Showing posts with label Rants. Show all posts
Is THIS BIS ? Our Experts Panel ?
Bureau of Indian Standards ! These are the people who represent India at ISO and give their views on Standards and their adaptation. Funny to say that these people voted against OOXML. Their reasons ? Here are the minutes of the "experts" meeting, but to cut a long story short, here are my sentiments :
1) It seems BIS does not understand the fact that the design goal of OOXML was not to deal with binary file format. They seem to be more worried about conversion from Binary format to be part of the standard rather than looking at how the new standard can actually make life a lot more easier from interoperability point of view.
2) The enlightened guys in the committee objected to Custom XML being allowed to be embedded inside OOXML documents. To quote "... the provision to include custom xml elements into a document unacceptable if inter-operability must be ensured." Guys ! dont you understand the basics of what XML is used for ?
3) As stated by a learned professor of the committee, he is strongly of the view that voting for OOXML by BIS at ISO will increase the digital
divide in India and will harm the domestic industry and economy. Eh ?? On what basis sir ? Care to explain ? Or you just like making statements ? And he feels it wise to go by ODF. I hope he is currently living his life with an Open Standard wordprocessor running on an Open Standard Operating System with an Open Standard thought process. I wish the BIS team reads up on the fact that the ODF format is limited to the features and performance of OpenOffice and StarOffice.
As far as the story goes, Microsoft has won the OOXML battle and has won ISO recognition as a global document standard. Of course, Microsoft has frowned at BIS for voting against the format which as the ruling suggests, most are in favour of. However, Microsoft has agreed to work and support what BIS expects from them.
So at the end, OOXML joins the ranks of PDF, HTML and ODF amongst document formats.
1) It seems BIS does not understand the fact that the design goal of OOXML was not to deal with binary file format. They seem to be more worried about conversion from Binary format to be part of the standard rather than looking at how the new standard can actually make life a lot more easier from interoperability point of view.
2) The enlightened guys in the committee objected to Custom XML being allowed to be embedded inside OOXML documents. To quote "... the provision to include custom xml elements into a document unacceptable if inter-operability must be ensured." Guys ! dont you understand the basics of what XML is used for ?
3) As stated by a learned professor of the committee, he is strongly of the view that voting for OOXML by BIS at ISO will increase the digital
divide in India and will harm the domestic industry and economy. Eh ?? On what basis sir ? Care to explain ? Or you just like making statements ? And he feels it wise to go by ODF. I hope he is currently living his life with an Open Standard wordprocessor running on an Open Standard Operating System with an Open Standard thought process. I wish the BIS team reads up on the fact that the ODF format is limited to the features and performance of OpenOffice and StarOffice.
As far as the story goes, Microsoft has won the OOXML battle and has won ISO recognition as a global document standard. Of course, Microsoft has frowned at BIS for voting against the format which as the ruling suggests, most are in favour of. However, Microsoft has agreed to work and support what BIS expects from them.
So at the end, OOXML joins the ranks of PDF, HTML and ODF amongst document formats.
MSN Messengerrrr Grrrrrrrrr !!!
I noticed something recently with MSN Messenger 8.1. When you hover the mouse over the advertisement section at the bottom of the main window, a big ugly advertisement comes up. Basically the advertisement zooms up and takes a large part of the screen.. and gives me back some distraction in return. Grrrrrr... I hate this !
Pathetic cricket telecast by Sahara One and Doordarshan !
I was home today and was watching the 7th ODI between India and England. But Sahara One spoilt my mood by inserting commercials just about wherever they could. So much so that they even missed the winning shot to be shown live because they had a silly advertisement that they inserted during the telecast. Even Doordarshan who was showing a parallel feed were not far behind with the same number of commercials being shown there. It was so annoying and I felt that other channels like Ten sports and Star Sports are at least considerate in showing commercials. They do not irritate the life out of the the viewers. For the sake of the game of cricket and the cricket enthusiasts, the people responsible for giving rights for television feeds should keep a clause wherein commercials are shown but at an appropriate time and with a reasonable frequency. I have vowed not to buy Reliance products after being bombarded with Reliance mobile commercials every few minutes during the match.