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National Archive File Format Time Bomb

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the cleaning-up-your-own-messes dept.

geordie_loz writes "The BBC is reporting that the UK National Archive is warning of old formats being a 'ticking time-bomb' where data is going to be lost because of incompatibility in newer versions of software, and software not existing at all. More surprisingly, Microsoft has offered a solution via the OOXML format."

2 of 233 comments (clear)

  1. The big lie... by advocate_one · · Score: 5, Informative
    they keep repeating this everytwhere they go... "Open XML"... their format is not Open... it's closed off with licensing and other restrictions... all the really good stuff in the specification has been obfuscated out and hidden behind indirections to the behaviour of legacy apps that only microsoft know the real ins and outs of... not only that, there's still an easy means for them to merely use XML as a wrapper for binary blobs...

    to give it a proper name, the format is "Microsoft Open Office XML", they deliberately went to a lot of trouble to pick a name that's as easily to confuse as possible with OpenOffice

    --
    Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
  2. Re:MS should not own the standard by dvice_null · · Score: 5, Informative

    There is no such thing as Open Office format. Perhaps you mean OpenDocument Format, which is used by several different applications ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_applications_ supporting_OpenDocument ), including OpenOffice.org.