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."

Hrmph.

[Kingrames]

Looks like they weren't prepared for slashdot after all.

Is there a mirror to be found?

Re:Hrmph.

[mattbee]

Customer's ISP here - just loaning this chap's virtual machine some more memory to deal with the hoardes. Ah there, it's back up again and using no swap, hooray. Apache might be hitting its MaxClients limit as well, I'll keep an eye on it :)

Re:

[erayd]

Nice to see there are still some good ISPs left out there... Plenty would have just left the VPS to melt, never mind about the impact on the poor customer who got slashdotted.

Re:

[SQLGuru]

It's a selling point....

"Our company monitors Slashdot and keeps you running even when the Slashdot effect kicks in." (Wouldn't you like *YOUR* job to involve reading Slashdot.....well on purpose.)

Layne

Re:

[CarpetShark]

Said customer may not have wanted it published that his site runs on a virtual machine rather than his own dedicated systems.

said customer is very happy to be running on a VM

[dominux]

It is very good value for money, the bandwidth and latency is very low, performance is excellent. No way could I afford that level of bandwidth and processor and rack space as a dedicated box. The initial slashdot shock caused the VM to run out of memory (it is doing a lot of stuff in just 128MB) and I was struggling to fix it. One email to support and 10 minutes later they have boosted the memory, restarted the box, sent me a reply and posted that they had fixed it on Slashdot! I would unhesitatingly recommend hosting stuff in a VM from Bytemark.

Re:

[SeaFox]

Looks like they weren't prepared for slashdot after all.

Yet another server casualty that could have been prevented with BitTorrent.

BitTorrent for web sites?

[tepples]

Yet another server casualty that could have been prevented with BitTorrent.

BitTorrent is designed for unchanging large files (>10 MB) or unchanging large folders. How, may I ask, would BitTorrent help with much smaller files such as HTML files, image files up to 0.1 Mpx used in most web pages, and PDFs containing text (not scans of printed material)? How would BitTorrent help distribute pages that are updated with news weekly or more often? And how does one hook a web browser up to BitTorrent?

Re:

[garbletext]

I don't think it's fair to say that BT is "designed" for large files, it's just most commonly used for those because they represent a bandwidth challenge more often. In this case, the document to be served is both unchanging and hobbled by bandwidth issues. Bittorrent has a configurable block size and is very efficient at distributing small files, even in a situation with lots of leechers, since in the time it would take to shut down your client right away, you'll still upload several times the amount you

For one thing, BitTorrent is an extra install

[tepples]

In this case, the document to be served is both unchanging and hobbled by bandwidth issues.

But how can I persuade a prospective audience to install a client designed for retrieving an unchanging collection of unchanging documents if it does not also retrieve changing documents? We already get Slashdot users who complain in comments to an article because they can't download something on the break room computer at work.

Bittorrent has a configurable block size

Must block sizes be constant throughout a single torrent, and must they be a power of two octets in size?

and is very efficient at distributing small files

Even if so, how long does it take to get one or a dozen files, and how man

Re:

[SeaFox]

BitTorrent is designed for unchanging large files (>10 MB) or unchanging large folders. How, may I ask, would BitTorrent help with much smaller files such as HTML files, image files up to 0.1 Mpx used in most web pages, and PDFs containing text (not scans of printed material)?

Even PDFs of printed text are not always tiny files due to all the formatting. Now take this size and multiply it by 662, and you'll see an archive that easily justifies torrent distribution.

How would BitTorrent help distribute page

Re:

[SeaFox]

These resolutions are not, but the blog page about them is.

Yes, and I wasn't talking about the blog. I was talking about the avalanche of PDFs online, Requiring a password few people can obtain and hosted on a server that cannot handle the traffic load it's contents would attract. A single archive of them could have been much more available if distributed as a torrent.

Re:

[antonyb]

Thanks for sharing that with us.

Ant.

I like the country count.

[sethawoolley]

Note the number of comments submitted by the smaller countries that have taken up open source efforts. Colombia, Venezuela, etc.

Goes to show a few people CAN make a difference.

Re:

[palegray.net]

As evidenced in politics, provided the "few" make enough noise and communicate amongst themselves efficiently, they can definitely have an influence over issues that have long-term impact. An unfortunate side effect is the fact that this works both ways...

Re:

[Elektroschock]

Yes, of course you can make a difference and help to kill the standard. More than 70 000 people signed the petition. What concerns me are the attempts of Microsoft to use Slashdot as their communication channel and kill all critical discussions. We had the same in Wikipedia. [noooxml.org]

Actually it the whole contribution of "Rob isn't Weird" is pointless. Of course Microsoft is absolutely free to publish it comments resolutions but they would be pointless anyway

The real question that matters is if your national Committ

Re:

[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:

[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

advice for moderators: offtopic or overrated?

