Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Standing Firm On OOXML ISO Vote
christian.einfeldt writes "Microsoft has responded via the industry trade group ECMA to some of the thousands of criticisms of its submission of Office Open XML as an ISO standard. Open standards advocate Russell Ossendryver takes a look at those responses to see if Microsoft has made significant changes in either the substance of OOXML or the manner in which the OOXML specification will be maintained going forward. Ossendryver concludes that Microsoft's position has not significantly changed, but only hardened in place in advance of the Ballot Resolution Meeting which is to occur from February 25 through 29 in Geneva. While no one can say for certain whether Microsoft will succeed in having OOXML win the nod from the international community, Ossendryer thinks that Microsoft's firm stance is likely to backfire."
I believe Microsoft made 5 billion in revenue from having customers worldwide locked into their proprietary office document format.
The vendor lockin from Office makes up almost half the company's yearly revenue.
Microsoft would cease to exist as we know it if the office document lockin revenue went away to an open format.
Fight? LOL! This is the type of shit Microsoft execs live for.
Fake grassroots efforts.
Standards body subversion.
Paid for media shills.
Shame studies.
Mysterious compatibility problems with the competition.
All in a days work.
All of the yes with comments votes now have it confirmed that their comments have noit actually been taken involved. The involvement of the EU in investigating MS's practices leading up to the fast track also means that they involved have to be more circumspect about gathering votes, so they really don't need to be annoying people like this.
Of course, the plan could just be to say "We would have got away with ISO approval, if it wasn't for that pesky IBM". It's a bit odd, but there we are. MS is losing the EU to open standards.
"To any truly impartial person, it would be obvious that I am right."
well... as long as it's a real standard, doesn't really matter who came up with it. That's the whole point of standards. They are open and anyone can use them.
MSFT has so badly screwed up ISO, I can see many parties who were going to vote yes to change it into No.
directly because of MSFT the ISO has done nothing but stumble around they can't get the majorities that they need in oder to pass standards. Everything is stagnate. Here's to hope that MSFT gamed the system so hard that it blows up in MSFT's face.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
the file format from global communications is too important to be left to a for-profit corporation that has a history of manipulating market for maximizing profits...
truly open file formats are the only resolution for ALL office documents used in business & government. for audio/video multimedia file formats too but office communications it is just simply too important to be left to a private corporation...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Petition currently running at noooxml.org
http://www.noooxml.org/petition
All I could think of when reading this is a M$FT rep saying "Come on, we're Microsoft! You can trust us!" while hiding a +10 Spiked Club of Patent Trolling behind their back....
Guarantee to me in writing that you will update Office 2007 and Office 2008 so that the version of OOXML that they use will be exactly identical to your ISO submission in every way, and then carry out your promise, and I will join the OOXML camp.
Sincerely,
ODF supporter.
What "nod" are they trying to win? They lost the nod, and they lost it bigtime, if you take a look at the countries who didn't show up just for that one vote. The only question is whether or not they paid enough to "buy the nod".
I'm hoping that the non-bought votes that voted "yes" last time figure out what's going on and vote "no" this time. We'll see.
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
The horse has left without the cart. Office already saves thousands, if not millions, of documents in OOXML - today. MS cannot change their format - the spec is in the field. I'm somewhat surprised they haven't taken some things into consideration for future releases, but frankly the reality set.
OOXML is not a standard. It cannot be used to shield any entity from MS's product changes. Also, OOXML extends into nebulous areas where other implementors or translators will be unable to replicate the viewers or editors like Office. Governments or corporations must take it or leave it.
PS
I recently received a DOCX from an MS rep and wrote back asking for a DOC format (we've not upgraded). They sent me a PDF. Moral: OOXML isn't a standard. There's no turning back - its a conversion world, not an interoperable one.
See above. The current implementation of OOXML doesn't comply with the proposed standards. And how would you feel if once OOXML got passed as an ISO standard, MS sued our precious Open Office, to ensure the dominance of MS Office? So much for open.
How would they do that?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
And here's their latest trick: sending all the JTC1 NB's a poorly-researched, demonstrably inaccurate study.
Many reasons:
1. There is already an ISO standard for this same purpose.
2. There are exclusions in Microsoft's Open Specification Promise, meaning Microsoft can sue over other parties writing implementations of some of the things that the OOXML standard references (ActiveX and VBA are examples).
3. OOXML is designed so that fully-compliant applications can only be written by Microsoft, and mostly-complaint applications can be written by other parties but only to run on a Windows platform. Therefore OOXML is not inter-operable with other applications and especially not with non-Windows platforms, and the whole purpose of making something a standard is to facilitate such inter-operation.
