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Australia Mandates Microsoft's Office Open XML
littlekorea writes "The Australian Government has released a common operating environment desktop policy that — among security controls aimed at reducing the potential for leaks of Government data — mandates the ECMA-376 version of Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) standard and productivity suites that can 'read and write' the .docx format, effectively locking the country's public servants into using Microsoft Office. The policy [PDF] also appears to limit desktop operating systems to large, off-the-shelf commercial offerings at the expense of smaller distributions."
iirc, even MS office doesn't use the standard as published ???
That's right. Freedom is a lot of trouble. Just give it up.
~223 years on, they are still ruled by idiots.
They're not clueless. They're very smart. It's just that their priorities aren't your priorities. Their priority is putting money in their pocket. Who do you figure hands out money? It's not the linux geeks I'll tell ya that much. :)
If they insist on actual compliance with the standard, even MS will be out...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Here's the thing - we're all gonna die in the end, so all these fights against proprietary formats won't mean jack.
In that case, so is replying. Yet you seem to care enough about justifying your position (perhaps to yourself) to reply, so don't give me this nihilistic bullshit.
In life we pick the battles we can fight. These are potentially important issues, but basically given you're effectively saying about 90% of people are part of the "problem", I don't give a fuck anymore.
When 90% of the people are part of the problem is when I absolutely do care.
Take another battle I've picked: Religion. There's a small minority which does some really crazy shit. And they get away with it in the name of "religious tolerange", because a majority of the world believes enough crazy shit of their own that it takes a lot to make us as a culture say, no, you can't let your child die because you'd rather fucking pray than get help.
Easily 80-90% of the US population is religious, which makes it a safe bet that you are, too -- probably also Christian, probably believe faith is a virtue. If so, merely by supporting the idea that faith is a virtue, you are encouraging yourself and those around you to turn off their critical thinking and skepticism when the situation calls for it. That kind of thinking leads to atrocities. Never mind that merely by calling yourself "Christian", you lend credibility to these fuckwits.
Am I going to win? Not really. I do hope to reinforce separation of church and state, to promote actual science education instead of "Intelligent Design", and to establish some basic rights the religious would deny, like the right to marry. I'd love to see people tolerate less of the extremists. I really doubt I'm going to see the religious become a minority in my lifetime.
But you know what? I'd like to think that when I'm lying on my deathbed, I lived for things that matter. I'd like to think that I'd still be the kind of person who would be ashamed to think I gave up because it was too hard, or because there were too many people who disagreed with me.
Life shouldn't have to be some damn crusade.
You're right, it shouldn't. But this is the world we live in, and there are some issues which tend towards exactly that -- either you're a good little worker propping up the status quo, or you're actually helping to move things forward.
And life should be meaningful -- and it's up to you to find that meaning. Maybe you honestly don't care, but that's not what I'm hearing. What I'm hearing is that you do care, you're just too lazy to do anything about it anymore.
Yet somehow, you're not too lazy to post, and to try to justify how much you don't care. That says a lot.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
MOOXML, aka Microsoft Open Office XML
Quick! Spread the meme!
One of the key problems in our government is career politicians get positions that aren't relevant to their history, career, or expertise. Many of them have a degree in getting votes doing things like graduating with a degree in Economics and then going straight into politics. Does this sound like a suitable background for a person making critical decisions on the IT in any government? Well this is our current Communications Minister. At least the opposition's communication minister Malcom Turnbull actually did something to earn his position such as chaired an internet service provider. I'm willing to bet he has more clue than the current buffoon. I'm willling to bet everyone has more of a clue than the current buffoon.
This happens with many ministers. Such as Penny Wong our former Minister for Climate change, who's only real experience with anything environmental was siding with loggers in the 90s logging debates. She also has a degree in Law and Arts which I'm sure is a lot of help for her current portfolio which includes a huge finance position.
The "Ancient Greek Democracy" was very alike to our democracy: A plutocracy were the wealth make the decisions, very far away from the people of the country. Now, we have a lot more of circus, but the inner workings are exactly the same.
