You can hardly call it a standard when only one company controls it and it's not consistent with itself over time. Users really do hate that kind of thing and OOXML is never going to gain real use. Nine months after the release of Vista, ODF is still more used. M$'s made a huge blunder trying to pretend they are all the good things free software is while pushing a massive forced format change over. They have given all of their customers a reason to shop and recommended their competitors - that is, anyone else in the world. The rest of the world is united in their support of a real standard and it's going to win.
The defang you are looking for has been provided by the free software community. Unlike the worms themselves, user and vendor action are required for this to work and it's completely legal. Vendor support is growing every day because everyone now realizes the root cause is a costly software monoculture. IBM, HP and Dell now all sell gnu/linux to desktop users. With a little bit of advertising the problem will go away soon.
Fifteen minutes could save you fifteen percent or more on your operational cost.
Dropping the number of computers needed to do a job by an order of magnitude will save you more than 15%. The time spent nursing sick servers is better spent making new product for more revenue.
When you are big enough, 15% is a big deal. Walmart, for example, has more revenue than any company besides Exxon, but is only able to keep 3% of it. If they were able to drop their costs by 15%, they would have proffits five times M$'s.
To make up the difference, M$ would have to give them the software, pay the electric bill and donate engineering time for custom applications. If you read the article, you will see that the company dropped from at least 60 servers to 15. I say at least, because the only count they give of how much hardware they were using is the 50 or 60 that "were giving them trouble." It's clear that time spent nursing that mess was better spent moving to software that works better and allows easier customization. Their continued good results with other software proves their competence as well as the poor quality of what they were using before. Quality that poor is a bad deal unless it's heavily subsidized, so your imagined extortion can only work for a few prominent customers. When that does work, the rest of the customers will pay that much more to keep M$'s profit to revenue ratio at 35%.
Web 2.0^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Windows is a bloated, risky, pointless waste of time, money, bandwidth, and electricity. Or at least that is my opinion.... opinions are not trolls or flamebait. Please don't mod me down because I'm testy, you don't agree, or you think I am being "stuck up". Reply instead.
IT departments actually know how complicated, messy, potentially insecure and how awful support of such "projects" are going to be.
The same people still chasing their tails making Windoze work on hundreds of desktops? No, they would never want anything messy, insecure or awful to support.
tech-types don't usually give into the hype about things like Web 2.0 that columnists, marketers and your usual assortment of weirdos do.
Once again, we are talking about the same people who bought into Windoze when there were better alternatives. It's true that bigger companies were slow to move but following fads slowly is not wisdom, it's retardation.
What, the same people who put Windoze on desktops and increasingly into the server room don't like Wikis and other very cool free programs? Shocker. There are plenty of exceptions, like the CIA, but Windows inertia is a good part of this problem and established IT departments are something that have to be circumvented to get things done. The solution is radical removal of the problem. Doing that removes all sorts of networking problems and frees up staff for productive use. It's sad that users have to push this kind of change onto the IT departments instead of the other way around.
In the free software world, one owner is as good as any other. If the software is free, it has no owners and the company location does not matter. There is nothing to own but your effort, so there is nothing to "give away".
Foreign owners hiring US workers is the ultimate irony for jingoistic tools who sold their freedom to M$ and others to benefit the "US information economy". If you want US dominance based on merit, you should advocate free software. If you want US dominance at any cost, your persuit of non free software was a mistake. Either way, non free was a loser. Laws like the DMCA have harmed the ability of the US to compete in the world market. They benefited those who grew outside their influence and they will be used by them now that they are big enough. Justice only comes from freedom. Benefits gained outside of freedom don't last long and restrictions will always be turned against you.
thankfully, we still have a great service industry, lots of restaurants, etc. That'll keep us safe in times of financial/world troubles.
That's sarcasm, I hope. Burger flipping will not tide us through the next depression. If the US is to remain wealthy, it needs an industrial base and things to trade things that people want. At the rate things are going, China and India will have superior weapons to match their overwhelming manpower and we won't even be able to bully things people won't trade freely. That would not be so bad if China was a free country, but it's not and our inability to defend ourselves will be the end of our freedom.
If it's eavesdropping on the signals sent to your larynx, does that mean that you can't talk and drive at the same time?
It means your subvocalizations can be eavesdropped. There's a world of abuse that can come of that which should be outlawed before abuse becomes practical. If you thought it was creepy that TIA was scanning your web browsing, email and phone conversations, just wait till they can parse thoughts you don't even know you had.
