If you're a Microsoft dev, you might know: have they already sacked your colleague, the (i'm making this up)
"single disgruntled employee who singlehandedly and without authorization from his/her manager bribed the national bureaux of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Congo, Costa Rica, Côte-d'Ivoire, Croatia, Cuba (Cuba? they're not even allowed to buy Microsoft products!), Cyprus, Egypt, Fiji, Jamaica, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Lebanon, Morocco, Kuwait, Nigeria, Pakistan, Panama, Qatar, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Sri Lanka, Syria, Tanzania, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan,
(take deep breath)
Austria, Bulgaria, Colombia, Germany (shame on you, DIN), Ghana, Greece, Kenya, Malta, Poland (only half of the committee(s)), Portugal, Singapore, Switzerland, Tunisia, Turkey, Uruguay, USA, Venezuela (wait 'till someone tells Chávez this),
(remember to breathe)
and thwarted into abstinence the votes of a.o. Malaysia, the Netherlands and Sweden",
yet? (verb at beginning of sentence)
Let's all thank the 1 country above quotum that voted no, otherwise this would have destroyed the credibility of ISO, IMHO.
Thank you VERY much,
Brazil, Canada, China, Denmark, Czech Republic, Ecuador, France, India, Iran, Ireland, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, Norway, Philippines, South Africa, Thailand, United Kingdom. I don't have money but you have my respect.
I don't know anything about DHCP (and it beats me why you've got downmodded to 0) but in case the linux-side DHCP server didn't understand the packets, couldn't it send some kind of error, indicating that the MS client would have to try a simpler version of the protocol? I.e. I'd imagine in handshake protocols, some kind of acceptable middle ground is negotiated, and there is always a "bottom line" protocol described in the appropriate RFC which both sides HAVE to agree to otherwise they don't (both) speak the protocol at all.
The second half of your post (the rant) rather nicely describes the file format of ODF, IMHO.
If you don't believe me, try to unzip one. Preferably with pictures (odp) or spreadsheet cells (ods). If you're on MS Windows and winzip refuses to unzip it, try another unzip program.
I'm not sure about your "+ javascript", though; what would be the added benefit of that? I don't find javascript such a well-specified language (yes I'm aware that ECMAscript exists, but still).
This is Kali-Microsoft: with those ehrm. "hip ornaments" depicting the various national bureaux that are now voting "abstain" (see? they've lost their "voice". very nice semiotics there.),
and the body on the floor symbolizing the international standardization process being lightly danced upon.
Can we change the old Bill-gates-borg icon with this one, now? please?
Lordi was certainly entertaining, but c'mon... that Moldovan song with the drumming granny wasn't bad! I wish they'd have won.
On another note, how did we get from "the international standards process is severely ill" to "why Lordi won the Eurovision contest"?
Oh yes.... via the argument "don't worry if the international standards process is broken, the eurovision song contest is also broken, get used to it".
I don't like that analogy. Or that pattern of discussion. Grmbl.
Yes, I think PP is right, that the normal ISO process is that the body (ECMA in this case) which presents the proposed standard has already studied it for years and vetted it thoroughly, so therefore the *normal* case is unanimous approval, sometimes with comments; "no" vote with comments means approval but only after the comments have been solved; and "abstention" means that your country doesn't have a clue and leaves it to the others.
On a national scale, it depends on each country how they decided to do the voting process: from "there are not enough chairs in this room so you must stay outside" via "my wife is a lawyer and she says it's safe" to "sure you can come in on the last week, pay, and get to vote without us vetting whether you've even read the standard". It's almost as if national bureau members are real people who don't know how to react when a violent drunk suddenly shows up at the birthday party and starts pissing in the bowl of crisps:-)
I am not at all involved in any of this, but I'd be very angry if: I was a legit member of such a committee, wrestled through the 6000 pages for 5 months, carefully writing down my comments, and then it's all invalidated because Microsoft votes "yes", vetoing the other 5? members vote "no with comments", so according to dutch rules it's a "we're not in consensus so we'll have to officially shut up about it and tell ISO that we the dutch don't have anything to say about document production standards":
On August 16th 2007 the final meeting of NEN NC 381034 "Behandeling en uitwisseling van tekst", the Netherlands' mirror committee of ISO/JTC 1 SC 34 resulted in an "abstain without comments" which places the Netherlands outside of the remainder of the DIS 29500 process.
