Australia Mandates Microsoft's Office Open XML 317
littlekorea writes "The Australian Government has released a common operating environment desktop policy that — among security controls aimed at reducing the potential for leaks of Government data — mandates the ECMA-376 version of Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) standard and productivity suites that can 'read and write' the .docx format, effectively locking the country's public servants into using Microsoft Office. The policy [PDF] also appears to limit desktop operating systems to large, off-the-shelf commercial offerings at the expense of smaller distributions."
Down under is going down, down, down (Score:2, Funny)
The land down under just went under.
Re:Down under is going down, down, down (Score:4, Funny)
The land down under just went underer.
ftfy
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I wonder if this is at ends with australian government themselves, given that they're following a standard which is not implemented?
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i live in a country run by morons.
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i live in a country run by morons.
So you live .... on Earth?
Re:But people in the US should thank them.... (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, they are now required not to pay the Microsoft Tax. The last tests I saw showed that Microsoft Office got over 5,000 failures in Microsoft's own OOXML conformance tests. It therefore does not support OOXML and can therefore not be used by the Australian government. I suggest that anyone in Australia points this out to their elected representatives.
Amusingly, Microsoft Office actually did better in ODF conformance tests (with a plugin, I think), than it did in OOXML conformance tests. I'm not sure how OO.o does with OOXML, but it's managed to open both of the the OOXML files I've ever been sent.
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... for paying the "Microsoft Tax" in addition to their own taxes, to prop up the US economy at their expense.
I wouldn't be that optimistic. [google.com]
I can't imagine why they'd do it; but the US sure could use the money to pay off some of it's debt.
Lobbies and money funneling come to my mind first. The business as usual for MS and the likes. And the gov't officials.
I keep seeing... (Score:3)
Re:I keep seeing... (Score:5, Insightful)
They're not clueless. They're very smart. It's just that their priorities aren't your priorities. Their priority is putting money in their pocket. Who do you figure hands out money? It's not the linux geeks I'll tell ya that much. :)
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Where where the other US products Australia could have selected from?
Or Microsoft offered some very unique file tracking options.
From simple unique identifiers too ??
From schools to gov to states, to teaching hospitals, MS has been very busy in Australia.
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There aren't really any office products out there that are better than MS Office. If there were, people wouldn't use MS Office. OpenOffice.org isn't terrible, but it's still no where near as good as MS Office.
That's why they settled on an MS "open" (what a crock) standard. It's better, and better usually wins.
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"Better" is pretty subjective though. There are lots of better text editors, better page layout programs, better structured document systems, etc. MS Word takes a jack-of-all-trades approach that necessarily leads to poor mastery in any particular area. Some people are willing to make the tradeoff to only use a single program, but that's often not the "better" choice. Minivans are by far the most versatile vehicle for many people, but many people dismiss them unless they really need a car that can do it all
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Funny open standard, which only MS can read/produce.
Plenty of apps and utils can read OOXML, including Open Office. The point is that aside from MS Office, the only thing that can currently write OOXML is LibreOffice.
Re:I keep seeing... (Score:5, Informative)
Not even MS Office is able to write OOXML as in ECMA-376:
Office 2010 provides read support for ECMA-376, read/write support for ISO/IEC 29500 Transitional, and read support for ISO/IEC 29500 Strict.
(emphasis mine) [source: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc179190.aspx [microsoft.com] ]
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all these /. articles about gov't IT and Internet policy in OZ. It's hard to believe they're truly that clueless. (Not that us Yanks are much better off, it's just more centered around "security from terrorists," and ""intellectual property"". - same, only different)
I think most (or all?) aside from this have actually been speculation, rumors or things that have failed pretty epically long before implementation.
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Do you think politicians anywhere aren't dumb?
US govt aso hands out no-bid contracts and sets some rather stupid standards. Same thing with the UK govt, Japanese govt, German govt ad nausium.
The thing about this standard is that I doubt it will be followed, the Australian Public Service is really a feudal nightmare on multiple levels. The king of IT will always be fighting the King of accounting.
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Don't worry, I learned from this H.264 guy that this is totally ok, OOXML is free because we are free to pay for it, and it's open because every can see Microsoft implementing it!
