Slashdot Mirror
OOXML's 662 Resolutions
Rob Isn't Weird writes "Microsoft has finally responded to the resolutions concerning OOXML (or 662 of them at any rate). The only problem? The JTC1 NBs who are deciding OOXML's fate have to download 662 individual PDFs from a slow, password-protected server; and many have had trouble getting the password. Don't misunderstand the ECMA's intent, though: there would have been 662 OOXML files if they had wanted to make it hard for people to read and criticize the responses. Thanks to the Internet, other interested parties have put all 662 resolutions online in a searchable, taggable format and are requesting that everyone interested help examine them. That means you, Slashdot."
Looks like they weren't prepared for slashdot after all.
Is there a mirror to be found?
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
Note the number of comments submitted by the smaller countries that have taken up open source efforts. Colombia, Venezuela, etc.
Goes to show a few people CAN make a difference.
Their database seems to have gone into "oh god please no more" mode.
Obligatory blog plug: http://www.caseybanner.ca/
We don't RTFA much more those 662 files.
- but
We could comment on it now if you wish...
We would download it anyway to archive the world's internet and determine the melting point of silicon in your everyday datacenter...
From one, slow, crappy server to another, huh?
Bill Gates actually had several more responses, but they forgot to upload 4 of the pdfs.
CATS/Diebold '08- All your vote are belong to us!
662 was just too much...
I must've missed the memo that declared "evangelism" as the new corporate-sponsored FUD. But boy, it does feel wholesome.
662 Resolutions ought to be enough for anybody.
-I only code in BASIC.-
I thought 640 K would be enough for anyone.
God spoke to me.
Don't misunderstand the ECMA's intent, though: there would have been 662 OOXML files if they had wanted to make it hard for people to read and criticize the responses.
huh???
Well you're not missing much because the 662 responses are mostly grammatical fixes and the big stuff is yet to come. Read the country comments at iso-vote.com/comments
After someone did all that hard work to get them all in a single place for others some genius decides to publicise the document on slashdot, end result nobody can access them .... back to square one!
Where are the other four?
db
I am literally 3000 tokens away from the chaotic crossbow --Stephen
just woke up to find the server not responding, checked slashdot whilst starting to fix it . . . OH SHIT, now I know why it is down! I will try to keep it up.
I can confirm that Microsoft's plan all along was to get Rob to publish something like this, then have it pushed to /. to ensure that all sites quickly become unavailable!
Hopefully, normal service should be resumed shortly.
That means the same soon-to-be-ISO-standard OOXML file can be interpreted differently, depending on the 'platform' in which it is being used / read! Typical Microsoft rubbish.... and AGAIN!
Also Rob responds to a query: "Even their correction is ambiguous. What is the "MacIntosh Character Set"? There is Mac OS Roman, MacCyrillic, MacIcelandic, Mac Central European, and with OS X we have UTF-8 as the default." Hilarious!
And again, probing a bit deeper into the ANSI character set for Windows... there's no such thing apparently:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI In Microsoft Windows, the phrase "ANSI" refers to the Windows ANSI code pages (even though they are not ANSI standards[1]). Most of these are fixed width, though some characters for ideographic languages are variable width. Since these characters are based on a draft of the ISO-8859 series, some of Microsoft's symbols are visually very similar to the ISO symbols, leading many to falsely assume that they are identical. To top it all, quoting from a response: One thing to note here is that MS explicitly do not support UTF-8 as an non-UCS2 encoding[1], while most Linux distributions are moving towards putting everything in UTF-8. So it would likely be the case in the near future that Linux and Windows users would not share a common platform character set, even if they spoke the same language. (e.g. Windows English British in Windows-1252, and Linux en_GB.UTF-8) And I thought Vista was the most confusing stuff from Microsoft!
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
the site is a Wordpress blog on Apache and MySQL with Debian as the operating system. It is on a fairly well occupied server, it is actually running in a xen virtual machine. It has loads of bandwidth available, it is in a big datacentre in London. At the moment I can't SSH into the box, I am doing a reboot from the xen admin console (just saw it switch to runlevel 0 - it is running still, but very very slowly.) What settings should I tweak to help it stay up under the impressive load of a slashdot effect? I am going to get more of the host resources allocated to it later (more RAM for a start) but I am not sure what else I can do. I might turn off some of the logging (although I would like to see the logs for today).
on the site at the moment are the 3492 (ECMA say there are 3522, not sure where the extra ones came from) comments from the .zip file of .doc files of the country comments. About 750 or so (I would tell you exactly if I could see my site) have been classified. I think in my inbox there is a mail with a leak of the 622 responses, I would tell you for certain if my email server hadn't just been slashdotted. I will identify the 622 comments as soon as I can and we can all laugh at them together. I think the general format is "we agree . . . blah blah blah . . . we are not going to do anything about it"
1) always slashdot proof websites *before* the slashdot effect takes hold
2) that's all I got so far...good luck. Most likely there are some good debian admins kicking around might take pity
3) A year from now you'll look back and think this was funny, just keep that in mind...
