a_n_d_e_r_s writes "The vote on OOXML looked fairly secured. Most in the Working Group in Sweden was against the vote to approve OOXML. The day of the vote, though, more companies showed up at the door. Some 20 new companies — each one payed about $2500 to be allowed to vote — and vote they did ... for Microsoft. Most of the new companies were partners from Microsoft who suddenly out of the blue joined the Working Group, payed membership fees and voted yes for approval. From the OS2World story: 'The final result was 25 Yes, 6 No and 3 Abs and this would from the start be a done deal of saying No! Jonas Bosson who participated in today's meeting on behalf on FFII said that he left the meeting in protest and so did also IBM's Swedish local representative Johan Westman.'"
It's a tactic that's unfortunately too common, but easily defended against, with either of these options:
A) Don't let new members vote for any issues until they've been members for a certain period of time
It's an issue that we dealt with before even approving bylaws for our organization. Someone in the proposed membership mentioned that they wanted protection against this and we decided to require 6 months in the org before allowing voting membership (or 7 days following the Spring Meeting). This was eventually lowered to 3 months by the membership by vote.
We don't charge dues so anyone could have walked into a meeting and maliciously taken it over with no intentions on doing anything but spend the few dollars we have.
The only reason an organization like this could allow that is because they wanted the money for their coffers and couldn't care less about the actual "standards" being approved.
Yeah, because nobody has ever thought of planting people ahead of time, and there isn't already a cadre of Microsoft employees, and indeed from every other major computing organization, on every major standards body. All that means is that Microsoft submarines half a dozen people onto any committee they want to work on for some up-front amount of time. It's the Price Is Right Conundrum: any amount of time you put up there on the board, Microsoft will add one dollar - pardon, day - and bid there. Why do you think Netscape, a tiny company, had so many people on the various W3 standards? Why do you think Opera does today? It's the exact same thing, and this is just how these boards work. There's no particular way around it; you can't set time limits, price limits, count of people from a company, because they're all trivially easily gamed.
Any time you make a plutocracy, it will be commercially exploited. If they want to be immune to this crap, they need to move to a meritocracy or an election. Next time you have a solution, put your black hat on and see if you can break it in under 15 seconds of honest thought. (You could have, this time, several different ways.)
Poor products or not it looks like they invested $50k to cement their format as a standard. Considering they stand to make billions from that, it was a wise investment. It is the people who designed a system that could so easily be bought who should be ashamed, if that wasn't their intended outcome in the first place. A company can't deny its nature.
Because they don't have to. It's not about poor products, but why leave something to chance when you can seal the deal by splashing some cash around? I'm not defending them, it just makes a lot of sense.
Why can't Microsoft compete without buying the outcome of the game? Are their products that poor?
Yeah, mostly, but that's irrelevant. They do have a few good products, but that's also irrelevant to sales.
Microsoft's entire history, and IBM's for the previous decodes, demonstrates quite well that sales in any computer-related field are determined almost entirely by marketing budget. Quality is nice, but it doesn't add materially to sales, so if you have the marketing clout, there's no financial reason to also invest heavily in quality.
Sorry to break the news to you. The best product doesn't win. The best-marketed product wins.
There's no (financial) reason that MS should care whether OOXML is good or bad. Their primary concern is that people use it, and this only requires that it be minimally usable. Investing what is for them a small amount to get their encoding declared a "standard" is just a (standard;-) marketing approach, and it would be puzzling if they didn't do it.
Why can't Microsoft compete without buying the outcome of the game? Are their products that poor?
Well, it's pretty obvious they're "that poor." What's interesting though is that these sort of tactics show that it's obvious not just to us but to them as well. They have far more confidence in their ability to game the system than they do in their ability to produce products that are competitive on a level playing field (though fortunately, they're often poor at gaming the system as well).
It's simply their corporate culture. I expect it may have to do with the fact that a large number of their programming workforce were hired right out of college without a lot of real-world experience, combined with the fact that their management style is apparently, management by intimidation. Combined, those factors make a pretty lousy recipe for producing quality products on time.
