Pro-ODF Legislation Loses In Six States 264
ajanp writes "Computerworld discusses the defeat of pro-ODF legislation in the states of California, Florida, Texas, Oregon, and Connecticut which 'would have required state agencies to use freely available and interoperable file formats, such as the Open Document Format for Office Applications, instead of Microsoft Corp.'s proprietary Office formats.' A similar bill in Minnesota was changed to study the issue instead. There was heavy lobbying being done in private on both sides with one problem being 'the jargon-laden disinformation that committee members felt they were being fed by lobbyists for both IBM and Microsoft. Although lobbyists would tell the committee one thing in private, they got cold feet when asked to verify the information publicly, under oath.' However, 'Despite the string of defeats, Marino Marcich, executive director of the Washington-based ODF Alliance, said the legislative fight has only begun.'"
deep pockets (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:deep pockets (Score:5, Funny)
will determine the outcome. It's the American way.
Oh shit, there goes my karma.
I'm not from America (Score:2)
But when I read the summation of state names that rejected ODF it rang a bell.
Are these some of the most republican states?
Re:I'm not from America (Score:4, Insightful)
Keep up the pressure. Eventually, it'll work (Score:4, Insightful)
ODF needs to do this, too. Keep it up and one year real soon, they'll win and it's over.
Re:I'm not from America (Score:4, Informative)
oregon is a little democratic
florida is a little republican
texas is very republican
Minnesota is a swing state.
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Ha. Funny. The Californian State Assembly is majority democrat. If you live in this state you would think it is anything but Republican/conservative by some of the crap that they try to pass up in Sacramento.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_State_Asse mbly#State_Assembly_Members.2C_2007-2008_Session [wikipedia.org]
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C//
Re:I'm not from America (Score:5, Insightful)
Because, in a democracy, all citizens have a right to access government documents. That includes Linux users, people who can't afford to spend $300 on Office, blind people (using specialized software), and people 50 years in the future (long after any proprietary format becomes unreadable -- try opening a WordStar or Word/DOS document in Word 2007 and see how far you get, for example).
Proprietary formats -- all proprietary formats, without exception -- cannot fulfill this requirement by definition.
(Incidentally, Office-type formats are really the least of our worries. Government should be prohibited from accepting building plans in the form of proprietary AutoCAD DWG files, etc. too.)
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OT your sig. (Score:2)
Incorrect. That study showed that helmets increased the risk of collision.
Once you're in a collision however, you're fucked if you don't have a helmet.
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The Democrats wanted to keep Gray in office, so their campaign was "Keep Gray Davis in office...but if you don't want him, vote Cruz Bustamante instead." That didn't go over very well.
By Nov 04, Arnold was very unilateral
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Please. What about the budget deficit? The recall election happened due to many reasons, not just the electricity crisis. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_Davis#Widespread _disapproval [wikipedia.org]
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Florida - Not sure about the state legislature, but this is a swing state.
Texas - Heavily Republican.
Oregon - Blue state, although no California...
Connecticut - Blue again.
Minnesota - Last I lived there house was red, senate blue.. pretty much a toss up at the state level.
Technology issues aren't a Democrat V. Republican thing in the states, both sides are equally ignorant and more than willing to listen to the money. They just kind of assume that MS or whomever is talking to th
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Don't Worry (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Don't Worry (Score:5, Funny)
Write to your reps (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Write to your reps (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Write to your reps (Score:5, Insightful)
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Is this not already the case or have the OpenOffice.org people been lying about its capabilities. As you mention Adobe is already well entrenched for read only documents. MS also provide free viewers for most of their formats so access to these documents is available and there is curren
Re:Write to your reps (Score:5, Insightful)
$300 word processors (Score:2)
A lot of versions of Office has been Microsoft tacking on a new version number to try to get everyone to re-buy Office again - look at the differences between Word 2000 and 2003, for example.