4. OOXML is technically very inferior to the existing standard, ISO 26300. For example, OOXML specifies three different implementations of "a table", instead of just one common to different Office applications. This means that you cannot write a "table handling class" as a library, but instead you have to duplicate equivalent functionality several times over.
5. OOXML includes deliberately mandating bugs (such as dates before 1900) just to pander to errors in Microsoft software.
6. OOXML is controlled by just one corporation
7. ISO 26300 already has many implementations by many vendors on multiple platform. OTOH even Office 2007 running on Windows Vista does not implement OOXML
8. ISO 26300 even works with Microsoft Office (up to Office 2003) using a free plugin written by Sun. Microsoft deliberately broke Office 2007 file filters so that this plugin (or any other plugin not written by Microsoft) would not work in Office 2007.
9. ISO 26300 has a compliance test suite. You can use this test suite to make sure a given application works properly with ISO 26300. No such thing exists with OOXML.
10. It makes no sense to have "choice in standards"
They actually hold multiple patents (18 currently held, or pending) that apply to OOXML. My worst fear however, is that they'll maintain the format, and change it continually, not warning anyone when they're going to make a unilateral move. Leaving everyone else who wants to read documents sent to them in that format in the dark.
The "Deluge of facts KOs OOXML" article says that the "ECMA [is] a RIAA-like industry group dedicated to advancing its members' interests". wtf? Hardly!
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Yeah, well, here's the kicker:
If they lose, it just proves what I've said all along: in the end, being proprietary and closed will catch up with you and you will become irrelevant. Just ask a company that's had to learn that lesson the hard way over the years.
My blog
We have discussed this before, and in the end it doesn't matter. Those DOCX Files are out in the wild. I see people at school saving their documents in DOCX all the time. The people using those MS Office can't open ODF Files. The Genie is out of the bottle. The ECMA can say OOXML is completely banned from becoming an ISO format ever and ODF is the true open format as it should be, in the end it makes no difference. M$ will just give the standards board the middle finger and people who use M$ Office will continue to use Office and like it because they have no other choice.
OOXML and ODF are both thin veneers on particular application products.
.sxc, etc) were vaguly similar to the ODF formats, but not the same. (And of course native formats aside, there are plenty of other office apps that can read/write ODF.)
OOXML may be (or pretend to be), but what application products were you thinking of for ODF? Were you aware that KOffice (no relation at all to OpenOffice.org) also uses ODF as its native document format? The old StarOffice/OpenOffice.org formats (.sxw,
The "thin veneer" argument against ODF is just Microsoft FUD.
-- Alastair
There is a distinct difference: ODF doesn't "specify" AutoFormatLikeStarOffice5.2 or WrapLinesLikeStarWriter1.0.
I suggest you read http://ooxmlisdefectivebydesign.blogspot.com/ and see for yourself if OOXML can be considered broken from an objective POV.
Seems to me Anonymous is better suited for this battle - first they DDOS the transwarp hubs and then they protest right in gront of the cube- oh nevermind.
Perhaps not, but there are certainly gratuitous hacks like that in plenty of IETF specs. FTP has an enormous amount of crud devoted to ASCII/EBSDIC issues, to the point that the default mode for FTP MUST be character mode and image mode is an explicit switch. Its completely unnecessary and broken of course but it goes on all the time.
That is exactly the sort of thing I would WANT to see in a 1.0 version of a standard, and hopefully those exceptions would be deprecated and replaced over time.
Describing the current state of affairs is definitely a best practice for standards writing. If you have the constituency then its fair to ask for an accomodation.
Standards are not an exercise in abstract perfection.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Relying on current application behaviour is not bad per se. It is bad not to reveal what the application does. Things like autoSpaceLikeWord95 are referenced but not specified. This is objectively bad. Just think of it: I give a new screw standards paper to the ISO. It simply says that the screw can easily be driven in with my old Bauhaus 95 screwdriver. However, the spec doesn't say what the dimensions of my screwdriver actually are. Do you think ISO should make this a standard ?
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
Start making calls, Aussie.
Ozymandias
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said--"Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert... Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
Good, I am glad that some of the details are being documented. Tim S PS, I liked your prior signature. I think the irrational fear was funny.
Point taken; however ...
Yeah Apple is so open and this is the reason i can run OS X on my beige bo- OH WAIT I CANNOT !
Actually you can. There are a bunch of sites explaining how; that is much more useful than running XP on the new Intel Macs, which you can also do.
But that's not such an issue at least songs i downloaded with Itunes can be played on my noname mp3 play- OH NOES IT FAILS !
You have to convert them first; you can do that in Itunes.
Well at least Itunes runs on Linux, to- SHIT IT DOESN'T !
It works with wine apparently, or Crossover Office.
Google Knows All.
