ISO Miscounted Cuban OOXML Vote 100
An anonymous reader notes Groklaw's coverage of the apparent mix-up ISO made with Cuba's vote in the matter of recommending OOXML as a standard. Cuba apparently voted against OOXML in September, but ISO recorded their vote as a "yes" — which is odd on its face, as Microsoft is forbidden to sell any products in Cuba. The Cuban NB head has apparently now officially responded to the BRM, but Groklaw's PJ notes that verification remains problematical, and "...the bottom line to me is that a process that worked perfectly well when folks all trusted each other falls into chaos when there are allegations of dirty tricks or undue pressure."
obligatory (Score:3, Insightful)
No, NOT "Duh." (Score:5, Insightful)
The author is basically saying, the system is flawed because it does not take into account certain facts about human nature, and fails at one of the most basic tasks any socio-political system should strive to accomplish, namely limiting the ability of participants to put undue pressure on each other and use dirty tricks.
Re:No, NOT "Duh." (Score:5, Insightful)
With the corollary that if nobody had any reason to cheat, then everyone would play fair, and the system would work.
I think this is part of why "communism" only seems to work on the scale of the "commune", where ultimately even the most corrupt person could, what, lord over the persons and crops of fifty people? Have the most sweet potato of any villager? Scale that up to the level of a nation-state, and suddenly taking control and abusing the system provides a lot more gains in wealth and power.
Similarly with ISO, in the past the system worked because, by and large, nobody had any significant reason to game the system entirely. Sure different companies had their reasons to promote their standard, but ultimately it was still about cooperation and interoperability. While I may be missing some cases, I feel confident stating that this is the first time a standard presented to ISO has the potential to make or break a multi-billion dollar monopoly.
So of course when that kind of cash is on the line, a system that before survived because there wasn't much incentive to abuse it is found to be completely vulnerable. Kind of like if that commune suddenly found itself sitting on a gold mine.
Rules always rely on trust (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd argue that it's impossible to build a system that will work when people don't respect it. For example - the third-party payola loophole [wikipedia.org] farce. Another example - democracy might work when people respect it, but the rules mean nothing to "I have a PhD in violence" Mugabe.
In essenence, the rules themselves are only useful if they are followed in spirit. When they are not followed in spirit, then we need more clarifying rules until we come down to some basic rules that are followed in spirit. That's why are law books are so large - and it's still not large enough for people like Darl McBride... proof that the more we disrespect each other, the bigger the rule book needs to become.
The traditional solution is to turn your back to people fail to follow the spirit of the rules. You just tell them that they can go bother someone else. You can't force other people to learn ethics, and there'll always be that fuzzy area where the amorale can do horrible but legal things like deliberately spread disinformation about global warming [alternet.org]. These people should be charged with treason, because they are subverting the public good.
When an untrustworthy entity enters a situation where a certain level of trust is already assumed (M$ and ISO), then the rulebook needs to catch up *a lot*.
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The open question is why Cuba was recorded as approval. Did Microsoft pass a Dollar to them? Uhmm, what about the trade sanctions imposed by the US. Just curious...
Honour culture (Score:3, Insightful)
What you are talking about quickly becomes the rule of the strong, and an honour culture. I most definitely do *not* want to live in an honour culture. The invention of trial by jury was a significant leap forward in the human endeavor. Same with the separation of powers.
So instead of teaching others to fear you, perhaps one could teach others to respect you because of who you are. The first will manifest in conflict, and the second in harmony.
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...well DUH...
I don't see it as that big of an oversight. A lot of things only work in proportion to the willingness of people to work together for the greater good, including churches, co-ops, even society as a whole (which is what the mafia exploits in their work -- even then, it's a group of people working for the greater good of the organization which is set against the society). The majority of people are willing to play fair, so they naturally assume that everyone else will until they've been burned by their tend
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I knew it (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I knew it (Score:4, Funny)
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Thanks
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http://www.noooxml.org/ballotresults [noooxml.org]
Re:Er, um... (Score:4, Funny)
Don't worry, it was designed by Microsoft, and it runs on Vista.
Ahhh, my eyes! (Score:3, Funny)
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Now they'll mod ME funny =(
At least its a vitrectomy and not a vasectomy...
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Just look at SMTP. It was built assuming people would use it for good. Now we have spam, and all the oversights are just crawling out of the woodwork.
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Before you go for that procedure, get him to spell it out, on paper, and exactly what part of your anatomy will be cut away at.
Cheers
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Yes, I gathered that from your post. I didn't mean to make light of your upcoming surgery.
:-P (Yes, I know, any joke which requires explanation was a lousy one. ;-)
Just make sure he knows it's not a vasectomy [wikipedia.org].
Cheers
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Amen brother!
