UOF Vies to Be a Third Contender in ODF–OOXML Battle 166
Andy Updegrove writes "Long-time followers of the ODF-OOXML story will recall that there is a third editable, XML-based document format in the race to create the documentary record of history. That contender is called UOF, for Uniform Office Format, and it has been under development in China since 2002. Last summer, UOF was adopted as a Chinese National Standard, and on Friday the first complete office suite based upon UOF was released. It's called Evermore Integrated Office 2009 (EIOffice 2009 for short). How successful could this new entrant be in China? For starters, Evermore Software Co. Ltd., its developer, is reportedly the largest software vendor to the Chinese government. And then there's price: Evermore's professional edition is less than a quarter of the price of the comparable version of Office 2007. And finally, it's clearly no coincidence that on July 11, Evermore Vice President Cao Shen called for Microsoft to be the first target for China's new anti-monopoly law, which will take effect in just ten days' time. Whether Shen is speaking to, or for, the government remains to be seen."
I guess it's true... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I guess it's true... (Score:5, Insightful)
- The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Pirates
Re:I guess it's true... (Score:5, Funny)
Hitler, Stalin, and Roosevelt would like to thank you for making this point. Also, they wanted to mention that they all hated pirates.
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Hah, beat me to it.
http://www.schlockmercenary.com/ [schlockmercenary.com]
Separating the ideas from the source (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't avoid MS Office or Windows because they're from Microsoft. I avoid them because they cost a lot and I don't really like them that much anyway. I also don't like the way that Microsoft doesn't give me the freedom to use them how I want to. Why should a format, OS and/or Office suite that originates from China be judged any differently?
I'm not a great fan of China or its policies, many of which I find quite abhorrent and I'll protest about them in my own way for what they are. China's a massive and very complext place, though. If UOF and EIOffice are actually beneficial and useful (neither of which I could vouch for because I haven't seen them), wouldn't it just make sense to encourage them on their individual merits?
Exceptions to this might be if you could show that the UOF specifications were developed by jailed political prisoners being unjustly forced to live in torture chambers and design document format specifications against their will, and perhaps you wouldn't want to encourage that kind of thing if it's likely to continue happening. But if you ignored ideas simply because of where they came from rather than the merits of the ideas themselves, you'd be restricting yourself a lot and we probably wouldn't have many of the beneficial things we have today.
Re:Separating the ideas from the source (Score:4, Insightful)
I haven't used the Chinese versions of MS Office or Open Office, or any other Office suite/applications for that matter, since I have a hard time reading Chinese.
I've used MS Office to write in Japanese though, and it feels a bit retrofitted...
But one might think it logical that a Chinese-developed suite would be specifically tailored to work well with the somewhat complex Chinese writing-system.
Wonder what kind of accusations the creators of EIOffice throw at MS via China's anti-monopoly laws.
And if, say, MS is forbidden to sell MS Office in China, wouldn't that make EIOffice a monopoly. =)
But, of course, their anti-monopoly laws might only apply to foreign companies. Not entirely impossible.
Many countries have a tendency to side with "their own" companies in any international legal struggle.
Especially when there's a lucrative market to protect from foreign companies and lots of money to be saved on not importing something as abstract as bits and intellectual property.
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Or more aptly put: The enemy of my enemy is my "friend".
Coming soon... (Score:5, Funny)
Coming soon from MacDonald Software [wikipedia.org], the Enterprise Interoperability Evermore Integrated Office release (E-I-E-I-O).
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"Old MacDonald had a server farm..."
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What they didn't tell you, is the spelling. Old MacDonald didn't have a farm, he had a pharm.
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Wonder if they will play nice with OO (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Wonder if they will play nice with OO (Score:4, Funny)
Ole Mi Tou Nol had an office suite. EI....EIOffice
Re:Wonder if they will play nice with OO (Score:4, Informative)
They have. (Score:5, Informative)
Here is software that will convert between ODF and UOF [sourceforge.net], written by the Open Standard Lab of Peking University. In the process of writing this software, they have been participating in the UOF standardization process and talking with ODF folks to make sure the two formats can be converted well.
The UOF is a written standard approved by the Chinese national standardization bodies - not just "whatever ElOffice does". I don't know if there is an english translation - I have been able to find one with google.