But, when Microsoft has had a real competitor, things have improved. Look at the difference between the original DOS Word and early Windows versions and Word 6 due to WordStar and WordPerfect, and look at the nifty new version Microsoft made (2007) due to OpenOffice. Same thing goes with Internet Explorer - until Fi
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Virtually every historic event is going to involve government documents. It does not matter that Microsoft provides a reader in the present day that works in a very limited scope. One of the key points of requiring an open format is to ensure the documents can be read by historians hundreds of years from now. Such a guarantee can not be made without a clear published standard.
Re:Write to your reps (Score:4, Interesting)
If anything the losses in state legislature open the door for class action law suits and forces every corporation involved to put forward their views in public and under oath. So while it might be a struggle in politics it should be far easier in the courts.
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Um I'm sorry, but what do you think 90%+ of government applications are? They're proprietary applications that store information in their proprietary format, be it document maangement, e-mail, office, hr, payroll, accounting and all sorts of department-specific tools. If they were to change systems, they'd probably have to migrate to a
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All that is required is an open alternative, good, bad or indifferent, it's that cut and dried. It is not a political discussion, proprietary document formats are proprietary.
Whilst lobbyist and their ilk can argue all sorts of n
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Re:Write to your reps (Score:5, Insightful)
Ever heard of the Freedom of Information Act? Governmental transparency is a prerequisite of freedom, and in a transparent government all documents, including "internal" ones, are potentially released. Therefore, all documents, including "internal" ones, need to be in open formats.
When you get right down to it, proprietary formats are un-American.
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Despite this, the specifications for this format are next to useless [slashdot.org] so in the real world, you'll probably end up with Office (which will implement it just fine) and everything else (which will sort-of work, sort-of not work, and basically just be a pain in the backside).
None of them are satisfied (Score:2, Informative)
Please explain how to implement "autoSpaceLikeWord95" and "lineWrapLikeWord6". Microsoft's proposed 6000 page standard does not define these, along with many other parts of the specification. Even if you can reverse engineer Micro
Govenment could limit itself to the standard (Score:2)
A possible solution would be that government
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But if some clerk used Word 6 back in 92, and that file has been in use since then, being updated by successive clerks, that 'do-it-like-Word6' tag is still going to be in there, waiting to choke some non-Microsoft reader, which won't know how to do it. It will then muck up the formatting of the file. Maybe catastrophically.
As long as 'do-it-like-Word6' and 5500 hundred other p
Fuck you. M$ is the bad guy here. (Score:3, Insightful)
the Reps admit to being technically clueless and correctly point out that they should not be choosing technical formats.
It's not a technical question. The issue is getting away from a single vendor lock in that limits choice. I'm a GNU/Linux user and I can't do anything with M$'s new "open" format. Mac users are in the same boat. The new format is not "open" and legislators should be able to see the issue for what it is. If they want their documents to be readable, they need to dump the bad apple,
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Microsoft lobbied heavily against the policy in the state legislature, and advocates for people with disabilities complained that ODF-compliant applications don't work with screen readers and other tools used by the blind as well as Office does. Last year, Massachusetts officials said the state planned to adopt plug-in software that would let its Office users create and save files in ODF, enabling agencies to continue using the Microsoft applications.
Not practical (Score:3, Insightful)
So, MS-Office is a drug? (Score:2)
Just like cocaine... hmm, I see, perhaps you are right. But, wait, when a cause is worthwhile shouldn't we at least try before giving it up as "not practical"?
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Wait, there's a difference (Score:3, Insightful)
The "war on drugs" failed because it's impossible to identify and arrest every drug lord hiding somewhere in the South American jungles. In the case of office file formats, we know who they are and where to find the masterminds behind the stuff that's being peddled at the street corners.