...good old-fashioned democracy at work.
Seriously, though, what kind of organization are they running, here? Any company, from anywhere, can suddenly be a member just by paying 2500-- a nominal fee, for many large companies. That seems like asking for trouble to me.
Any Swedish company can become a member of SIS buy paying somewhere around $300-$500 per year.
To be allowed to vote in this particular issue an extra 15 000 Sek ($2500) was needed.
So yeah, it is open for anyone with cash (but they had to be members of SIS since before.
Rules are always more a mater of their spirit than their letter. The protest of other members is real and well founded. It's pretty obvious that M$ played the organizations rules to get a result that is against everything the organization stands for. If the organization does not investigate and punish this kind of blatant abuse, the organization will lose all community respect.
A reasonable US Government would investigate M$ for corrupt foreign practices.
My understanding, from watching Bjarne Stroustrup's lecture before about the standardization process for C++ (also through the ISO), was that you need to attend a certain number of meetings (3?) before you can vote.
I fail to see how anyone other than MS would have anything to gain from pushing OOXML, unless they are getting kickbacks. Even companies partnering with MS would benefit greatly if a more open standard, such as ODF, was being used into which they could integrate into more easily and actually do something useful with. This all sounds like a corruption of the standards organization unlike anything I have ever heard of previously. If this does not become anti-trust material a few years down the road, at least in the EU and Japan, I would very surprised.
I fail to see how anyone other than MS would have anything to gain from pushing OOXML, unless they are getting kickbacks.
They were MS Gold certified companies. They make their living pushing MS products.
Even companies partnering with MS would benefit greatly if a more open standard, such as ODF, was being used into which they could integrate into more easily and actually do something useful with.
I doubt they see it that way. The more people sticking with MS, the more cache "MS Gold certified partner" has. OOXML will be more easy to integrate if everything is already MS.
Having worked for MS Gold partners, MS Gold partners are just extensions of Microsoft itself basically. They push Microsoft products and are not allowed to promote alternative products.
I worked for a hosting company that was a MS Gold partner but our 'free' hosting and static domain names was on Apache/Linux for the 'free' reason and we had to proxy the requests through a bunch of IIS boxes or reroute certain ICMP traffic on the firewall so it would come up as IIS/ASP.NET/Windows 2003 with NetCraft. And then the sales junkie finally got the report that more than 50% of their machines were Windows.
The sales were not allowed to sell Linux or Mac unless specifically asked and persisted on by the customer and then we had to support Apache/PHP/MySQL on Windows (that was back in 2002), then on tradeshows we had to say 70% of our machines were running Windows, that metric we got only because we didn't include our internal Linux service machines (you know Nagios, e-mail, spamfilters, Snort, firewalls,...).
By the way: we hosted parts of MSN (Belgium) and the dumbest thing they did: buy a cheap Shared Hosting package for MSN advertisements (which were going to display nationwide) and they HARD CODED the shared package URL (msn.server.hostingcompany.com) in MSN Messenger, we had to redirect our nameservers for that URL to a separate server.
All the new companies were MS certified partners, so it was in their best interest to vote the way they did.
Bullshit! Do you know just how bad OOXML is? It's so bad that the only way even Microsoft can benefit from it is by using it as a tool to prop up its monopoly. Hell, I'm not even convinced it's in Microsoft's best interests to be pushing OOXML -- its monopoly might be better served by MS Office implementing ODF, since MS Office still has great mindshare and interface advantages over OpenOffice.
Microsoft's tactic of pushing OOXML is like trying to gain territory via nuclear war: sure, they might get the territory in the end, but it'll be radioactive and worthless.
One would think that SIS would not accept new companies to participate in the vote since they haven't been part of the earlier discussions and meetings. But according to SIS they didn't see any problem that new companies wanted to take part in this vote without prior notice. So what happened here is that Microsoft gather together a bunch of loyal partners that would vote yes to their standard without any questions.
Did Microsoft pay their fee? If yes, then they stuffed the box. If not, then 23 companies with a common interest with Microsoft joined an organization to vote for something in their own interests.
