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51 Comments
- Phocion55, on 10/12/2007, -8/+56And this is exactly why I loath Microsoft.
"Document formats serve as an underlying digital container, controlling access to files like spreadsheets and the ability to share them. Efforts like Homan's could lead to broader use...."
"But within an hour of the proposed bill's reading in late March, Homan said, he was greeted in his office by three lobbyists representing Microsoft Corp....."
Is anyone else sick of Microsoft influencing everything for the good of Microsoft and not the good of its users?
Are people pissed off that they can't open a DOCX file by default in Office 2003 and 2000?
Are people pissed off that they will be forced to buy Vista if they want DX10 functionality?
Microsoft is the largest and richest software company out there. For them to say that something isn't "backwards compatible" is pure *****. - richard2, on 10/12/2007, -3/+31Are there any morally valid reasons for why lobbying hasn't been made illegal in the USA?
- fredxor, on 10/12/2007, -7/+29@Phocion
Microsoft is a company. The first thing about business you do what's best for the company. If that means locking in users, then you do it. It's not about good tech support or doing the right thing. Just look at the companies that dump industrial waste into rivers and streams because the fine for doing so is less than the cost of properly disposing of the waste.
Oh, and I'm also sick of Microsoft being evil as well. - Phocion55, on 10/12/2007, -2/+19@fredxor: I agree. But isn't technology supposed to bring people together? Help people collaborate easier? Make things more efficient?
Microsoft is crippling that capability for their own gain. That's my major problem with Microsoft.
Recently, I got a DOCX file as an attachment at work. What did that file say? I have no idea....because I couldn't open it. I'm not going to waste time trying to figure out how to open it either. We might as well have been speaking different languages.
Embracing open standards elminates these types of problems. Too bad Microsoft's paid lobbyists don't see it this way. - arbulus, on 10/12/2007, -1/+16Lobbying absolutely should be illegal. It takes power from the people and constituents of a representative and hands that power to a few who wield the most money. It's absolutely horrid and despicable that we allow this to continue. People want to talk about campaign finance reform or ethics reform, but the ignore the most important fact: there will NEVER be ethics reform or an honest legislature as long as special interest groups are allowed to steal the voice from the people and buy legislators.
- Bicep, on 10/12/2007, -1/+15Inevitability and time are the only things that stand between using open source software and sticking to the same old proprietary mindlessness.
For greed, Microsoft is slowly slitting its own throat in a world where advancement of humankind is paramount to quarterly business profits and top-sales charts. And now they are trying to muscle the government.
Greed melts gigantic glaciers, crumbles arctic ice shelves, pollutes our air with thick black smog, kills off species, and ensures a degraded or even impossible future for our children and humankind, it's time to wake up!
Open source (and the right to choose) isn't just about freedom, prosperity, well-being, healthy competition, and liberty... It's about having enough sense and intelligence to realize that you should have a choice, and that competition ultimately makes things better - Anybody in a FREE society should see this point, and embrace it.
If you like Microsoft products, that's great, but let there be choice, let there be freedom, let there be a best product, and most of all... take off the blinders before the world passes you by.
-Free User of Computer Software - sotopheavy, on 10/12/2007, -2/+14Sorry for the double post. Here is the key part of the law describing what an open document format is and how it should be used by government agancies:
(b)Each electronic document created, exchanged, or
maintained by a state agency must be created, exchanged, or
maintained in an open, Extensible Markup Language based file
format, specified by the department, that is:
--(1)interoperable among diverse internal and external platforms and applications;
--(2)published without restrictions or royalties;
--(3)fully and independently implemented by multiple software providers on multiple
----platforms without any intellectual property reservations for necessary technology; and
--(4)controlled by an open industry organization with a well-defined inclusive process for evolution of the standard. - Ratteler, on 10/12/2007, -1/+12The real answer here is to disallow corporate lobbying.
A Corporation is not an individual. Every individual in a corparation has all the rights that the Constitution grants them.
Why, when a bunch of rich individuals gang up should they be entitled to a special extra set of individual rights? The corporation basically becomes a fictional person who can take all the blame for the "Boards" actions.