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I guess one thing is that it will be the standard for the government in a country with 1.3 billion inhabitans?
But yes, I'd also like to see a more extended comparision, I saw something in the articles mentioned I belive but it wasn't much.
Advantages? (Score:3, Interesting)
More Free (Score:5, Funny)
Seeing as how both ODF and UOF is based upon open standards (based on Wikipedia), what advantages does UOF offer over ODF?
Less jail time if your Tibet protest pamphlets are saved in UOF?
The Name (Score:2, Funny)
Shove it down their throats. (Score:3, Insightful)
I hope they also try to ram UOF down ISO's throats. The ensuing chaos will require actual government to step in and impose a standard by fiat.
Or we could all just go back to using LaTeX. I'd be alright with that. Actually, I learned LaTeX after switching to odf, so I've always viewed LaTeX as an upgrade from odf.
Re:Shove it down their throats. (Score:4, Insightful)
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There's LyX [lyx.org].
Tried it. It's crap. It's got it's own format, instead of using standard LaTeX. I want an editor that gives me just a little bit of WYSIWYG help whilst creating a simple, legible and standard LaTeX source file.
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Tried it. It's crap. It's got it's own format, instead of using standard LaTeX. I want an editor that gives me just a little bit of WYSIWYG help whilst creating a simple, legible and standard LaTeX source file.
LyX has it's own format, yes, but it can also output to simple legible standard LaTeX. It's not a drop-in replacement for things like Word as I was talking about in my original post, but it's most certainly not crap. It's got it's uses. For really complex math functions it gets a bit hard to follow while just typing the LaTeX source - a WYSIWYG for that is really helpful.
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LaTeX will never have a complete WYSIWYG editor, the whole point of LaTeX is that WYSIWYG is clumsy when doing the most detailed work.
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You'd think that with computers as fast as they are now, they could do real time previews of latex output side by side with the text files that create them... kinda the reverse of reveal codes back in the day on WP?
Back in uni I took notes for all my courses in LaTeX (much easier to read than my illegible writing). I wrote the notes in emacs, converted to dvi with latex, and viewed the dvi with kdvi which updated the display as soon as the new dvi was generated.
With a little practise it was still tricky keeping up with the profs notes on the board, but I had a much easier time of actually reading the notes I took.
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Why didn't you just learn traditional shorthand instead of all of that rube goldberg mess you did? About as fast as it gets, a "standard" for decades for note taking before "word processing" was even invented.
Because I'm a programmer and LaTeX is a useful skill to have, because my writing sucks and I'm a decent typist, and because my notes were really damn readable.
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4x cheaper than mso? (Score:5, Funny)
but it is NaN times more expensive than OpenOffice.org!
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but it is NaN times more expensive than OpenOffice.org!
Egg-zaktly. Proprietary => no thanks.
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No one forces you to use a proprietarian office suite just because you use their open format.
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but it is NaN times more expensive than OpenOffice.org!
Really? If it's free, I guess I might as well look into it, huh?
(Hint: 1/0 == inf; 0/0 == nan)
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For me, 1 / 0 is error CS0020: Division by constant zero
On the other hand, 1.0 / 0.0 is Infinity.
(The precise output might change slightly if you're using csc rather than mcs.)
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Extra feature? (Score:5, Funny)
It was bound to happen (Score:4, Funny)
1. Get a team of programmers and sponsor them with big chinese govt. money
2. Put them to work to get rid of Microsoft
3. Profit!!
Anything subversive or defensive possible? (Score:2)
I can see a future where English-speaking users struggle through Chinese software that's badly translated but free and effective nonetheless...
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If the standard is open why not READ IT if you are so afraid of it?
Also you don't need to use their chinese software just because you use their data format.
But on the other hand if you are so afraid of chinese technology good luck with your next movieplayer, mp3player, tv, receiver, ...
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Rob Weir's blog post on YEARFRAC() [robweir.com]
or faulty mathematical functions:
here's a fourth one (Score:3, Insightful)
It's called "HTML" and everybody is already using it.
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Re:here's a fourth one (Score:5, Funny)
I just threw up in my mouth a little.
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Sure. If you believe that I have a fifth: ASCII plain text.