Re:I keep seeing... (Score:4, Insightful)
This happens with many ministers. Such as Penny Wong our former Minister for Climate change, who's only real experience with anything environmental was siding with loggers in the 90s logging debates. She also has a degree in Law and Arts which I'm sure is a lot of help for her current portfolio which includes a huge finance position.
Re:I keep seeing... (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me play devil's advocate for a minute here.
I'm going to make a number of assumptions. All are what I would consider "reasonable", though obviously they're assumptions so make of them what you will.
So at just about the time that it becomes apparent that some sort of standardised document format is necessary, enter Microsoft stage left, proudly announcing that they've spent a long time working on just that and if they upgrade now, they can have an office suite that uses a standard document format. All they need to do is dictate that every department purchases something that is compatible with OOXML. The issues surrounding OOXML aren't brought up because the big cheeses are unaware that they even exist and the Microsoft sales team certainly aren't going to volunteer such information - in fact, there's a good chance they're not aware of the issues either.
Where's the salesman for OO.o? Where's the flashy suit, the company car and the briefcase full of numbers showing cost savings? These guys are from a very traditional background, and know little or nothing of the F/OSS world. From their perspective, software is developed by businesses - and what sort of a business can't even be bothered to put together a sales department? If you've ever tried explaining F/OSS to that cousin of yours who runs a business and has always bought Microsoft products - and before you've even got the first couple of sentences out you can see you're getting looks of open disbelief, by the time you've finished your cousin is seriously thinking you need to see a psychiatrist - those are the people who are making the decisions.
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Government by bureaucrats and politicians is always guaranteed to be awful. That's what happens when you put control of everything into the hands of a few and then stop paying attention.
Amazingly, when radicals talk about opening governance [wikipedia.org] to everyone, lots of people quickly decry the idea, complaining about how idiotic "the people" are. Are all the people really any less idiotic than a small group of people? Really?
Vox Populi, Vox Dei.
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SOme of those ideas have some merit. But in general that smells a lot like direct Democracy and Democracy is a terrible idea. The US Founders considered it to be worse than any of the other options, Kings included. No, the answer is to keep government small enough that a) the voters have a decent shot of keeping up with what it is doing without it being a full time job and b) it doesn't have much opportunity to be evil in the first place.
Take this example. If the Australian government weren't so large t
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The US Founders considered it to be worse than any of the other options, Kings included.
The US Founders were aristocrats - the very thought of mere rabble voting on major policy issues was not only off-putting to them, it was downright dangerous because they'd get kicked out of power real soon. Just to remind, US had property qualifications to vote when it was founded, which in some states amounted to over half of their entire population.
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Whilst I'm not the greatest fan of the way most governments in the world seem to work these days I have to ask: Have you met the rabble? I'm probably no better informed than they are but still, it's scary when you talk to a lot of people, who don't really have an interest in understanding anything beyond what they've heard from the media or other like-minded people.
Consider direct democracy in this case: Most people will be thinking 'what's wrong with Microsoft, I use it all the time.' The few voices wh
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People are idiots.
For all politicians get it wrong, and wrong, and wrong again, it's not total kneejerk-reaction nonsense.
Give power to the people and you'll find pretty fast that a lot of people are quite happy to have immigrants and homosexuals hanged, to ban even more stuff than the government, to react with short-sighted, self-destructive strikes....
I believe that *I* should be given more say in how things are run, but not that everyone else should. Until this situation is resolved (with me being handed
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Give power to the people and you'll find pretty fast that a lot of people are quite happy to have immigrants and homosexuals hanged, to ban even more stuff than the government, to react with short-sighted, self-destructive strikes....
There are more than two options, you know. There is a middle ground where the power of the government is reduced and the people have more (but not all) power (and still must work within the bounds of the law and the constitution). That sounds more ideal than the corrupt system we have now (even if only slightly so).
does office even support the standard? (Score:5, Insightful)
iirc, even MS office doesn't use the standard as published ???
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Their implementation is not even reliable across different versions.