This is one of the best stories I've seen on Slashdot in months. Actual facts always trump FUD and jumping to conclusions.
In the end, the study shows a correlation between corruption in a country and a country's approval of OOXML. That's interesting, but there are more direct and useful studies and actions. Those places that voted "yes" should be embarrassed, not because "yes" was wrong, not because there's a statistical correlation between "yes" and corruption.
It was easier to study OOXML and condemn it with facts directly. Plenty of people did this and published it. Those studdies point to places where the standard was woefully incomplete, contradictory and impossible to implement in a reasonable way.
It was also easier to prove real corruption where it occurred. Vote buying and stacking was proved at all levels.
Finally, it's better to spend time on a remedy than it is on interesting studdies. OOXML was rejected, but further action is required. M$ should be punished for their corrupt practices even though they failed. ISO needs to protect itself from that kind of behavior or it will lose public confidence. M$ was blatant this time, perhaps because they would like to destroy ISO itself. Next time, they might not be so obvious but should not be given the chance. Usually, when you prove malice like that you don't get another chance to screw things up. Those who took bribes should be banned forever and M$ should not be allowed to participate in new standards for years. Their participation in the future should be dependent on all people responsible being replaced.
If we abandon truth, we have nothing left to believe and no reason to bother. It is better to substitute a simple truth than a juicy lie.
OOXML sucks big time! It's just a repackaged DOC format!
It would be better to point out that OOXML is no better than DOC, or more directly that the purpose of DOC and OOXML is vendor lock in. Simplified: M$ is an abusive monopoly that wastes your time and money without care. Formats like DOC and OOXML are examples.
"Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden hated each other and would have killed each other if they could."
That might be actually be true but it's more direct to say, "George Bush is a liar." This last truth goes to the heart of why you don't want to be a liar.
If nothing else, the error message about "inappropriate language" is news. It's bad enough that xbox would restrict normal behavior, but M$ make it worse by not explaining why. It made me laugh.
If it is a Trademark thing, it must take forever to get a screen name. Next time you are in a grocery store, just look at all of the names for tampons. It's hard to imagine the size of the database they will have to parse though and that's before you get to L337 stuff like T4mpax or V46ici11
the excuse of using technology because "it's just easier this way" has in fact lead to atrocities that will be remembered for a thousand years.
Yes, it's now a "you are with us or against us" deal, where those who object will be economically marginalized and then eliminated. The goal is power and those pushing for RFID use already have too much of it. Surgical implants represent a low point of depravity, but the same ends can be had through "easier" inventory control and RealID. If you want to get scared, consider the prison camps now set up in all 50 states for "immigration control."
it's about sovereignty of ones body. If it is forbidden on "privacy" grounds, then the privacy grounds can be addressed...
I'll keep my body and my privacy, thank you. The privacy nullification of individual marking tags for clothes and credit cards is just as great as any other tag and that needs to be addressed. There's no good reason to treat everyone like a convicted felon and the practice should be outlawed.
my respect for and general goodwill toward the ISO process has been fairly well shaken.... respect and admiration that I had for international standards bodies must now be earned.
That would be an unqualified win for M$, but we can do better than that by fixing the process. The corrections that have taken place in Sweeden, Norway and Hungary have started the process. The completion of that process is censoring OOXML, the tactics used and M$ itself. They have acted with malice and should be banned from participation.
To not punish this kind of behavior would be to treat M$ more than fairly and everyone else less than fairly. M$ needs to be fined and banned from participation for a few years.
Seriously, what's the point of "yes, with comments"? I mean, if the standard is endorsed, what are the odds that the comments will be addressed?
It means the standard is workable but could be improved the way you noticed. Outside of Redmond, people engage in constructive criticism and mean mostly mean well.
The adversarial tone above is the worst damage that M$ has done to ISO. Standards are agreements meant to reduce duplication of work and friction between people, not a way to lock people into buying your crap. Real standards, like ODF are created by groups representing many interested parties. They are complete and easily implemented by others, and exceptions are always documented. OOXML, on the other hand, is incomplete, contradictory, patent protected and will remain single vendor. It's presentation was an affront. The gamesmenship was worse. If it that kind behavior is tollerated and encouraged, there will be no standards for anything. But this attack has been coming for ten years. As they put it themselves,
OSS projects have been able to gain a foothold in many server applications because of the wide utility of highly commoditized, simple protocols. By extending these protocols and developing new protocols, we can deny OSS projects entry into the market.