90% of business documents oculd be in this format with no loss of information, a 99% reduction in size and ability to use any number of tools to search and organise it.
But the PHBs want to use Comic Sans and paste movies into their memos.
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90% of business documents could be in this format with no loss of information, a 99% reduction in size and ability to use any number of tools to search and organise it.
But only if they use American English. Or would you please point me towards the cyrillic characters, or the Greek characters, or the mathematical symbols etc within the ASCII specification. I do not think that documents written in English account for 90% of business documents in the world, although that figure might be an accurate estimate for your own country. However, I suspect that your suggestion is somewhat tongue-in-cheek and merely offered as a rebuttal to 'HTML'. If I'm wrong and you were seriou
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Or Australian.
Okay then make it Unicode.
However, I suspect that your suggestion is somewhat tongue-in-cheek and merely offered as a rebuttal to 'HTML'.
Yes. HTML is pretty horrible as far as character sets go too. I live in Hong Kong and often have to manually change the default character encoding to be able to view a page in the intended character set.
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People seem to be constantly using ASCII as a synonym for plain text, not the actual character encoding. So, just imagine the GP meant Unicode instead.
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Which Unicode, UTF-16 or UTF-8?
</nitpick>
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Since when has html allowed you to write and format on A4 represented pages. What a stupid suggestion.
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Except it sucks and doesn't do WYSIWYG, stupid web designers tend to belive it does though.
State level NIH (Score:5, Informative)
is quite common in China. However, as for UOF, this is not totally due to the Chinese standardization body. When the idea of the UOF standard was forming in 2002, ODF had not been on its standardization track yet. It turned out that the development of UOF was slower and ODF got ahead.
Another example of this kind of NIH is the standards for Chinese character encoding. There are a series of "GBxxxxx" standards (GB is for Guo-Biao, acronym for national standard in Chinese) which are totally incompatible with Unicode, but both GB and Unicode are widely used China, causing a great deal of pain and trouble. Some Web developers, unaware of the character encoding problem, screw up the Web pages by sending the wrong header or using the wrong XML declaration. Some email programs automatically fuck up your email's encoding. This also made distributed development more difficult.
Usually the "invented-here" standards are not technically better than the others. Some of them are too restricted in scope (e.g. the GB encodings can handle English, Chinese, Japanese kana and the Cyrillic alphabet, but few others). But now it may be too late to make a change.
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This is the same around the world, and has nothing to do with NIH. Unicode did not exist until the early 1990s, so in 1980 when the Chinese government standardised GB2312, there was no way they could make it compatible with Unicode. Since then, GB2312 has been extended with som
"speaking for the Chinese government" (Score:5, Interesting)
You don't get to be in a position where you're the CEO/President of a company who's standard is "blessed" by the Chinese government without having very deep tendrils into the government itself (cough...corruption/nepotism...cough).
More often than not, there are personal and/or family relations between the regulators and the regulated in China that would land all the parties in jail in a developed country. Welcome to Chinese business 101.
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"But it seems likely that they are more contained by the US system than the Chinese one."
Maybe. I would mostly just say the two systems are different but both are pretty bad. One big difference is the U.S. maintains a greater illusion of freedom than China does. The U.S. does have a two party system, but most Americans will tell you that there isn't really a dimes bit of difference between the two on most issues. The two parties are extremely effective in snuffing out any chance of any any new party ris
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Dude, you missed the point. I didn't even pretend to say the U.S. is identical to China. I just pointed out that they aren't really as different as you are trying to paint them to be.
From 2000 to 2006 the Republican's very nearly did succeed in doing what you describe for all practical purposes. Their use of 9/11 fear mongering was so successful the Democrats and the U.S. media could just as well been in a camp, the outcome would have been the same. The Bush administration did manage to completely disma
There's always the opium option... (Score:3, Insightful)
What Microsoft could do is, start offering doses of opium free to the Chinese with purchases of Windows. Then, if the Chinese government tried to stop it, Microsoft could claim foul to our government, who would land troops and suppress the Chinese government enough to ensure that the opium was distributed so that people would turn to Microsoft for more opium.
