, and my wife and I were pleased that our gift was received so well. Our son Peter was most entranced by the device, and became quite a pro at surfing the net. When Peter began to spend whole days on the machine, I became concerned, but Carol advised me to calm down, and that it was only a passing phase. I was content to bow to her experience as a mother, until our youngest daughter, Cindy, charged into the living room one night to blurt out: "Peter is a computer hacker!"
As you can imagine, I was amazed. A computer hacker in my own house! I began to monitor my son's habits, to make certain that Cindy wasn't just telling stories, as she is prone to doing at times.
After a few days of investigation, and some research into computer hacking, I confronted Peter with the evidence. I'm afraid to say, this was the only time I have ever been truly disappointed in one of my children. We raised them to be honest and to have integrity, and Peter betrayed the principles we tried to encourage in him, when he refused point blank to admit to his activities. His denials continued for hours, and in the end, I was left with no choice but to ban him from using the computer until he is old enough to be responsible for his actions.
After going through this ordeal with my own family, I was left pondering how I could best help others in similar situations. I'd gained a lot of knowledge over those few days regarding hackers. It's only right that I provide that information to other parents, in the hope that they will be able to tell if their children are being drawn into the world of hacking. Perhaps other parents will be able to steer their sons back onto the straight and narrow before extreme measures need to be employed.
To this end, I have decided to publish the top ten signs that your son is a hacker. I advise any parents to read this list carefully and if their son matches the profile, they should take action. A smart parent will first try to reason with their son, before resorting to groundings, or even spanking. I pride myself that I have never had to spank a child, and I hope this guide will help other parents to put a halt to their son's misbehaviour before a spanking becomes necessary.
1. Has your son asked you to change ISPs?
Most American families use trusted and responsible Internet Service Providers, such as AOL. These providers have a strict "No Hacking" policy, and take careful measures to ensure that your internet experience is enjoyable, educational and above all legal. If your child is becoming a hacker, one of his first steps will be to request a change to a more hacker friendly provider.
I would advise all parents to refuse this request. One of the reasons your son is interested in switching providers is to get away from AOL's child safety filter. This filter is vital to any parent who wants his son to enjoy the internet without the endangering him through exposure to "adult" content. It is best to stick with the protection AOL provides, rather than using a home-based solution. If your son is becoming a hacker, he will be able to circumvent any home-based measures with surprising ease, using information gleaned from variou
> it's just a battle of Sun versus Microsoft, which none of them deserves to win.
No. It's a battle between ODF and OOXML.
ODF was approved over a long drawn out process that took the input from various companies and can be implemented by multiple companies and open source projects. It reuses existing standards wherever possible. ODF is open to criticism and has already included revisions to include support for disabilities and generally specified formulas. Hopefully, it'll absorb China's format too. The official version of ODF is what's specified in the standard (regardless what OpenOffice implements), so you can be sure of a level playing field.
OOXML, OTOH, was rubber stamped by ECMA (that was one of the conditions of the submission) and fastracked to the ISO despite the objections of a record number of countries. It reinvents stands wherever possible, forces the implementation of bugs in the standards (i.e. implement the Y2K bug), has references to external specifications that are not being standardized, and has cute phrases like "Do this the way Word95 did it" without specifying what that means. The official version of OOXML is what Microsoft implements (regardless what ISO specifies), so you can be sure of an uneven playing field with Microsoft being 2 steps ahead of everyone else.
Given these two document formats, ODF clearly deserves to win.
Please let us not forget that Chinese are extremely good negotiators and bargainers. Look at the way North Korea is playing six countries like a well tuned orchestra. If NKorea can play this well, imagine how well China will play it. It is very much possible it is a negotiating strategy by Chinese to extract maximum benefit of their eventual suitor MSOffice XML. So let us be cautious and see real committment by the Chinese (and India/Kerala, Brazil, and other developing nations/states) before jumping to conclusions. Words are cheap. Pleasant words are even cheaper. Unless these governments put money where their mouth is, Sun will be just another pawn in the games between these governments and Microsoft.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I assume that you are claiming that ODF is the StarOffice format and that OpenOffice.org is the open source fork of StarOffice. The problem with this is that the format did change significantly when OASIS took over and sought input from many organizations. ODF has been adopted by the KOffice team, the folks writing Goolge web apps, IBM, etc. But don't be swayed by name dropping, just look at documents in the format, they are worlds apart from OOXML in terms of readability and conformance with existing XML standards. MS took existing binary formats and converted them to XML, this is quite different from taking existing XML tools/standards and combining them when possible and adding to them as needed. Its a completely different mindset and it leads to completely different results, even if both are superficially similar 'zipped XML' formats.