But then again I'm not really surprised. IE also has problems with some MS-specific aspects of Microsoft's own Javascript dialect, even if you follow the specifications to the letter.
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That was my thought as well - there were those stories that not even MS Office supported OOXML completely (that talk about no existing reference implementation).
I guess Australia will go back to typewriters and ledgers ...
Re:does office even support the standard? (Score:5, Insightful)
The catch here is that they mandated the Ecma version of the standard, not the ISO version. The Ecma version is pretty much what Office 2007+ supports. ISO used that as a base, but the committee did change quite a few things there, and the final version of ISO standard still has all those changes - and it's that which does not have any supporting implementation yet.
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Re:does office even support the standard? (Score:4, Informative)
Office 2010 supports only ECMA-376 read support. Read/Write support is for ISO/IEC 29500 Transitional, and they claim to be able to read ISO/IEC 29500 Strict.
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To be fair: how is the cross-application support for ODF? Does it really look the same in various word processors? Honest question, not trying to troll here.
I'm using OpenOffice.org myself exclusively - no fancy layout or any advanced features though - and it works fine. Only sharing within the office, all identical software.
But in this situation .doc(x) works fine too, especially when you do not share documents.
To me it seems that it is still a big problem to standardise and reliably implement a format
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HTML is not meant to look precisely the same in all clients - by design.
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If you want true WYSIWYG then you're not talking document format, but typesetting format. The issue with OOXML is that no one has in fact implemented the ECMA standard, what's more it does not appear that anyone other than Microsoft could because it as an absolutely horrible spec, and more to the point despite all of that Microsoft offers no product that adheres to the ECMA spec.
ODF has some faults, but it is actually a reasonably implementable document format. Whether it's a superior document standard as
Re:does office even support the standard? (Score:4, Interesting)
They don't use the ISO standard as published, no - which is why Australia has specified the ECMA version. The ECMA version basically just documents what Office 2007 does, warts and all.
Compression must default to .zip (Score:2)
Urgh.
Even better, mandated support for .zip as the default compression format. LZMA is so much better, and free too.
7-zip does have a pretty horrible UI though. I can see why you might want to standardise on WinZip, but still use LZMA compression.
I also note that Firefox's crap central management support will probably also rule it out of being included in Aussie federal SOEs. Guess it'll be the latest version of IE for the government (again)...
Re:Compression must default to .zip (Score:5, Interesting)
The nice thing about .zip is that it is, in fact, supported everywhere, out of the box.
It's also nice in that it actually supports directory trees. The legacy lzma, and the newer xz, well, don't. I like tar in principle, and I use these formats for all sorts of things that I don't have to share with others, but there are definitely cases where zip is nice -- where it's nice to be able to effectively "mount" a zipfile, "seek" to an appropriate file within it, and read it, without having to decompress the whole thing. This is why zip is used by tons of games, where they might not even be using compression, but they can't trust most filesystems to handle that many small files properly. It's why it's used by both OpenDocument and MS OOXML -- it's the easiest way imaginable to embed multiple files into a single document, including multiple XML files that are compressed well.
It also depends what your goals are. Zip compresses and decompresses a hell of a lot faster than lzma. These days, I standardize on either lzop for speed or xz for compression ratio, but zip and gzip are nice compromises.
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Naming of OOXML a really dirty trick by MS (Score:5, Interesting)
Sneaking the word "Open" into this specification was a really dirty trick by Microsoft because
- it implies that this standard is somewhat "open", and the word "open" has positive connotations
- it (seemingly deliberately) creates confusion with "Open Office" ie the product OpenOffice.org, or open source in general.
I wouldn't be surprised if a number of people were taken in by this, thinking that by making the decision to support OOXML they were somehow contributing to more "openness" in the sense of open government and/or open source.
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Nothing new...it's similar to calling a tyranical government a "people's" republic.
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Like calling a windowing operating system "Windows"? Or an office suite "Office"? Or a word processor "Word"? Or a worldwide identity "Passport"? Or a competitor to Java called ".net"? How in the holy shit do you search for ".net"?
"I want to do [x] in .NET"
Results: you can do anything at zombo com. Anything at all.
