Technology, Thoughts, and Trinkets

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I’ve previously talked about the horrors of the native document format in the Office 2007 (and now 2008 for Mac as well), OOXML. I’m not going to go through an extended talk about the nonsense that Microsoft has done to essentially bankrupt the legitimacy of ISO bodies around the world. I’ll let you head over to Bob Sutor’s blog if you want to do that (disclaimer: Bob is a VP at IBM. He’s super smart, but IBM is an ardent supported of ODF, and opposed to OOXML. That position comes through in the blog.).

Now, I just want to note something that you might have missed in some of the FUD that has been swirling about OOXML receiving ISO certification. While it’s true that OOXML may indeed receive such certification (which will be a sad, sad day), the current office suites that Microsoft has on the market (i.e. 2007 and 2008) do not support ISO 29500 - the OOXML standard. That’s right: if you’re saving your documents in OOXML right now, you are NOT saving it as the default standard that Microsoft is championing. Instead, you’re just saving in the ‘transitionary’ format. This means that you could potentially be stranded with a lot of OOXML documents in the future, especially if you decide to move to a non-Microsoft office package. At the very least, it’s looking as though only Microsoft will be able to be ‘backwards compatible’ with 2007 and 2008 when and if the ISO 29500 is approved - no Open Office, Neo Office, Abiword, Google Docs, or anything else for you!

I’m so impressed that ‘open standards’ are translating to ‘closed, proprietary based standards’. It seems in accordance with the thousands of pages that go into the OOXML so-called ’standard’.

(Source - That stack of papers is the documentation for ISO 29500, prior to its being revised)
All hail Balmer?

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, OOXML, ISO

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I feel like I should start with a notice: This is not a product placement blog post.

The image that you see at the head of this post is for a CCTV-like mirror. I was linked to these recently and the very first thing that I thought was “Wow, my partner would never let me buy these and install them as replacements for mirrors in the house”. The second was “I wonder what the consequences of having them secretly delivered and installed while she was out would be”.

I’ve decided the consequences would far outstrip my (sure to be incredibly!) momentary amusement. That said, I would love to have something like this outside of a well-trafficed bathroom in a place that I lived in, just so that people thought a little bit about how often cameras watch them do private actions, but without a necessarily clear reason for why the cameras need to be there.

(Really, I think that I’d like them because it would be something to talk about that is a bit more interesting than the paintings that we have on the walls, because I’m really not all that competent at discussing the intricacies of fine art. Plus, I just think that the CCTV-like mirrors are kind of cool.)

Technorati Tags: Humour