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 [oasis-open.org].
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.
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).
I didn't entirely believe this, and anyone else who didn't should go here like I did: ECMA Standard Office Open XML Formats [ecma-international.org]. Although the writing style is slightly less retarded than in fritsd's paraphrased version, the writing content isn't. It turns out that the 1900-based dating is screwed up "for legacy reasons" (in an unstandardized format that didn't exist in any previous versions??) As the spec states,
"A consequence of this is that for dates between January 1 and February 28, WEEKDAY shall return a value for the day immediately prior to the correct day, so that the (non-existent) date February 29 has a day-of-the-week that immediately follows that of February 28, and immediately precedes that of March 1."
I'd like to read further to try to understand why they're expressing integers as "1.0000000..." instead of "1.0" or even "1", but I'm starting to fear that the Stupid might be contagious.
Kudos to Google for being one of those to "suddenly" join, but on the "No" side. Most of the other companies on the list of new arrivals [tryggve.se] are unfamiliar to me, excepting Google and HP, and we don't officially know how HP's vote went.
Shame on the others for having no sense of decency.
... in Germany, Deutsche Telekom and Google would have voted "no". However, both were not allowed to vote because they came in late.
And another guy left the voting session early, but his "yes" was counted although before it was said that only votes count that were given in presence. (according to Heise (german) [heise.de])
Hmm.. Interestingly enough, the german IBM delegate then somehow managed to join the Kenyan delegation, and managed to write the objection. How can someone be both a german and kenyan delegate?
Step 1 - allow votes to be bought. Step 2 - take money from companies who wish to buy votes. Step 3 - Profit! Step 3a - Complain about the unfairness of it all, all the way to the bank.
I'm surprised it has not been covered on slashdot, but similar things have occured in Germany, Switzerland, Norway, Portugal, Australia, etc. Microsoft is determined to push its proprietary "open" format through by any means neccessary:
Hmm. If things continue this way, and we end up with the ISO effectively rubber-stamping OOXML on the strength of purchased votes, what effect will this have on the ISO's credibility in the long run? The ISO looks after a lot more standards than just data exchange formats; will we have to consider that every single one of those standards is potentially bought and paid for by its richest benecifiaries, despite technical flaws in the standard and opposition from peers?
I can't help thinking that the OOXML standardisation effort should be shelved until one of two things becomes true: either at least two or more independent implementations, developed by distinct organisations from the specification alone, can be shown to interoperate to a degree that justifies the moniker "standard"; or preferably, a complete reference implementation, with full source code available under a BSD (or equally permissive) licence, is submitted with the proposal. In fact, I can't understand why this isn't, er, standard practice. Were it so, the OOXML efforts could be trivially dismissed on technical grounds, and this whole dog and pony show could be avoided.
In developing standards, as in other engineering processes, it is a bad idea to reinvent
the wheel. The OOXML standard document is 6546 pages long. The ODF standard,
which achieves the same goal, is only 867 pages. The reason for this is that ODF
references other existing ISO standards for such things as date specifications, math
formula markup and many other needs of an office document format standard. OOXML
invents its own versions of these existing standards, which is unnecessary and
complicates the final standard.
If ISO were to give OOXML with its 6546 pages the same level of review that other
standards have seen, it would take 18 years (6576 days for 6546 pages) to achieve
comparable levels of review to the existing ODF standard (871 days for 867 pages)
which achieves the same purpose and is thus a good comparison.
Considering that OOXML has only received about 5.5% of the review that comparable
standards have undergone, reports about inconsistencies, contradictions and missing
information are hardly surprising.
Did they cheat somehow?
No, They followed the rule required to vote - they payed the fees.
Is there some reason that these companies should NOT have been allowed to vote?
They failed to participate in any of the discussions leading up to the vote & in fact most have not partecipated previously in any discussions on any ISO related standards.
Are any of them not legitimate companies? No? Then STFU and stop whining.
