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South Africa Appeals ISO Decision On OOXML
mauritzhansen sends us a blog post by Steve Pepper, former chairman of the Norwegian standards committee responsible for evaluating OOXML, reporting that the South African national standards body, SABS, has appealed against the result of the OOXML DIS 29500 ballot in ISO. From the blog: "In a letter sent to the General Secretary of the IEC (co-sponsor with ISO of JTC1), the SABS expresses its 'deep concern over the increasing tendency of international organizations to use the JTC 1 process to circumvent the consensus-building process that is the cornerstone to the success and international acceptance of ISO and IEC standards.' Having resigned as Chairman of the Norwegian committee responsible for considering OOXML for exactly this reason, I congratulate South Africa on its willingness to stand up for the principles on which standardization work should be based."
"Despite having an open source strategy the South African government doesn't really understand how to benefit from OSS. This is according to Microsoft director of corporate standards, Jason Matusow." http://www.tectonic.co.za/?p=2432
Some extra info and thoughts in this article: http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php?story=20080523052458101
Dependency hell? =>
He managed to keep South Africa from using ODF. He thinks they have a problem benefiting from free software and he'd like to keep it that way.
Good for South Africa to nail M$XML. They might be learning faster than he can bribe his way out of it.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Thank you South Africa!
Hip Hip Hurray!!
BTW, the pdf letter linked in TFA is a great read, perfect summary of all the problems that were so apparent to anyone actually looking into the whole mess.
In the meanwhile, you can sign The Hague declaration in support for free and open digital standards
In general I agree with your observations.
Only quibble is how far back "cyberpunk" goes, any grandfather is certainly older than Max Headroom. Check out Larry McCaffery's anthology "Storming the Reality Studio" and its Cyberpunk 101: A Schematic Guide. It starts with 1818's Frankenstein and goes up from there. Viewable at Google Book Search:
http://books.google.com/books?id=qcd-pFFEtHIC&dq=storming+the+reality+studio&pg=PP1&ots=M6Iri6TXg6&sig=PV88FEsDxjZROKv_Xl9yQJv5vdw&hl=en&prev=http://www.google.com/search%3Fhl%3Den%26q%3Dstorming%2Bthe%2Breality%2Bstudio&sa=X&oi=print&ct=title&cad=one-book-with-thumbnail
P.S. This is on my mind because I just recently finished Burrough's "The Soft Machine" from 1961 which is also listed as a grandfather of cyberpunk, and provides the name to that anthology:
http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=65175992&blogID=398162984
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
The last I heard these were in "optional" sections, not in deprecated ones. That is to say, MS can and probably will use them in new documents they create, but others won't be required to implement them to meet the spec. Of course this still means documents will slightly "break" when switching between applications and as such still undermines the ability of OOXML to bring all the benefits of a truly open standard. For that matter, since OOXML has not yet been fully implemented by anyone, there is no reason for such a clause to be in the spec if it won't be in newly created documents.