A company, ANY company should have no right to hire people to sway the influence of our elected officials. They are elected by individuals to serve those who elected them. Corporations have no vote. They should have no representation. - Phil246, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10moral, no. But if a bill were to come in to make lobbyists illegal - you can bet that every single lobbyist from every single company would be beating a path to their doors
- fredxor, on 10/12/2007, -12/+22@hedgefighter
Haven't you heard? ASCII quote brackets are the "in" thing to do. Whenever you have a quote that is more than one line, you are required to use the ASCII quote brackets or else we will deem you uncool. Don't do drugs. - sotopheavy, on 10/12/2007, -2/+11FTA: This bill has been introduce in Texas.
Here is it's status:
http://www.legis.state.tx.us/BillLookup/History.aspx?LegSess=80R&Bill=HB1794 - cynicist, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9"...because Java is basically emulating a different processor, which makes it slower"
What? If you are referring to JVM, .Net has its own virtual machine component. - Ratteler, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8Nothing wrong with lobbying. Only CORPORATE lobbying.
It's an individuals right to address their concerns to their elected officials. The problems is, paid corporate lobbyist are not representing themselves, or an individual. They are representing a fictional person created by a board of directors.
Make it illegal to pay lobbyists in any way. See how much influence a company has after that.
At the very least, the "Board" members will have to scoot around the country. - geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7""Microsoft is the largest and richest software company out there."
IBM is quite a bit bigger..."
Actually, Microsoft's bigger, IBM's older. More people in standard's agencies listen to IBM over Microsoft due to IBM's history in computer science (they were literally in it from the beginning). Along with HP and Intel, you've got the core group of guys that invented computer science (minus Babbage and Ada and Pascal, etc).
"As far as why they don't want to just adopt ODF, it doesn't support all of the features that MS Office does. Ideally, Microsoft and the ODF group should come together and work out a format that will work for all office suites. I know both sides really don't want to, but they should."
Yeah, good luck with that. Microsoft's known for their Not Invented Here stance on a large number of technologies, telling Microsoft that one of their core technologies might have to embrace someone else's standard is more than just a belly-blow, it's a down-right decapitation. It'd be admitting that they were out-done by the Open Source community, and Microsoft would rather give everyone in China a free copy of Windows than do that. The truth is, ODF is what everyone wants, and Microsoft not only knows this, but is doing everything in its power to defeat this, per the article. And if we let the legislators pass these laws, say hello to even more Microsoft lock-in through to the future. Instead, Microsoft should have to compete for the best product, and the legislator should force them to adopt ODF. But hey, why do that when Microsoft's willing to pay for your next eighteen elections, buy you and all of your friends Porche 911s, all for a lousy signature? - GMorgan, on 10/12/2007, -5/+12I think targeting MS is futile. We need to find out why developers use MS API's rather the cross platform ones. Why do developers use .Net when Java does the job just as well in theory and has proven to be more efficient than .Net (before anyone cries, Java is more aggressive in optimisations so takes longer to start but is more efficient when running. This is a legacy of the enterprise penetration of Java).
- GMorgan, on 10/12/2007, -2/+9No they aren't memory dumps. They are formally declared data standards based on XML. MS used to dump memory into a binary lump but even OOXML isn't that bad. I'm not sure I'd call OOXML to be 'true' XML though, it uses obscure element titles.
- GMorgan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6ODF can easily be extended to include the edge functionality and indeed work is already under way to do so as a further ISO standard. It is a lame excuse that isn't relevant long term. We are talking about the next 25 years here not the next 25 minutes.
- TeatimeGrommit, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6Lobbying is how representatives learn about the unintended consequences of their bills. It really isn't intended to be evil. But, in a media dominated world where individual campaign contributions are no longer sufficient to win an election, lobbyists gain a power that they should not have. Specifically, the power to threaten. The solution isn't to ban lobbyists, the solution is to change the flow of information with a combination of technology and law such that a representative can say to Microsoft, "Did you just THREATEN me? No, you didn't. You *didn't* just threaten me!" and then go vote against MS, secure in the knowledge that the truth will get out and that her reelection campaign won't be harmed by going against a big company.
- tempusrob, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5"Make it illegal to pay lobbyists in any way."
Heh ... yeah, so instead we'll have MS 'volunteer evangelists' who happen to get very nice birthday gifts from relatives of very rich MS employees.
I mean, I agree with you 100% ... but at the end of the day, money talks. - GMorgan, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6@fredxor
I know what Java is, I specifically compared it to the .Net CLR ;).