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
Quoting from zmotula's post:
"...see the post by the guy who evaluated the OOXML specification for the Czech Normalization Institute. This means that Czech Republic is most probably going to vote for OOXML when the time comes."
Read that post and you see that nearly every one of the Czech Republic's objections has been addressed (the only one not satisfactorily addressed was the Czech Republic's complaint that part of the spec has redundant info). Let me quote:
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
The fact that there are work-arounds for all of these things doesn't negate the fact that they were locked down in the first place.
The iTunes DRM is roughly equivalant to a false positive for piracy in Windows Genuine Advantage. They've purchased the product, but now there are these digital hand-cuffs keeping them from using it. I doubt anyone saying that "false positives in WGA aren't too bad - there are work arounds. [link]" would get modded up too far, though.
Also came accross this Disclosure: In January 2007, Rick became embroiled in a controversy after mentioning in his XML.COM blog an approach from Microsoft for a several-day contract job to correct some Wikipedia entries from a neutral point of view, as an experienced technical writer with credible first-hand knowledge of standards and procedures. This was incorrectly reported as being a secret plot to subvert Wikipedia. With the support of many editors on Wikipedia, with complete transparency, and with care to respect the Wikipedia rules, Rick has started participating on the Wikipedia entries.
The company that is the co-owner of Topologi has a long-standing training business and will be providing some presenters for some Microsoft sponsored-events in 2007 in Australasia. It is highly likely that Rick will be one of the presenters on standards matters at some of these. link
Seems he has lots of involvement with MS.
*However*, and that makes all the difference, Apple does *not* have a monopoly on the desktop. So they are free to do as they please. And apparently whatever it is they are doing, it doesn't bother their customers (yet).
So comparing Apple to Microsoft is just plain meaningless. In the current context, they have nothing in common.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
You're confusing "open" with "free" (as in freedom). Actually OS X is open enough that you can run it on a beige box. It is, however, not free, so the license prohibits you from doing this legally. If you want to complain about Apple not being open enough, you should have picked something else, like not being able to easily customize the native GUI.
But that's not such an issue at least songs i downloaded with Itunes can be played on my noname mp3 play- OH NOES IT FAILS !Again, this used to be a valid, complaint, excepting the fact that this was a requirement from the RIAA cartel and Apple was actually the company that pressured them into changing that policy... so your complaint falls a little flat. Apple sells non-DRM'd music these days and while it is not in the MP3 format, it is in the MP4 format, which is actually slightly more open in terms of licensing, since the royalty requirements for MP4 are slightly more free (both are equally open as they are both fully documented codecs). If you bought a music player that doesn't support MP4, well that is just as if you bought a really outdated one that doesn't support anything but .WAV files. It isn't Apple's fault as they don't license either codec, the MPEG group does. Most players do support it these days, including even Microsoft's Zune player.
Well at least Itunes runs on Linux, to- SHIT IT DOESN'T !This one sort of applies, in that it is neither open nor free and as a result you can't port it to Linux yourself without getting a license to the code from Apple. This isn't really much of an issue, however, since it is simply a matter of a software company not maintaining a port for platform X (being Linux in this case). I guess you could argue that all software should be free and open, but I doubt if you'll get a lot of investment in commercial end user applications that way. Just use one of the many programs that do support it, or WINE, which runs it just fine.
Shame studies.
I think you meant "sham" studies but I sorta like your way better. It's a sham that's also a shame. ;)
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I call bullshit on this one. I actually did look at both specs. OOXML is indeed a quick and dirty XML-like version of Office formats and doesn't even pretend to try to make functionality generic enough to make it easy for any application to implement. Even for functionality that is designed to interoperate with other types of applications OOXML is written just for the most popular add-on. ODF, on the other hand, makes a reasonable attempt at implementing functionality in a generic way so that it can be easily implemented by not only existing software packages but also new software developers who have no access to the source to existing applications. It certainly isn't perfect, but it is a night and day comparison to OOXML. ODF is already fairly well implemented by software from numerous commercial entities as well as open source projects. OOXML would be very, very hard for any third party to implement as written and it is unclear if anyone will ever be able to write to the spec instead of (as is the current case with MSOffice formats) trying to reverse engineer enough for partial compatibility.
OOXML is MS's attempt to create something close enough to an open standard to fool some bureaucrats or give them plausible deniability when they're bribed, but at the same time make sure that users don't gain the benefits of a truly open standard, which is to say interoperability with numerous programs so that users can easily switch from one to the other and gain all the benefits of real competition. This is business as usual for MS. If you look at their "shared source" initiative it was very much the same strategy. Customers wanted the advantages of open source software (many eyes to find bugs, competitive bids for new development, guaranteed migration path and future proofing) so MS came up with something sort of like open source that they could claim was "just as good" to people who didn't understand what the benefits really were and just knew that open source was beneficial in some way.