Actually (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a poor analogy which doesn't apply to document formats. What's important with document formats produced and required by government is that they are a documented standard which will allow interoperation between platforms and which will still be reada
Well... (Score:2)
Also, you have to look at this another way:
* Are all our old-format Microsoft documents going to be accessible in 10 years? I mean, who has a copy of Word 1.0 these days? And no, the legacy support in current versions is NOT good enough.
* Aren't we going to go through the same damn trouble in the next new, incompatible version of Word?
Between those two factors, you may be saving some pain in the short term, but you're hurting y
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Office 2007 is Not practical (Score:2)
Re:Not practical (Score:5, Interesting)
Your client management suite should be able to do this in about an hour, including testing time. What, you don't push your software? Compared to the cost of 100 seat licenses for Office, a software push / update is trivial.
then top it off with a mention that there is no real way to regulate attachments coming from outside and this is DOA in any local govt.
You don't need to. You can keep going with Word for the time being for recieving attachments, but the agencies would be required to internally communicate and send out communications in a format that anyone could read.
The idea is not to kill microsoft. The idea is to push government agencies and the software suppliers that support them to use and create document formats that we have a hope of reading in 10 or 20 years (let alone 200). Can you imagine if the US constitution was written in Symantec Greatworks? Or if key data from 50 years in the past was written in GobeProductive on BeOS? If Microsoft adopts a truly open format that satisfies this need for transparency and readability, then that's great! But if not, we shouldn't be tying ourselves to them to fill a need they don't want to fill.
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At the risk of being modded a troll, every time a proposal which includes "install this software on all your PCs" is made, someone pipes up with an answer along the lines of "But that would take forever!". The worst bit is they often get modded up as insightful.
Considering this is a site
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And storing your documents in binary formats that you can only open with software from one vendor reliably is practical? It's not even a nice idea - it may be common practice, but it's insane if you want to store the documents for any length of time.
A switch would cost money initially but would save a huge amount more when you count the costs of archiving (long term), retreival and upgrades for editing software, not to mention the cost to the people the local gov
Stupid Politicians... (Score:3, Insightful)
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Though I hate to generalize; I don't mean to say there aren't any honest polit-Oh, wait.
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I assume then that you would agree that the geek should not be permitted to make decisions for others outside his own narrow area of technical competence...
Problem with definition... (Score:2)
(Taken from the intro to the Oregon legislation, not sure if the other states are similar or not.)
Why does it matter if it was developed or updated by more than one independent software provider? As long as it is well-defined and inclusive, and follows the other tenets (not encumbered by royalties, for example,) then does it really matter that it's developed by one sole provider? PDF is developed solel
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Yes, I really think so.
"As long as it is well-defined"
That's the point. Experience shows that you cannot seriously hope for such an entangled thingie as a document format (or network protocol) to be defined beyond shadows on a written standard. The only way to know you have a functional open standard is to have a look at the source code itself. I'd prefer taking away the "multiple providers" and to say inst
Where have we heard this one before? (Score:5, Interesting)
All kidding aside, what makes this fight different from the usual standards wars is that it's not between two companies trying to pitch different standards like Beta and VHS or BlueRay and HDDVD. In that kind of fight, whoever wins, the victor is still going to be a giant corporation. For the buying public it's truly a case of same shit, different pile. ODF isn't just a product being shilled by a single corporation and so there's no single company to bankrupt or buy out so victory can be declared. I think this is going to be more like guerrilla warfare than a conventional battle.
I predict that there will be many, many more defeats for ODF legislation, especially in the US. The question is whether there will be a victory or failure after all those defeats. Microsoft certainly has the dollars in this fight. There's the old quote from Vietnam, allegedly from when both sides were having a talk after the final peace was declared. A Col. Summers had a chat with General Giap. "You know you never defeated us in the field," Summers said. "That may be true, but it is also irrelevant," Giap replied.
No matter which way it goes, this war is going to be interesting to watch.
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ODF isn't just a product being shilled by a single corporation and so there's no single company to bankrupt or buy out so victory can be declared. I think this is going to be more like guerrilla warfare than a conventional battle.