Fuck their marketing department, it makes it impossible to search for anything relevant until the search engines optimize for their retardedness.
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How in the holy shit do you search for ".net"?
god forbid you need help doing something in GIMP.
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Or the time I was trying to flip a \ding{51} in LaTeX. That was an interesting search.
(LaTeX is the most interesting language to search for, which is why I use the book so much at work)
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You search for .net articles by typing ".net" into the search anyone. Every single search engine knows what .net as a word is. You could also search dotnet, or better yet search for how to do what you want in your language of choice because that's the logical thing to do. As for your other complaints... Really? The only thing this shows is your inability to properly utilize a search engine. Every single example you've given can be easily researched.
That's why I always preferred MOOXML (Score:2, Insightful)
MOOXML, aka Microsoft Open Office XML
Quick! Spread the meme!
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Using government and politics to push an unimplemented standard through the fastrack process is a dirty rule breaking move. The fastrack process is for "standards" that are in current use and has been fully implemented. OOXML is neither of those. The fact that ISO is supposed to be separate from political influences and was completely ursurped by it is another example.
Are you intentionally looking the other way or do you simply not know what happened?
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OOXML has only become a standard due to monetary reasons (read: bribes, lots of it), not techical ones.
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The WebM specification is complete enough that it can be implemented by third parties. There are already multiple open and closed source applications implementing WebM.
The WebM specification also comes with a reference implementation which is licensed under liberal terms.
OOXML includes references to proprietary technology which is not documented in any open standard.
OOXML (and perhaps WebM too) includes ambiguities which will force anyone implementing it to either make a guess or consult a reference impleme
Typical (Score:5, Interesting)
Unfortunately this seems pretty typical of this government. They like to make policies up on the spot and those policies don't have any thought put into them. We've had stimulus spending that - helped keep the economy going. They didn't actually plan what they were going to spend on though and they never put proper policies in place and we ended up spending way too much on stuff that didn't work.
I especially like the opt-out section:
51. This policy is subject to the process for administration of opt-outs from Whole-ofGovernment arrangements.
52. Initial opt-out considerations will be factored into the transition plan and are expected to
show how alignment to the policy will be achieved as part of the transition plan. Claims for
opting out will not be considered during the transition phase.
53. When seeking an opt-out, an agency will need to include a remediation plan to detail how it
will return to the WofG COE policy. Opt-outs are limited to a maximum of 3 years, after
which the original business case will be reassessed to ensure it is still valid.
54. While it is recognised that agencies may have a need to develop separate SOE images, it is
expected that these images will comply with the standards set out for the COE to ensure
that agencies can still share data and services in a seamless manner.
Whoa shite! Opting out is a massive process and has to be reviewed every 3 years.............
I read this as... (Score:2)
aka - use microsoft products. Not sure how this is news, but I guess it gives the
Insist on FULL compliance with the standard (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it really that hard? (Score:2)
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There is no office product that has read/write support for ECMA-376 (the OOXML spec in the story) yet.
Office 2010 has read support for it (though what document it could read, I don't know, since nothing writes it yet), and writes the transitional ISO standard. SoftMaker 2010 and OO.org both import it, and SoftMaker can output the ISO transitional standard like Office 2010. I don't know if OO.org can do that yet.
Give it another year and all three will likely support it.
Small software companies don't make o
That's a GUARANTEE there will be leaks (Score:2)
Was Australia not paying attention to the Stuxnet situation? It was a HIGHLY TARGETTED malware designed for the purpose of infiltration of very specific systems. The fact that Windows and office is a highly predictable execution environment guarantees that there will be vectors of attack that Australia will be vulnerable to. And there WILL be people who see this as easily as I do because I'm no genius in these matters. And of course, the empowerment of anonymity combined with the foolishness of youth, t
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Yes yes Windows has a lot of holes in it, we know. Now think of what you just wrote. Not using Windows doesn't stop attacks like Stuxnet.
Stuxnet was designed to attack very specific systems; the real target being some embedded computer in a controller. No idea what OS that runs, not Windows I'd guess.
