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France Leading Charge Against OOXML
Bergkamp10 writes "As Microsoft's Office Open XML document format waits in ISO limbo, South Africa, Korea, and the Netherlands are now actively pursuing the alternative Open Document Format instead, said the ODF Alliance. The Alliance now claims 500 members, and by their count 13 nations have announced laws or rules that favor the use ODF over Microsoft's Office formats. Those nations include Russia, Malaysia, Japan, France, Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, Germany, and Norway. The French have been the most aggressive in their rejection of Microsoft's standard; nearly half a million French government employees are being switched to OpenOffice. There has been no similar move in the US, though in a speech at Google last week Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama called for data to be stored in 'universally accessible formats.'"
You ofcourse are referring to UK Government Loses 15 Million Private Records.
There have been some very bad things happening lately in France like the Olivennes report which is to lead us to some massive and generalized internet filtering (this has already been discussed on slashdot here : http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/23/1355220&from=rss) and having a president who is a friend of major media corporations doesn't help in this regard. I guess the ODF support is at least something I can be proud of in my country. And I definitely hope it will last as Sarkozy makes me kind of pessimistic both for French and European future (sadly, not only in a technology-related fashion)
My school (here in SK) fought some worm all last week. They couldn't get rid of it. They re-installed all the computers in the school (except my clean box), but couldn't get rid of it. I tried to tell them that they had better be patched up before they connected.
Anyway, they just upgraded everyone to Vista (except, again, me), so there's here's another 100 or so computers with Vista. I have to assume it's pirated. Who knows? It appears to have worked, but large numbers of people lost months of work. See the blog in my sig for my experience about this this morning.
Regarding lock-in, though, the online banking industry here standardized on an ActiveX plugin before SSL was common, so anyone who wants to bank online has to be on MS Windows. It sucks here.
I don't buy that they're supporting ODF for a second. I believe they're against OOXML, but that's because almost everyone uses HanSoft's Han Office, which doesn't support it. This is one of the few places in the world where MS Office doesn't have a majority of installs.
Put identity in the browser.
We translate acronyms (how arrogant!)
AIDS = SIDA
kB = kO
OPEC = OPEP
And the list goes on. We do that less than the French speaking Canadians though... KFC = PFK is my favorite.
Apparently he's also pro network neutrality: http://obama.senate.gov/podcast/060608-network_neutral/
c++;
here they are: http://www.dis29500.org/category/countries/france/ nearly as much as the UK and more than twice the USA total. Raw totals of comments can be a bit missleading, but the UK, France and the USA were the top three in terms of numbers of comments. That kind of indicates the level of detail with which they looked at the standard, not the depth of feeling they have about it and how resistant they will be to MS lobbying during March (they have 30 days after the BRM to change their votes - it will be a crazy amount of lobbying and no doubt there will be more corruption/allegations of corruption)
I've seen french road signs depicting an exploding car with the letters "GPL" written below it.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
From what I have read about Obama, when he takes a position for/against an issue, he really educates himself about it before making the decision. He is not the type to just accept what his advisors tell him.
Look who's talking. How about the high-profile Hollywood screenwriter strike? And it's not "la French", it's "LES French".
I can't avoid feeling antipathy for the French, but I must concede to them, it takes balls to stand up for their rights the way they do. It's hard to be on strike and lose many days of pay.
I think it was a joke about the news referring to the fact that the england tax administration have lost 2 cd with millions of personal and confidential data.
http://www.computing.co.uk/computing/news/2203890/25m-records-lost-tax-man
>>Law that says i need to use odf format, is as bad as using M$.
Wrong. ODF is honestly open, OOXML is absolutely *not* open. In the OOXML specs there are several sections that essentially say: "do this the same as in Word-95" but the Word-95 specs are still closed.
BTW: ODF does not exclude msft. There are pluggins that allow ms-office to work just fine with ODF. Also, msft is entirely free to incorporate ODF if msft so choses. Msft's claims that ODF excludes msft is pure bullsh!t.
The ODF (that would be Foundation) was never in charge of the ODF file formats. They just had a confusing name. The ODF format was created by OASIS
Actually the french unions have treasure funds so that the strikers do get compensation when thy go on strike. Wht I've sen pretty often as well is that once the strikers get all they wanted after weeks of strikes: pay us our strike days or we keep going. So no, strikes are not a financial burden on the strikers in many cases. On top of that unions often behave as mobs; torture, kidnaping and even eco-terrorism (dump toxic stuff in rivers) is not beyond them.
Most of the past governments have let strikes govern the country, but now people realize that the whole country is only getting crippled more and more after every year while strikes benefit a minority. There are many things I don't like about Sarcozy, but he is the only candidate I though could steer the country in a better direction.
I'm french and when people tell me France is great, I usually reply that France is so great that I live in California.
The government is still using proprietery formats for public facing data.
/. for, are they giving away music now? And the obligatory, does it run on Linux?)
To file a complaint about spam email I have to submit a word document.
There is a PDF version but that's not editable.
And this is from the Information Commissioners Office, you would have thought they knew better!
Mind you the ICO doesn't do a lot, in the UK it is apparently illegal to conceal your identity when sending unsolicited mail, however to lodge a complain you have to be able to identify the sender. Ah the UK understands technology oh so well.
It's a pity the HMRC didn't use some kind of open standard to encrypt the populations personal details before popping them in the post.
GnuPG anyone?
Seriously the UK government rarely follows any kind of open standard, they much prefer Microsoft's, or there own broken one.
(On another topic, what's the mp3 link next to the captcha in
Considering that he wrote the first word in Spanish and the last word in English, it probably doesn't matter if the middle word isn't proper French.
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Hmm, you'll give up your weekends off then? After all, it was the unions that bled for those. I normally would never use the word "ungrateful" as an insult, but when I hear union detractors talk, I'm sorely tempted. Mind you, I'm not saying that unions are perfect, but what you don't seem to realize is that corporations have 1 single goal: to make money. They're beholden to their investors, not their employees. Striking gives us a way to ensure that our voices are heard alongside those of the stockholders.
Today's lucky number is: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
A capitalist will make a profit doing whatever he can that is profitable. If he can make a profit from working his workers 16 hours a day he will do so. If you want to work 7 hours a day then he will fire you and get one of the 4% of workers that are unemployed at the 'best' of times to replace you.
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD