P
Peter Flass
Guest
On 1/28/2011 8:34 AM, jmfbahciv wrote:
If there is no one to hear a tree falling in the forest, does it make a
sound?
Maybe a thud a it's chopped up for paper to produce copies of a 6000
page standard no one will read.
Is it a standard if no one uses it?Roland Hutchinson wrote:
On Wed, 26 Jan 2011 13:26:02 +0000, jmfbahciv wrote:
Roland Hutchinson wrote:
On Tue, 25 Jan 2011 14:34:57 +0000, jmfbahciv wrote:
Jim Brown wrote:
Charlie Gibbs wrote
(Joe Thompson) writes:
Jim Brown<jb45678@gmail.com> wrote
Seebs wrote
Back in the day, I once spent a day and a half trying to find a
vendor who was willing to sell me a non-Windows laptop.
But was so stupid that you couldnt even manage to work out that
even you should be able to add anything you liked to the hardware.
It doesn't count as a "real choice" unless it's on the same terms.
If I have to pay for Windows even though I intend to wipe the drive
and install another OS before Windows ever boots, I do not have a
real choice.
Nor is it a choice in environments where other people are sending
you files in proprietary Microsoft formats.
You can obviously use something that can handle those.
Sigh! Proprietary meant that the formats were not published. To
translate that sentence for you, it meant that nobody knew what the
formats were and, thus, could not write code to read those formats
unless they were ble$$ed by MS.
Even the published ones require reverse engineering to implement. Have
you looked at the scandal that is OOXML, Barb?
No. I don't think I've seen OOXML word before. Something tells me I
don't want to know after the past 6 days in that other newsgroup.
It's Microsoft's latest success at making darkness the new standard.
As governments started to wise up and require that documents be preserved
in documented file formats, Microsoft decided that rather than embracing
the already established international standard for office documents, they
would subvert the ISO standards process by packing various committees
with new representatives from various nations whom they had coerced or
bought off and ram through a "fast-track" approval of their own newly-
devised proprietary format as a standard.
Needless to say, the proposed standard was of Byzantine complexity,
unnecessarily long (6000 pages), and yet not long enough, since it was
full of "documentation" that amounted to things like like "Do this the
way Excel 97 does" without further elaboration, all of which made it
impossible for anyone else to implement.
Even the bought-and-paid-for committees couldn't quite bring themselves
approve it as it stood over a sea of (inadequately heard) objections from
third parties, so some revisions were required. Result: a "standard"
that nobody supports, not even Microsoft, but with a "transitional"
version that (what a coincidence!) matches Microsoft's current Office
formats.
The whole episode has left the ISO itself in a very bad light indeed,
with calls for revising the procedures that let this happen.
Yea, well, they have had a history.
But don't take my word for it. Here you go:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open_XML
Fuckers. another example of very, very short-term thinking.
If there is no one to hear a tree falling in the forest, does it make a
sound?
Maybe a thud a it's chopped up for paper to produce copies of a 6000
page standard no one will read.