On the other hand, there's a press release from one of the parties (who presumably voted "no with comments" because all parties except Microsoft did): isoc.nl statement which paints a much more negative picture.
I think the outcome "abstain without comments" is ridiculous for a highly industrialized country with a corresponding large production of documents.
We don't want an immature document standard, thank you very much. We have a working standard already. Just use ODF, and if it needs to be expanded (e.g. to incorporate elements of Chinese UOF), then fine.
OK, keep that thought, ODF advocates lobby governments to mandate ODF exclusively. Agreed.
Now consider what happens next:
Microsoft issues a press release saying, grudgingly, they'll have full 100% read/write compatibility with ODF in Microsoft Office 2007 1/2 within 3 weeks, so that governments and private customers can keep on using Microsoft Office indefinitely.
What's your problem with ODF being the sole ISO standard, now? If all word-processor companies can boast "100% compatible with ODF" and speak the truth?
Or are you saying Microsoft is incapable of allocating the people/time/money to implement a 700 page standard (as opposed to their own 6000 page standard)? In fact there are already several plug-ins with which this can be done (one commisioned by Microsoft from may 2007 which apparently is unusable and one by Sun which apparently works).
The point is, and I think it's a very important point, if ODF is mandated nobody loses (not even Microsoft; I don't believe *everyone* will drop Microsoft Office and switch to different word processors immediately; do you?). But if OOXML is mandated, the whole world ex. Microsoft loses. Government-sanctioned vendor-lock-in to a 3x convicted monopoly-abuser, what an enticing concept!
In the case of Microsoft, they thought of that too: there are many different implementations! From Microsoft, Novell, Xandros, Linspire..:-)
I'm surprised SCO isn't busy writing a word processor yet.
So I'd change
from distinct vendors
to "from distinct independent vendors", if I were you.
ODF leaves an astonishing amount as implementation-defined, including most of spreadsheets.
Reference?
Microsoft could easily make Office read and write ODF 100% following the standard, and have horrible interoperability with OpenOffice, simply by not recognize OpenOffice's non-standard elements.
Microsoft is a long-term member of OASIS. They were invited to join the OpenDocument TC. They were even urged to do it by the European Commission.
They declined. If, as you say, it would have been easy for them to wiggle their "embrace extend extinguish" technique into the cracks between ODF and the actual file format of OpenOffice, then WHY DIDN'T THEY DO THAT?
And, also, why did they refuse to extend ODF to incorporate those precious (formalized / parameterized) AutoSpaceLikeWord95 features, which would have been a PITA for their competition to implement? Now they are actually whining that ODF isn't "feature-complete" enough for them so they had to invent OOXML.
I think any comment that ODF would be deficient as the default file format for Microsoft Office is FUD until you can provide examples.
There are lots of detailed examples that OOXML is crap (see the commentary of those national bureaus that weren't silenced or corrupted), the ODF spec is approx 10% as many pages as OOXML, surely you can come up with *some* examples where it is deficient? Otherwise all you do is spreading Microsoft's FUD.
You mentioned spreadsheets: please enlighten us with your comments. Is it about par. 8.1.3 p. 189,
Formulas allow calculations to be performed within table cells. Every formula should begin with a namespace prefix specifying the syntax and semantics used within the formula.
?
Agreed, that's under-specified and would benefit from a future clarification, such as OpenFormula.
But it's not wrong, unlike the "dates start at either 1900 or 1904 i forget which but at least 1900 is a leap year from now on" crap from OOXML (part 4, par. 3.17.4.1, p. 2522, if you don't believe me -- I almost fell of my chair when I read that paragraph).