That would make it easier to filter out your comments.
4. Promote whoever loves your cock the most, and will take it into your mouth with the shortest notice.
Could very well be the same person.
Wordpress is notorious for killing servers with heavy loads when there are many incoming connections. You could try making a temporary static page and disable Wordpress for a day or two; then in the comments section make a notice along the lines of "Sorry, due to server issues, commenting has been disabled until 2007-12-06".
/. frontpage once. If the load continues to be high, then yeah, go for it, but slashdotters have a short attention span. See a tale about slashdottings here
You could also see if CoralCache can help you out a smidgeon. Check this page for further details.
Also, a piece of advice: don't sink money into an upgrade because you've been on
The only thing good ECMA is widely known for is ECMAscript. I'll assume everyone here knows that is Javascript (a.k.a. ECMA-262, ratified in 1999; 56-63 years ago in Internet Years). Otherwise, all ECMA is knowing for is taking Microsoft's money and then bending over.
By this point ECMA should have as much pull with sovereign governments (and the populaces that grant them power) as the hand written standard for communicating standards via written language I have here beside me that I just wrote.
That stupidity such as what is demonstrated here persists demonstrates the failure of geeks. I am a geek (for evidence, just ask my long suffering wife who succumbed to my deceit during the two years in college when I became "preppy" and thin to attract a mate; she has since mostly succumbed to the charms and advantages of marrying a smart person who isn't a cover model [such charms consist mostly of being able to fix broken things and provide enough comedic relief to save $50-$150/month on cable TV. Also, as Revenge of the Nerds taught us, we're great at sex because we think about it all the time.) and it is to my personal shame that Microsoft still has a monopoly on desktop operating systems and electronic document formats.
Geeks! learn how to talk to people and convince them that your position is the correct one. THIS will be the most challenging yet rewarding effort of you life. This is our World War II.
Doctorow is our Churchill. Lessig is our Roosevelt (the crippled one). I don't know who our Stalin is, but we're probably better off without him.
A meme is beginning to grow that asks what have we done to live up to the precedent set by our grandparents?
This will be the legacy we leave to our grandchildren (assuming we as a group learn how to convince the opposite sex to allow us to copulate with them in order to have grandchildren).
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
http://ocaoimh.ie/wp-super-cache/ ! Does not work with the standard debian-install of wordpress (plugin does not like symlinks) !
as soon as I can get it up for a few minutes I will install that.
I must've missed the memo that declared "evangelism" as the new corporate-sponsored FUD. But boy, it does feel wholesome.
Where in the article do you see "evangelism"? Weir is stating a bunch of relevant facts and providing a bunch of useful pointers. What is wrong with that?
Sometimes, you don't have to consider the source.
2+2 is always 4. You may disagree with everything I stand for; you may think I represent evil incarnate, or that I'm just lazy hippie scum; but if I say "2+2=4", you kind of have to agree with me.
So, unless you're actually going to dispute the fact that:
Unless there's something factually wrong with that, pretty much anyone can independently figure out that the process sucks giant donkey balls.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Given Microsoft's attitude towards the process, I'm assuming the response was "Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, you're cool, and fuck you, I'm out!"
UTF-8: There and Back Again
Why doesn't Microsoft use their super productive RAD tools to give the comments/resolutions in multiple formats? Why does some (well intentioned) dude have to do all the work himself? I have been led to believe that Microsoft has several hundred employees and billions of dollars, and their marketting people assure me that Visual Studio .NET + ASP.NET + SQL Server are the best things since the invention of the internet. Surely they should be able to slap together a web app with their own tools, _and_ still have a button/link which gives the results as an archive of multiple .doc files.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
You've now got me wondering if maybe both formats suck, but neither of the two pages you linked to have any rationale for why Unicode -- and UTF8 in particular -- were not used.
On a completely unrelated note, if Microsoft is to blame for these HD-DVD specs, why is it that not only is no text compression supported anywhere (no gzip), but all Javascript files (maybe all text files period) must be UTF-16? (Actually, I suspect it has something to do with making a particular XML implementation easier, but the XML itself can be UTF-8.) And, in a perverse twist, it does try to support existing standards -- the DOM level 2 support is decent -- but why, oh why, does it taunt us by pretending to support XPath?
Then again, Microsoft is certainly not the only company who put that spec together, so meh.