[sethawoolley]

if you don't like somebody's reply to an offtopic/hijacking/flamebait post, the best thing to do is to rate it "overrated", that way it doesn't go into moderation as an offtopic post, because, well, it was on the hijacked topic. That's the beauty of threading, isn't it -- topics can change.

Overrated simply means, relative to its current score, it's not something somebody browsing at what it's currently scored at would expect.

I "think" that's what the offtopic moderator wanted to say. Or they just got conf

Because it's not open

[tepples]

Now that ODF has failed

Define failed, and give citations that OASIS' ODF has failed in the way you describe

why so much hostility toward an open standard?

OOXML is not as open as the title implies if a lot of elements amount to the following: "If this element is present, an implementation shall emulate the behavior of x brand software. This behavior is not described in this standard." In each case, the software in question is copyrighted with all rights reserved, its source code is a trade secret, and it is long out of print.

Besides, an open standard is not enough.

I believe I speak for most of us..

[RuBLed]

That means you, Slashdot.

We don't RTFA much more those 662 files.

- but

We could comment on it now if you wish...
We would download it anyway to archive the world's internet and determine the melting point of silicon in your everyday datacenter...

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

"What's the problem? What benefit do I get from reading through 662 file format comments?"

A) I think you answered what the problem is. That "Open" file format only works on your closed system.

B) Don't ask what the 662 comments can do for you but what you can do for the 662 comments.

Re:

[jhol13]

You might have year 1900 as leap year or not. You might get mathematically correct results from CEILING() or perhaps not.

But maybe you just don't care as long as it loads into your Word.

Re:

[Heir Of The Mess]

The thing is, this is all some political game between governments and Microsoft. It's played out like this:

Government person A wanted to stop being locked into Microsoft products.
A was told to give a reason why.
A came up with "Because it's not a open format. Information is controlled my MS".
Policy was made that documents had to be in an open format
Microsoft pulled a naming stunt putting "Open" in the name
Policy was changed to format has to be an ISO standard
Microsoft responds by pushing OOXML through

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:

[rpp3po]

Just install bootcamp and buy windows XP and Microsoft Office 2007. You were given bootcamp for a reason, use it. Yes, OOXML's world is so open, you have to reboot your machine into another proprietary operating system just to open a stupid office document.

Re:

[garbletext]

I'm pretty sure you're being sarcastic. *Please* tell me you're being sarcastic.

Re:

[galoise]

something it's done: it's called metamoderation.

Bill's 662 responses

[Rebelgecko]

Bill Gates actually had several more responses, but they forgot to upload 4 of the pdfs.

Re:Bill's 662 responses

[HerbieStone]

> Bill Gates actually had several more responses, but they forgot to upload 4 of the pdfs.

640 should be enough evil for anyone. ;)

slashdotted

[spatialguy]

662 was just too much...

Re:slashdotted

[RLiegh]

Indeed. 640 Resolutions should be enough for anyone.

This means a lot...

[Anonymous Coward]

... especially coming from a full-time salaried employee of International Business Machines, who by cosmic coincidence recently released a product that uses ODF and competes (or tries to compete) Microsoft Office.

I must've missed the memo that declared "evangelism" as the new corporate-sponsored FUD. But boy, it does feel wholesome.

Re:This means a lot...

[jkrise]

This means a lot...especially coming from a full-time salaried employee of International Business Machines,

So what? Don't you think an open dialogue between competitors is much better than shady backroom dealings that screw the customer?

who by cosmic coincidence recently released a product that uses ODF and competes (or tries to compete) Microsoft Office.

ODF was the first to be recognised as an ISO standard, it's MS that's trying to compete and catch up... and making a very bad attempt of it, besides.

I must've missed the memo that declared "evangelism" as the new corporate-sponsored FUD. But boy, it does feel wholesome.

If it's FUD, why not expose it by refuting any opinions in the article. Not every corporate-sponsored research is FUD... not every company is Microsoft! Maybe you are a full-time paid shill for them?

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you are a full-time paid shill for them?

Why is it that anyone who disagrees with the Slashdot groupthink and annoying little trolls like you must be employed by Microsoft? Is that some sort of security blanket you carry around to survive on the internets or something?

Seriously, go back to IRC.

Please get an account

[empaler]

That would make it easier to filter out your comments.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[Dragonslicer]

Maybe you are a full-time paid shill for them?