THAT is what those companies and national bureaux voted for, to make that an international standard. They should be ashamed.
Aren't you confusing the hedonistic, pleasure part with the materialistic part? They are completely different issues, you know. Compare e.g. the behaviour of the "tub-boy", cosmopolite, and inventor of Cynicism, Diogenes who didn't "engage in materialistic pleasures" but from what is written about him might be quite interested in porn nevertheless;-).
Interesting. So do you see God as a process, or as a goal?
AFAIK the latter was kind of the idea of Teilhard de Chardin (catholic), that ultimately, the fate of humankind if it managed to "grow up" would be to join the mind of God (reminds me of "Childhood's end" by Arthur C. Clarke btw).
However to see God as a process instead of a goal seems to imply a much more tangible, contemporary connection between us clods and God (God as the process of expanding our Monkeysphere?), as opposed to some kind of teleological finality which we don't yet have to understand as long as we make sure we produce offspring that follows one of the roads that lead to it.
For legacy reasons, an implementation using the 1900 date base system shall treat 1900 as though it was a leap year.
Legacy reasons?? In a new document format standard?
Basically they are saying that although the Gregorian calendar says 1900 is NOT a leap year, from now on it should be, otherwise a certain program's spreadsheet data wouldn't be correct anymore because one programmer screwed up getting the dates right in said legacy program, many years ago.
Never mind that the world didn't start in 1900 (dates before either 1900 or 1904 are NOT IMPLEMENTED)
Never mind bothering to implement other calendars (Islamic, Chinese etc.) which might be of interest in large parts of the world.
WHY didn't they just use ISO 8601, like ODF did?
Speaking of ODF, this is what they put in par. 14.7.11 (p. 523) if you don't believe me:
The attribute may have the values gregorian, gengou, ROC, hanja_yoil, hanja, hijri, jewish, buddhist or an arbitrary string value. If this attribute is not specified, the default calendar system is used.
So basically, my gripe with OOXML is not that it's legally unclear, or not open enough, it's that it's clearly not written to be A STANDARD.
Think with me pls:
If the OASIS people overlooked an important calendar/date problem, and there is consensus, it can be added in the next version of the standard.
All existing ODF documents are safe.
vs.
If the ECMA/Microsoft people decide one day to correct this bogus "1900 should from now on be a leap year" feature, all OOXML text documents that contain dates will have to be checked, and the ones that turn out to have dates from 1900 have to be corrected.
If you take 15 minutes of your time, download the two standards documents for ODF and OOXML (OK depending on download speed a bit longer than 15 minutes for the latter) and browse through them quickly, glancing at the topics and the descriptions a bit, maybe reading a paragraph or 3 in depth, then you would have spent less time than you needed to write your long post and you wouldn't have to write "i am not a document expert" because you'd know about as much about both ODF and OOXML as the average slashdotter:-)
IIRC, not normally, but if you apply an external magnetic field then yes. See the wikipedia article about NMR for a simple explanation (yes I know it's NMR instead of EPR there, but the general principle's the same). Also IIRC the energy difference is tiny (radio wave type frequency as opposed to, say, light). There was a simple explanation what effect this had on the relative populations of the both spins but I've forgotten it. I thought that it didn't cost a lot of energy under normal operation but I'm sure I once felt a sample tube that had become slightly warm (the probe is quite well shielded from the liquid helium temperature around the magnet coils). I thought EPR could only be done with special molecules (paramagnetic metal salts?).
Thanks for the two examples. I don't know what you mean by "click on the Republican/Democrat topic".
However, to me your examples both combined read like a template "party X did something wrong, but when party Y did something wrong the rabiate slashdot crowd stirred it up into a scandal" whereas I'd say that obviously, BOTH party X and party Y did wrong and should be publically tsk-tsked for those shenanigans. I know a little bit about the USA voting system, that similarly to the UK it tends to reach an equilibrium state of either one or the other part of the "republicrats" winning the election each time, but it's important to know that it DOESN'T have to be that way.