HTML is also a document standard.Yeah HTML is a document standard, but the stuff that you have to hand to IE in order to have it work properly is not HTML because it has to break the standard to work. It also fails to implement pretty much any of the last 6 years of development on HTML and other Web standards. I don't think you picked a very promising example if you're arguing in favor of MS's willingness to use standards. The whole of Web technologies has been artificially retarded by nearly a decade as a way to keep the Web from being a viable alternative platform to Windows. Progress has been crippled and billions of dollars wasted every year in order to insure MS's platform lock-in and avoid fair competition in the marketplace. The whole point of requiring standards compliance in the first place is to insure competition and the other benefits of avoiding a single vendor lock-in for office applications. MS understandably would rather have guaranteed profits than have to actually make a better product, but there is no reason why anyone other than them and people they have paid to go along with it. That is why it is important to have a truly open standard that can be and is fully implement by multiple vendors all of who are truly interoperable. OOXML is clearly an attempt to avoid that.
Is it really possible that you don't see how ridiculous it is for giant government customers to ask vendors to create products that comply with a specification and to have one monopolist tell the customer that "No we won't make a product that meets those specifications. Unlike everyone else we're going to invent another format that is incompatible and we're going to try to force you to use it using our monopoly influence in several markets." Not only should governments not be accepting OOXML as a standard, they should be charging MS with criminal antitrust violation for trying to foist it upon them.
That's not true. As you could see in the posts above, Apple's actions do bother at least some of their customers. I know it annoys me. But they compensate for their practices a lot better a=than MS does by offering a vastly superior OS and beutiful hardware that in some cases is worth the extra money.
-- Cheers!
All in a days work.
I think you meant "business as usual"
Actually you can. There are a bunch of sites explaining how; that is much more useful than running XP on the new Intel Macs, which you can also do. Yeah, you can get it running. If you don't care about security updates. If you take full responsibility for driver problems. If you don't mind dickering with your computer for a day or two. I never could get it to work under either VMWare Player or VMWare Workstation. > But that's not such an issue at least songs i downloaded with Itunes can be played on my noname mp3 play- OH NOES IT FAILS !
You have to convert them first; you can do that in Itunes. Great. Another hack. Wouldn't it be nice if you didn't have to download software of questionable legality? Feeling that Apple love, yet?
Neither am I. > Well at least Itunes runs on Linux, to- SHIT IT DOESN'T !
It works with wine apparently, or Crossover Office. I'm noticing a pattern, here... Wine is a barely acceptable hackaround of the proprietary Win32 API. Wouldn't it be nice if iTunes actually worked... on Linux!?!?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
I have an article in the pipeline on OOXML. I SO hope it shows up in time. It'll be in the XML section on developerWorks.
KEEP PEELED EYES! Mmmm. Peeled eyes.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
M$ won the initial vote in Pakistan. LinuxPakistan is fighting back. Here is the link http://www.linuxpakistan.org/ooxml/index.php
Well, because the "standard" is so convoluted, it's not totally clear.
.docx files end up chock full of VML because of linkage with proprietary MS tech. See the "Application-defined" binary blobs for Microsoft Ink(TM) data?
.docx using such deprecated or proprietary features (i.e., saving a file which is not interoperable with non-MS products using the OOXML standard). And you have to be some kind of genius to know what not to use.
.bin file format" might be interesting to you also.
The OOXML standard states that use of (proprietary) VML is deprecated, but if you search the web for "VML"+"office 2007" you get lots of info on how most
This may or may not be OK with the standard, the big point is that there is no mode for Office 2007 which warns you when you save
"Office 2007
I call bullshit.
Keeping the old defects in a new standard for reasons of "compatibility" is not a good idea, because it means missing a good opportunity for improvement.
Keeping them in new versions of the old products is something I can (barely) understand, but declaring bugs to be features for the whole industry is just plain wrong. I think if Microsoft/ECMA keep insisting on that, ISO should reject OOXML outright.
C - the footgun of programming languages
Since, clearly, different competing standards are bad. Which is why there is only one standard type of screw drive head, Flathead. I once heard someone claim that there were other standards, such as Philips (better for automated assembly) and Pozidriv (allows latge torque without gouging the screw); but I reckon they were lying. I mean, how could competition possibly be better than one standard having a monopoly? Everyone knows how good monopolies are."
There is no single corporation that provides both the all the screwdrivers and/or all the screws.
Yes... but it means they'd have to do some hard work.
Why bother with that when you can lock up everybody's valuable data then take your time adding just enough new features to get people to upgrade?
No sig today...