You're right we should stop whining & petition ISO to change the rules on voting to block this kind of ballot stuffing. I doubt very much that any of these companies have seen the document spec let alone read & understand it.
This is actually one of the fairer subversions of the process - in Portugol they denied IBM & SUN access claiming the room was too full, then allowed MS partners to enter & vote. In another place, the chairman - an employee of an MS partner announced the voting procedure as
Consensus to approve - vote to approve
majority approve - vote to approve
no majority - vot to approve
majority to dis-approve - vote to approve with comments
consensus to dis-approve - abstain
Now that's how to really stack the deck - you completely remove the option to vote against the standard.
Did they cheat somehow? No, They followed the rule required to vote - they payed the fees.
Your definition of "cheating" needs updating.
If I find a bug in WoW that allows me to get a million gold everytime I click a specific key combo, you, Blizzard and every WoW player would call it cheating, even though the "rules" of the game include that bug at that point.
Cheating is not breaking the rules. Cheating is breaking the spirit of the rules, whether or not you literaly break them. In fact, most cheating happens by lawyer-weaseling your way through the loopholes in the rules. Most board game rules do not explicitly forbid you to look at the cards stacked face-down on the board, but everyone would agree that doing so is cheating.
You are complaining about a process that subverts... well, what you want the outcome to be. But this democratic process subverts something else: market forces.
You do realize monopolies are restrained by law because they subvert the free market forces, right? For example, if you have a monopoly in one area you can use it to extract more money from a market while expending less investment and giving less to consumers, thus accumulating piles of money you can use to say, pay other companies to act on you behalf in meetings. Or pressure other companies to act on you behalf under threat of financially ruining them by cutting them out of markets that interact with the one(s) controlled by your monopoly.
This particular round of misdeeds is just one more symptom of the main problem, MS is an abusive monopoly with so much money they've been able to buy the politicians who run the courts and are supposed to enforce the law.
There's a huge difference between "legal" and "right." I'd really like you to make an argument that this was a right and correct tactic for Microsoft to use. What if, for the sake of argument, people could buy their way into a jury in criminal prosecution? I think we'd see right away what would happen. Every person with an agenda would routinely buy his chance to vote to "hang'm high!"
In this case, it's a chance to vote on an international standard -- one that many governments are obliged to allow, support or follow. This is, in effect, a chance to "buy" your way into government policy.
But there are certainly, in my opinion, two problems here:
1. That the ability to vote has such low entry requirements and that no amount of knowledge or understanding seems to have any bearing on whether or not someone is qualified to vote. (yes, I realize you could make the same argument for local elections, and I do.) 2. That Microsoft has no shame in deploying such an obvious, self-serving tactic of essentially buying their way into being elected as an international standard. It may be 'legal' but it's unethical and definitely not right.
I'm sorry to break this to you, but ISO approval of standards is supposed to be governed by TECHNICAL considerations. By this logic, a vote on whether OOXML is approved by fasttrack should be based on the TECHNICAL merits of the proposal, not on how popular Micorosft Corp. is.
Sadly, the fact that these people joined the discussion only *after* the debate on those technical merits was over only shows that this process has become nothing more than a high-school president election in a bad B-movie.
There's more to this issue than "mummy mummy microsoft did a bad thing and it's not faaaaaair!". The question we should be asking is "Is this the sort of behaviour we really want to encourge?"
Do we really want an industry where standards are sold to the highest bidder without any
scrutiny as to fitness for their supposed purpose. If so, the ISO committees may as well pack their bags and go home now, because we are headed for a world where no one will pay any attention at all to their
so called "standards".
I think that merits some discussion. Not because Microsoft did a Bad Thing so much, but because the
standards process served a useful purpose. Microsoft may well be willing to burn this process to the
ground in order to protect their file formats. I think the least we could do is shout "FIRE!"
They played by the rules of the ISO. The 'normal way things are supposed to work' are apparently not what they had in mind, if they allow anyone to join at any time and vote at short notice. I agree, its dumb, but they followed the rules to a tee.
This is not capitalism. This is communism.
Only, instead of a state, we have a corporation, Microsoft.