Back to OOXML... in what world does "Beyond the scope of this document, go test it out in this obsolete/extinct piece of software on this obsolete/extinct platform to see what we mean" constitute "partially documenting"? I would call that "Documenting exactly what we refused to document." I'd rather have undocumented behavior that I can at least read the source code for than "partially documented" behavior that I have to take a wild guess at.
Yeah, host it on MS Sharepoint.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
if you don't like somebody's reply to an offtopic/hijacking/flamebait post, the best thing to do is to rate it "overrated", that way it doesn't go into moderation as an offtopic post, because, well, it was on the hijacked topic. That's the beauty of threading, isn't it -- topics can change.
Overrated simply means, relative to its current score, it's not something somebody browsing at what it's currently scored at would expect.
I "think" that's what the offtopic moderator wanted to say. Or they just got confused because my reply showed up underneath another topic such that the only way you can tell it's really a reply to a different topic was that there were double angle-lines that are easy to miss.
You can also choose not to read it instead of moderating. Perhaps there should be an option to hide all children modded-down topics in slashcode.
With all the fighting and bickering with the OOXML and document standards the market may eventually decide this anyway.
At some point people will grow tired of the politics of this so-called debate and the issue will become completely irrelevant.
In this instance I'm not sure if letting market forces decide which format it will use because Microsoft Office is the market anyway.
Actually maybe this is Microsoft's plan all along:
If their document spec (in it's original form) had made it through the standards process - win for Microsoft
If there were objections to it, obscure and delay the whole standards process and implement the spec through Microsoft Office anyway - win for Microsoft
Win-Win for Microsoft!
Of course this would mean a Lose-Lose situation to everybody else - Microsoft maintain their lock on the market and an obscure standard becomes a nightmare to implement for everyone else.
It's a pity a company has to act this way - If they actually cooperated with everyone Microsoft could influence the I.T. industry in a positive way.(If they weren't so blinkered by Windows - I'm 'looking' at you Mr Ballmer!)
Looks like you missed that memo too, welcome to obscurity!
rgds
This means you must have missed this memo too, welcome to obscurity!
rgds
Nirvana:~/stuff bill$ chmod 662 reolutions.pdf
Nirvana:~/stuff bill$ ls -hal
-rw-rw--w- 1 bill bill 42M Nov 30 9:58 resolutions.pdf
"Ha, that'll teach them. They can edit, but not read!"
"Hm, on second thought..."
Nirvana:~/stuff bill$ split -b 64k resolutions.pdf
"Memo to myself: Find somebody to hide it on the internet..."
Would have sworn it is a comment on a slashdot thread! Way to go Alan Bell!! 3 cheers.
- - - - - -
US - 270
Naming DIS 29500: The current name of DIS 29500, Office Open XML is seriously misleading in several respects. First, it is not a document format based on XML but rather an XML representation of a legacy document format with particular processing semantics. Second, reference should not be made to commercial products and clearly "Office" in the title of this proposal is meant as a reference to Microsoft Office. Lastly, the proposal is no more or less open than any other ISO proposal and so "Open" is meaningless in this context.
It is suggested that a new name be chosen for the proposal that reflects its goal of representing and continuing a legacy document format as represented in XML. Such a name should not carry an implied reference to a Microsoft product nor should it use the term "open." One possible name would be: Legacy Document Formats Represented in XML. The principles developed from this effort might well prove effective for other legacy document formats that should be represented in XML.
DIS 29500
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Thanks to the Internet, other interested parties have put all 662 resolutions online in a searchable, taggable format and are requesting that everyone interested help examine them. That means you, Slashdot.
yeah, just what we need... the 99% of slashdot who's real understanding of technology is a gimmick and not a science to be offering in their 0.02 on the issue. how many times can we read 'micro$oft is teh fuktahd!' before we realize how much of a biased, nonscientific joke this place is?
I would've bet anything that 666 was the number.
thanks to Bytemark for sorting it out, we now have 450MB of RAM, up from 128 this morning. It is serving up over three thousand hits per hour, about one hit per second on average, and they are complicated pages. I think I will probably install wp-cache or something, but right now it is working and I don't want to touch it!
"Don't misunderstand the ECMA's intent, though: there" 'though' is not needed here. sure the comma sets it apart from the sentence but it stops from reading it fluidly.
Here are the responses to that oft-reported Word95 kludge: http://www.dis29500.org/?s=word95
Interesting that the responses look like they were written by different people.
> especially coming from a full-time salaried employee of International Business Machines, who by cosmic coincidence recently released a product that uses ODF and competes (or tries to compete) Microsoft Office.
:-) The "Rob Isn't Weird" thing comes from a conversation I had with Rob over his blog about his last name and how I remember to spell the URL for the site: weird without a D. He said it's how he remembers to spell weird.