You bring up this link: http://xmlguru.cz/2008/01/ecma-response-to-czech-ooxml-comments
Have you actually tried to open the PDF files with "Proposed dispositions" that the page links to? You cannot, because they are password protected. No one knows what these dispositions are, and even if they exist at all. We only have to believe the words of this so called "expert" and have no way to check them.
Because once you have a generally accepted standard and applications that support it, you should be able to use those applications for a very long time.
If an individual vendor ceases to support the standard, you have a good chance of finding another who will do so. In that case, you may have some expenses for switching applications but you can still can use your document format.
With Microsoft, your chances of getting either are slim:
-they often change their document formats, which leads to users of later Office versions sending you documents you cannot use without upgrading.
-third party support for MS formats usually depends on reverse engineering because the formats are poorly specified. Note that you can usually download some specifications, but those tend to be out of date and incomplete. This leads to third party support that sucks, and I think the Open Office developers did a quite good job by getting it almost right under those circumstances.
C - the footgun of programming languages
Governments have a need to keep documents for pretty long times, and they are increasingly aware of the problems they will get from a vendor that changes the default formats of its applications every few years. If you watch the IT news, you will see a tendency to mandate open document standards for government use.
;-)
Now Microsoft has three options:
1) Give the standards board the middle finger and lose the government business. Financial ouch, and more importantly companies who work with the government a lot might switch to the same application as the government (like Open Office) for convenience. Great way to erode the dominant position of Microsoft Office.
2) Use ODF. Might not support all quirks of their old documents (which is a valid concern but not reason enough to support those quirks for eternity). But more importantly, it kills the vendor lock-in. Another great way to erode the dominant position of Microsoft Office.
3) Try to push a lousy pseudo-standard like OOXML through the standards boards. I will skip the discussion of the details here and just say I think the opponents are right when they say only Microsoft would be able to support OOXML (halfway) well. Result if MS gets away with it:
Microsoft can claim to save documents in a standardized format, any legal requirements in that regard are satisfied. A great step towards keeping the government business without being really interoperable with others.
Now guess what Microsoft is trying
C - the footgun of programming languages
Let's do a hypothetical situation, and see how you'd do it in ODF and OOXML. You've got a program that reads WordPerfect 5 files. Your job is to add ODF and OOXML support to it. While writing your WP5 to ODF and OOXML importers, you notice that WP 5 has some line spacing modes that you can't really capture in ODF or OOXML. You'd like to record somehow in the translated file that these modes were used in the original. That way, your program, which knows about those modes, can display files converted from WP 5 the same way they displayed before conversion, and if someone exports one of your ODF or OOXML files back to WP 5, you can use those modes in the exported file.
So how do you do that? In ODF, what you'd do is define your own tag or attribute, in a namespace you'd define, and use that to mark the parts of the document that originally had WP 5 line spacing. Now you can go back and forth between ODF and WP 5, and the spacing is right, as long as it is your application used to view the documents. If you send a converted WordPerfect document to someone using OpenOffice, it won't use WP5 spacing, but that is OK. That tag of yours was just there to let programs that DO understand WP5 spacing use it if they wish.
Meanwhile, across town, I'm ALSO changing my old application that handles WP 5 files so that it can translate to ODF and OOXML. I also come up with a tag or attribute, and a namespace. Someone gives me one of your ODF files, and I open it. Hey, guess what--no WP5 spacing. It only works on your applications, because I have no idea what your tags means.
Not being idiots, we realize that it would make a lot of sense if we were to agree to use the same tag or attribute or WP5 spacing. That way, if someone uses your program to translate a WP5 program, mine can use the resulting ODF document. If we are smart, we publish the tag we are using, so everyone (hopefully) who has a program that understands WP5 can use the same tag to mark places in ODF documents where the original document used WP5 modes that don't translate into ODF.
So, where should we publish that tag? The best place would be in the standard. That way, everyone who has reverse engineered WP5 will end up using the same tag, and can then have a much better chance of interoperating.
And that is just what they've done in OOXML. There are a set of compatibility flags, all of which are like what I describe above. They took about a dozen or so things that don't represent well in OOXML (or ODF) that would be common in legacy documents (not just from Microsoft software, BTW...they have some for WordPerfect settings), and basically said "if you have software that understands those old formats, and you are going to tag places in your documents where those old formats used features that aren't in OOXML, then use these tags, so you will interoperate with others who do the same".
There is no rational way to argue that this is bad.
No you are not, you have not got the slightest interest in implementing this specification regardless of whether it is fully documented or not. This is simply a game that the Slashdot community is playing.
The real issue is that people think they can force government IT depts to stop using word by preventing OOXML being declared an ISO standard.
I oppose this because I don't like the idea of top down dictators deciding what tools people use. This is not about free choice for the user, its all about ramming Open Office down the government employees throats whether they want it or not.