Proprietary companies are using .Net.
Also it is worth noting that Java can be faster than native code in some cases thanks to Hotspot which does run time optimisations that are impossible to realise in native binary form.
This was just one example though. Another might be D3D,DSound V OGL,OAL. - Atomic1fire, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Digg needs a quote feature
if just to remove the disputable quote brackets - Phil246, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5@fredxor
"If Microsoft embraced an open format, that would mean that other competitors would be just as compatible, which means more people will use the cheap competitors of MS Office."
Surely this is a good thing? A little competition is a good thing to drive innovation in features. Making sure that the programs could use the same data formats simply prevents vendor lockin - nothing more.
"For instance, there is a "space_like_word_95" (or something like that) attribute. Only Microsoft knows exactly how Word 95 spaces documents. Anyone who wants to fully embrace OOXML is going to have to either reverse engineer Word 95 docs to figure out how the spacing works, or license the information about it from Microsoft."
Precisely the problem with using OOXML as an open format - all of the specifications are not 100% open for everyone
"Java also has automatic garbage collection, which can sometimes be a hassle if you want your stuff to stay in the memory."
So does .NET. Besides garbage collection removes those elements which are no longer linked to or accessible in code. Things like objects which are dereferenced and cannot be accessed again - If the language was C++, this would be a problem as it represents a memory leak. Things being created but not tidied away again.
The garbage collection does this for you so programmers no longer need to worry about it
"Finally, Java programs can more easily be decompiled because it is multiplatform."
C is multiplatform as well, it doesnt make it any easier to decompile and make sense of just because its multi platform.
Everything can be decompiled just as easily, regardless of the platform. You can go all the way down to the machine code / assembler level with all languages ( except assember which you cant really break down much further )
It doesnt mean it has to make sense though to humans. - sk545, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3"The real answer here is to disallow corporate lobbying.
A Corporation is not an individual. Every individual in a corparation has all the rights that the Constitution grants them.
Why, when a bunch of rich individuals gang up should they be entitled to a special extra set of individual rights? The corporation basically becomes a fictional person who can take all the blame for the "Boards" actions.
A company, ANY company should have no right to hire people to sway the influence of our elected officials. They are elected by individuals to serve those who elected them. Corporations have no vote. They should have no representation."
Lobbying is the biggest crime in the US government. No idea as to why its even allowed. Problem is that the general public doesn't even know what lobbying is. Watch the movie "Manchurian Candidate", for a example of how the US government is really run. But then again, what did you expect from a capitalist country? No saying that communism is any better, but capitalism has its own share of problems. - schestowitz, on 10/12/2007, -26/+29Worry to 'hijack' the thread, but here are a few supplementary items to show an example from just one state. From the previous Mass. CIO:
,----[ Quote ]
| As CIO of Massachusetts from February to November last year, Louis
| Gutierrez had to endure most of the brunt of Microsoft Corp.'s political
| wrath over a state policy calling for the adoption of the Open Document
| Format for Office Applications, or ODF -- a rival to the software vendor's
| Office Open XML file format.
`----
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9012760&source=rss_news50
And the previous CIO:
,----[ Quote ]
| Quinn: Almost to a person, to anybody involved or who knows about
| the ODF issue, they attributed the story to Microsoft, right, wrong
| or otherwise. Senator Pacheco may be a bully but I do not believe he
| is disingenious and would stoop to such a tactic. Senator Pacheco and
| Secretary Galvin's office remain very heavily influenced by the
| Microsoft money and its lobbyist machine, as witnessed by their
| playbook and words, in my opinion.
`----
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20060119232859729
After both got pressured out of their jobs for supporting Open Source, this is what happened:
MA Governor-Elect Names MS Anti-ODF Lobbyist to Technology Advisory Group
http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php?story=20061128161343183 - fantasticFlan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3@bobbyi
A corporation is not a person, cannot be held to the same standards, laws as a person, should not have the rights of a person. - geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3"These are no more than memory dumps from the running programs"
If you're going to use someone else's quote, at least get the phrasing right:
"Both are basically memory dumps with angle brackets around them. If forced to choose one, I'd pick the 700-page specification (ODF) over the 6,000-page specification (OOXML)."
