When is a Standard Not a Standard?

On Open Enterprise blog.

Standard Deviation

Another corker here from Rob Weir on ISO's rather pathetic OOXML FAQ:

To put it in more approachable terms, observe that Ecma-376, OOXML, at 6,045 pages in length, was 58 standard deviations above the mean for Ecma Fast Tracks. Consider also that the average adult American male is 5' 9" (175 cm) tall, with a standard deviation of 3" (8 cm). For a man to be as tall, relative to the average height, as OOXML is to the average Fast Track, he would need to be 20' 3" (6.2 m) tall !

For ISO, in a public relations pitch, to blithely suggest that several thousand page Fast Tracks are "not unusual" shows an audacious disregard for the truth and a lack of respect for a public that is looking for ISO to correct its errors, not blow smoke at them in a revisionist attempt to portray the DIS 29500 approval process as normal, acceptable or even legitimate. We should expect better from ISO and we should express disappointed in them when they let us down in our reasonable expectations of honesty. We don't expect this from Ecma. We don't expect this from Microsoft. But we should expect this from ISO.

Ars Nova: The Art of Misrepresentation

A nice summary by Rob Weir of Microsoft's increasingly desperate campaign to undermine ODF in every way possible through artful and persistent misrepresentation of the facts. It begins with a real killer opening par:

Tim Anderson has an interesting article up on his ITWriting blog, "Microsoft’s Jean Paoli on the XML document debate". Of course, I treat anything Jean Paoli says on XML with such attention as I usually reserve for listening to the isorhythmic motets of Philippe de Vitry. Like de Vitry, Paoli can be understood on several different levels: What is he saying? And what is he really saying.

ODF Now Free (as in Beer)

There is a certain irony in the fact that the OpenDocument Format, that essence of office suite freedom, has been locked up as a proprietary document costing the princely sum of 342 Swiss Francs.

Well, it's now been liberated - at least in the beery sense. You still can't do anything daringly with it, like change it; but since it is meant to be a standard, I suppose that's not totally unreasonable.

Be warned, though: its 728 pages are not for the those of a delicate disposition (but are, at least, better than the 6000 pages from Microsoft's rival OOXML offering.) (Via Rob Weir.)

Warm Fuzzies in OpenOffice.org Calc

Once a mathematician, always a mathematician. I've been one since the age of 8, so when I came across FuzzyMath, a fuzzy logic add-in for OpenOffice.org Calc, I was naturally intrigued:

InrecoLAN FuzzyMath allows to use uncertain or approximate values in OpenOffice.org Calc. It means with InrecoLAN FuzzyMath you can perform ordinary arithmetic operations and use ordinary mathematical and financial functions with uncertain values as if they are standard, or crisp, numbers.

What's interesting about this - aside from the fact that it is maths - is that it shows that OpenOffice.org is gradually becoming a platform for all sorts of novel add-ins.
(Via Rob Weir.)

Not Hoping for Misery

This reminds me why I'll never learn Esperanto.

The Smell of Conspiracy Theories in the Morning

Lovely:

The truth can now be told. We have a nine-floor complex beneath Devil's Tower in Wyoming, Dick Cheney's home state. We employee three-hundred Oompa Lumpas, ostensibly here on student visas, to read through the 6,000 page OOXML specification. They then input their concerns into a massively parallel computer, based on the old Deep Blue chess computer that beat Gary Kasparov. The computer takes the objections, formats them into English, inserting random literary quotes from The Modern Library of the World's Best Books, and then posts them in blogs and press articles. The computer can express these objections in the form of sonnets, haikus, or even as crude limerick. Every year on January 14th (Thomas J. Watson's Birthday) at 3:14am the Oompa Lumpas come to the surface, smear their bodies with blue paint, dance around a bonfire, howl at the moon and entreat the gods to vanquish their foes, mainly Microsoft, who canceled their favorite application, Microsoft Bob. Rob Weir doesn't really exist. He is just a subroutine. As they say, "On the internet, nobody knows your are a subroutine processing data input by Oompa-Loompas working for IBM underground in Wyoming"

But is it just coincidence that the time quoted in this extract - 3.14 - happens to be precisely the Köchel number of the Flute Concerto by Mozart that is almost certainly the lost Oboe concerto written for Ferlendis? I don't think so....

Time Jumps When Microsoft Snaps Its Fingers

I missed this the first time around:

So, for most of the world, the Gregorian calendar has been the law for 250-425 years. That's a well-established standard by anyone's definition. Who would possibly ignore it or get it wrong at this point?

If you guessed “Microsoft”, you may advance to the head of the class.

Datetimes in Excel are represented as date serial numbers, where dates are counted from an origin, sometimes called an epoch, of January 1st, 1900. The problem is that from the earliest implementations Excel got it wrong. It thinks that 1900 was a leap year, when clearly it isn't, under Gregorian rules since it is not divisible by 400. This error causes functions like the WEEKDAY() spreadsheet function to return incorrect values in some cases.

Here are Rob's updated thoughts on the subject, and how the problem is being propagated by Microsoft's rival to ODF, OOXML.

Akkadian and the Opens

Any post that manages to link Akkadian with openness gets my cuneiform inscription.

Telling the Truth About a Telling Fact

Rob Weir has a characteristically sharp and original analysis of the recent approval by ECMA of Microsoft's Open Office XML:

Thus the remarkable achievement of Microsoft and Ecma TC45, who not only managed to create a standard an order of magnitude larger than any other markup standard I've seen, but at the same time managed to complete the review/edit/approve cycle faster than any other markup standard I've seen. They have achieved an unprecedented review/edit/approval rate of 18.3 pages/day, 20-times faster than industry practice, a record which will likely stand unchallenged for the ages.

I think we would all like to know how they did it. Special training? Performance enhancing drugs? Time travel? A pact with the Devil? I believe you will all share with me an earnest plea for them to share the secret of their productivity and efficiency with the world and especially with ISO, who will surely need similar performance enhancements in order for them to review this behemoth of a standard within their "fast track" process.

I am optimistic, that once the secret of OOXML's achievement gets out, the way we make standards will never be the same again.

The Curse of the Zombie Standard

Another great post by Rob Weir, with an even better heading (any friend of Modest is a friend of mine). It shows in loving detail how Microsoft would rather exhume one of its old zombie standards rather than be caught, er, dead supporting an open standard, especially one supported by ODF.

Microsoft the Translator, Microsoft the Traitor

Since I sank to the (oceanic) depths of linking to a fisheries story on the basis of an irresistible headline, I don't see why I shouldn't do the same for this post, winningly entitled "Traduttore, Traditore" - Italian for "Translator, Traitor".

It's an interesting examination of the reality behind Microsoft's much-ballyhooed support for ODF, but what really grabbed my attention was the fact that this translator/traitor word pairing is always close to the surface of my mind whenever I use either: I'm always teetering on the brink of swapping one for the other. Which would be unfortunate. (Via Bob Sutor's Open Blog.)