Of course, there are some downsides, but they are mostly the tin-foil-hat-wearing kind. A central database of your health records could be infiltrated, thus compromising your privacy. There are a lot of people who would want to know how healthy you are, but it's really none of their business. This could be potential employers, political competitors, etc. Security would have to be a number one priority of such a system.
What security? If it's going to be available to the ER when they wheel you in with a concussion, it's going to be available to anyone who bothers to look you up.
Then there's the fascinating question of future employment prospects once you've seen the "crown jewels." A key part of copyright law is whether you've had the opportunity to copy the material rather than recreate it (clean room.) Keeping your developers "uncontaminated" can be a tricky business.
Being exposed raises some serious issues regarding the future employability of the "exposed" developers.
As one of the geezers who had to fight for being able to use a slipstick in class, I'll point out that they teach something that more precise tools don't: estimation. Before you run a slipstick calculation, you must have some idea of the result. I've seen too many ludicrous results from uncritical use of a calculator.
Boy, that one's familiar. Microsoft recently (see the DIS-29500 spec) reinvented "BigNum," the extended-precision integer format that I first ran into in USCD Pascal back in the 70s.
It looks like someone managed an off-by-one error in it, with this as the result. Well, it's not like anyone uses Excel where errors could have serious consequences, right?
Hey, a new space race sounds like a great way to drive up the market price of engineers and industrial product, with both the US and Chinese space programs trying to outbid each other for the same Chinese technical staff and factories.
I absolutely support this. Nobody but Microsoft should be legally allowed to have the operating system spy on users and use that information to load the UI up with ads.
MS? The world will be a better place if they push this to the max and beyond.
As for the other stuff, I agree it is not nice of them, but am not sure how you could twist their arm to go beyond that.
We never had any problem in other standards bodies (and I've served on several.)
You open every meeting with a statement of the organization's patent policy. You make participation contingent on agreement with the policy, which includes an affirmative obligation to identify any known blocking IP. When a submission comes from a company, you require a binding letter from the company covering all IP they have covering that submission. You do this for every single point in the draft specification. Anything that doesn't get IP clearance doesn't make it into the draft.
Microsoft could have simply issued a blanket IP clearance for ECMA-376 as passed. Any additions after that point might not be covered, but anything sticking to ECMA-376 as submitted would have been. That's a very common industry practice; in a normal standards body that would have been required. They didn't. Now, I'm a believer in the law of intended consequences, which is similar to "intention" in common law: when a rational party goes out of their way to do something that has predictable consequences, it's reasonable to conclude that they intended those consequences.
Microsoft (and Microsoft Legal) isn't run by idiots. Logic follows.
Well, you ignored the part where I mentioned that this was being taken care of.
You mentioned that "things" were being taken care of; you did not (in any of your posts here, and I read them all) specify that the scoping was one of them
You're pulling the classical "I have secret knowledge that proves that I'm right" rhetorical trick. Point me to the revised spec and we can talk.
You've practically proven, all by yourself, that DIS-29500 isn't at the level of committee draft, much less final ISO submission. One of the basic responsibilities of a technical committee (see, for instance, JEDEC JM-21L) is clearly defining the requirements for conformance and clearing legal rights for those requirements. According to you, that hasn't been done and here we are at the ISO final vote stage. ECMA-376 needs to go back to committee until it's actually ready for prime time.
Now you argue about optional, so let me clarify, I meant OOXML "optional" which has a very precise term in the spec. Since we are talking about OOXML I expected you to be familiar with it, I guess you were not familiar with it, but only with the handful of bullet points circulating the intertubes.
As a standards maven, I've read the controlling portions (I'm not planning to implement it, so any controlling language hidden in footnotes missed me. As they should.) I'll point out that "optional" has a predefined meaning in standards literature, much as "scope," "shall," "may," and other words that are no more subject to local redefinition than any other legal term. Apparently, the drafters of ECMA-376 had never done any standards work before (the "Scope" section alone makes that very clear) and ECMA made no effort to correct even the most basic flaws.
The problems with technical details I'll leave to others.
Again, your "most of that has already been fixed by ECMA" is an indictment, not an excuse.
I'd rather have an open source implementation of a microsoft invention then some proprietary binary (like linux flash). If Macromedia decided to open source the flash player, then, sure, I'd favour them:)
Except that Adobe doesn't have a stated strategy of luring their competition into dependence on their technology and then cutting them off.
Flash is multiplatform because Adobe depends on a wide user base. MS formats (think WABI. Think Solaris Internet Explorer) are one-way streets leading to an MS-only world.
However, I'm open to being corrected. Care to name an example where MS put out anything that was really multiplatform?
Sorry I thought OOXML in its current form is licensed under MS OSP
Well, sort of. For instance, any changes made in JTC1/SC34 aren't necessarily covered.
More to the point, only the features required to implement the spec are covered -- and the spec only requires syntax. If you actually implement any of the semantics, you're exposed.