Let me play devil's advocate for a minute here.
I'm going to make a number of assumptions. All are what I would consider "reasonable", though obviously they're assumptions so make of them what you will.
So at just about the time that it becomes apparent that some sort of standardised document format is necessary, enter Microsoft stage left, proudly announcing that they've spent a long time working on just that and if they upgrade now, they can have an office suite that uses a standard document format. All they need to do is dictate that every department purchases something that is compatible with OOXML. The issues surrounding OOXML aren't brought up because the big cheeses are unaware that they even exist and the Microsoft sales team certainly aren't going to volunteer such information - in fact, there's a good chance they're not aware of the issues either.
Where's the salesman for OO.o? Where's the flashy suit, the company car and the briefcase full of numbers showing cost savings? These guys are from a very traditional background, and know little or nothing of the F/OSS world. From their perspective, software is developed by businesses - and what sort of a business can't even be bothered to put together a sales department? If you've ever tried explaining F/OSS to that cousin of yours who runs a business and has always bought Microsoft products - and before you've even got the first couple of sentences out you can see you're getting looks of open disbelief, by the time you've finished your cousin is seriously thinking you need to see a psychiatrist - those are the people who are making the decisions.
The fact that this "rights management" service requires cooperation from individual client side applications renders the whole idea flawed... If it's not enforced at the kernel level, its pretty trivial to bypass.
As a classic extremely simple example, get a workstation where group policy prohibits your user from running cmd.exe, now open up cmd.exe in a hex editor and search for the unicode string "disablecmd" and change it to something else... Save it out and run the binary, it will run just fine. Alternatively you can load up a debugger and modify the program in memory.
If you implement restrictions like this, people will find ways around it, even if they just point a camera at the screen. If you don't implement restrictions people will just take the easiest approach and probably not realise their actions have been logged. If you log their actions you can catch them. If they're leaking data in a more sneaky manner they're likely to get away with it for a long time (and thus a huge amount of data) before you can find out who did it.
Also the more onerous restrictions you enforce, the harder it becomes for people to do their jobs.
OpenOffice won't implement DRM because the whole idea is fundamentally flawed, all it does is provide a false sense of security and a hindrance to legitimate users. However you implement it, hackers will soon work out how to break it and the naive staff who implemented it won't even consider that its been broken, and waste time trying to investigate other possible sources of the leak.
Not really. Last I checked the average IQ is around 104 which means for everyone that actually bothered to learn about an issue and to weigh its merits you'd have a HS football field full of knuckle draggers that would believe anything the TV told them to which would pretty much torpedo your "power to the people" idea pretty quick. I mean just look how many without health insurance rallied against any kind of reform at all because its "socialist" without even knowing what that word means, they just knew Beck told them it was bad.
That is why I think the ONLY way a more direct democracy could work would be to bring back poll tests to weed out the most stupid. This would also be more fair to those that actually cared and participated because they cared by keeping their vote from being negated because "the TV told me to". I mean if you can't even answer the most basic of questions like "what are the three branches of government" or "what is the difference between a state law and a federal law" then why should you have the right to screw things up for everyone else?
And I believe this would help with one of the biggest problems we are facing ATM, the crooked but smooth talking politician. Nowadays it is all about sound bytes designed to manipulate the masses. But if the stupid couldn't vote (and just hearing they had to take a test would cause probably a good 70% to not even attempt voting) then politicians would actually have to be able to talk about what they were for/against and back it up instead of just whipping some sound bytes off that appealed to whatever group they wanted to hit this week. This might also allow us to have a real multi-party system since the incredible power of the MSM would be shot to hell. And I'm not even talking about basing it on IQ or test taking which some smart people freeze up on, we are talking about just being asked some basic questions about the process.
After all to use the all powerful /. car analogy: We don't let anyone operate a motor vehicle without proving they understand the basics so why in the hell should we let them vote which risks impacting a hell of a lot more lives than any car wreck?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.