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Re:There's always the opium option... (Score:5, Informative)
Except it was originally the UK :)
Parent and grand-parent are referring to :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars [wikipedia.org]
Another Word-compatible format? Please, no... (Score:2)
According to what I've googled, this is based on what was originally called "RedOffice", the Chinese fork of OpenOffice.
If UOF is based on a product derived from "RedOffice", that means the format is likely to have similar limitations to ODF and OOXML, both of which are based directly or indirectly on Word's document structure.
The problem is that Word's document structure is awful. It's not a hierarchical format in any meaningful sense, the only nestable structure is the table, and the basic block is a full
In communist China, irony strikes me. (Score:2)
Does anyone else find it ironic that a (supposedly) Communist country has passed an anti-monopoly law?
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The AC is right. How many versions of wordprocessor extensions do we really need? Since anything official (courts government, etc.) has to be in PDF these days why not just use Acrobat for all of it? Who cares if it's closed source?
How about native support for mkv video? That would be news. How about native 64 bit software? Let's really try somthing new, code a wordprocessor to actually use multithreading! Nah! let's just cook up a new extension for text files, and then fight about it.
This whole wordp
Re:who gives a fuck? (Score:5, Funny)
The AC is right. How many versions of wordprocessor extensions do we really need?
I for one welcome our dyslexic UFO overlords.
Re:who gives a fuck? (Score:5, Informative)
How many versions of wordprocessor extensions do we really need?
One or two. And one or two for spreadsheets, and presentations, and so on.
The point is that it should be the right one or two. It would kind of suck if that extension ended up being TXT, right?
Since anything official (courts government, etc.) has to be in PDF these days
Unless it's Excel -- which was the case last time I looked at the federal budget, if I recall.
why not just use Acrobat for all of it? Who cares if it's closed source?
PDF != Acrobat.
PDF actually is an open standard, and is well supported by several open readers. While there are many Adobe-specific quirks, and Acrobat is arguably the worst PDF reader out there (heh, I just typoed it "Acrobad"), PDF is still very useful in a lot of contexts.
There are two problems with this: First, PDF is read-only (not everything should be).
Second, your mother doesn't know how to save as PDF. She'll still send you whatever the default format for her office suite is. It would really help if that default format was something we all know how to read -- that's the point of having a standard, so we don't have to think about this anymore.
So, you see, you actually should care about this debate -- precisely because if we win, no one will have to think about it anymore.
How about native support for mkv video? That would be news. How about native 64 bit software?
Both of these already exist.
let's just cook up a new extension for text files
And that about shows your complete lack of understanding.
It's not just a "new extension", it's actually a different file format -- there's a lot more work that has to go into this than typing "odt" instead of "doc".
And it's not just word processing. It's presentations, spreadsheets, pretty much all office formats. But sure, let's pick the least useful of these for our most common example...
Extensions vs. Extended Attributes (Score:2)
How many versions of wordprocessor extensions do we really need?
One or two. And one or two for spreadsheets, and presentations, and so on.
The point is that it should be the right one or two. It would kind of suck if that extension ended up being TXT, right?
Operating Systems using extended attributes for file types (like OS/2 and Mac OS X) have no problems when all extension are the same. In fact they work perfectly well with no extensions at all.
It's not just a "new extension", it's actually a different file format -- there's a lot more work that has to go into this than typing "odt" instead of "doc".
This is why I think IBM and Apple got it right in not relying on extensions for file formats and it would be better of if we did not have them at all. And I don't speak about hiding them - which only leads to "Summer Vacation Photo.jpg.exe" exploits.
Interesting side note on hiding extension: With Mac OS X hiding exten
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Most unix apps will quite happily deal with files that don't have filename extensions. I still have stacks of files from my Amiga days, none of which have extensions, and yet i can still open them fine on linux.
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Windows and Linux don't have fall back mechanism for file systems which don't support extended attributes natively. That might be the reason they don't use them.
Linux could just use magic(5) which although slower would be fairly reliable.
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Windows and Linux don't have fall back mechanism for file systems which don't support extended attributes natively. That might be the reason they don't use them.
Linux could just use magic(5) which although slower would be fairly reliable.
True magic can replace one use of extended attributes. It can't replace the others. OS/2 for example had an EA called ".ICON" - which allowed you to set an icon for every file or directory.
Martihn
Martin
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Good point.