Cheers
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So long as none of them are on this list [slashdot.org] I probably don't have a lot to worry about.
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I mentioned it in a couple of journals (in passing):
Behind my sig [slashdot.org] linked from the Zaphod quote; this one is about having my 20/400 vision corrected to better than 20/20 using a new technology (FDA approved in 2003) in my left eye; the other is still 20/400. I'm now a cyborg. You will be assimilated. resistance is not only futi
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Do you, by chance, know how to convert between dpt and X/Y feet? Wikipedia isn't helpful as the English one uses dpt and doesn't mention feet. It's weird when yo
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I have 20/200 vision-uncorrected (at 20 feet, need 200mm high letters to read), or: L. eye= -3.6 diopters, r. eye= -3.7 diopters for corrective lenses.
I hope this helps somewhat. Actually, I hope this is less painful to get used to than my trifocals were for me!
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the "...describe their eyesight as X/Y with both numbers being distances in feet."
is slightly off IIRC. The way I remember it is x=20 feet, and y=height in millimeters the letters/numbers need to be to be accurately discerned. Thus my 20/200 vision would require 200mm letters for me to read at 20 feet distance- a mixture of metric and Imperial measures....Ain't America grand?!
The -3.6, and -3.7 diopters is what my lense prescription is, so it might not mean the same thin
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I'm not allowed to drive without glasses, as well - but then again I couldn't even read the speedometer or recognize traffic signs without them! I also have to have regular checkups with
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Diopters would be meaningless to someone with no correction n
No, you're ok. (Score:2)
They get their computers from Hugo Chavez (Score:3, Funny)
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Undermining our way of life... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Undermining our way of life... (Score:5, Funny)
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Blunt thang, you make my eyes sting!
Blunt thang, you make everything groovy.
Blunt thang, I think I love you!
*to the tune of 'Wildthing'*
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Chavez' Venezuela on the other hand is not that cunning. [noooxml.org] They sell their standard snake oil to Microsoft and voted approval in the september ballot. I wonder what decision they will take this time...
Windows PXP (Score:1)
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And they have plenty of computers in the island, Chaves and the Spanish flooded them with computers. The main thing over there is Internet access. They don't have enough backbone access to outside, as they rely on the old Wiltel cable that goes out from
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Only on slashdot is the truth considered flamebait...
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You're kneejerking. The poster was probably talking about the Cuban government's ban on owning computers (with exceptions made for tourists, certain government workers, etc). It was actually lifted by Raul Castro a couple of weeks ago, but the average Cuban still probably doesn't have one.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/2 [yahoo.com]
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Cuba doesn't really have much to offer the US, which is why it's easy to keep up the embargo.
Only partly true. The other, and larger, part is that the Cuban American political block is still quite powerful at a national level in the USA, and blame Castro's revolution for destroying their wealthy, antebellum culture.
Posting this one anonymously, as I have acquaintances of Cuban upper class background, who turn very ugly when questions about recent Cuban history come up.
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Welcome to the new game show (Score:2)
Contestant one: Uhh, wanker?
Announcer: That is correct! Challenge number two, oooh! It's our daily double! Okay, global warming...
Re:Y'know... (Score:4, Informative)
See this web site [consortiuminfo.org] for one example.
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The abuse here is trying to push OOXML through on fast track, when it's obvious to anyone following the process that this should take the same route as SQL, for example. But that wouldn't be quick enough for Microsoft to stem the organisations mandidating open standards to look at their options, and choose OpenDocument over OOXML.
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Re:Y'know... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's more than that. The normal process is a specification-creating process. The "fast track" process is just ISO urinating on some company's product in an attempt to convince people to use it. Microsoft doesn't want to make a system, they want their existing system to be advertised.
The whole OOXML noise is a joke - but then, ISO shouldn't have a "fast track" process in the first place, and the "standards" worship that is in vogue these days is just silly. The purpose of ISO (and all similar organisations) is for people to come together and create an agreement on how they are going to make their systems work together. If there is no intention for people to make their systems work together, then there is no value in any of it.
A "standard" is not some kind of law about how computer systems have to work (despite what a lot of very stupid people seem to think), it is the symbol and partial documentation of a completed process of development and negotiation, which all parties agree they can work to. If you try to just make up the document without that agreement, then all you have is a worthless piece of paper, since nobody is going to be able to build systems around it even if they wanted to.
When all the proprietary UNIX vendors sat down together and worked out a specification for the common elements of their systems that anybody could write programs against, that was a real standards process which resulted in real benefits, because they started with the intention to make it possible to write portable software and designed a specification which they could and would all implement. When somebody just makes up a new bunch of rules off the top of their head and gets some official-sounding organisation to put out a press release, that's purely marketing, of no particular use to anybody, and it doesn't matter who the organisation is.