Last I knew Sun and IBM had lots of stock in ODF and where also the main Microsoft resistance. But neither of those companies will be owned by Microsoft any time soon I think.
Precisely my point. Even if Microsoft could buy one of them out, it is unlikely that they could buy all of them out. The concept of ODF is not just owned by one particular company but is a concept that has been adopted by them. The whole open source idea isn't a hippie commune idea the way detractors portray it to be: the idea is that anybody can use the ideas to make money just so long as they also give back to the community. It's about open source capitalism rather than unworkable idealistic communism, t
In the case of Texas... (Score:5, Informative)
Looking at the links for Texas, it appears that the two bills in question, SB 446 [state.tx.us] and HB 1794 [state.tx.us] are not "defeated", but instead just pending in committee. I'm not naïve enough to believe they couldn't be left there, but they've *not* been voted down explicitly yet...
Write/email your local representative!Re:In the case of Texas... (Score:4, Informative)
"The committee," he said, "wanted a flat-out answer from the DIR. 'Was [moving to open document formats] something we should be doing right now? And did they need the backing of the committee to do it?' The answer in both cases was, 'No.'"
That's not to say you shouldn't write your local Texas Rep if you support either Microsoft's or IBM's position, but for now, the bill has been "quashed".
Seeing things like this (Score:3, Insightful)
Though one could also argue there is no fundamental difference between the two. If nothing else Scientology has certainly blurred the line a bit.
Microsoft killed the bills. (Score:2)
would-be laws were all killed off within the last month while being debated in legislative committees, following fierce opposition from Microsoft Corp. lobbyists
Are we supposed to be surprised?? (Score:2)
Liars (Score:2)
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Norton Antivirus.
I think that speaks for itself, really.
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Not even considering the free pdf printers, Office 2007 gets a plugin to save as pdf the first time you try. Easy enough.
For the rest, the company I work for just finished putting together a php + perl script (they did, I'm not touching those with a 10 foot pole, mind you) to extract data from office documents to push it in a database, and thats with the pre-2007, harder to read format, and it was done -without- using any of the COM components made by
Rich! (Score:2)
Office 2007 gets a plugin to save as pdf the first time you try. Easy enough.
Wow, I'm sold, can you hear my wallet snapping open as I run to the nearest M$ vendor to buy Office 2007 so that I can finally print pdf? I don't care that I'll probably have to buy a whole new computer to get reasonable performance, that "free" pdf print out is just too good to pass up.
On second thought, I'll just keep my six year old computer which runs the latest and greatest Open Office without a hitch. Thanks anyway.
You
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So agai
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Actually, you can thank Adobe for this. Adobe wouldn't even allow MS to ship PDF support inbox in Office 2007, that's why it is a seperate download. Adobe is afraid that if everyone knows they can save PDF files with Office 2007 there will be no reason to buy anything from Adobe.
Why should
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I have had the problem where people have sent me proprietary files and well, not owning Office meant I couldn't get the data. (OpenOffice didn't have compatibility with the new versions.)
You, sir, are showing your ignorance. MS's new "OpenXML" file formats are far EASIER to get your information out of, not less. At the worst, you just unzip the darn file and read the XML. If you can do it with OOo files, you can do it with MS '07. (Where do you think they got the idea?)
The things that make MS office superior are, off the top of my head:
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No you can't, because OOXML has shit like "<renderthislikeWord95>some text</renderthislikeWord95>" (among other things). How the fuck do you figure out what that means without getting a copy of Word 95?
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Well I don't agree. Perhaps you can specify a few reasons why you think it is fundamentally broken?
I really don't know if ODF is the best open office-document standard that we could ever develop (probably not) but it is certainly very good at doing its job so far. And I mean that it does both the "office-document" part and the "open" part. With regard to being a good
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No, you can't reliably write your own parser, but you didn't do that for ODF either.