Hakon Lie, Opera's CTO. - GMorgan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Exactly right for the most part. It should be noted that even if MS wins on the OOXML front it will not be the perfect victory we hope for but is still a big victory for open standards. There is enough there to ensure that future products can use it even if it is an inferior standard. What MS is fighting for is a tiny glimmer of hope in an area they have already lost.
These arguments which people are framing as vital for OSS are really just icing on the cake things. Either way it is a marked improvement and something that MS despise.
Still I back ODF. Technically it is a much better standard because of the way it interacts with other standards and the fact you could implement it by largely just through reading the source of a sizeable ODF document. - Atomic1fire, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2so does that mean (by your Opinion) HTML should be made the standard
if so why
Its more common in websites
No normal user is going to use a WYSIWYG editor to make reports/letters/etc
so why do you want HTML to be a standard (yeah it already is for website design) - OBKenobi, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2[quote]And now they are trying to muscle the government.[/quote]
No, not now. This has been going on for years. You think a cash cow like Microsoft doesn't have influence in the US government?
This is how the Microsofts and the Halliburtons get away with it. Play ball with the government and you can get away with anything.
Like the plundering of Iraq. Or US taxpayers. Or OS preloads, AKA the Microsoft Tax. - GMorgan, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3I don't think banning lobbyists is the way forward. What is needed is education for people to see where the money is going and vote accordingly. It needs to become socially unacceptable for companies to buy favours.
- workharderscum, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3OOXML uses bitmasks as element attributes. 'nuff said.
ODF on the other hand, is not just a memory dump from openoffice - its a genuine attempt at an application independent office file format. All Microsoft need to do is to add ODF support to office, and all the "standards approved file format" states/countries can continue using Office. Why is this a problem?
AMD and Intel show why competition is a good thing - they both force each other to be innovative and keep prices low. If either of them went under, it would be a very, very bad thing for the consumer. Software needs this kind of dynamic, otherwise we'll end up with Internet Explorer 6 again..... - workharderscum, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3As is Java. Java vs. .Net arguments only serve to show how similar they both are....
- fredxor, on 10/12/2007, -6/+8@Phocion... again
If Microsoft embraced an open format, that would mean that other competitors would be just as compatible, which means more people will use the cheap competitors of MS Office. If you read up on the specs of OOXML (I think this is the same as DOCX), it has all sorts of horrible abbreviations that confuse programmers so they have no idea what the hell they are doing. It is also completely backwards with Word documents. For instance, there is a "space_like_word_95" (or something like that) attribute. Only Microsoft knows exactly how Word 95 spaces documents. Anyone who wants to fully embrace OOXML is going to have to either reverse engineer Word 95 docs to figure out how the spacing works, or license the information about it from Microsoft.
@GMorgan
Devolopers choose Microsoft's APIs over Java ones because Java is basically emulating a different processor, which makes it slower. Another reason is that Microsoft has the biggest market share. Java also has automatic garbage collection, which can sometimes be a hassle if you want your stuff to stay in the memory. Finally, Java programs can more easily be decompiled because it is multiplatform. - GMorgan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2There were previous JITs made for things such as Smalltalk but Smalltalk never was a commercially viable language because practically it was too pure (all variables were heap allocated since everything was an object, this was too inefficient at the time). The JIT there was very much a new technology so wasn't as good as later ones.
Sun produced the first commercially viable JIT in Hotspot. Later on MS adapted some of the ideas but their JIT is crippled by the native image generator* which essentially removes all possibility of run time optimisation and forces the CLR to use a subset of the possible machine instructions. It does improve startup time though which is why many see .Net as faster than Java.
*
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-in-time_compilation - GMorgan, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Sun produced the first commercially viable JIT compiler for Java. It is not a .Net only thing. Infact Hotspot is vastly superior to the .Net equivalent in both JIT and the fact Hotspot does runtime optimisations which .Net doesn't as of yet.
MS did their normal impression over reality business by making a weak JIT that gets the code running as quickly as possible at the expense of performance. This is similar in a way to how XP boots the desktop before all the services are running creating inefficiency in order to give the appearance of speed. - GMorgan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I don't know what's going on with that link. Look up just in time compilers on wiki to see some details about the MS JIT compared with the Java one.
//damn thing is working now.// - workharderscum, on 10/12/2007, -3/+4These laws are NOT ABOUT SOFTWARE. They are about the file formats used to exchange data. If Microsoft wanted to make Office compliant with these laws, how long do you think it would take with their resources? A couple of days? A week?
