Home Messages Index
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next]
Author IndexDate IndexThread Index

Re: [News] 6,000 Pages Cannot be a Standard

__/ [ The Ghost In The Machine ] on Monday 11 December 2006 19:51 \__

> In comp.os.linux.advocacy, Roy Schestowitz
> <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>  wrote
> on Mon, 11 Dec 2006 17:42:56 +0000
> <2080786.WXykeoStS4@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
>> A cathedral of formats or a castle of cards?
>>
>> ,----[ Quote ]
>> | ECMA has strong ties with Microsoft, and the very philosophy of the
>> | ECMA is to acknowledge existing technologies and call them a
>> | standard. This view is quite opposed to the one of the OASIS
>> | consortium, because the consortium does try to design
>> | specifications based on consensus, plausible engineering
>> | decisions and not on the fait accompli.
>> | 
>> | [...]
>> | 
>> | Microsoft's Open XML file format may perhaps be one day an OSI
>> | standard (who knows, so many things are OSI certified, one day
>> | Microsoft may be able to certify its own business practices as
>> | the ISO standard for monopolistic position and anti-competitive
>> | behaviour) but it will never be an open standard.
>> | 
>> | [...]
>> | 
>> | By writing 6000 pages, something else strikes many, including myself:
>> | no human can implement that. In fact, nobody aside Microsoft will be
>> | able to rightly implement it because Microsoft is the only one can
>> | deal with the previously existing formats. For these 6000 pages are
>> | thousands of man/years of confusion, users' lock-in, con-formating
>> | of data, IP and jealously kept trade secrets. And you would expect
>> | that anybody might come up with something that works? Apple, by
>> | the way, will not. Because Microsoft Office for Mac will not be
>> | able to use Open XML for some years, as I have learned. So good
>> | for the great open file format of Microsoft. 6000 pages cannot
>> | be a standard. It is FUD. It is a scandal, and a digital wart
>> | in the industry. 6000 pages cannot be reputed conformant by
>> | anybody else than their author. And their author is Microsoft.
>> `----
>>
>>
http://www.libervis.com/blogs/5/charles/a_cathedral_of_formats_or_a_castle_of_cards
> 
> OK, dumb question.  Who wrote those 6,000 pages?
> 
> - A phalanx of lawyers?
> - A building of engineers?
> - A convocation of marketers?
> - A computer program which wandered through Microsoft's MSDN library,
>   picking things up from their API?
> - A postmodernist paper generator?  :-)  (e.g. http://www.elsewhere.com)
> 
> (see http://www.rinkworks.com/words/collective.shtml; some of them are
> rather interesting.)

Maybe DocGen. They just routed the printout toward the EU. Ran it as an
overnight computational task...

Sarcastic of course... the truth is that they had technical writers...
probably glancing at the code and formalising the algorithms. Speaking of
working in reverse... code -> spec.

What a hoax.

-- 
                        ~~ Kind greetings and happy holidays!

Roy S. Schestowitz      |    Ballmer O/S - so furious it may crash
http://Schestowitz.com  |     GNU/Linux     ¦     PGP-Key: 0x74572E8E
Mem:    514480k total,   481864k used,    32616k free,     4768k buffers
      http://iuron.com - next generation of search paradigms

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next]
Author IndexDate IndexThread Index