As for ODF being a t
performance (Score:2)
Both zip files and XML files are data streams that must be read sequentially, like a typical tape. You can't skip around. There is no significant indexing ability. You can't skip to page 123 of a presentation, cell $12345$67890 of a spreadsheet, or page 1234 of a book. You have to read the whole damn thing into memory, doing a mildly expensive decompression operation as you
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I think the confusion is that ODF, etc. are meant to *keep* the data in a way that is unlikely to ever be unsupported. A fast binary format may be far too heavily engineered to easily tell what it is without looking at implementation source code or ve
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Using a proprietary, custom-made API? Whoop-de-do! If that's your definition of "programmatically accessing the data," I could just as well say that IBM assembly code translated into Sanskrit and optically encoded into a freakin' JPEG is "scriptable" too, because I could conceivably build some software to OCR, translate, and decode it!
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In its own internal affairs? Hell yes!
Great. What's the alternative? Should the city council hold a vote every time they want to author a new document, to determine what format the town wants it in that time?
Even if you wanted that, who decides how to take the vote? Maybe they'll write ballots in MS Word, maybe in ODF.
No, OOXML is M$ only. (Score:3, Interesting)
An AC has the nerve to say OOXML is usable:
your comment that only MS can use MS formats is a red-herring
Show me working Mac and GNU/Linux editors. No, I don't mean the pathetic half done Word readers from Novel and M$, I mean full working office suits. It's not because OOXML is not really Open. The people who reverse engineered the previous generation of M$ DOC are more than capable of understanding and implementing this supposedly easier format, but it's not really easier and it's going to take time
OMG, the AC Persists. (Score:4, Interesting)
As for your link, it doesn't state that they can't unzip the DOCX .... blah blah blah
What it shows is that you can't get the text out, which is all the man wanted. How's that for Open?
Just stop while you are behind! Those "few minor obsolete" things are people's work that M$ should have translated for them not thrown away. But M$ can't do that because their formats are mutually contradictory. That's why much of their spec simply states do it like prints of the old versions without further explanation. [slashdot.org]
The OOXML propaganda is bigger and dirtier than Mnt. San Diego [latimes.com] but will cost much more. You just can't wash this stuff and the truth will be out soon enough. Microsoft has wasted their time and money making yet another M$ only format and they should be punished by market rejection, not rewarded with state money.
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You can easily get the text out of a docx file, just open the zipped file and look at the XML text. It's an open format.
Are you making your point out of ignorance, or deliberately spinning out-of-date and irrelevant facts about the beta like the worst kind of corporate lobbyist?
Re:UGH! Open Formats Do Not Limit Choice! (Score:5, Interesting)
WMV support is built into Windows Media Player. The files are binary, if you look at them in a hex editor, they're generally plain numbers. Which is to say, JUST AS READABLE AS MPEG.
Except not, unless you are a fucking moron. I'm sorry, but XML is not magic open interoperability pixie dust.
Nope. Nice try, though.
What actually happened was, MS looked at ODF, but felt that since it threatened their monopoly of Office applications, they wanted their own "standard" that they could control.
Or maybe they did it by accident. (Yeah, right.)
ODF was designed to be all things to all office suites. OOXML was designed to basically be an XML dump of MS Office documents, and from what I have heard (and seen), it's little more than a straight 1:1 conversion of the binary Office format into XML.
I suggest you go actually try to read the OOXML "open standard", and understand why it is neither. It has little to do with the 6000 pages, it's about how little is actually in that 6000 page document.
No. We complain that it is not a standard, and not suitable for implementation in anything but MS Office.
The problem is not that it supports all these various iterations of Office, and even older things (WordPerfect, etc). The problem is that they support these by creating some sort of tag or attribute or something which flags a section as being formatted for Word95 or somesuch, and then don't define how to do that. They basically say it's "beyond the scope of this document", and that you should emulate the behavior of the software in question.