They buy their power with their money. And a big part of their money comes from our wallets via taxes.
I mean, a really big part.
I mean a part much bigger than what you'd think.
I mean, much bigger than what I'd think, too.
I mean, *huge*.
Then, with this power, they take away what really is common goods. Or aren't "standards"?
Here are the parts of Capitalism that I don't understand: - unsafe products - unhealthy products - unsustainable processes - suppression of the truth about unsafe products - exploitation of the poor and the uninformed - outsourcing (abandonment of the community) - tax evasion - consumerism - competition that puts profits before people - profitable relationship with war
But then if you accept the premise that People Don't Matter, all the above makes perfect sense.
many government departments and even entire governments arround the world are threatening to require arhived documents to be in standard formats. MS is trying to do an end run arround theese requirements by getting standards bodies to approve a fake standard they have written. Unfortunately it seems that they are having quite some sucess in doing so thanks to thier use of various dirty tactics.
Truly, they are evil, and any person of conscience could not work there and retain their integrity.
Sir, walk carefully, for you are treading on other people's livelihoods. I know a number of Microsoft employees, and they couldn't possibly be more offended by your suggestion that they lack the right stuff. At Microsoft, they all feel like they are finally important, like they are finally part of something bigger than themselves. At Microsoft, everybody gets to be an integral part of stealing money from donation boxes and candy from babies.
This reminds me of a political joke I heard somewhere. I've adapted it to programming.
God was in a good mood and decided to give virtues to people. One day he decided to give all the programmers in the world three virtues:
They would be smart, well-intentioned, and work for Microsoft. But an angel told him: Hey, wait a minute, aren't they too many virtues? "You're right", said God. "They'll have these virtues but a person can only have two of these virtues at the same time".
Since then, programmers in the world were divided in the three following groups:
Programmers who were smart and well-intentioned, couldn't work for Microsoft. Programmers who were smart and worked for Microsoft, couldn't be well-intentioned. Programmers who were well-intentioned and worked for Microsoft, couldn't be smart.
Corporate whores (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Corporate whores (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Corporate whores (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
How to defend against this (Score:5, Insightful)
A) Don't let new members vote for any issues until they've been members for a certain period of time, or
B) Don't let new members vote on any issue that had already been opened for debate (or perhaps officially proposed) prior to their joining.
It's as simple as that.
Parent
Re:How to defend against this (Score:5, Insightful)
A) Don't let new members vote for any issues until they've been members for a certain period of time
It's an issue that we dealt with before even approving bylaws for our organization. Someone in the proposed membership mentioned that they wanted protection against this and we decided to require 6 months in the org before allowing voting membership (or 7 days following the Spring Meeting). This was eventually lowered to 3 months by the membership by vote.
We don't charge dues so anyone could have walked into a meeting and maliciously taken it over with no intentions on doing anything but spend the few dollars we have.
The only reason an organization like this could allow that is because they wanted the money for their coffers and couldn't care less about the actual "standards" being approved.
Parent
Re:How to defend against this (Score:5, Insightful)
Any time you make a plutocracy, it will be commercially exploited. If they want to be immune to this crap, they need to move to a meritocracy or an election. Next time you have a solution, put your black hat on and see if you can break it in under 15 seconds of honest thought. (You could have, this time, several different ways.)
Parent
Your Windows monopoly money at work. (Score:5, Insightful)
Why can't Microsoft compete without buying the outcome of the game? Are their products that poor?
Re:Your Windows monopoly money at work. (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Your Windows monopoly money at work. (Score:5, Funny)
Yes ?
Parent
Re:Your Windows monopoly money at work. (Score:5, Funny)
fixed it for ya.
Parent
Re:Your Windows monopoly money at work. (Score:4, Funny)
fixed it for you.
Parent
Re:Your Windows monopoly money at work. (Score:5, Insightful)
Poor products or not it looks like they invested $50k to cement their format as a standard. Considering they stand to make billions from that, it was a wise investment. It is the people who designed a system that could so easily be bought who should be ashamed, if that wasn't their intended outcome in the first place. A company can't deny its nature.
