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ISO Rejects OOXML Protest Appeals
snydeq writes "ISO and IEC gave OOXML the greenlight after organization leaders rejected appeals from four countries to protest the vote that approved OOXML as a standard. According to an ISO press statement, appeals by the national bodies of Brazil, India, South Africa and Venezuela did not garner support from two-thirds of the members of the ISO Technical Management Board and IEC Standardization Management Board, which is required by ISO/IEC rules to keep the appeals process alive."
This is only in the spotlight because it matters to anti-MS geeks. International standards have ALWAYS been such a freagin mess. It has always been a fight of power and money. "Fine, we will let you have your feature in the standard, if our technology is part of the standard too, then we'll vote for your proposition, and you vote for our proposition tomorrow".
Its why many are so stupidly hard to implement, are political mess (XHTML2 anyone?), and why corporations eventually feel the need to make their own, to just bypass it all and be done with it.
It was -always- this way. ISO has -always- been a freagin joke, and most people who implemeneted their crap already know this (ISO9001, lol). This is just a whole lot of same old same old.
The damage to the standard has been done. There has been so much negative press swirling around OOXML that ISO approval at this point is largely symbolic and meaningless.
Microsoft shot itself in the foot by trying to bribe national ISO members instead of keeping it on the downlow and improving OOXML to appease those obsessive standard-freaks. But then again, this is Microsoft we're talking about.
I'm not a luddite and would gladly try new things (including Microsoft things), but my perception of OOXML is so low based on all the news stories I've read that I'd rather switch to papyrus than save a document in .docx
Norway has decided that all official documents must be available through ODF, PDF or HTML; which ever is most suited to the information in question. Also schools and public offices must accept ODF as a valid format. This is because no policy should require citizens to purchase expensive software to use public services. Among other things.
The Long Now Foundation
It is not about "We head Microsoft", it is about the fact that something like WordWrapLikeWord95 should not exist in an ISO standard.
...
BTW: There was a very interesting graph in the German magazine c't. The essence was as follows:
XHTML: ~100 pages, ~400 days of standardization process
ODF: ~800 pages, ~900 days
SVG: ~600 pages. ~1050 days
SOAP: ~200 pages, ~950 days
OOXML: ~6500 pages, ~350 days.
You've no idea how incredible that looks in a graph...
That is entirely true, which is why Plato argued that people should have superior education. Now, in the modern world, what constitutes superior eduction? Superior to what Plato knew of? Superior to what they have now? Or superior to the standard required to understand the basics of contemporary life, the technologies and societies within it, and the interactions between them? I would argue that that last option should define the minimum standard acceptable for anyone, that better should be encouraged but that since all people have some input to geopolitics, major business decisions, community policies that are likely to have a wider impact, and so on, we should never tolerate a standard of ignorance that perpetuates ignorance and harm.
Arguably, what I'm asking for is not going to be easy or cheap, but if you optimize the quality of the population, you must also optimize their ability to function together, their ability to make good decisions, and their ability to reduce unnecessary damage. At some point, the additional value brought will equal the additional cost to improve standards. That is the "ideal" point, as any more investment is burning money with no benefits and could be put elsewhere for better gain.
A "utopian" society is not a stress-free society by this standard, and there'll still be plenty of bigotry and abuse. Rather, a "utopian" society by this standard is the greatest ability and greatest freedom to choose a different path, with the least possible negative consequences for not being selfish and harmful, because people will have the understanding and tools to make genuine choices, not choices they have copied from someone else without really knowing why, or choices out of fear. To me, "utopia" isn't about perfection, it's about balance. Better understanding with no means of using that understanding isn't more "perfect" than a balance between the two. Nor is superior technology than our ability to understand what it does, why, and whether there are longer-term effects that need to be considered.
Technology should not be held back in fear, nor should understanding. By my definition of "utopia", if one is racing ahead, you should develop the counterpart until it catches up. (As a completely pointless exercise, I came up with six variables you'd need to push hard on, to keep them as close together as possible, to produce the most stable and most enlightened civilization that can be achieved at that time. I believe firmly that allowing any of those six variables to backslide will invariably destabilize society and corrupt understanding, and that all civilizations that have ever declined have done so with that being the core reason, the actual mechanics being a mere secondary effect resulting from this primary cause.)
I believe that the ignorance shown by the ISO board is a direct consequence of that board being unbalanced by my definition. It has poor understanding of the engineering and an even poorer understanding of the social consequences, simply so that it can play with shiny new toys. If there's such a thing as reincarnation, we now know what happens to cats when they die - they become board directors.
I fully accept that there'll be plenty of people who disagree with my notion of "utopia" being a state of optimized relative dynamic equilibrium, where the absolute states are always increasing, and it'd probably be a lot of people's idea of a dystopia, as it is inherently restless and requires active intervention rather than allowing the different markets to independently determine their relative pace. I also agree that a regulated balancing act of this kind may in fact not be achievable in practice, but I've yet to hear any convincing argument as to why not, only the usual stuff about big governments, which doesn't even apply to this.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The idiom probably predates the common person owning an elevated bed. I've always assumed that it sprung from the fact that a manservant WOULD put their masters pants on both legs at once while their master was sitting on an elevated bed.
A commoner, having a flat pallet for a bed, would slide one leg of their breeches on and then the other as holding both legs off the ground at once is quite a challenge for most people.
What any of this has to do with ooxml I really have no idea.