That is not what standards are for. If a tool is good there is no problem getting people to use it. The Mozilla folk have no problem getting people to use their product voluntarily.
In itself a standards designation, particularly an ISO designation means absolutely nothing. OOXML has an ECMA designation, that is plenty. There is not a single IETF Internet standard that has an ISO designation although this is possible in theory. All an ISO designation means is that people have to pay for the standard in future. Thats the same whether its OOXML or ODF that gets an ISO designation, transfer of the copyright is a mandatory part of the process.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Standards for bolts and screws? Don't get me started!
:-
..] different competing standards are bad. Which is why there is only one standard type of screw drive head, Flathead. I once heard someone claim that there were other standards, such as Philips (better for automated assembly) and Pozidriv (allows latge torque without gouging the screw); but I reckon they were lying.
..] I mean, how could competition possibly be better than one standard having a monopoly? Everyone knows how good monopolies are.
You wrote
[sarcasm
Are you trying to say that having these these different screw head standards is OK, therefore two document standards will also be OK?
Low torque screw heads are a good example of why there should only be one standard - Pozidriv in this case. Philips was an earlier cross head, still used by the Far East, but Pozidriv was an improvement on it. And any crosshead is better than flat head - more blade drive area and less likely to slip out.
Many people do not understand though that such standards are NOT compulsory (except in some safety areas). Even if dropped as a standard, Flathead would always be widely used in special areas - like on camera battery compartments meant to be opened with a coin. Likewise there will be "anti-tamper" heads which are essentially non-standard.
Note I said "low torque" use. Standards can overlap. There are also standards for hexagon and Allen heads, used for high torque and larger applications. While there can be overlap with low torque applications, they are basically for different applications. ODF and OOXML however are NOT for different applications.
[sarcasm
Standards don't "have monopolies". Standards are NOT monopolies. In fact, standards are the very opposite idea from monopolies. One idea of ODF is to stop monopoly.
Standards should enable any company to come along and join in the party without fear of patent or copyright infringement. That is why Microsoft hate standards, because they love their own monopoly. But, recognising that the world is demanding a standard here, they are desparately promoting a crippled half-baked one in OOXML in the hope that their rivals will find hard to implement, and that its control will be retained by themselves.
That they deliberately named the damned thing to look like a piece of open office is dispicible.
Apple is more open than they were, OSX is now based on an open source OS whereas =OS9 was based on entirely their own proprietary design, their hardware is now x86 based and fairly standard etc... They are also moving to DRM-free songs on itunes, which certainly can be played on other devices, they are in the standard AAC format (not quite as widely supported as mp3, but still a standard documented format - they play just fine on linux)...
Companies don't change overnight, Apple are moving in the right direction.
A probably better example of a formerly totally closed company becoming more open would be IBM...
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
The DRM needed to be closed to satisfy the music companies, otherwise the itunes store wouldn't have had big name bands. Non DRM'd files work just fine...
The AAC format is also a standard, it's not a proprietary Apple format, only the DRM is proprietary.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Here is a list of NB with delegations at ISO http://www.noooxml.org/delegations
Good, I am glad that some of the details are being documented.
No you are not, you have not got the slightest interest in implementing this specification regardless of whether it is fully documented or not. This is simply a game that the Slashdot community is playing.
Sigh. If it was fully documented it would be different. Look at the spec. Look at the ECMA TC45 committee charter and scope which states that OOXML must be fully compatible with the formats used in Microsoft Office. How much clearer can it be that this standard is just for Microsoft?
The real issue is that people think they can force government IT depts to stop using word by preventing OOXML being declared an ISO standard.
This argument is too funny. Word has been forced on countless numbers of people simply because it was the only way to reliably read
OOXML does nothing to improve that. It would merely grant Microsoft even more control than they have now. Microsoft defines the standard.
ODF is vendor neutral. I want a format that is not controlled by any single company. How about not being forced to use Word?
I oppose this because I don't like the idea of top down dictators deciding what tools people use. This is not about free choice for the user, its all about ramming Open Office down the government employees throats whether they want it or not.
You think there is free choice now? Please.
That is not what standards are for. If a tool is good there is no problem getting people to use it. The Mozilla folk have no problem getting people to use their product voluntarily.
In itself a standards designation, particularly an ISO designation means absolutely nothing. OOXML has an ECMA designation, that is plenty. There is not a single IETF Internet standard that has an ISO designation although this is possible in theory. All an ISO designation means is that people have to pay for the standard in future. Thats the same whether its OOXML or ODF that gets an ISO designation, transfer of the copyright is a mandatory part of the process.
Microsoft has stated that they feel no obligation to actually follow the ECMA standard. Indeed, the whole thing is merely a farce.
You sir are the reason that Anonymous Cowards are permitted.