Vote for a third party (almost any third party) that swears to change the constitution to allow multi-party system and you're all set. How much percent does this Nader guy usually get in your elections? Would it be a good option to vote Green Party just for the one-off? Or is it more complicated than that and is it constitutionally difficult to move away from this destructive two-party system? (division of power between executive and the actual States is a bit unclear to me as an outsider).
Slashdot Mirror
"single disgruntled employee who singlehandedly and without authorization from his/her manager bribed the national bureaux of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Congo, Costa Rica, Côte-d'Ivoire, Croatia, Cuba (Cuba? they're not even allowed to buy Microsoft products!), Cyprus, Egypt, Fiji, Jamaica, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Lebanon, Morocco, Kuwait, Nigeria, Pakistan, Panama, Qatar, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Sri Lanka, Syria, Tanzania, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan,
(take deep breath)
Austria, Bulgaria, Colombia, Germany (shame on you, DIN), Ghana, Greece, Kenya, Malta, Poland (only half of the committee(s)), Portugal, Singapore, Switzerland, Tunisia, Turkey, Uruguay, USA, Venezuela (wait 'till someone tells Chávez this),
(remember to breathe)
and thwarted into abstinence the votes of a.o. Malaysia, the Netherlands and Sweden",
yet? (verb at beginning of sentence)
Let's all thank the 1 country above quotum that voted no, otherwise this would have destroyed the credibility of ISO, IMHO.
Thank you VERY much, Brazil, Canada, China, Denmark, Czech Republic, Ecuador, France, India, Iran, Ireland, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, Norway, Philippines, South Africa, Thailand, United Kingdom. I don't have money but you have my respect.
Oh yeah, overseer = epi-skopos. Bishop. OK.
(f) According to the other posts in this thread, all versions of Microsoft OS'es worked fine with unicast (not just optional but DEPRECATED broadcast flag set OFF) except for: MS Windows for Workgroups 3.11a (not 3.11b), MS Windows NT 3.5 (not 3.51), and MS Windows Vista.
seems like a slight regression there.. aren't those other "broadcasting" Windows versions really old?
I don't know anything about DHCP (and it beats me why you've got downmodded to 0) but in case the linux-side DHCP server didn't understand the packets, couldn't it send some kind of error, indicating that the MS client would have to try a simpler version of the protocol? I.e. I'd imagine in handshake protocols, some kind of acceptable middle ground is negotiated, and there is always a "bottom line" protocol described in the appropriate RFC which both sides HAVE to agree to otherwise they don't (both) speak the protocol at all.
Maybe they could have extended RFC 1149 to wooden horses?
The second half of your post (the rant) rather nicely describes the file format of ODF, IMHO.
If you don't believe me, try to unzip one. Preferably with pictures (odp) or spreadsheet cells (ods). If you're on MS Windows and winzip refuses to unzip it, try another unzip program.
I'm not sure about your "+ javascript", though; what would be the added benefit of that? I don't find javascript such a well-specified language (yes I'm aware that ECMAscript exists, but still).
The ODF spec is here btw.
If you're an USian, you might as well sit back and enjoy the show -- your tax money paid for it!
You're mistaking Kali's boyfriend Shiva with her!
This is Kali-Microsoft: with those ehrm. "hip ornaments" depicting the various national bureaux that are now voting "abstain" (see? they've lost their "voice". very nice semiotics there.), and the body on the floor symbolizing the international standardization process being lightly danced upon.
Can we change the old Bill-gates-borg icon with this one, now? please?
On another note, how did we get from "the international standards process is severely ill" to "why Lordi won the Eurovision contest"?
Oh yes.... via the argument "don't worry if the international standards process is broken, the eurovision song contest is also broken, get used to it".
I don't like that analogy. Or that pattern of discussion. Grmbl.