Think global, act loco
Sun threatens global warming and heat waves if they do not comply.
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
So, one issue would be whether ODF is suitable for representing Chinese (and Japanese) text. ... and how much aggravation is involved in using ODF to represent the chanacters -- compared to whatever solution(s) they are using now.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
he wouldn't do it if he didn't think he would be sucessful? yeah right... his other option is to sit back and watch his steadily dwindling market share. last ditch effort is what this is
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
That's what he said, ol' Scott McNealy, "Mr. Tao, tear down this wall!"
In Sun you need to file a business justification to run a Windows machine. If China runs ODF then Sun's China sales and support force does not need to run Windows or Word.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
may do, may not when IDC recently partAies). At THE Distro is done Here you down. It was but suufice it downward spiral. way. It used to be violated. In the
Every time I pay rack price and read that people around the world are paying between $3 and $30 (below cost when you consider patents) it really irritates me. Because part of the reason my milk is $5, and my taxes are high, and my costs are high is that everyone else here is also paying full price.
Then I get put into competition with these people who I am subsidizing and see jobs in my field offshored left and right because they are cheaper. It is just not right. It is not fair.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Andy Updegrove gave interesting link to article: Sun's McNealy Proposes Merging ODF with Chinese Counterpart .
The article goes into into technical side of merge highlighting technical differences between the two file formats. And from my reading it seems like UOF is superior to ODF in many aspects.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Hmm, last time i read M$ sold only some ~300 Vista licenses in China in 2 weeks. Not much more of a loss if China uses ODF.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
One of the reasons you have a nice way of life is because we, the rest of the world, are supporting it. The USA give us paper (or just a flow of bits) in exchange of natural resources so you can waste them however you want.
My Pathetic Story
This is a true story that depicts my descent into the hellish world of "computer customization."
It started innocently about a year ago; as few friends of mine sat around the glow of the monitor and trolling for Grammar Nazis on Usenet. Lucie said something or other about different keyboard layouts. I didn't think anything about it until the next time we met over at Bill's place.
Lucie had this black bag with her and she pulled out a keyboard. "C'mon," she urged with a malicious twinkle in her eye, "its called a Dvorak and all the kewl kidz are using them."
Bill said that was cool and plugged it in. We each took turns typing with it and all of us liked it much better than the old QWERTY keyboards.
I felt odd going back to the old layout on my own computer so I gave Lucie a call a few evenings later and she said her brother was expecting a big order at the end of the month. I managed to wait four more days until the 31st and I was riding high until the 18th when I was called in to the Principal's office. She asked me if I was alright or if there was something stressful happening at home. I said I was fine and I went to Lucie's place to wind down after school.
Lucie told us that the latest thing was "ergonomic keyboards" and she had only two for us to sample tonight. I fell hard for this and bought one before leaving. By this time I was leaving school at noon just to type on my new keyboard.
Over at Mike's place on Saturday evening Lucie pulled out a track ball and made Mike unplug his mouse and use this instead. Mike was too square to try using it and we all had a laugh at his old-school QWERTY keyboard and his cheap clone mouse.
Lucie and I began dating during the summer and then her brother committed suicide on June 15th. I started pushing peripherals in July and we bought his and hers Porsche Boxsters in August. Apparently this was too much for our parents, Mike's Dad ratted us out and we now face charges of trafficking in computer accessories and other electronic devices. We lucked out since the police never found the boxes of aluminum mouse pads and chording keyboards in my folk's garage.
School starts in a week and I think we will each do well in our senior year. We have learned our lesson and now use standard peripherals only. Once a week we attend an accessories-anon meeting with our parents which helps a lot. Don't let this obsession ruin your life.
NAMES have been changed to protect the innocent.
Now, i will ask to McNealy.
Why is bad the presentation of OO document?
Why there are still OO flaws since many years ago?
Why don't you release Java as GPL?
Why have i to fill your form register when OO starts?
Why OO is slow running over your still private JVM?
I hate you McNealy.
Chinese friends, don't agree them, it's a trap!.