Why is it that anyone who disagrees with the Slashdot groupthink and annoying little trolls like you must be employed by Microsoft? Is that some sort of security blanket you carry around to survive on the internets or something?

Seriously, go back to IRC.

I think you missed the point of that statement. The original comment said that the criticisms aren't valid because they come from an IBM employee. The response made it rather clear how ridiculous it is to base the validity of a comment solely on the commenter's employer.

What is FUD?

[MickDownUnder]

ODF defines a standard which makes no allowances for backwards compatibility with past file formats as opposed to MS's OpenXML format which does.

All of the criticism levelled at OpenXML is about the difficulty to implement the backwards compatibility constructs of the format. There's nothing MS can do about this complexity, as the complexity is already out there in form of the MS Office documents sitting round in corporate filing systems dating back to the 90's.

In reality its actually very easy to implemen

and the problem is... ?

[m2943]

I must've missed the memo that declared "evangelism" as the new corporate-sponsored FUD. But boy, it does feel wholesome.

Where in the article do you see "evangelism"? Weir is stating a bunch of relevant facts and providing a bunch of useful pointers. What is wrong with that?

Re:

[m2943]

Let me guess - you've never actually read his blog until today. Right?

No, I haven't. How is that relevant? His posting was factual and to the point; what's the problem with that?

...It kind of does.

[SanityInAnarchy]

Sometimes, you don't have to consider the source.

2+2 is always 4. You may disagree with everything I stand for; you may think I represent evil incarnate, or that I'm just lazy hippie scum; but if I say "2+2=4", you kind of have to agree with me.

So, unless you're actually going to dispute the fact that:

• There are 662 separate PDFs
• The comments and the resolutions to the comments are on completely separate pages
• The whole thing is password-protected

Unless there's something factually wrong with that, pretty much anyone can independently figure out that the process sucks giant donkey balls.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[Dragonslicer]

2+2 is always 4

Except for large values of 2, then it's 5.

Re:

[R2.0]

"sucks giant donkey balls"

What's sad is that there is a probably a video in the internet of someone doing just that.

At least the donkey is happy.

[coolGuyZak]

Completely OT, I know. (look at the post title).

Re:

[SanityInAnarchy]

I'll concede that, because I'm too lazy to look up how to denote base in mathematics :P

Re:

[mugnyte]

  Interesting. You decode on "personal attack" as a rebuttal to the terms of the information staging. You fail to address the actual issue in any way. In total, you reinforce the post's sentiment, rather than negating it: That spitefully subverting the process will somehow aid in its public perception.

  I daresay you are the same person. Well done sir.

obligitory anti-MS line....

[theheadlessrabbit]

662 Resolutions ought to be enough for anybody.

Re:

[zoefff]

Did you look at the dupe amount: 652. Leaves that us with only ten issues here?

662 strikes against OOXML?

[CrazyJim1]

I thought 640 K would be enough for anyone.

Re:

[theheadlessrabbit]

640K?

oh god, can you imagine having to go through and open 640 000 seperate password-protected PDF files.

If that were to happen, people on slashdot might start accusing Microsoft of being evil.

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]

Re:

[martinlp]

"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"

Don't know how you searched but I searched for "South Africa" and the comments that came up certainly are not grammatical fixes. Makes me proud to be a South African!

Way to go posting the link on slashdot

[mwc28]

After someone did all that hard work to get them all in a single place for others some genius decides to publicise the document on slashdot, end result nobody can access them .... back to square one!

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Me. Sorry.

Re:

[raynet]

I don't read the articles that are linked from Slashdot, I just click on the link to see the pretty pictures and banners.

662 responses?

[rachit]

Where are the other four?

Open

[clarkn0va]

From Rob Weir's blog:

Yes, the comments and the resolutions to the comments are on two different web sites with two different passwords

Bravo. How proud then is Ecma of these 662 resolutions? Remember, kids, the "O" in OOXML stands for "Open".

db

sorry about the slashdotting

[dominux]

just woke up to find the server not responding, checked slashdot whilst starting to fix it . . . OH SHIT, now I know why it is down! I will try to keep it up.

Re:

[Crizp]

I think your host graciously loaned you some memory and/or cpu for your vhost a bit farther up :)

Re:

[dominux]

yes, I asked them to help. Bytemark [bytemark.co.uk] are great!

This has been our plan all along...

[Osrin]

I can confirm that Microsoft's plan all along was to get Rob to publish something like this, then have it pushed to /. to ensure that all sites quickly become unavailable! Hopefully, normal service should be resumed shortly.