On a national scale, it depends on each country how they decided to do the voting process: from "there are not enough chairs in this room so you must stay outside" via "my wife is a lawyer and she says it's safe" to "sure you can come in on the last week, pay, and get to vote without us vetting whether you've even read the standard". It's almost as if national bureau members are real people who don't know how to react when a violent drunk suddenly shows up at the birthday party and starts pissing in the bowl of crisps :-)
I am not at all involved in any of this, but I'd be very angry if: I was a legit member of such a committee, wrestled through the 6000 pages for 5 months, carefully writing down my comments, and then it's all invalidated because Microsoft votes "yes", vetoing the other 5? members vote "no with comments", so according to dutch rules it's a "we're not in consensus so we'll have to officially shut up about it and tell ISO that we the dutch don't have anything to say about document production standards":
I couldn't find *ANYTHING* about it at first on www.nen.nl which is odd.. however just now I found a press release saying in extremely neutral terms that no consensus could be reached: Nederlandse standpunt bepaald over ratificatie norm 'Office Open XML file formats'On the other hand, there's a press release from one of the parties (who presumably voted "no with comments" because all parties except Microsoft did): isoc.nl statement which paints a much more negative picture.
I think the outcome "abstain without comments" is ridiculous for a highly industrialized country with a corresponding large production of documents. We don't want an immature document standard, thank you very much. We have a working standard already. Just use ODF, and if it needs to be expanded (e.g. to incorporate elements of Chinese UOF), then fine.
Or is this the version Rab C. Nesbitt tells his kids to put them to sleep?
BTW can you do the same to the Gilgamesj epos now?
Now consider what happens next:
Microsoft issues a press release saying, grudgingly, they'll have full 100% read/write compatibility with ODF in Microsoft Office 2007 1/2 within 3 weeks, so that governments and private customers can keep on using Microsoft Office indefinitely.
What's your problem with ODF being the sole ISO standard, now? If all word-processor companies can boast "100% compatible with ODF" and speak the truth?
Or are you saying Microsoft is incapable of allocating the people/time/money to implement a 700 page standard (as opposed to their own 6000 page standard)? In fact there are already several plug-ins with which this can be done (one commisioned by Microsoft from may 2007 which apparently is unusable and one by Sun which apparently works).
The point is, and I think it's a very important point, if ODF is mandated nobody loses (not even Microsoft; I don't believe *everyone* will drop Microsoft Office and switch to different word processors immediately; do you?). But if OOXML is mandated, the whole world ex. Microsoft loses. Government-sanctioned vendor-lock-in to a 3x convicted monopoly-abuser, what an enticing concept!
So I'd change
to "from distinct independent vendors", if I were you.And, also, why did they refuse to extend ODF to incorporate those precious (formalized / parameterized) AutoSpaceLikeWord95 features, which would have been a PITA for their competition to implement? Now they are actually whining that ODF isn't "feature-complete" enough for them so they had to invent OOXML.
I think any comment that ODF would be deficient as the default file format for Microsoft Office is FUD until you can provide examples.
There are lots of detailed examples that OOXML is crap (see the commentary of those national bureaus that weren't silenced or corrupted), the ODF spec is approx 10% as many pages as OOXML, surely you can come up with *some* examples where it is deficient? Otherwise all you do is spreading Microsoft's FUD.
You mentioned spreadsheets: please enlighten us with your comments. Is it about par. 8.1.3 p. 189,
?Agreed, that's under-specified and would benefit from a future clarification, such as OpenFormula.
But it's not wrong, unlike the "dates start at either 1900 or 1904 i forget which but at least 1900 is a leap year from now on" crap from OOXML (part 4, par. 3.17.4.1, p. 2522, if you don't believe me -- I almost fell of my chair when I read that paragraph).
THAT is what those companies and national bureaux voted for, to make that an international standard. They should be ashamed.
Aren't you confusing the hedonistic, pleasure part with the materialistic part? They are completely different issues, you know. Compare e.g. the behaviour of the "tub-boy", cosmopolite, and inventor of Cynicism, Diogenes who didn't "engage in materialistic pleasures" but from what is written about him might be quite interested in porn nevertheless ;-).