Re:Y'know... (Score:5, Insightful)
Your characterization of the Groklaw crowd is quite inaccurate. Plenty of people there are familiar with standards processes. And yes, they know that there has been controversy before, but rarely has there been controversy of this magnitude, to my knowledge, NEVER in the fast-track process. The purpose of the fast-track process is to expedite the formalization of what are already de facto standards, which means standards that are well thought out and carefully written, that exist in multiple implementations, and on which there is substantial consensus. Microsoft's attempt to use the fast-track process for OOXML is outrageous given that OOXML is a bloated mess, has yet to be implemented by anyone, not even Microsoft, and is a single-company effort on which there is no consensus.
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Ever read Milton's essay on Machiavelli? One of the points that he makes is that it's not straightforward for an outsider to judge what is barbaric in a historical or cultural context. You might think that having an assassin poison a rival city's leader is barbaric, but there is something to said for the theory that it's less barbaric than laying siege to his city and burning it to the ground. People of a more Northern European c
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Assassination is a lot less barbaric than a full-blown war... but less 'honorable' somehow. War, on the other hand, is more barbaric, messy and painful and supposedly more 'honorable.'
But let's look at the two opposing view points to see whose lives are at risk:
1. Pro-assassination: The leaders are at risk
2. Pro-war: The non-leaders (everyone else) are at risk
Now given it is the leaders who are making the laws, policies and practices, it woul
This is news? (Score:4, Funny)
Like we haven't learned that from the spammers abusing e-mail, the various hacks to slashcode to prevent carpflooding, etc. etc. etc.?
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You've never been carpflooded? (Score:2)
River full of carp + snow melt = carp flood.
no MSFT, no problem! (Score:2)
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The Communist Party's newspaper's Web site doesn't appear to run on Linux, unless there's an IIS port to Linux:
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Orly? (Score:3, Informative)
It is only odd if MS had a hand in it. However, if it was just a dumbass doing the counting, then it is not odd at all.
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ISO (Score:1)
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ANY problem can be tied back to Microsoft, no matter what it is.
Cancer? Microsoft
War? Microsoft
Famine? Microsoft
Bryan Adams? Microsoft
Disease? Microsoft
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Article is blocked in large parts of Europe (Score:1)
Groklaw is among the sites currently being blocked from Europe along with related sites. If you're in Europe, you might need to go through a proxy [google.com] to reach Groklaw articles.
It's hard to say whether all the Pro-Open Standards material and damning data on DIS 29500 is the cause or if it's the Iowa case evidence about MS' decade long jihad against 'non-believers' [groklaw.net]
Works fine here in Italy (Score:2, Informative)
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Re:Works fine here in Italy (Score:4, Interesting)
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Yep. I live in Finland and use TeliaSonera (or Surina (noise/buzz is english) as we call it) ADSL and can't reach Groklaw. Unfortunately I live in an area where TS is the only choice as ISP.
But luckily I live in an area where TS isn't disconnecting their phone lines! Couple of kilometers north from here and you can't get ADSL there anymore.
Not blocked in Germany (Score:1)
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Perhaps you're confusing Europe with China?
Standards were ALWAYS cutthroat politcs (Score:4, Insightful)
But standards operations have ALWAYS been about cutthroat politics and dirty tricks to gain competitive advantage. (For instance: There's stuff in an international protocol standard from the '70s or so that was transparently-crufty weirdness a US delegation proposed to get the French to back down from something they didn't like - but the French instead embraced the cruft wholeheartedly and the US negotiators couldn't admit it was just a bluff...)
The ideal is to standardize exactly what you're already marketing (or are about to release), so you continue to sell it and become (or become more) the dominant and entrenched market player while everybody else is delayed while they make changes - and become incompatible with their previous prototypes or products. This is a massive advantage even if you DO have to give up your patent locks on the technology to make it into a standard.
What's different about this is just the scale and the ability of the multibillion-dollar gorilla to afford tactics that weren't cost-effective enough to be common.
Shouldn't there be an ISO to *count* the votes? (Score:2)
when there are allegations of dirty tricks (Score:2)
Is the ISO a joke? (Score:3, Interesting)
A delegate from Brazil is challenging the "Law of Silence," The ad-hoc restrictions on revealing details of the BRM meeting. He alleges that he believes Microsoft has itself violated it. It relates to Microsoft's claim that 98% of issues were resolved at the meeting, which he says is inaccurate, but his question relates to why Microsoft can talk about the BRM and no one else can.
The ISO seems to make "rules" ad-hoc, according to what Microsoft dictates, then they don't even follow their own bogus rules.
The ISO has lost all credibility with me. Unless the ISO completely reforms their processes, I will consider them about credibilitily as an Enderle article.