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:

[someone1234]

What other platform you talk about? I guess M$'s intention is to have a single platform. For customer's benefit.

Re:Interesting 'resolution'.... still confusing!

[Anonymous Coward]

In Microsoft Windows, the phrase "ANSI" refers to the Windows ANSI code pages (even though they are not ANSI standards...

I think Microsoft should rename its text encoding as Windows Text Format... or WTF! Everyone can undesrtand exactly what WTF means, without any ambiguity! Hell.. even rename OOXML as WTFML, no need to look it up on Wikpedia to understand!

Re:

[cheros]

Thanks - I'm going to call it like that from now on :-)

Re:

[SnprBoB86]

Although I work for Microsoft, I really have no personal interest in whether or not OOXML becomes a standard.

I do, however, enjoy playing devil's advocate (and believe me, I do the same in support of non-MS tech at work).

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!

This link gives me reason to believe that Brian Jones and his team have at least done their homework:

http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2007/02/20/beyond-the-basics.aspx [msdn.com]

I'd rather a well-defined platform-specific behavior than an ill-defined application-specific behavior.

On an unrel

Any suggestions to slashdotproof it?

[dominux]

the site is a Wordpress blog on Apache and MySQL with Debian as the operating system. It is on a fairly well occupied server, it is actually running in a xen virtual machine. It has loads of bandwidth available, it is in a big datacentre in London. At the moment I can't SSH into the box, I am doing a reboot from the xen admin console (just saw it switch to runlevel 0 - it is running still, but very very slowly.) What settings should I tweak to help it stay up under the impressive load of a slashdot effect? I am going to get more of the host resources allocated to it later (more RAM for a start) but I am not sure what else I can do. I might turn off some of the logging (although I would like to see the logs for today).

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

DO A BARREL ROLL (press z or r twice)

Re:

[ben0207]

This is the /. equivalent of the captains last words as he goes down with his ship.

Re:

[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:

[surfi]

i would use round robin to redirect 50% of the traffic to any random pr0n site.. this would give you some time while keeping everyone happy

Re:

[dominux]

excellent suggestion, I will keep that in mind for the future. More ram seems to have done the trick though.

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]

it seems to be holding now with a bit more RAM

[dominux]

thanks to Bytemark for sorting it out, we now have 450MB of RAM, up from 128 this morning. It is serving up over three thousand hits per hour, about one hit per second on average, and they are complicated pages. I think I will probably install wp-cache or something, but right now it is working and I don't want to touch it!

Re:

[BarlowBrad]

Just read this a few hours ago, not sure if it helps or not but it certainly seems worthwhile. http://www.binaryfortress.com/2007/12/how-to-survive-a-traffic-spike-with-wordpress/ [binaryfortress.com]

Re:

[Sangui5]

Your only problem is the dynamic content. Any halfway competently written webserver can deal with a much heavier rush than slashdot, *if* it is serving static pages. Since you probably don't have the time to switch to a Rails implementation, take empaler's advice: try to move as many of the pages as you can to a static setup. Especially the ones that you feel the /. crowd (or Digg, or Fark, or whatever) are likely to read. Of course your truly dynamic content has to stay dynamic, but if you cut back on

Re:

[Just Some Guy]

mod_proxy [apache.org] can be your friend. There's probably no need to regenerate a whole page every single time it's requested.

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) !

sounds good

[dominux]

as soon as I can get it up for a few minutes I will install that.

whilst the server is rebooting, a small correction

[dominux]

on the site at the moment are the 3492 (ECMA say there are 3522, not sure where the extra ones came from) comments from the .zip file of .doc files of the country comments. About 750 or so (I would tell you exactly if I could see my site) have been classified. I think in my inbox there is a mail with a leak of the 622 responses, I would tell you for certain if my email server hadn't just been slashdotted. I will identify the 622 comments as soon as I can and we can all laugh at them together. I think the general format is "we agree . . . blah blah blah . . . we are not going to do anything about it"

Pardon the Language: Fuck ECMA

[foo fighter]

The only thing good ECMA is widely known for is ECMAscript. I'll assume everyone here knows that is Javascript (a.k.a. ECMA-262, ratified in 1999; 56-63 years ago in Internet Years). Otherwise, all ECMA is knowing for is taking Microsoft's money and then bending over.

By this point ECMA should have as much pull with sovereign governments (and the populaces that grant them power) as the hand written standard for communicating standards via written language I have here beside me that I just wrote.

That stupidit

Re:

[russotto]

Geeks! learn how to talk to people and convince them that your position is the correct one. THIS will be the most challenging yet rewarding effort of you life. This is our World War II.