If someone were to specifically attack a government, they would target that specific system. It's not that if the government chooses Linux, that there will be dozens of versions around. As any large organisat
Public information should be open (Score:5, Informative)
As long as they provide information to the public in an open format such as HTML or PDF, I don't care what they adopt in an SOE.
The major beef I do have however, is the Windows only tax return software provided by the Australian Taxation Office. The fact that I have to use Windows if I want to file my tax return electronically is totally unacceptable.
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> As long as they provide information to the public in an open
> format such as HTML or PDF, I don't care what they adopt in an SOE.
Try filling up a PDF form with open source software and save it. Very practical.Not.
Business as usual. (Score:2)
This really isn't a drastic change from policy that was already in place within many government agencies in Australia.
As much as our Amercian cousins here on slashdot lament the stupidity of their representatives they are streets ahead of those who inhabit the parliaments of Australia in terms of their tech savvyness - our mob are truly luddites and assume that M$ are the only competent people in the whole IT industry.
It's especially true in the national capital... it's one of the few places in the country
Active Directory Rights Management Services (Score:5, Interesting)
After Wikileaks, governments are going to be all about rights management protection for documents. RMS stops people opening sensitive documents that they've copied to a USB stick.
Open / Libre Office doesn't have this functionality (and because of the Open Source movement's philosophical objection to rights management technologies probably will never have this functionality).
The recent wikileaks saga has been a big wake up call to business and government - because they want to do their best to make sure that their information isn't plastered all over the Internet. Office 2007 / 2010 support this out of the box (just that few people use it). Open / Libre Office won't support it in a million years because "DRMs is Teh Evil"
Re:This is why... (Score:5, Interesting)
At least at University, I'm seeing more and more students primarily using free operating systems. In my CS courses especially, it's all over the place: a show-of-hands survey in one of my upper-levels recently had probably upwards of ten Linux users in a class of thirty. Of course, it's a lot more prevalent among CS students, but even among the less technical students Linux usage is extremely common. When I first got here, I was shocked when I would see a Linux laptop or two near me in a class...nowadays I'm a little surprised if I don't.
Free software may not be catching on as well as we would like with the older generations, but it most certainly is with the younger folks.
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If you are used to one thing the other is always going to be worse.
You are going to have a hard time using the same fonts as Office uses since Open Office doesn't license the same fonts, you can choose to install them by yourself. OO will keep the font settings of a Office document but use its own fonts. Having done the switch my self, and having a big and expensive font collection I can tell you that OO handles fonts perfectly fine, even the standard OO fonts are fine.
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That's why they should publish the slides as pdfs.
Re:This is why... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's right. Freedom is a lot of trouble. Just give it up.
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Freedom is only trouble because it steps on the toes of the powerful.
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I guess this confirms the other story about sharks swimming down Australian business streets?
representative govt. and squeaky wheels (Score:2)
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This is why I can never bring myself to move to Linux and cut ties with Windows entirely. It's just too much hassle when you end up having to interact with content produced using Windows-only software and you cannot guarantee perfect parsing of the file formats used.
This is indeed why I keep a Windows partition around, occasionally remote into a Windows terminal server or boot a VM.
But I'm not quiet about it. If they can write docx, that implies they've got a decently new version of Word. Decently new versions of Word natively support odt.
Fortunately, I find I have to do this less and less, both as I have fewer documents I have to read from people period, and as people get the hint and start producing PDFs that everyone can read.
It's time to give up the fight against Microsoft and succumb.
Remember IE6? Remember how fucking long
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Not sure you realize this, but many people are STILL stuck with MSIE6.
And for Microsoft, competition is a "last resort" measure.
Re:This is why... (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's the thing - we're all gonna die in the end, so all these fights against proprietary formats won't mean jack.
In that case, so is replying. Yet you seem to care enough about justifying your position (perhaps to yourself) to reply, so don't give me this nihilistic bullshit.
In life we pick the battles we can fight. These are potentially important issues, but basically given you're effectively saying about 90% of people are part of the "problem", I don't give a fuck anymore.
When 90% of the people are part of the problem is when I absolutely do care.