Miguel, the entire ECMA-376 spec is "optional," in the sense that a compliant application only needs to accept the syntax -- the semantics aren't required (and, therefore, are not covered by any of Microsoft's IP "pledges.")
However, the "Scope" for the specification clearly states that its primary purpose is full-fidelity preservation of legacy documents. If so, then those "render this like WordStar1.3" tags are necessary for any application using it to be useful.
So which definition shall we use?
The one where it's possible to write useful ECMA-376 applications, but the spec doesn't document the required functionality and you're naked to Microsoft Legal?
or the one where you're probably safe legally but have an application that doesn't work with the only implementation of ECMA-376 that really matters?
Well, I suppose there's room for opinion on that. For instance, Jim Mason seems to think it's a long way from prime time, just as a specification.
Now, to put this in perspective: Jim Mason (of Oak Ridge National Laboratory) isn't on one side or the other, but has been doing document-format specifications for a looooong time -- he was, I believe, the founding chair of SC34 and had a hand in the creation of SGML. The dude knows documents, he knows standards, and when he writes
the
submitters obviously did not read -- and edit -- this submission into a
consistent whole. If it were coming through the normal ISO process, I'd
say it was in the state of a Working Draft and not yet ready for
registration as a Committee Draft and assignment of a number
I'm inclined to take his word for it than Miguel's.
Downloading from Novell comes with a Microsoft patent license?
I'm sorry, Miguel, but this is getting weirder and weirder. You may be a sierra-hotel coder, but I'm not sure that translates into authority to make legal commitments on behalf of Microsoft.
The Honorable Judge Don Quixote is tilting at windmills here. According to the United States Supreme Court, the ACLU and its clients don't have standing to challenge this law, since they can't prove that they personally were ever the subjects of investigations.
The Government can prevent this kind of challenge by simply declaring that the existence of such NSLs is a State Secret, denying any prospective plaintiffs proof that they have standing. That's exactly what the USSC ruled in the secret-wiretap ruling recently and the Administration is sure to have pointed that out (I don't have a copy of the pleadings here, but given the Administration's fondness for that tactic I can't imagine that they would have missed that one.
Did anybody other then Microsoft have any input on this "standard"?
There really was a committee in ECMA which did the editorial work for Microsoft, but it had a very clear charter to document Microsoft's MSO2K7 file formats. No changes allowed.
Seriously, what's the point of "yes, with comments"?
In a normal standards process, "Yes, with comments" is very valuable. Remember, in a normal standards process everyone is basically on the same team. "Yes, with comments" means that the spec under consideration is "good enough," but that it could be improved by (for instance) clearer wording of a section.
Again, I can't overemphasize that this kind of hardball, take-no-prisoners approach is very much the exception and that ISO (and the national bodies) simply aren't prepared to deal with it. Have a look at the comments of, for instance, the Hungarian government for a taste of how "enlightening" this has all been.
Of course, this is coming up just as mine are all graduating.
In contrast, some schools are charging a premium for those very courses of study on the grounds that since engineers make more money than English lit grads, the former should subsidize the latter. Or something like that.
In any case, he mentions problems with power-saving modes. It is very bad that this doesn't work as any new motherboard should be supported by vista already. But I wonder if going to linux there will make his life simpler, I never even tried, and from what I've heard it is far from easy to get it working satisfactorily.
Well, I've never had a problem with my systems. "Hibernate" goes to swap, that's all folx; close the lid on the Thinkpad and Kubuntu sends her straight to RAM sleep. Open her up and in a blink she's back. It all Just Works.
Yeah, or you could hold your breath until you turn blue and die. THAT will make Bill and Steve sorry, won't it?
Thank you very much, but Linux doesn't need "friends" who use it as a Horrible Fate that they'll threaten to inflict on themselves as a way to get Mommy Microsoft's sympathetic attention.
I think you mean it wouldn't be possible to do cost-effectively.
Cost-effectiveness doesn't enter into it. The process doesn't even get within ICBM range of cost-efficiency calculations, because the organizational DNA of public schools is based on production-line methods. Production lines work only by using uniform methods to process uniform uniform materials into uniform products, and "individual variation" is outside of the paradigm. Anything too far "out of spec" is defective, and at best is routed to a scrap recovery process ("special education.")
Someday we might get to the point of asking about cost-effective methods of education, but to even ask the question a huge number of other reforms will have to happen first.
I was one of the "beneficiaries" of the 1950s-1960s "Sputnik" educational reforms.
Then, like today, it was much easier for schools to keep classes uniform by holding bright kids back so that more effort could be spent on the "slow" ones. Uniformity is the goal, and it's a lot easier to dumb down smart kids than the other way 'round.
Oh, and here's a clue: if you offer bonuses for teachers of math and science, the teachers with the most seniority (regardless of whether they can add) will teach those classes. My kids had a math PhD teaching music, but she couldn't get into the math program against the ed majors who ran the system.
Slashdot Mirror
Get over it.
Being exposed raises some serious issues regarding the future employability of the "exposed" developers.
Now I think I'll go back to dozing on the porch.
