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Microsoft Bids To Take Over Open Document Format
what about sends in a Groklaw alert warning that, by PJ's reading, Microsoft may be trying to take over ODF via a stacked SC 34 committee. The article lists the attendees at an SC 34 meeting in July and gives their affiliations, which the official meeting materials do not. (The attendees of the October 1 meeting, which generated a takeover proposal to OASIS, are not known in full.) "Why do I say Microsoft, when this is SC 34? Look at this ... list of participants in the July meeting in Japan of the SC 34 committee. The committee membership is so tilted by Microsoft employees and such, if it were a boat, it would capsize ... Of the 19 attendees, 8 are outright Microsoft employees or consultants, and 2 of them are Ecma TC45 members. So 10 out of 19 are directly controlled by Microsoft/Ecma ... [I]f the takeover were to succeed, SC 34 would get to maintain ODF as well as Microsoft's competing parody 'standard,' OOXML. How totally smooth and shark-like. Under the guise of 'synchronized maintenance,' without which they claim SC 34 can't fulfill its responsibilities, they get control of everything." A related submission from David Gerard points out that BoycottNovell has leaked the ISO OOXML documents, which ISO has kept behind passwords.
Yeah: Anyone who can still rationalize working for this company is an asshole.
Sorry, but that is my belief. I've worked for companies before where people quit on principle even when the company's actions didn't affect them personally. And on those occasions the company had done far less than Microsoft has done to harm the community.
It is high time it became a badge of dishonor to be affiliated with Microsoft in any way.
Sure Apple has done some things that ware bone-headed and just plain wrong but nothing they've done remotely compares to what Balmer et al is trying to pull here.
You are correct, Apple simply ignores current standards instead and invents their own and/or adds DRM / security-through-obscurity crap on top of known standards.
Examples: The "mailbox" file format of iMail (or what its called) and ipods. I know there are more, I can't be bothered to find them :-)
Viral infection vectors is not the same thing as a virus. The guy was saying that the product was full of security holes. Please don't argue the accuracy of his statement with me, I really don't care.
The rest of your post would be a less obvious troll if you weren't so vulgar.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
That's funny. Obviously I must be retarded for calling your holy OS unusable for a desktop. I mean, I was only using RH back about as far as version 4, I totally have to be clueless.
When Ubuntu rolled around, I even went "I'm going to try to go Windows-free." And you know what? It worked, for small values of "worked." Sure, Eclipse worked--but it was slower than a dog on Linux when it was entirely snappy on Windows. Sure, it worked--when I wasn't starting WINE for Dreamweaver or Photoshop or Office (because OpenOffice sucks, thank you very much, and KOffice, while having potential, is still not very good). Sure, it worked--but I had to run a VM to work in .NET, because Mono wasn't there yet (it is now, mostly, but with all due respect to mhutch and his crew, MonoDevelop is nowhere near as good as Visual Studio). Sure, it worked--when my xorg.conf file wasn't magically disappearing (and given that I have an ATI card, that makes it doubly special!).
Eventually I realized that I got more done in Windows than I did on Linux. So I switched back, and the problems went away. 'Mazing, that. Windows is, for most normal people, the path of productivity and least resistance. Whining that people aren't using your alternative when it is more difficult to use is moronic.
Here's a guideline for the desktop: if you ever have to open a terminal outside of truly exceptional error cases, you have failed to make a good enough desktop. The fact that Linux desktop aficionados don't get this makes "why does Linux on the desktop suck?" a question that is much easier to answer.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."