OOXML's 662 Resolutions

Rob Isn't Weird writes "Microsoft has finally responded to the resolutions concerning OOXML (or 662 of them at any rate). The only problem? The JTC1 NBs who are deciding OOXML's fate have to download 662 individual PDFs from a slow, password-protected server; and many have had trouble getting the password. Don't misunderstand the ECMA's intent, though: there would have been 662 OOXML files if they had wanted to make it hard for people to read and criticize the responses. Thanks to the Internet, other interested parties have put all 662 resolutions online in a searchable, taggable format and are requesting that everyone interested help examine them. That means you, Slashdot."

Slashdotted

[Anonymous Coward]

Well you're not missing much because the 662 responses are mostly grammatical fixes and the big stuff is yet to come. Read the country comments at iso-vote.com/comments [iso-vote.com]

Interesting 'resolution'.... still confusing!

[jkrise]

FTA: "The CHAR() function converts an integer into a character. But no character set was defined in the DIS to govern this conversion. Microsoft clarrified tis saying that the function uses the "Macintosh character set"on the Mac and ANSI on all other platforms."

That means the same soon-to-be-ISO-standard OOXML file can be interpreted differently, depending on the 'platform' in which it is being used / read! Typical Microsoft rubbish.... and AGAIN!

Also Rob responds to a query: "Even their correction is ambiguous. What is the "MacIntosh Character Set"? There is Mac OS Roman, MacCyrillic, MacIcelandic, Mac Central European, and with OS X we have UTF-8 as the default." Hilarious!

And again, probing a bit deeper into the ANSI character set for Windows... there's no such thing apparently:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI [wikipedia.org]

In Microsoft Windows, the phrase "ANSI" refers to the Windows ANSI code pages (even though they are not ANSI standards[1]). Most of these are fixed width, though some characters for ideographic languages are variable width. Since these characters are based on a draft of the ISO-8859 series, some of Microsoft's symbols are visually very similar to the ISO symbols, leading many to falsely assume that they are identical.

To top it all, quoting from a response:

One thing to note here is that MS explicitly do not support UTF-8 as an non-UCS2 encoding[1], while most Linux distributions are moving towards putting everything in UTF-8. So it would likely be the case in the near future that Linux and Windows users would not share a common platform character set, even if they spoke the same language. (e.g. Windows English British in Windows-1252, and Linux en_GB.UTF-8)

And I thought Vista was the most confusing stuff from Microsoft!

Re:I believe I speak for most of us..

[rpp3po]

It does not even load in Microsoft's own Office 2004 for Mac for which they still aren't selling an alternative. Their OOXML converter is a silly joke. Convert an old Word XP HTML to Word 97 (doc) to Wordperfect to Word 95 to RTF and it will still look much better than the laughable output of their converter.

Re:Any suggestions to slashdotproof it?

[clarkn0va]

Since it sounds like bandwidth isn't your problem, you can start by optimising your filesystem mount options for speed, particularly the partition carrying your log files, as these will be writing like crazy right now. For example, in /etc/fstab, for xfs use "noatime,nodiratime,logbufs=8". For reiserfs, "noatime,notail". Do mount -a to effect the changes right away.

Just my 2 cents.

db

Re:I like the country count.

[Anonymous Coward]

...due to a lack of genetic biodiversity...

Why the PC terms? It's called inbreeding. I should know, I'm from another people that was almost wiped by European diseases that we couldn't handle.

Re:I like the country count.

[sethawoolley]

...due to a lack of genetic biodiversity...

Why the PC terms? It's called inbreeding. I should know, I'm from another people that was almost wiped by European diseases that we couldn't handle.

They weren't trying to in-breed, unlike your bunch ;-). They just never had contact with any new migrations after the land bridge closed up (three or four waves of migration from 40k to 10k years ago are represented in their mitochondrial DNA). With a 28% chance of having a near identical immune system as somebody else, versus 2% for Europeans, the virulence was unheard of, even by European standards.

Though, they main reason they're around today in some form is due to hybridization with the new visitors from Europe. I guess that's a positive way of looking at it.

OK, ok. I won't be so P.C...

They were raped by the conquistadors, their new lords and masters.

Wordpress is the problem

[empaler]

Wordpress is notorious for killing servers with heavy loads when there are many incoming connections. You could try making a temporary static page and disable Wordpress for a day or two; then in the comments section make a notice along the lines of "Sorry, due to server issues, commenting has been disabled until 2007-12-06".
You could also see if CoralCache [coralcdn.org] can help you out a smidgeon. Check this page [coralcdn.org] for further details.

Also, a piece of advice: don't sink money into an upgrade because you've been on /. frontpage once. If the load continues to be high, then yeah, go for it, but slashdotters have a short attention span. See a tale about slashdottings here [smu.edu]

Better: WP-supercache

[Alphager]

http://ocaoimh.ie/wp-super-cache/ [ocaoimh.ie] ! Does not work with the standard debian-install of wordpress (plugin does not like symlinks) !