Parent
Re:Your Windows monopoly money at work. (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Your Windows monopoly money at work. (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, mostly, but that's irrelevant. They do have a few good products, but that's also irrelevant to sales.
Microsoft's entire history, and IBM's for the previous decodes, demonstrates quite well that sales in any computer-related field are determined almost entirely by marketing budget. Quality is nice, but it doesn't add materially to sales, so if you have the marketing clout, there's no financial reason to also invest heavily in quality.
Sorry to break the news to you. The best product doesn't win. The best-marketed product wins.
There's no (financial) reason that MS should care whether OOXML is good or bad. Their primary concern is that people use it, and this only requires that it be minimally usable. Investing what is for them a small amount to get their encoding declared a "standard" is just a (standard;-) marketing approach, and it would be puzzling if they didn't do it.
Parent
Re:Your Windows monopoly money at work. (Score:4, Interesting)
Why can't Microsoft compete without buying the outcome of the game? Are their products that poor?
Well, it's pretty obvious they're "that poor." What's interesting though is that these sort of tactics show that it's obvious not just to us but to them as well. They have far more confidence in their ability to game the system than they do in their ability to produce products that are competitive on a level playing field (though fortunately, they're often poor at gaming the system as well).
It's simply their corporate culture. I expect it may have to do with the fact that a large number of their programming workforce were hired right out of college without a lot of real-world experience, combined with the fact that their management style is apparently, management by intimidation. Combined, those factors make a pretty lousy recipe for producing quality products on time.
Parent
And we are surprised why? (Score:4, Insightful)
Too bad the truth gets lost when the money starts talking. *sigh*
We all know that M$ doesn't play fair in terms of open standards, and never will. Why are we surprised?
Re:And we are surprised why? (Score:4, Informative)
We are outraged.
Parent
Ahh... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Ahh... (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
They violated ethical standards. (Score:5, Insightful)
An organization that has no ethics is worthless.
Rules are always more a mater of their spirit than their letter. The protest of other members is real and well founded. It's pretty obvious that M$ played the organizations rules to get a result that is against everything the organization stands for. If the organization does not investigate and punish this kind of blatant abuse, the organization will lose all community respect.
A reasonable US Government would investigate M$ for corrupt foreign practices.
Parent
Re:Ahh... (Score:5, Interesting)
Why wasn't this the case here?
Parent
Re:Ahh... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Ahh... (Score:5, Informative)
They were MS Gold certified companies. They make their living pushing MS products.
I doubt they see it that way. The more people sticking with MS, the more cache "MS Gold certified partner" has. OOXML will be more easy to integrate if everything is already MS.
Parent
Re:Ahh... (Score:5, Informative)
I worked for a hosting company that was a MS Gold partner but our 'free' hosting and static domain names was on Apache/Linux for the 'free' reason and we had to proxy the requests through a bunch of IIS boxes or reroute certain ICMP traffic on the firewall so it would come up as IIS/ASP.NET/Windows 2003 with NetCraft. And then the sales junkie finally got the report that more than 50% of their machines were Windows.
The sales were not allowed to sell Linux or Mac unless specifically asked and persisted on by the customer and then we had to support Apache/PHP/MySQL on Windows (that was back in 2002), then on tradeshows we had to say 70% of our machines were running Windows, that metric we got only because we didn't include our internal Linux service machines (you know Nagios, e-mail, spamfilters, Snort, firewalls,
By the way: we hosted parts of MSN (Belgium) and the dumbest thing they did: buy a cheap Shared Hosting package for MSN advertisements (which were going to display nationwide) and they HARD CODED the shared package URL (msn.server.hostingcompany.com) in MSN Messenger, we had to redirect our nameservers for that URL to a separate server.
Parent
Re:Ahh... (Score:5, Interesting)
Bullshit! Do you know just how bad OOXML is? It's so bad that the only way even Microsoft can benefit from it is by using it as a tool to prop up its monopoly. Hell, I'm not even convinced it's in Microsoft's best interests to be pushing OOXML -- its monopoly might be better served by MS Office implementing ODF, since MS Office still has great mindshare and interface advantages over OpenOffice.