Actually, no. I'm the submitter, not Rob. I just read his blog, I've never worked for IBM. The closest I came is that I gave an IBM guy a resume once or twice at a job fair, but I never got further than that. My real job is tech support. That's my interest in avoiding OOXML: I don't want to have to support it.
BTW, you may have noticed me posting the same joke about 662 OOXML files over there. I'm the same anonymous guy who submits almost all the stories from Rob's blog to Slashdot. You can tell it's true because no one else thought of that lame joke
Anyhow, as the others have pointed out, ODF is already an ISO standard, Microsoft is the one playing catch-up here because they don't want to lose their monopoly control over the format. It's also true that the ISO process has been highly irregular. Haven't you noticed all the votes failing because the countries who joined to support Microsoft don't care about anything but OOXML? They're not even voting to abstain.
Sure, there's FUD here, but it's on the other side. I'm not doing anything but spreading the word about what's going on. You can agree or disagree all you like, but FUD means "Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt" and I don't think I'm spreading any of those. Or are you afraid of the 662 responses? Does pointing to somewhere you can download and read them all make you more uncertain? As for doubt, doesn't letting you read them remove it?
Oh, right. This is Slashdot. We complain that we're being ignored unfairly, then don't pony up any actual facts to support our position. It's the other guys fault!
I'm just supposed to dismiss you with a handwave instead of, you know, giving you links to more information than you'll ever bother to look at, all of which are in TFA.
Bah! Go away, troll!
*handwave*
Define failed, and give citations that OASIS' ODF has failed in the way you describe
why so much hostility toward an open standard?OOXML is not as open as the title implies if a lot of elements amount to the following: "If this element is present, an implementation shall emulate the behavior of x brand software. This behavior is not described in this standard." In each case, the software in question is copyrighted with all rights reserved, its source code is a trade secret, and it is long out of print.
Besides, an open standard is not enough. It must also be a Free standard, which can be implemented without payment of royalties in free software. ODF is a Free standard (see OOo 2.x).
- A collection of documents is published as a torrent of a folder.
- Each file in the folder is between 5 and 50 KiB in size, and the sizes are not multiples of a large power of two.
- Most users will request fewer than 10 percent of the documents.
- The median last mile to each user is 1 Mbps down, 250 Kbps up.
- I can persuade every reader of the collection of documents to download and install a BitTorrent client designed for reading small documents, such as an HTTP-to-torrent proxy analogous to the proxy that Freenet uses.
So what kind of latency should people expect between requesting a file and having it? And how can I gain a wide audience if I insist on assumption 5?Submitter here. I read about you on Rob's blog. Then I saw the "how you can help" page that asked for publicity. Well, actually, I think it said you wanted a *little* publicity. But hopefully this will work out somehow :-)
:)
P.S. You should thank your ISP. From the other post up there, it looks like they were very helpful. Wish I knew who they were, because if I ever set up a website, I know I'd want a good host like them
Completely OT, I know. (look at the post title).
This sentence makes no sense in English.
There are very many anonymous posts today, which all share a common style. Absolutely lacking any arguments, maybe to not attract further discussion, but clearly intended to make the whole issue around OOXML appear as a solely political one. Posts discrediting the slashdot crowd, post discrediting critics as IBM puppets. OOXML IS a seriously flawed standard. There were endless very level headed comments on slashdot listing serious issues (e.g. the recently talked about "ANSI" and "Mac codepage" references), where you really ask yourself, how could a person knowing to be writing a "standard" put such rubbish in there?
It is very good value for money, the bandwidth and latency is very low, performance is excellent. No way could I afford that level of bandwidth and processor and rack space as a dedicated box. The initial slashdot shock caused the VM to run out of memory (it is doing a lot of stuff in just 128MB) and I was struggling to fix it. One email to support and 10 minutes later they have boosted the memory, restarted the box, sent me a reply and posted that they had fixed it on Slashdot! I would unhesitatingly recommend hosting stuff in a VM from Bytemark.
ODF defines a standard which makes no allowances for backwards compatibility with past file formats as opposed to MS's OpenXML format which does.
All of the criticism levelled at OpenXML is about the difficulty to implement the backwards compatibility constructs of the format. There's nothing MS can do about this complexity, as the complexity is already out there in form of the MS Office documents sitting round in corporate filing systems dating back to the 90's.
In reality its actually very easy to implement the constructs required to create new OpenXML format documents, and just as easy to implement a reader for such documents. So this criticism is coming from interests such as those in IBM that would like to everyone to give up on all the content they have created using MS formats.
In reality, this is not an option, should OpenXML just become another ODF then the corporate world would probably just choose none of the above and wait for another solution to come along that does satisfy their needs.