- GMorgan, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3Yes but he is wrong in the fact that the data is implementation agnostic. In both cases what is in memory will be a translation of the XML file, you cannot just dump the memory, .Doc used to do this. If they are just memory dumps then everything is a memory dump.
In any case they are no more memory dumps than XHTML and both are far better standards for office documents. - workharderscum, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1GMorgan, can you clarify that first sentence a bit for me please? Do you mean "Sun produced the first commercially viable JIT compiler" or "Sun produced the first commercially viable JIT compiler *for Java*"?
I don't mean to attack your argument, rather I could do with some ammunition in Java vs. .Net discussions.... - clyde2801, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1To Richard2:
No, it's just that they tried passing those kinds of laws before, but the lobbyists had them killed in committee. - addicted68098, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I can't stress the importance of open formats, and standardization, really it future proofs documents if everyone used the same format. But I can't help but notice that there is already a format like this, its called HTML, XML based and the premiere publishing platform of the internet. HTML can pull off everything word can pull off with half the code, they even share many of the same conventions
- cantormath, on 10/12/2007, -4/+4M$ can sit and spin ::grin::
- Atomic1fire, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1If not lobbying they will just pay people to vote favorably
and lobbying isnt all bad
Look at your pro neutrality groups now personally I don't care about Net Neutrality Nothing bad has happened yet and if it did People would stop paying or complain about slower service but they do and they lobby for it - daveking, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0Just but it is just in time compiled to native code.
- bobbyi, on 10/12/2007, -4/+2Yes, it's called the first amendment. Political speech is the most highly protected kind of speech.
Are you recommending that no one should be allowed to discuss concerns with their elected officials? Or only that interests you disagree with be stripped of their political voice? Either way, seems pretty fascist. - daveking, on 10/12/2007, -4/+0"Microsoft is the largest and richest software company out there."
IBM is quite a bit bigger...
"For them to say that something isn't "backwards compatible" is pure *****. "
You can download (for free) an addon for previous versions of office to open docx files. You can't do it by default because the format didn't exist when they were originally released.
As far as why they changed the format - the new one is quite a bit better. First off, the new files are about a quarter of the size of the old ones. They also allow you to fully embed excell graphs and visio documents in word and powerpoint documents, rather than having to insert them as a graphic and not being able to modify them later. And finally, the the new format is quite a bit easier for other programs to read from and write to. Instead of having to try to reverse engineer the format, it is in easy to read xml, and I believe documentation is even available.
As far as why they don't want to just adopt ODF, it doesn't support all of the features that MS Office does. Ideally, Microsoft and the ODF group should come together and work out a format that will work for all office suites. I know both sides really don't want to, but they should. - estvir, on 10/12/2007, -11/+6> Are people pissed off that they can't open a DOCX file by default in Office 2003 and 2000?
Microsoft has released converters just for that, for example:
"By installing the Compatibility Pack in addition to Microsoft Office 2000, Office XP, or Office 2003, you will be able open, edit, and save files using the file formats new to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007."
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=941b3470-3ae9-4aee-8f43-c6bb74cd1466&displaylang=en
> Are people pissed off that they will be forced to buy Vista if they want DX10 functionality?
First, it's been 'proven' several times on Digg that it's not simply a marketing decision and DX10 relies on new things in Vista such as the updated/new kernel, new memory management, new driver model and so on.
Second, people like you and others expect Microsoft to backport everything that is new in Vista to XP, it seems, which a ridiculous thing to expect. - daveking, on 10/12/2007, -6/+1Are you kidding me? The laws that this articles discusses are specifically preventing states from using Microsoft software, not giving them the "choice" to use something else.
- stou, on 10/12/2007, -9/+3@cacoe: yes but the comments help the promotion of yet another anti-microsoft story from schestowitz's.
Microsoft _IS_ evil... no doubt, but schestowitz is over-doing it a bit (look at his history)... I am not quite sure what percentage of Digg users need to be convinced of just how ***** up Microsoft is... - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -16/+4Forget ODF and OOXML. These are no more than memory dumps from the running programs. The difference is that they are now documented. It would be better to use well supported and understood standards to save documents, such as XHTML and CSS.
-
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