Take another battle I've picked: Religion. There's a small minority which does some really [google.com] crazy [mgmbill.org] shit [youtube.com]. And they get away with it in the name of "religious tolerange", because a majority of the world believes enough crazy [photobucket.com] shit [motifake.com] of [southparkstudios.com] their [southparkstudios.com] own [creationmuseum.org] that it takes a lot to make us as a culture say, no, you can't let your child die because you'd rather fucking pray than get help. [whatstheharm.net]
Easily 80-90% of the US population is religious, which makes it a safe bet that you are, too -- probably also Christian, probably believe faith is a virtue. If so, merely by supporting the idea that faith is a virtue, you are encouraging yourself and those around you to turn off their critical thinking and skepticism when the situation calls for it. That kind of thinking leads to atrocities [whatstheharm.net]. Never mind that merely by calling yourself "Christian", you lend credibility to these fuckwits [godhatesfags.com].
Am I going to win? Not really. I do hope to reinforce separation of church and state, to promote actual science education instead of "Intelligent Design", and to establish some basic rights the religious would deny, like the right to marry. I'd love to see people tolerate less of the extremists. I really doubt I'm going to see the religious become a minority in my lifetime.
But you know what? I'd like to think that when I'm lying on my deathbed, I lived for things that matter. I'd like to think that I'd still be the kind of person who would be ashamed to think I gave up because it was too hard, or because there were too many people who disagreed with me.
Life shouldn't have to be some damn crusade.
You're right, it shouldn't. But this is the world we live in, and there are some issues which tend towards exactly that -- either you're a good little worker propping up the status quo, or you're actually helping to move things forward.
And life should be meaningful -- and it's up to you to find that meaning. Maybe you honestly don't care, but that's not what I'm hearing. What I'm hearing is that you do care, you're just too lazy to do anything about it anymore.
Yet somehow, you're not too lazy to post, and to try to justify how much you don't care. That says a lot.
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It's called a rant. People do it on Facebook and Twitter all the time, and on forums for even longer. I care enough to reply, because it's bothered me for ages. Trust me, this will be the last I say of it but won't be the last anyone else says of it.
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It's really strange to hear of someone who has ahd the opposite experience to me.
Windows... you have to mess around with finding and downloading drivers, you can't find decent (free) software equivalents to most of the stuff available on linux, if you do then you have to download them from some untrusted third-party. The platform experience just isn't that good.
The other day win 7 popped up a "you didn't shut down properly" or "failed to start properly" screen whilst I was booting. Naively I hit the top opt
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Unlike a (religious) fundie, his reasoning is sound. Big difference there.
What all religions have in common is that they declare a universal cause of human suffering and claim to know the cure. Fundamental atheists claim religion is the universal problem and fundamental, evangelical atheism is the only cure. It's a religion of religion-bashing. That type of circular logic makes me think of a dog chasing its tail.
The logical flaw is that religion isn't the cause of all human suffering. People are, according to Sartre, but I lean toward the more broad, Buddhist perspective: Life it
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It's not capitalism. Capitalism is based on open markets. When a government mandates a certain platform that is not open. Actually....it's more like socialism.
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Government is mandating for itself, not for companies or anyone else. There is no political theory that prevents the government from choosing its own internal tools, it would make no sense (except completely stateless anarchism, I guess).
What could - but its hard to say - be happening here is corruption, which is possible in every organization (including private companies) regardless of the political ideology.
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Not really, since MS Office is better than OO.org in just about every way (except for price, but hey that may change soon!) it makes sense that they would choose an MS based standard.
Too MS is going to spend more money pushing their standard (not necessarily greasing palms, but maybe) than Oracle. You can't win if you aren't even trying.
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What about the ISS, the LHC and all those science programs which are based on international cooperation, and hence openness? Openness doesn't preclude competition. In fact, it stimulates it by ensuring you can't rest on previous achievements, since they'll all be copied soon.
Of course, I don't see what any of this has anything to do with the choice of software by the government - it's not their secrets that closeness is protecting, it's lock-in to manufacturers.
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That may be true for product development, but it is a load of unadulterated steaming dog shit when it comes to standards.