Microsoft's tactic of pushing OOXML is like trying to gain territory via nuclear war: sure, they might get the territory in the end, but it'll be radioactive and worthless.
Parent
Who paid? (Score:5, Insightful)
ODF vs OOXML FUD with spreadsheets (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [oasis-open.org].
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.
Parent
Re:ODF vs OOXML FUD with spreadsheets (Score:5, Informative)
I didn't entirely believe this, and anyone else who didn't should go here like I did: ECMA Standard Office Open XML Formats [ecma-international.org]. Although the writing style is slightly less retarded than in fritsd's paraphrased version, the writing content isn't. It turns out that the 1900-based dating is screwed up "for legacy reasons" (in an unstandardized format that didn't exist in any previous versions??) As the spec states,
"A consequence of this is that for dates between January 1 and February 28, WEEKDAY shall return a value for the day immediately prior to the correct day, so that the (non-existent) date February 29 has a day-of-the-week that immediately follows that of February 28, and immediately precedes that of March 1."
I'd like to read further to try to understand why they're expressing integers as "1.0000000..." instead of "1.0" or even "1", but I'm starting to fear that the Stupid might be contagious.
Parent
Google Joined to say No (Score:3, Interesting)
Kudos to Google for being one of those to "suddenly" join, but on the "No" side. Most of the other companies on the list of new arrivals [tryggve.se] are unfamiliar to me, excepting Google and HP, and we don't officially know how HP's vote went.
Shame on the others for having no sense of decency.
Interesting ... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Interesting ... (Score:4, Interesting)
http://ooxmlhoaxes.blogspot.com/2007/05/has-ibm-a
Sounds like both sides aren't playing fair.
Parent
But... didn't they want it like that? (Score:5, Insightful)
Step 2 - take money from companies who wish to buy votes.
Step 3 - Profit!
Step 3a - Complain about the unfairness of it all, all the way to the bank.
More OOXML shenanigans (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070824
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070815
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070723
What of ISO's credibility now? (Score:4, Interesting)
I can't help thinking that the OOXML standardisation effort should be shelved until one of two things becomes true: either at least two or more independent implementations, developed by distinct organisations from the specification alone, can be shown to interoperate to a degree that justifies the moniker "standard"; or preferably, a complete reference implementation, with full source code available under a BSD (or equally permissive) licence, is submitted with the proposal. In fact, I can't understand why this isn't, er, standard practice. Were it so, the OOXML efforts could be trivially dismissed on technical grounds, and this whole dog and pony show could be avoided.
6546 pages? (Score:4, Informative)
What can each of us do to stop OOXML in the ISO? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Sore losers (Score:5, Interesting)
You're right we should stop whining & petition ISO to change the rules on voting to block this kind of ballot stuffing. I doubt very much that any of these companies have seen the document spec let alone read & understand it.
This is actually one of the fairer subversions of the process - in Portugol they denied IBM & SUN access claiming the room was too full, then allowed MS partners to enter & vote. In another place, the chairman - an employee of an MS partner announced the voting procedure as
Now that's how to really stack the deck - you completely remove the option to vote against the standard.
Parent
The funniest thing of all (Score:5, Funny)
This is a quote from the SIS.SE home page:
Translation in english: "It's not money that makes the world go around. Do you want to know what it is?"
Apparently the answer is: money
Parent
Re:Sore losers (Score:4, Insightful)
If I find a bug in WoW that allows me to get a million gold everytime I click a specific key combo, you, Blizzard and every WoW player would call it cheating, even though the "rules" of the game include that bug at that point.
Cheating is not breaking the rules. Cheating is breaking the spirit of the rules, whether or not you literaly break them. In fact, most cheating happens by lawyer-weaseling your way through the loopholes in the rules. Most board game rules do not explicitly forbid you to look at the cards stacked face-down on the board, but everyone would agree that doing so is cheating.