It's a defining characteristic of geeks that we cannot do that. (except in the context of fraud, i.e. "social engineering")

Further, if we could, our interests would naturally become aligned with the other persuasive people in the world (politicians, salespeople, etc) rather than with geeks. And the status quo ante would thu

Re:

[TwinkieStix]

There was a Stallman in WWII?

The response.

[halcyon1234]

Given Microsoft's attitude towards the process, I'm assuming the response was "Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, you're cool, and fuck you, I'm out!"

Re:

[TheSciBoy]

Don't you mean "Screw you guys, I'm going home"

Re:

[empaler]

Nope [imdb.com]

MS Tools

[pembo13]

Why doesn't Microsoft use their super productive RAD tools to give the comments/resolutions in multiple formats? Why does some (well intentioned) dude have to do all the work himself? I have been led to believe that Microsoft has several hundred employees and billions of dollars, and their marketting people assure me that Visual Studio .NET + ASP.NET + SQL Server are the best things since the invention of the internet. Surely they should be able to slap together a web app with their own tools, _and_ still have a button/link which gives the results as an archive of multiple .doc files.

Sharepoint

[Sweetshark]

Yeah, host it on MS Sharepoint.

Sharepoint: embracing and extending Intranets

[MichaelCrawford]

I was really dismayed when I got on my new employer's Intranet, only to find that Sharepoint just shares Word .doc files. WTF?

Market forces may decide

[mrpacmanjel]

With all the fighting and bickering with the OOXML and document standards the market may eventually decide this anyway.

At some point people will grow tired of the politics of this so-called debate and the issue will become completely irrelevant.

In this instance I'm not sure if letting market forces decide which format it will use because Microsoft Office is the market anyway.

Actually maybe this is Microsoft's plan all along:
If their document spec (in it's original form) had made

Re:

[Tranzistors]

In the heat of the battle it is easy to forget the ODF - I guess the only "lose" moment for MS

chmod

[spatialguy]

Nirvana:~/stuff bill$ chmod 662 reolutions.pdf
Nirvana:~/stuff bill$ ls -hal
-rw-rw--w- 1 bill bill 42M Nov 30 9:58 resolutions.pdf
"Ha, that'll teach them. They can edit, but not read!"

"Hm, on second thought..."
Nirvana:~/stuff bill$ split -b 64k resolutions.pdf
"Memo to myself: Find somebody to hide it on the internet..."

Very interesting amendment, from USA no less!!

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Would have sworn it is a comment on a slashdot thread! Way to go Alan Bell!! 3 cheers.
- - - - - -
US - 270

Naming DIS 29500: The current name of DIS 29500, Office Open XML is seriously misleading in several respects. First, it is not a document format based on XML but rather an XML representation of a legacy document format with particular processing semantics. Second, reference should not be made to commercial products and clearly "Office" in the title of this proposal is meant as a reference to Microsoft Office. Lastly, the proposal is no more or less open than any other ISO proposal and so "Open" is meaningless in this context.

It is suggested that a new name be chosen for the proposal that reflects its goal of representing and continuing a legacy document format as represented in XML. Such a name should not carry an implied reference to a Microsoft product nor should it use the term "open." One possible name would be: Legacy Document Formats Represented in XML. The principles developed from this effort might well prove effective for other legacy document formats that should be represented in XML.

DIS 29500

Re:

[akirapill]

ouch. Although LDFRXML doesn't quite have that same ring to it, does it? I think he's dead on, and maybe lemonade can come from these lemons if MS decided to focus this format as a standard for legacy documents rather than a as weapon against FOSS.

Re:

[Fred_A]

While techically true, it will never fly. I'll stick to calling it MOOXML though, both because of the MS Office origin and in reference to the amount of bullshit MS has spewed about it.

Word95

[UdoKeir]

Here are the responses to that oft-reported Word95 kludge: http://www.dis29500.org/?s=word95 [dis29500.org]

Interesting that the responses look like they were written by different people.

Re:

[Fred_A]

While I wouldn't quite have put it in those terms, I too am quite surprised by the completely childish attitude of MS. What's wrong with those people ? Was making one file that hard ?

Paid anonymous posters

[rpp3po]

There are very many anonymous posts today, which all share a common style. Absolutely lacking any arguments, maybe to not attract further discussion, but clearly intended to make the whole issue around OOXML appear as a solely political one. Posts discrediting the slashdot crowd, post discrediting critics as IBM puppets. OOXML IS a seriously flawed standard. There were endless very level headed comments on slashdot listing serious issues (e.g. the recently talked about "ANSI" and "Mac codepage" references)