For example, and here's where I get to use a car analogy, would you argue that there should be special roads for Toyota that Ford can't use
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~223 years on, they are still ruled by idiots.
Was ever a country ruled by smart people? Please provide examples if possible.
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~223 years on, they are still ruled by idiots.
Was ever a country ruled by smart people? Please provide examples if possible.
Hutt River Province... [principali...-river.com]
Seems rather pertinent under the circumstances.
It is, after all, the second biggest country in Australia.
GrpA
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~223 years on, they are still ruled by idiots.
Was ever a country ruled by smart people? Please provide examples if possible.
Hutt River Province... [principali...-river.com]
Seems rather pertinent under the circumstances.
It is, after all, the second biggest country in Australia.
GrpA
Is secession still possible?
How does it work with "compulsory land acquisition" laws - see the current Kimberley-related [gasland.com.au] matters?
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If only! Sycophants (Imagine a prime minister saying I did but see her passing by, and yet I love her till I die". About the Queen...)
and [smh.com.au] (G.W. Bush visit, US agents decide who gets into our parliament, allow CNN in despite Australian security saying no)
lackeys [abc.net.au] (Chinese officials allowed to question Chinese political dissidents
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Actually just the ECMA standard. Nobody, not even Microsoft supports the ISO standard. So yep, effectively locked in.
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Actually just the ECMA standard. .... So yep, effectively locked in.
Locked in to standards-conformant software...hrm...
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If it can only be implemented by a single company and is a "standard" that only exists through what could reasonably be called corruption of a standards body, it's not really a standard.
The ISO standard is much stronger because it is supported well across the entire range of office suites available. None fully support it.
No, this is a myopic piece of crap from people who are either corrupt, inept or both. I have nothing against proprietary software, I work for a company that makes proprietary software and d
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So indeed basically nothing changes because I don't believe they moved from OO to Word.
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But why go with a commercial format when OpenDocument formats have been around earlier, supported for longer and on just as many (if not more) software packages, including Microsoft Office? There's nothing saying that we can't use Microsoft Office and store/save in OpenDocument. All the IT managers would need to do is change a site-wide setting for default save format.
I get the feel that it's a bit more than the Government being locked in with volume licenses. I suspect that either:
1) There was a bit of pre
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It's just one crazy law after another down under..
What crazy laws have there been? And this is just some govt policy, not a law.
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How is being locked in to a proprietary format supposed to stop things like wikileaks?
Or do they think that wikileaks won't be able to buy or pirate msoffice in order to read the leaked documents?
I have worked with companies and governments that try to implement various restrictions to stop employees taking data out of the organisation...
I have found that:
The restrictions are generally flawed (often the fault of ms for flawed implementation) and people can get round them easily.
The restrictions only serve to hinder people's ability to work.
Windows typically requires expensive additional software, eg software to prevent access to USB storage devices, and when this software crashes the underlying os allows the unwanted devices anyway.
Even if the restrictions work, there are other ways, eg taking photographs of the screen, printing stuff out, stealing the internal hdd from the machine etc...
You place restrictions on removable media, uploads to the web, attachments via email, people will just find another way... It's better to log rather than to restrict, because if there are no restrictions people will often pick the easiest route and you can at least catch them in the act, and everyone else can get on with their work unhindered.
When implementing security policy, people only tend to think about the front door, they concentrate on features rather than implementation... They buy all kinds of junk claiming to support fancy sounding buzzwords not realising that there are often ways around all of this stuff...
I saw a system where someone was using a web based application to keep data of different security classifications and belonging to different customers separated, now sure if you go through the web interface it won't let you access other people's data but if you get access to the underlying server you obviously have access to everything... And yet, people were claiming that an admin on the server wouldn't be able to access the data because they cant do so through the web interface!
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Applications that only support .docx read capabilities include Apple's iWork, IBM's Lotus Notes, Oracle's OpenOffice.Org and Google Docs, amongst others.
I also just checked, and it's true--I can't save as .docx with OO.O Writer. Read-only capability isn't good enough, since "[software] must have the ability to read and write the endorsed file format".
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What does any of this have to do with liberty or safety?
It's the government's internal documentation standard for god's sake! Get a grip!