And that's exactly what happened here.
Parent
Re:Sore losers (Score:4, Insightful)
You do realize monopolies are restrained by law because they subvert the free market forces, right? For example, if you have a monopoly in one area you can use it to extract more money from a market while expending less investment and giving less to consumers, thus accumulating piles of money you can use to say, pay other companies to act on you behalf in meetings. Or pressure other companies to act on you behalf under threat of financially ruining them by cutting them out of markets that interact with the one(s) controlled by your monopoly.
This particular round of misdeeds is just one more symptom of the main problem, MS is an abusive monopoly with so much money they've been able to buy the politicians who run the courts and are supposed to enforce the law.
Parent
Re:Sore losers (Score:5, Insightful)
In this case, it's a chance to vote on an international standard -- one that many governments are obliged to allow, support or follow. This is, in effect, a chance to "buy" your way into government policy.
But there are certainly, in my opinion, two problems here:
1. That the ability to vote has such low entry requirements and that no amount of knowledge or understanding seems to have any bearing on whether or not someone is qualified to vote. (yes, I realize you could make the same argument for local elections, and I do.)
2. That Microsoft has no shame in deploying such an obvious, self-serving tactic of essentially buying their way into being elected as an international standard. It may be 'legal' but it's unethical and definitely not right.
Parent
Re:Sore losers (Score:5, Insightful)
Sadly, the fact that these people joined the discussion only *after* the debate on those technical merits was over only shows that this process has become nothing more than a high-school president election in a bad B-movie.
Parent
Re:Sore losers (Score:5, Insightful)
Stop whining? Certainly. STFU? I don't think so.
There's more to this issue than "mummy mummy microsoft did a bad thing and it's not faaaaaair!". The question we should be asking is "Is this the sort of behaviour we really want to encourge?"
Do we really want an industry where standards are sold to the highest bidder without any scrutiny as to fitness for their supposed purpose. If so, the ISO committees may as well pack their bags and go home now, because we are headed for a world where no one will pay any attention at all to their so called "standards".
I think that merits some discussion. Not because Microsoft did a Bad Thing so much, but because the standards process served a useful purpose. Microsoft may well be willing to burn this process to the ground in order to protect their file formats. I think the least we could do is shout "FIRE!"
Parent
"Ready! Aim! ..." (Score:4, Funny)
...so long as MS is against the wall. Blindfolds or not, I don't care.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What part of "capitalism" don't you understand? (Score:4, Interesting)
Only, instead of a state, we have a corporation, Microsoft.
They buy their power with their money. And a big part of their money comes from our wallets via taxes.
I mean, a really big part.
I mean a part much bigger than what you'd think.
I mean, much bigger than what I'd think, too.
I mean, *huge*.
Then, with this power, they take away what really is common goods. Or aren't "standards"?
Communism.
Parent
Re:What part of "capitalism" don't you understand? (Score:5, Insightful)
- unsafe products
- unhealthy products
- unsustainable processes
- suppression of the truth about unsafe products
- exploitation of the poor and the uninformed
- outsourcing (abandonment of the community)
- tax evasion
- consumerism
- competition that puts profits before people
- profitable relationship with war
But then if you accept the premise that People Don't Matter, all the above makes perfect sense.
Parent
Re:Probably Stupid Question (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Evil bastards (Score:5, Funny)
If that's not integrity, what is?
Parent
Reminds me of a joke... (Score:5, Funny)
God was in a good mood and decided to give virtues to people. One day he decided to give all the programmers in the world three virtues:
They would be smart, well-intentioned, and work for Microsoft. But an angel told him: Hey, wait a minute, aren't they too many virtues?
"You're right", said God. "They'll have these virtues but a person can only have two of these virtues at the same time".
Since then, programmers in the world were divided in the three following groups:
Programmers who were smart and well-intentioned, couldn't work for Microsoft.
Programmers who were smart and worked for Microsoft, couldn't be well-intentioned.
Programmers who were well-intentioned and worked for Microsoft, couldn't be smart.
Parent