Non-moderator +1 from me.
The only stable state is the one in which all men are equal before the
MS biggest asset is that there are a lot of brainwashed (or brainless?) minds in the budget and management departments to be converted to use free software.
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
It's not about forcing openoffice down anyone's throats...
It's about giving people the freedom to choose whatever program they want based on their individual benefits, rather than on compatibility with proprietary microsoft formats where other vendors will always be at a disadvantage.
Firefox is gaining ground because the web is based on standards, with only a relatively small (and decreasing) level of corruption by microsoft. By comparison, their office document formats are entirely controlled and dictated by microsoft and not disclosed to third parties.
A significant number of organizations have looked at using openoffice, and most of those who decided against it did so because of compatibility concerns. If an open format was dominant, then openoffice would have a significant market share today (even if based on cost alone), the application itself would be significantly better (more users would attract more developers, and less time spent reverse engineering proprietary formats would leave more time to improve other areas) and other competing applications would also be significantly improved in order to compete.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
There are many earlier programs all with their own bugs, it makes no sense to encapsulate all of their bugs in a new format.
If WP5 has some line spacing modes which can't be specified in a new format, then it's worth modifying the new format to handle it. The new format should be flexible enough that line spacing can be specified fairly arbitrarily. Instead of saying "line space like wordperfect 5", it should be possible to do something like "use 1cm line spacing", and specify the spacing in a standard unit of measurement. If it's not then the format should be improved to make it possible to use a generic flag like this, rather than specifically mentioning some older app.
Programs designed to convert older WP5 documents should know that wp5 does 1cm line spacing, and specify this in the output file. If they want to convert it back, the converter program should know that 1cm line spacing corresponds to default line spacing in WP5...
As for a rational way to argue this is bad, of course using application specific tags is bad, it's a slippery slope that potentially never ends, what about "format-like-tasword-on-the-sinclair-spectrum" ? How much extra garbage will developers of modern applications be saddled with to support ancient apps?
If these formatting options are desirable, why not specify them in a generic flexible way, so that line spacing etc can be completely arbitrarily defined, that way you have a single way to do things, files converted from older apps will still look the same, new files can be converted to old formats instead of just existing old files being converted back. Saying "use wp5 line spacing" is lazy and pretty amateurish, saying "space lines by " is far more fitting for a modern standard.
Why should "wp5 style line spacing" be restricted to old converted documents, what if i want to create a new file that uses wp5 style line spacing?
Also, if you have "format like old apps" tags, what happens if you create a new document and try to convert it to a format used by these old apps? Would it save properly without these compatibility tags?
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Oh I don't disagree that Apple locked these things down in the first place. I just wanted to point out that there are unofficial workarounds to fix the problems. Apple has never locked anything down well enough to prevent clever people from actually doing cool things with the system. That's because a lot of the drive behind locking things down in the first place was to protect the user-friendly experience, not necessarily to stop people from using their computers in an unorthodox fashion.
As far as that goes, they are miles ahead of Microsoft and some others one could mention. After all they did release the code for the core of their bright shiny new OS .. ok so they entered into agreements that basically meant that the crown jewel that makes it most remarkable remains closed, but the open bits (and embracing more commodity hardware) are what make hacks like the above possible.
Something like a "WP5 line formatting" tag isn't restricted to old documents. If you were writing a new word processor, you could add it. In ODF, you'd make up a tag, and in OOXML, you might be able to use the one they provided. But in neither case, ODF nor OOXML, would anyone else's word processor be required to support WP5 line formatting. For whatever reason, both ODF and OOXML decided not to cover all possible things from legacy documents, and so for both of them, people WILL be going beyond the standard. The difference is in OOXML, they've guessed at a dozen or so places they think this will happen, and tried to make it so different implementations extending the standard for those cases will do it in the same way.
Thats not true at all.
The Massachusetts dictat that all departments had to change to open office forthwith was not a matter of choice, it was an order from the IT dept that was widely praised on Slashdot and elsewhere.
I don't like central control by IT departments. They get it wrong far too often. They choose products according to features that they like which are typically irrelevant to the end users.
The reason that the Web took off at CERN was that CN division operated in classic MIS dept. fashion, dictating the use of an obsolete, IBM mainframe to aggrandize its own power. Tim only tells one half of the story, the CERN phonebook was available online before the Web came along - but only on CERNVM which ran a dreadful botch of a DIY operating system CN division cobbled together. The Web made it possible to bypass CERN-VM entirely.
This is about giving 'freedom' to an abstract set of people by forcing a particular office suite on actual people. Its a rather Trotskyite view of revolution as far as I am concerned.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
you've taken the troll's bait and are now playing his game, which is rigged so that he'll win the argument. this is a bad decision. the correct response to this sort of nonsense (other than to ignore it, which is probably best) is to point out that the poster doesn't have any idea what he's talking about. you're starting with "yeah, but..." when the correct response is "no, dummy."