M$'s true intentions and use of standards is everything standards are supposed to avoid. This fact has been drug up in court several times.
ISO should punish those who took bribe as well as those who offered them. M$ should be banned from participation for a good long time or they will succeed in their destruction of real standards.
This brings us one step further to losing your right to read. All they need to do is fill it with non free textbooks and tell you not to share them. If there's something everyone needs, you don't need to put it in a locker. A private space for students and computer access would be nice, but not if it's just another tool of control. Requiring the use of non free software is just the first part of that control and it's funny that one of the reasons given was the lack of reliability of the old non free software. The web already offers ways to share calendars, movies and the rest outside the control of the school.
So, if it's human error that caused the problem, how can the swear that it won't happen again? Will there be no more humans working at microsoft anymore?
Ah, you must have stumbled on M$'s new "mind control" input. This is a secret project which will replace keyboards and other awkward input devices. It senses the will of the user and implements it. The first tool to use it, of course, is M$'s software build system and the harness has been placed on Bill Gate's head. The resulting software has not gotten out of regression testing because it mostly does wire transfers without asking the user.
Everyone reading this post is guilty of stealing trade secrets and will be fined accordingly.
Of course not, barring certain irrational people who're more interested in jumping up on soap boxes and screaming incoherently, the majority could probably give a shit about this issue as the CORRECT way to proceed with licensing is pretty much cut and dried.
Those would be the people to ignore and keep a watch on. There is something strange and wrong about controversy where there should be none.
the authors chose to release their code under BSD. About the only thing they want is for their attribution to remain intact. Granted, it's damn near impossible to prove in a proprietary, binaried product, but if the source is available... How can you expect people to respect your rights under the licenses YOU choose to release code under if you don't respect the rights of others with THEIR licensing requirements?
Therein is the fundamental difference between a free copyright and a free copyleft license and it highlights the strangeness of the complaint. The additional rights the gpl adds to the code are trivial modifications compared to the rights stripped out by commercial users of BSD. No one in the free software would is going to remove other people's copyright notices and attribution. Non free software companies, on the other hand, strip everything when they wrap up the code into binaries and may never provide the first line of code back. The GPL requires users to provide modifications but dual licensed code may not. Because the licenses express different intents, they can never really be used together.
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You can hardly call it a standard when only one company controls it and it's not consistent with itself over time. Users really do hate that kind of thing and OOXML is never going to gain real use. Nine months after the release of Vista, ODF is still more used. M$'s made a huge blunder trying to pretend they are all the good things free software is while pushing a massive forced format change over. They have given all of their customers a reason to shop and recommended their competitors - that is, anyone else in the world. The rest of the world is united in their support of a real standard and it's going to win.
The defang you are looking for has been provided by the free software community. Unlike the worms themselves, user and vendor action are required for this to work and it's completely legal. Vendor support is growing every day because everyone now realizes the root cause is a costly software monoculture. IBM, HP and Dell now all sell gnu/linux to desktop users. With a little bit of advertising the problem will go away soon.
It's *management* that chooses the OSes cause that's what THEY are used to. ... The IT department is simply stuck having to deal with all the pain.
It's sorry management that makes IT decisions without regard to the expert opinion they pay for.
Fifteen minutes could save you fifteen percent or more on your operational cost.
Dropping the number of computers needed to do a job by an order of magnitude will save you more than 15%. The time spent nursing sick servers is better spent making new product for more revenue.
When you are big enough, 15% is a big deal. Walmart, for example, has more revenue than any company besides Exxon, but is only able to keep 3% of it. If they were able to drop their costs by 15%, they would have proffits five times M$'s.
To make up the difference, M$ would have to give them the software, pay the electric bill and donate engineering time for custom applications. If you read the article, you will see that the company dropped from at least 60 servers to 15. I say at least, because the only count they give of how much hardware they were using is the 50 or 60 that "were giving them trouble." It's clear that time spent nursing that mess was better spent moving to software that works better and allows easier customization. Their continued good results with other software proves their competence as well as the poor quality of what they were using before. Quality that poor is a bad deal unless it's heavily subsidized, so your imagined extortion can only work for a few prominent customers. When that does work, the rest of the customers will pay that much more to keep M$'s profit to revenue ratio at 35%.
Are you happy with my testy reply?
