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Norway Moves Towards Mandatory Use of ODF and PDF
Andy Updegrove writes "Norway has become the latest European country to move closer to mandatory government use of ODF (and PDF). According to a press release provided in translation to me by an authoritative source, Norway now joins Belgium, Finland, and France (among other nations) in moving towards a final decision to require such use. The Norwegian recommendation was revealed by Minister of Renewal Heidi Grande Roys, on behalf of the Cabinet-appointed Norwegian Standards Council. If adopted, it would require all government agencies and services to use these two formats, and would permit other formats (such as OOXML) to be used only in a redundant capacity.Reflecting a pragmatic approach to the continuing consideration of OOXML by ISO/IEC JTC 1, the recommendation calls for Norway to 'promote the convergence of the ODF and OOXML, in order to avoid having two standards covering the same usage.' According to the press release, the recommendation will be the subject of open hearings, with opinions to be rendered to the Cabinet before August 20 this summer.The Cabinet would then make its own (and in this case binding) recommendation to the Norwegian government."
> I don't think it's right for the city/state governments to tell restaurant and bar owners that they can't allow smoking
But it's all right for the restaurant and bar owners to make their employees breathe that smoke eight hours a day in order to make a living? There is no choice for these folks. It may be secondhand smoke, but it's enough exposure that it may as well be chain-smoking. Just because it's recreational doesn't make it a right when it impinges directly on others.
And BTW, we do all pay for the treatment eventually.
Microsoft appears to be making moves towards turning a profit whether people accept their software or not. They can try to profit from Free and Open Source Software by ensuring that it must implement "patented" technology in OOXML. Just look at their latest insinuations regarding FOSS and Microsoft "patents" -- OpenOffice.org (which supports ODF) is in that list and it doesn't even have OOXML support!
If ODF is ever merged with OOXML then Microsoft will try to force free software developers to turn the same tricks Novell has. Or perhaps it will go after users in a RIAA-like rampage. This is why ODF should be protected from Microsoft's influence and OOXML (or any new standard Microsoft participates in) should probably remain untouched for at least 20 years.
Yeah... You have no idea how envious Norwegians get of people who make more than themselves, especially if it is not deserved. Not long ago there was a huge uproar over one of the politicians getting a personal trainer covered by her party. And socialism here isn't a fringe group, they pretty much _are_ the government. It's only the shade that differs.
Also note that we have a history of implementing pretty radical IT related legislature, like the data protection laws which puts great restrictions on what companies can keep of (especially unrelated) information, privacy, requirements on how studies are performed, notification when data is accessed, etc.
- These characters were randomly selected.
Although I use LaTeX myself for most of my document production needs, asking government employees to use LaTeX to produce documents is probably a little bit unrealistic, no matter what you or I might think about the ease of document production using a TeX-based system. Publishers and professionals will continue to use tools like LaTeX, because in those sectors there are professionals who handle layout and expecting them to be able to use powerful but occasionally cryptic software is not at all unreasonable (authors rarely ever make decisions on how to layout the text of a book they've written). But here, we're talking about people that aren't layout professionals and who are used to WYSIWYG tools, for whom LaTeX would present an unreasonable learning curve.
LaTeX and TeX look great and are arguably still better than most of their direct competitors, and certainly produce documents that look vastly superior to those produced by WYSIWYG programs (as Knuth quipped, "What you see is all you get"). But the government is more concerned about content and the ease of producing it than how it looks. They also probably aren't typesetting complex mathematical formulae, which has historically been TeX's great strength.
And before anyone says as much, yes, I have heard of LyX -- but if you think you're getting all of TeX's power using a TeX editor like that, you'd be wrong. Plus, at that point, how is TeX superior to ODF? You may not realize this, but TeX (like PostScript) is a Turing complete language, complete with branches and loops, and there's no way that any editor, no matter how feature rich, could duplicate that level of complexity, for the same reason that there are no "WYSIWYG" tools for creating applications that duplicate all the functionality of C, C++, Java, C#, whatever.
You may think, "that's ok, let's just support a subset!" Not a bad idea (that is, in fact, what PDF does -- it implements a subset of PostScript that is not anywhere near as complex). But then you really have to make it a subset and only a subset, otherwise I might decide to edit the LaTeX code you wrote with your word-processor by hand and unknowingly create a beautiful document that no one can edit using WYSIWYG tools, because I strayed outside of the supported subset of the language.
Plus, people these days are gravitating towards XML-based formats, and for good reason: XML is easy to parse, standard, and ubiquitous. Using a non-XML based standard like some TeX-subset means having a completely different parser internally. XML is also structured as a tree, which makes dynamic content generation easy, whereas TeX, which was designed to be much more flexible, eschews such restrictions (to our great annoyance, as we cannot support all its exotic features for the reasons outlined above anyway).
Every time this sort of discussion comes up, someone invariably says "What about TeX?" Hopefully I've shed some light on why that's not really workable or ideal.
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But it's all right for the restaurant and bar owners to make their employees breathe that smoke eight hours a day in order to make a living?
But it's all right for oil companies to put their employees on highly dangerous oil rigs, or fishing companies put their men out in highly dangerous and freezing cold seas? Or the US military puts its men in harms way?
The professions I mentioned usually involve more deaths than a waitress working in a smokey bar and are paid as such... One could say you know the dangers when you take the job, so if you aren't up to it... Then don't take the job.
Of course there are plenty of highly dangerous situations that were rectified such as coal mines and factory work.... But again... At some point you do have to take personally responsibility for your own health and your own job.
I have a hunch that one day my job will kill me through stress related health problems, but it is primarily my fault for not finding another line of work.
And yes... There is plenty of other work than working as a waitress... Work at a grocery store, retail, warehouse, or factory. Most of the people that I know work at restaurants and bars smoked themselves anyways.
And keep in mind I don't smoke, but I feel that is a personal choice and responsibility of the end user.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Unfortunately, TeX's Turing-completeness is implemented as a macro-expansion language. I use LaTeX for everything that's more than one page, and it is nice that I can still handle 15-year-old documents (except for the images which were tied to the emTeX printer drivers...), but it really sucks to change the layout because it is all in an almost-unstructured mess of macro expansions. Variable scoping rules are weird, you're restricted to max 255 counter variables, it can't do true floating-point arithmetic, and so on. In practice, you're dependent on packages written by TeX gurus, that often don't cooperate with each other.
It's time for a successor to (La)TeX. It's great what TeX can do given that it was originally designed to run on 1982-era hardware, but now we could use something that has less obscure internals so that mere mortals can extend its functionality. And the successor could have things like native unicode support, elegant interfacing with type-1 and truetype fonts, left-to-right and up-down scripts, and so on.
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