AFAIK the latter was kind of the idea of Teilhard de Chardin (catholic), that ultimately, the fate of humankind if it managed to "grow up" would be to join the mind of God (reminds me of "Childhood's end" by Arthur C. Clarke btw).
However to see God as a process instead of a goal seems to imply a much more tangible, contemporary connection between us clods and God (God as the process of expanding our Monkeysphere?), as opposed to some kind of teleological finality which we don't yet have to understand as long as we make sure we produce offspring that follows one of the roads that lead to it.
Disclaimer: iamverytired itsweekend iamalittledrunk
Basically they are saying that although the Gregorian calendar says 1900 is NOT a leap year, from now on it should be, otherwise a certain program's spreadsheet data wouldn't be correct anymore because one programmer screwed up getting the dates right in said legacy program, many years ago.
Never mind that the world didn't start in 1900 (dates before either 1900 or 1904 are NOT IMPLEMENTED)
Never mind bothering to implement other calendars (Islamic, Chinese etc.) which might be of interest in large parts of the world.
WHY didn't they just use ISO 8601, like ODF did?
Speaking of ODF, this is what they put in par. 14.7.11 (p. 523) if you don't believe me:
So basically, my gripe with OOXML is not that it's legally unclear, or not open enough, it's that it's clearly not written to be A STANDARD. Think with me pls:
If the OASIS people overlooked an important calendar/date problem, and there is consensus, it can be added in the next version of the standard. All existing ODF documents are safe.
vs.
If the ECMA/Microsoft people decide one day to correct this bogus "1900 should from now on be a leap year" feature, all OOXML text documents that contain dates will have to be checked, and the ones that turn out to have dates from 1900 have to be corrected.
See the difference?
If you take 15 minutes of your time, download the two standards documents for ODF and OOXML (OK depending on download speed a bit longer than 15 minutes for the latter) and browse through them quickly, glancing at the topics and the descriptions a bit, maybe reading a paragraph or 3 in depth, then you would have spent less time than you needed to write your long post and you wouldn't have to write "i am not a document expert" because you'd know about as much about both ODF and OOXML as the average slashdotter :-)
Not ANY streaming audio, just in the USA I thought. The world is thankfully a little larger than that.
IIRC, not normally, but if you apply an external magnetic field then yes. See the wikipedia article about NMR for a simple explanation (yes I know it's NMR instead of EPR there, but the general principle's the same). Also IIRC the energy difference is tiny (radio wave type frequency as opposed to, say, light). There was a simple explanation what effect this had on the relative populations of the both spins but I've forgotten it. I thought that it didn't cost a lot of energy under normal operation but I'm sure I once felt a sample tube that had become slightly warm (the probe is quite well shielded from the liquid helium temperature around the magnet coils). I thought EPR could only be done with special molecules (paramagnetic metal salts?).
... into Omikron Spermaceti??
Ken Brown, is that you? Sold a lot of copies of your book to CIO's lately?
I've never actually read Forbes magazine, but I get the impression that the kind of clueless people who DO read it are, well, your boss.
However, to me your examples both combined read like a template "party X did something wrong, but when party Y did something wrong the rabiate slashdot crowd stirred it up into a scandal" whereas I'd say that obviously, BOTH party X and party Y did wrong and should be publically tsk-tsked for those shenanigans. I know a little bit about the USA voting system, that similarly to the UK it tends to reach an equilibrium state of either one or the other part of the "republicrats" winning the election each time, but it's important to know that it DOESN'T have to be that way.
Vote for a third party (almost any third party) that swears to change the constitution to allow multi-party system and you're all set. How much percent does this Nader guy usually get in your elections? Would it be a good option to vote Green Party just for the one-off? Or is it more complicated than that and is it constitutionally difficult to move away from this destructive two-party system? (division of power between executive and the actual States is a bit unclear to me as an outsider).
sorry (blush).