IT departments actually know how complicated, messy, potentially insecure and how awful support of such "projects" are going to be.
The same people still chasing their tails making Windoze work on hundreds of desktops? No, they would never want anything messy, insecure or awful to support.
tech-types don't usually give into the hype about things like Web 2.0 that columnists, marketers and your usual assortment of weirdos do.
Once again, we are talking about the same people who bought into Windoze when there were better alternatives. It's true that bigger companies were slow to move but following fads slowly is not wisdom, it's retardation.
What, the same people who put Windoze on desktops and increasingly into the server room don't like Wikis and other very cool free programs? Shocker. There are plenty of exceptions, like the CIA, but Windows inertia is a good part of this problem and established IT departments are something that have to be circumvented to get things done. The solution is radical removal of the problem. Doing that removes all sorts of networking problems and frees up staff for productive use. It's sad that users have to push this kind of change onto the IT departments instead of the other way around.
In the free software world, one owner is as good as any other. If the software is free, it has no owners and the company location does not matter. There is nothing to own but your effort, so there is nothing to "give away".
Foreign owners hiring US workers is the ultimate irony for jingoistic tools who sold their freedom to M$ and others to benefit the "US information economy". If you want US dominance based on merit, you should advocate free software. If you want US dominance at any cost, your persuit of non free software was a mistake. Either way, non free was a loser. Laws like the DMCA have harmed the ability of the US to compete in the world market. They benefited those who grew outside their influence and they will be used by them now that they are big enough. Justice only comes from freedom. Benefits gained outside of freedom don't last long and restrictions will always be turned against you.
thankfully, we still have a great service industry, lots of restaurants, etc. That'll keep us safe in times of financial/world troubles.
That's sarcasm, I hope. Burger flipping will not tide us through the next depression. If the US is to remain wealthy, it needs an industrial base and things to trade things that people want. At the rate things are going, China and India will have superior weapons to match their overwhelming manpower and we won't even be able to bully things people won't trade freely. That would not be so bad if China was a free country, but it's not and our inability to defend ourselves will be the end of our freedom.
If it's eavesdropping on the signals sent to your larynx, does that mean that you can't talk and drive at the same time?
It means your subvocalizations can be eavesdropped. There's a world of abuse that can come of that which should be outlawed before abuse becomes practical. If you thought it was creepy that TIA was scanning your web browsing, email and phone conversations, just wait till they can parse thoughts you don't even know you had.
Fry's gets a Vas[tech]ectomy.
[me]This last truth goes to the heart of why you don't want to be a liar. --- [AC]Because you don't want to end up as president of USA?
Because reputation and credibility come from actions, not office or wealth.
This is one of the best stories I've seen on Slashdot in months. Actual facts always trump FUD and jumping to conclusions.
In the end, the study shows a correlation between corruption in a country and a country's approval of OOXML. That's interesting, but there are more direct and useful studies and actions. Those places that voted "yes" should be embarrassed, not because "yes" was wrong, not because there's a statistical correlation between "yes" and corruption.
It was easier to study OOXML and condemn it with facts directly. Plenty of people did this and published it. Those studdies point to places where the standard was woefully incomplete, contradictory and impossible to implement in a reasonable way.
It was also easier to prove real corruption where it occurred. Vote buying and stacking was proved at all levels.
Finally, it's better to spend time on a remedy than it is on interesting studdies. OOXML was rejected, but further action is required. M$ should be punished for their corrupt practices even though they failed. ISO needs to protect itself from that kind of behavior or it will lose public confidence. M$ was blatant this time, perhaps because they would like to destroy ISO itself. Next time, they might not be so obvious but should not be given the chance. Usually, when you prove malice like that you don't get another chance to screw things up. Those who took bribes should be banned forever and M$ should not be allowed to participate in new standards for years. Their participation in the future should be dependent on all people responsible being replaced.
If we abandon truth, we have nothing left to believe and no reason to bother. It is better to substitute a simple truth than a juicy lie.
OOXML sucks big time! It's just a repackaged DOC format!
It would be better to point out that OOXML is no better than DOC, or more directly that the purpose of DOC and OOXML is vendor lock in. Simplified: M$ is an abusive monopoly that wastes your time and money without care. Formats like DOC and OOXML are examples.
"Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden hated each other and would have killed each other if they could."
That might be actually be true but it's more direct to say, "George Bush is a liar." This last truth goes to the heart of why you don't want to be a liar.