I think we agree more than we disagree, (My comment wasn't one of my my best, but sometimes a little hyperbole stimulates some interesting conversation).
My point isn't that we should all go to PDF. The point is why introduce yet another incompatible format into the mix?
The average IT shop currently supports how many document formats right now?
With how many suites of apps to create them?
I've actually lost count.
Re:who gives a fuck? (Score:4, Interesting)
LaTeX is great, and is very useful when writing papers or manuals, etc.
It sucks for throwing together little one-off projects though. A little FAQ sheet. A letter to someone. A notice for the door. That kind of stuff. Word or Publisher (even Powerpoint sometimes) are just the ticket for that sort of thing.
Word is also handy for doing labels and envelopes since it's mail-merge is so simple.
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LaTeX is great, and is very useful when writing papers or manuals, etc. It sucks for throwing together little one-off projects though. A little FAQ sheet. A letter to someone.
Lyx
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Is there any other way to do LaTeX? :)
Lyx is cool - but still not as quick and dirty as a WYSIWYG editor when you are more concerned with layout and appearance for a single page or two.
Re:who gives a fuck? (Score:4, Insightful)
Because it looks awful.
Look, even SLASHDOT, home of the nerds, uses formatting .
The goal here isn't to reduce file sizes. Honestly -- for a one off project? The disk space is negligible. And even if you could use HTML-ized "plaintext" to convey formatting, suddenly it's not "faster" to author, especially for anybody who's not a psychotic tech fiend.
The goal here is to make approximately what you want, as quickly & easily as possible. Plaintext fails at "as fast as possible". LaTeX is harder than WYSIWYG editors for loose approximations at a small scale, and easier than WYSIWYG for tight approximations (especially where math is involved) at a large scale, with never-ending arguments over the exact boundary on those two axes.
Who are you? And what are you doing in my house? (Score:3, Informative)
@-moz-document domain(slashdot.org) {
border-color: -moz-use-text-color #FFFFFF rgb(255, 255, 255) !important;
}
border: 0px;
margin: 1.5em;
}
}
Rules without !important are overruled by
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Disk space? Really? Honestly, that hasn't been a concern of mine in about 10 years or so - unless you are counting my video editing. I don't know what the total amount of space from Word documents on my computer is, but I'd wager it's well under a GB.
Faster is another non-issue these days. There is not a perceptible difference in launch time between my text editor of choice and any WYSIWYG word processor that I use, and WYSIWYG is decidedly faster.
I don't even remember how to make a plain text file come out
Re:who gives a fuck? (Score:4, Insightful)
Because I need to format it. Trivial example: I want to print huge letters, one per page, so I can make a big sign to put in the window, for a one-night-only event (prank, actually).
Or because I'm writing up a resume. Like it or not, plain text looks unprofessional next to a proper resume, with contact info right-justified at the top, proper (graphically) bullet-pointed lists, and maybe even a photo.
So "faster" is a non-issue -- I can make a text file faster, and I do that for things like READMEs in software, but it won't do what I want for a resume, a big party sign, a "Lost dog -- Reward" sign, or any of the many other uses for desktop publishing [wikipedia.org].
And because even if I did this every day for the rest of my life, it would still use an insignificant amount of disk space -- even if I stored the XML unzipped, in a folder (which some apps can do).
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How about we don't use any of them? LaTeX is way better than any WYSIWYG.
+1
It's a shame that LaTeX isn't more widely used. There seems to be a stigma surrounding anything non-WYSIWYG.
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Because I don't know LaTeX, and don't have time to learn, especially for a one-off project. But even my grandmother knows Word. (Not making that up -- she also uses email, albeit very slowly.)
And because I can't recall ever needing the advanced features of LaTeX. I don't even use all of a WYSIWYG word processor's features -- when I use a word processor.
Re:who gives a fuck? (Score:5, Funny)
\begin{quote}
This whole wordprocessor thing has gone from the from the sublime to the ridiculous.
\end{quote}
What's a `word processor'?
\end{comment}
Re:who gives a fuck? (Score:5, Funny)
Well, I suspect it's something along the line of a food processor. You know the kind - you put your ingredients into it, push a button and the result is something you wouldn't recognize if you didn't know what just happened.
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"What's a `word processor'?