And this is not the right way to design a standard format anyway. Suppose different versions of Word came with different default heading styles. You could just put <word95heading> tags around something -- or you could use a format that supports defining custom styles.
That's true, we can reverse-engineer MS formats, and have done so. Most open office suites (OpenOffice, KOffice, AbiWord, etc) support the binary Office formats quite well. But it's still reverse-engineered, and still not complete.
It would be entirely possible to make a document standard that is just as flexible, concise, and transparent as ODF, but support all of the crap that OOXML does. The difference is, it would be much more difficult for MS to support such a standard, and much easier for everyone else. As it is, OOXML is much easier for Microsoft to implement than for anyone else.
Consider that, in order to fully support OOXML, you have to actually go and buy all of those different versions of Office, plus random crap like WordPerfect, and reverse-engineer their behavior. So OOXML is not any better than the binary formats, because in reality, you may actually have to reverse-engineer MORE products in order to make it work.
Wrong attitude... (Score:2)
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So it would be smarter to move to OpenOffice, rather than upgrade Microsoft Office.
Re:ODF is bullshit, use HTML (Score:4, Insightful)
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The problem was a lack of good and inexpensive SGML tools at the time - though in its Novell days, an excellent Wordperfec
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Sure they will. In fact, they'll assume it.
Basically, they will either assume that they can't make it into a webpage (because it's a word document, and that's different somehow), or they'll assume that making a webpage is too hard for them.
However, if they have a nice WYSIWYG editor or CMS, they'll copy/paste from the word processor onto the webpage, and that will work. If th
WYSIWYG Harmful (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html [wfu.edu]
Case in point : my wife filled in a job application last night. The application form was a Word document (as RTF, but RTF is just a different Word format). It took her about 3 hours, and the vast majority of the time was spent transcribing information out of her CV (also a Word document) and mucking about with the formatting. She didn't at any point write any new content ; the application just wanted the form filling in, and a copy of her CV, which contained most of the data in the form to start with. And this took three hours, lots of head scratching, brow furrowing and swearing at her laptop. Wifey is not a natural computer user, but I reckon I would still have taken about 2 hours doing the same thing, with most of the time difference accounted for by use of shortcut keys and my faster typing. I would not have been performing a different task set, since there really wasn't any clever magic that would have prevented me having to do the same thing and manually transcribe everything out of her CV into the form.
What SHOULD have happened is that either the form would have been aware of typical CV data, my wife would have had a CV written in a format that understands CV data, and a button click would have filled in the form from the CV file. Or even better, the job application would just take a CV file and a covering note. The process would have taken 5 minutes instead of 3 hours, and my wife could have gotten back to enjoying a glass of wine and an episode or two of Ugly Betty. Job applications are a well-understood application domain with millions of users, but the only support Word provides for a CV is a template that provides visual formatting and ONLY visual formatting.
When my wife writes documents she obsesses about the formatting during the writing. This disrupts her flow of composition and stresses her out immensely. I really think she would benefit from using TeX instead, especially since she mostly writes academic papers. But she's stuck with the WYSIWYG paradigm because that's all she knows, and she's not willing to make an investment in computer time to improve her productivity.
I used to use WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS at university, which was probably more productive than Word. A white-on-blue plaintext terminal screen, you concentrated solely on document structure. These days the vast majority of text I type goes into an IDE, a Notepad2 window, or one of the incarnations of vim. Using HTML, even in an HTML editor, would not improve matters for me at all.
The next great phase of office productivity will come from documents with intelligent markup that states what the content is and not just what it should look like.
looks like a bad law anyway (Score:3, Interesting)
Second of all, "file format used by only one vendor" doesn't disqualify Microsoft's OO-XML. Remember, Novell will be supporting it.
Third of all, there is no exception for formats like MPEG!!! OMG, WTF!!!
Result: this effectively mandates that OO-XML replace PDF, with videos being embedded in OO-XML to acheive compliance.
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