"open" does not mean "does what i want". to get more specific:
OS openness: one could actually make a reasonable point here, but the GP doesn't. the interfaces between the OS and the outside world are documented. third parties can develop for OS X in exactly the same way Apple can. it's even possible to create a "clean" implementation (see Gnustep; the fact that they don't have the manpower does nothing to impact the point) for going in the other direction. one could certainly take issue with the control-of-definition issue (Apple has only informal community input), but the documentation gets them a long way there. the open source nature of their core source code gets them a lot further.
iTunes songs on other hardware: any song you rip from a CD or other locally-imported source will work on any digital audio device supporting either mp3 or AAC (both independent, open standards). many songs you purchase from iTunes Music Store will work the same way (the iTunes Plus tracks; a growing percentage). as for the rest, it's not really Apple's product that he's complaining about, it's the record companies'; Apple just provides the marketplace. and they've provided an easy way to sell compatible, portable product for those who choose that path (and encouraged them to do so). it's worth noting that there's absolutely no issue with taking pretty much any third-party media and playing it on Apple hardware (unlike hardware from a great many other sources).
iTunes platform support: the weakest point in the bunch. the fact that iTunes doesn't run on your OS of choice has nothing at all to do with openness. i'm willing to bet dollars to doughnuts that your favorite media player doesn't run on my favorite OS, either, despite the fact that mine is OSI-approved "Open Source" and implements multiple open standards from ISO, ANSI, and so on, and yours may well be GPL'd or similar. "open" is not a magic word. iTunes doesn't run on Linux because Apple doesn't consider the cost worth it.
dummies like the GP see the word "open" and associate it with a very narrow definition of "open source" or, in the worst cases, as seen by the grandparent, linux and/or the GPL. the idea and practice of open standards predates the OSI, FSF, and linux. in OS X, apple has shown very good support for a wide variety of open standards. no OS will ever be absolute in that regard (let's say i've got this great OSF app i want to run on linux... and where's the linux equivalent of the SVID, by the way?).
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
They dictated that all departments had to change to the ODF format forthwith, not the openoffice format (as used in openoffice 1.x) which is somewhat different and now deprecated.
Thus, they require that you use applications which support the ODF format, giving you the choice of using:
Open Office
Star Office
IBM Workplace / Lotus
KOffice
MSOffice (with odf-converter plugin)
MSOffice (with sun odf plugin)
OSX TextEdit (text documents only)
AbiWord (text documents only)
Gnumeric (spreadsheets only)
Google Docs&Spreadsheets
As opposed to using microsoft's formats, which gives you the "choice" of using:
MSOffice
How exactly are they forcing anyone? They are giving users more choice than they had before, not less.
What would you prefer the Massachusetts government do, and how would this provide more choice to users?
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Does Microsoft has a monopoly in the operating system market ? Yes.
Does Apple ? No (so they can do whatever they like including giving away gold plated laptops in exchange for firstborns)
Does Microsoft have a monopoly in desktop peripherals ? No (so I did buy a MS mouse even though I resent giving them yet more money after they screwed me out of a Vista licence)
Does Apple ? No, so feel free to buy "mighty mice" and bury yourself in a pile of them (knobbly but fun).
Does anybody else ? No. There are major players (like Logitech or MS in that market, but none have 80% of sales, so nobody cares).
The *problem* is that when I recently had to buy a laptop to replace the iBook G4 which I did *not* like (I like KDE better than Mac OS, can't help it), I had the choice between utterly crappy generic systems that came with Linux, or regular machines that came with Vista. And from what I gathered from the Vista EULA, if you don't agree with it you have to return *everything* (that is including the machine) for a refund. Whereas with the XP EULA you could just say "I don't want this crappy system" and (theoretically) have a refund. And then you'd enjoy your Linux/BSD/BeOS/FreeDOS/Whatever machine -- and maybe get between $60 to $100 out of the deal.
Me, I just overwrote the Vista disk with another system, figured I'd lost about $100 in the process and that was that. OTOH, I now have a machine that I enjoy using instead of the iBook which did work ok but which I didn't like.
Anyway, I'm not anti-Apple, of course they use MS tactics. They try to sell their stuff. It's all fair game.
I'm mostly pro-diversity. If the network was 40% MS, 40% Apple and 20% Linux, it would still be much saner than it is now (although of course I'd rather have 1/3rd for each).
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
And from what I gathered from the Vista EULA, if you don't agree with it you have to return *everything* (that is including the machine) for a refund.
I can't believe that is legal even in the US. This should be taken to court.
-- Cheers!