MSOffice doesn't run on the operating system, it runs the operating system.
It looks like someone managed an off-by-one error in it, with this as the result. Well, it's not like anyone uses Excel where errors could have serious consequences, right?
Hey, a new space race sounds like a great way to drive up the market price of engineers and industrial product, with both the US and Chinese space programs trying to outbid each other for the same Chinese technical staff and factories.
MS? The world will be a better place if they push this to the max and beyond.
You open every meeting with a statement of the organization's patent policy. You make participation contingent on agreement with the policy, which includes an affirmative obligation to identify any known blocking IP. When a submission comes from a company, you require a binding letter from the company covering all IP they have covering that submission. You do this for every single point in the draft specification. Anything that doesn't get IP clearance doesn't make it into the draft.
Microsoft could have simply issued a blanket IP clearance for ECMA-376 as passed. Any additions after that point might not be covered, but anything sticking to ECMA-376 as submitted would have been. That's a very common industry practice; in a normal standards body that would have been required. They didn't. Now, I'm a believer in the law of intended consequences, which is similar to "intention" in common law: when a rational party goes out of their way to do something that has predictable consequences, it's reasonable to conclude that they intended those consequences.
Microsoft (and Microsoft Legal) isn't run by idiots. Logic follows.
- You mentioned that "things" were being taken care of; you did not (in any of your posts here, and I read them all) specify that the scoping was one of them
- You're pulling the classical "I have secret knowledge that proves that I'm right" rhetorical trick. Point me to the revised spec and we can talk.
- You've practically proven, all by yourself, that DIS-29500 isn't at the level of committee draft, much less final ISO submission. One of the basic responsibilities of a technical committee (see, for instance, JEDEC JM-21L) is clearly defining the requirements for conformance and clearing legal rights for those requirements. According to you, that hasn't been done and here we are at the ISO final vote stage. ECMA-376 needs to go back to committee until it's actually ready for prime time.
As a standards maven, I've read the controlling portions (I'm not planning to implement it, so any controlling language hidden in footnotes missed me. As they should.) I'll point out that "optional" has a predefined meaning in standards literature, much as "scope," "shall," "may," and other words that are no more subject to local redefinition than any other legal term. Apparently, the drafters of ECMA-376 had never done any standards work before (the "Scope" section alone makes that very clear) and ECMA made no effort to correct even the most basic flaws.The problems with technical details I'll leave to others.
Again, your "most of that has already been fixed by ECMA" is an indictment, not an excuse.
Flash is multiplatform because Adobe depends on a wide user base. MS formats (think WABI. Think Solaris Internet Explorer) are one-way streets leading to an MS-only world.
However, I'm open to being corrected. Care to name an example where MS put out anything that was really multiplatform?
More to the point, only the features required to implement the spec are covered -- and the spec only requires syntax. If you actually implement any of the semantics, you're exposed.
However, the "Scope" for the specification clearly states that its primary purpose is full-fidelity preservation of legacy documents. If so, then those "render this like WordStar1.3" tags are necessary for any application using it to be useful.
So which definition shall we use?
Now, to put this in perspective: Jim Mason (of Oak Ridge National Laboratory) isn't on one side or the other, but has been doing document-format specifications for a looooong time -- he was, I believe, the founding chair of SC34 and had a hand in the creation of SGML. The dude knows documents, he knows standards, and when he writes
I'm inclined to take his word for it than Miguel's.I'm sorry, Miguel, but this is getting weirder and weirder. You may be a sierra-hotel coder, but I'm not sure that translates into authority to make legal commitments on behalf of Microsoft.
The Government can prevent this kind of challenge by simply declaring that the existence of such NSLs is a State Secret, denying any prospective plaintiffs proof that they have standing. That's exactly what the USSC ruled in the secret-wiretap ruling recently and the Administration is sure to have pointed that out (I don't have a copy of the pleadings here, but given the Administration's fondness for that tactic I can't imagine that they would have missed that one.
Again, I can't overemphasize that this kind of hardball, take-no-prisoners approach is very much the exception and that ISO (and the national bodies) simply aren't prepared to deal with it. Have a look at the comments of, for instance, the Hungarian government for a taste of how "enlightening" this has all been.
Hmmm -- nope. Nothing.
Thank you very much, but Linux doesn't need "friends" who use it as a Horrible Fate that they'll threaten to inflict on themselves as a way to get Mommy Microsoft's sympathetic attention.
Someday we might get to the point of asking about cost-effective methods of education, but to even ask the question a huge number of other reforms will have to happen first.
More to the point, it would mean treating students as individuals and that would totally screw up the system.
Then, like today, it was much easier for schools to keep classes uniform by holding bright kids back so that more effort could be spent on the "slow" ones. Uniformity is the goal, and it's a lot easier to dumb down smart kids than the other way 'round.
Oh, and here's a clue: if you offer bonuses for teachers of math and science, the teachers with the most seniority (regardless of whether they can add) will teach those classes. My kids had a math PhD teaching music, but she couldn't get into the math program against the ed majors who ran the system.