Evidently something I wasn't using when crafting my rant.
"A word processor (more formally known as document preparation system) is a computer application used for the production (including composition, editing, formatting, and possibly printing) of any sort of printable material." (WIKI Quote)
When I started in IT, every office was equipped with numerous IBM Selectrics and a few standalone word processors.
The first machines that could store document text and formatting were
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The AC is right. How many versions of wordprocessor extensions do we really need?
Three and half.
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Let's see, we need one in GTK, one in Qt, one in Athena, one for the native Mac look, one for Windows that won't work with anything else... that's at least five already.
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has to be in PDF
Only in your country. There is a whole big wide world outside of it, you know, and we don't all think that PDF is the answer to the problem.
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It was worth citing the claim, I'll take that beer now. :-P
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No, please look again. I didn't say that PDFs are not used, simply that I am not aware of there being any REQUIREMENT for them to be used. And I have looked at each of the cites now, but nowhere can I find where it says that PDFs MUST be used. Can you please direct me to where that statement is made? Otherwise your cites are useless for supporting your argument that "some jurisdictions require them". I think you will find they use them but they are not forced to do so. I am quite content to be correct
Unsure whether PDF is mandated (Score:2)
PDF was mentioned in this interesting, now 5 years old, advisory Valoris report [eu.int] (as PDF, of course ;-)).
I can really recommend this as it shows how much strife and conflict we've all had the past 5 years, and how much is at stake :-/
Apparently, the next version of the European Interoperability Framework [europa.eu] is in the making, and these months you can post public comments. So if you think UOF should be adopted by Europea
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Sorry, some people aren't getting the joke. (you got an "Insightful" mod?). Obviously didn't notice the use of the words "sublime" and "ridiculous" in your last sentence -- that was the tell...
So, I have to hit them over the head -
mkv video native support? Of course, mkv is a COMPLETELY OPEN format. Native support is in (most) open OSs by default.
Native 64 bit software? If you have the source, rebuild it.
Multithreading word processor? Of absolutely no benefit.
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Heh, it was up to +4 Insightful, but has been down-modded and up-modded a whole bunch.
I was replying to a FP troll and trying to have some "on topic" fun at the same time, then it got all serious on me and I really hate burning up karma on a flippant comment.
So here I find myself defending an untenable position, where almost everyone missed the point to begin with.
I made the front page with a journal entry today so it's actually a good day, in spite of this thread.
Re:Aren't they harmonizing with ODF? (Score:4, Funny)
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... or the people of Iraq.
Asshole.
I don't see the benefit of not trying to make them work good together in case both will succeed, but I'd prefer if there was only one standard instead of the current three ones. Good work...
"Omg, .doc changes all the time, let's create three other standards." :/ Fail.
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ast I knew, they were working on a way to harmonize UOF with ODF. How is that going?
Well they have a new name, UFO: Unified File Object, which, if flies, will also offer security through obscurity in that its contents will be Unidentifiable, thus making Microsoft happy in the same breath. Microsoft of course wishes it to be called "Unidentified File Object" and thus mod it +5 Funny so that it doesn't get accepted.
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Ubuntu wont run with 256mb? Didn't know that...
Sure you can find a lightweight version tho.
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Got any proof for what you are saying or are you just leaking from your ass?
Also are the standard even made by Eloffice or was they just the first ones to implement it in their office suite because, like, they are chinese and the chinese people are their biggest market?
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Why would it be vaporware? Seems like their first release was 2002:
http://www.evermoresw.com/weben/product/whatsNew.jsp [evermoresw.com]
It's also written in Java so it runs on most platforms I guess, they mention Windows, Macintosh and Linux.
See the same url for new features or http://www.evermoresw.com/weben/product/integrated.jsp [evermoresw.com] for a more complete list.
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How can a standard be based on software? Isn't it the software which makes use of a standard?
Also sort of the idea of using a standard for data representation would be to make it possible for various software to support it.
And finally even if Eloffice was the only application supporting the standard Eloffice is written in Java and Microsoft Office is not so why the fuck would it be "stolen, bootlegged or otherwise-ripped-off software"?
So much bullshit in this thread.
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Note to self: Never to make a joke when there's some dough-head around to take it seriously.
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