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Office 2007 Fails OOXML Test With 122,000 Errors
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Groklaw is reporting that some people have decided to compare the OOXML schema to actual Microsoft Office 2007 documents. It won't surprise you to know that Office 2007 failed miserably. If you go by the strict OOXML schema, you get a 17 MiB file containing approximately 122,000 errors, and 'somewhat less' with the transitional OOXML schema. Most of the problems reportedly relate to the serialization/deserialization code. How many other fast-tracked ISO standards have no conforming implementations?"
For one example where this has worked well, consider vehicle networking. Bosch invented/designed the Control Area Network (CAN). This was standardised by SAE as part of the in vehicle networking specification. ISO then just adopted the SAE stuff and extended it in some new areas. The stuff all works well and is based on proven technology (ie. the technology existed before the standards).
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Diebold voting machines run Windows CE.
Language is typically defined by usage, not the other way around. Unless you're the French, perhaps. :-)
... except when it came to laypeople who largely didn't understand what was described in the first place. When that happened, we just told them that bigger is better and moved on...
:-)
Remember that "kilo" *did* (and does) mean 1024 in a computing context. Everybody understood that who was involved on a technical level. Everybody. There was no miscommunication in the general case
Your comment about octet confuses and annoys me. Go away.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
"1 MW" has always meant 1,000,000 watts. "9.6 kbps" has always meant 9,600 bits per second. A "500 GB" hard drive still means 500,000,000,000 bytes.
There are relatively few places where this is screwed up, most of which fall into these categories:
The latter doesn't even get it consistent. "1.44 MB" floppies are actually 1440 * 1024 bytes.
Another case of ivory tower types not being sophisticated enough to grok current industry usage, methinks..."Current industry usage" is to be ambiguous; 17 MB means "somewhere between 16 and 18 megabytes". The people you call "ivory tower types", including the IEC, are trying to use more precise language.
And don't even get me started on folks who assume a byte is always eight (b) bits. There's a reason folks in the Real World use the term "octet", people.The term "octet" does exactly the same thing that the binary prefixes do: They indicate more precisely what is being talked about.
As someone else in this thread said, "just because some people made the mistake, decades ago, of choosing to equal kilo to 1024 doesn't mean they were right."
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The referenced article claims that "the English had imposed GMT on the rest of the world by force when Britain was a big colonial power", which is bogus.
The English had a major sea trading infrastructure, at a time when improvements in clocks finally made accurate determination of longitude by celestial navigation practical for trans-Atlantic voyages.
They established an observatory at a major port (Grenwich) to provide a time-hack for ships in port (both military and commercial) to set their clocks, and distributed navigational charts with that observatory's latitude as the basis for the coordinate system (thus simplifying navigational calculations).
This quickly became the defacto standard on a voluntary basis among commercial shipping, along with the cities that grew up around major seaports (with multiples-of-an-hour offsets to approximate local noon - typically multiples of an hour, sometimes of a half- or quarter-hour), just as the coordinate system became the standard for shoreline mapping in other locations (to simplify navigation near shores by ships using the Grenwich meridian for their ocean charts). Then when railroads drove time standardization it spread from the seaport cities to inland locations.
Of course the empire's military and government used it internally. But the rest of the world adopted it voluntarily.
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Do ya think?
Governments started demanding documents in open formats.. that threatened their monopoly, so they paid to get their XML schema called one.. now governments go back to buying exclusively Office again... MS Wins.
End users don't give a shit about open. Governments do but only on paper.. once it comes down to the buying decision all they need is a checkmark on a list. It doesn't actually have to mean anything (cf. Posix compatibility in NT4.. damned near useless but it was a requirement at the time).
twitter now has six known accounts on Slashdot, three of which have negative or near-zero karma.
The twitter monologues. Click on my homepage and be amazed.
ISO 25436 describes a version of the Eiffel programming language that has never been fully implemented. The standard contains lots of "blue-sky" "would-be-nice-to-have" sections which are planned to be implemented in the future.
ECMA gives the document author a lot of control, so things can become ECMA standards that would not become ISO standards. But then the fast track ISO process (for existing ECMA standards) makes it easier for them to become ISO standards.
Paid Q&A/Research
C++ wasn't fast-tracked.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
What is this 'upgrade treadmill' you're referring to?
.gov orgs at least here in the US that I've seen are using everything from Office 97 to Office 2003, but none are using Office 2007.
Most
That suggests to me that there is no 'forced upgrade' or 'upgrade treadmill'.
What is it that you're seeing that indicates otherwise to you?
Facts? Try this fact: this is not an external standard that Microsoft is supposed to bring their software into line with, this standard was presented by Microsoft as accurately describing what their software actually did. That's the whole reason it was "fast tracked", because it was supposed to be a description of a conforming implementation.
If it's not, then it shouldn't have been "fast tracked", it should have gone through the same process as current HTML standards... you know, the ones Acid3 are testing...
That is, the issue is not whether Office conforms to the standard, but that Microsoft lied about its status.
Easy solution.
.doc or .pdf.
1. Tell them to send you
or
2. Install the free, simple, easy to install compat pack from MS.
Nothing you've said here translates into MS forcing you to upgrade. In fact they've given you tools that make it easy and simple to NOT upgrade, and made them free to download.
This is not to suggest that MS doesnt WANT you to upgrade, of course they do. But many, many businesses and orgs are still running quite successfully on older versions of MS Office.
Of course the compat pack only covers features that are shared between the different Office versions. If someone sends you an *.xlsm file with 66,000 rows, you are out of luck even with the compat pack.
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