Palm needs a new OS. Palm OS is looking so long in the tooth it's ridiculous.
So, what OS would you propose if it's not the one they just developed for Folio or Palm or the me too Windoze mobile?
If nothing else, the error message about "inappropriate language" is news. It's bad enough that xbox would restrict normal behavior, but M$ make it worse by not explaining why. It made me laugh.
If it is a Trademark thing, it must take forever to get a screen name. Next time you are in a grocery store, just look at all of the names for tampons. It's hard to imagine the size of the database they will have to parse though and that's before you get to L337 stuff like T4mpax or V46ici11
DIY.
the excuse of using technology because "it's just easier this way" has in fact lead to atrocities that will be remembered for a thousand years.
Yes, it's now a "you are with us or against us" deal, where those who object will be economically marginalized and then eliminated. The goal is power and those pushing for RFID use already have too much of it. Surgical implants represent a low point of depravity, but the same ends can be had through "easier" inventory control and RealID. If you want to get scared, consider the prison camps now set up in all 50 states for "immigration control."
it's about sovereignty of ones body. If it is forbidden on "privacy" grounds, then the privacy grounds can be addressed ...
I'll keep my body and my privacy, thank you. The privacy nullification of individual marking tags for clothes and credit cards is just as great as any other tag and that needs to be addressed. There's no good reason to treat everyone like a convicted felon and the practice should be outlawed.
my respect for and general goodwill toward the ISO process has been fairly well shaken. ... respect and admiration that I had for international standards bodies must now be earned.
That would be an unqualified win for M$, but we can do better than that by fixing the process. The corrections that have taken place in Sweeden, Norway and Hungary have started the process. The completion of that process is censoring OOXML, the tactics used and M$ itself. They have acted with malice and should be banned from participation.
To not punish this kind of behavior would be to treat M$ more than fairly and everyone else less than fairly. M$ needs to be fined and banned from participation for a few years.
Seriously, what's the point of "yes, with comments"? I mean, if the standard is endorsed, what are the odds that the comments will be addressed?
It means the standard is workable but could be improved the way you noticed. Outside of Redmond, people engage in constructive criticism and mean mostly mean well.
The adversarial tone above is the worst damage that M$ has done to ISO. Standards are agreements meant to reduce duplication of work and friction between people, not a way to lock people into buying your crap. Real standards, like ODF are created by groups representing many interested parties. They are complete and easily implemented by others, and exceptions are always documented. OOXML, on the other hand, is incomplete, contradictory, patent protected and will remain single vendor. It's presentation was an affront. The gamesmenship was worse. If it that kind behavior is tollerated and encouraged, there will be no standards for anything. But this attack has been coming for ten years. As they put it themselves,
M$'s true intentions and use of standards is everything standards are supposed to avoid. This fact has been drug up in court several times.
ISO should punish those who took bribe as well as those who offered them. M$ should be banned from participation for a good long time or they will succeed in their destruction of real standards.
This brings us one step further to losing your right to read. All they need to do is fill it with non free textbooks and tell you not to share them. If there's something everyone needs, you don't need to put it in a locker. A private space for students and computer access would be nice, but not if it's just another tool of control. Requiring the use of non free software is just the first part of that control and it's funny that one of the reasons given was the lack of reliability of the old non free software. The web already offers ways to share calendars, movies and the rest outside the control of the school.
So, if it's human error that caused the problem, how can the swear that it won't happen again? Will there be no more humans working at microsoft anymore?
Ah, you must have stumbled on M$'s new "mind control" input. This is a secret project which will replace keyboards and other awkward input devices. It senses the will of the user and implements it. The first tool to use it, of course, is M$'s software build system and the harness has been placed on Bill Gate's head. The resulting software has not gotten out of regression testing because it mostly does wire transfers without asking the user.
Everyone reading this post is guilty of stealing trade secrets and will be fined accordingly.
Those would be the people to ignore and keep a watch on. There is something strange and wrong about controversy where there should be none.
Therein is the fundamental difference between a free copyright and a free copyleft license and it highlights the strangeness of the complaint. The additional rights the gpl adds to the code are trivial modifications compared to the rights stripped out by commercial users of BSD. No one in the free software would is going to remove other people's copyright notices and attribution. Non free software companies, on the other hand, strip everything when they wrap up the code into binaries and may never provide the first line of code back. The GPL requires users to provide modifications but dual licensed code may not. Because the licenses express different intents, they can never really be used together.