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Tuesday, December 17, 2002 |
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How open is the new Office?. Microsoft's support for XML in an upcoming release of Office could finally open up the suite's proprietary file formats--but only if Microsoft discloses the underlying XML dialect. [CNET News.com]
How open? How about "not at all"? XML is a ruse; there's plenty of ways to keep an XML file proprietary, and Microsoft has zero incentive to open up their file format. Zero. With 90%+ market share for office productivity apps, they can only lose, not win, and Microsoft cares only about winning. If they're not above faking evidence for a court of law, they're certainly not going to be above saying XML but remaining closed, in the hopes no one will notice.
Problem is, it'll probably work.
4:51:03 PM 
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Bush to California: Choke on this. The White House has joined with the oil and auto industries to undermine the state's rigorous environmental regulations. [Salon.com]
Republicans are for state's rights, as long as it's putting money in the hands of the rich, or fundamentalist zealots, or otherwise furthering their causes. God forbid a state should want to keep itself a nice place to live, when that conflicts with Big Oil's desire to render it a wasteland.
4:30:49 PM
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New Tax Plan May Bring Shift In Burden As the Bush administration draws up plans to simplify the tax system, it is also refining arguments for why it may be necessary to shift more of the tax load onto lower-income workers. Economists at the Treasury Department are drafting new ways to calculate the distribution of tax burdens among different income classes ... working up more sophisticated distribution tables that are expected to make the poor appear to be paying less in taxes and the rich to be paying more. [Daypop Top 40]
Of course we should tax the poor more, after all, they're the ones with all the money...as I'm sure the New Math as practiced by Dumbya's economists will show.
4:24:48 PM
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Lies, damn lies, and the RIAA If the Recording Industry Association of America is to be believed, file sharing and P-2-P applications cost them billions of dollars each year because of piracy. But what if the decrease in CD sales was mostly the RIAA's doing, and was to be expected? A Register story states the major recording labels have had a 25% dropoff in titles over the last two years. If you release less product to the masses wouldn't you expect to see a drop off in sales? [Ars Technica]
3:49:13 PM
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© Copyright 2003 Michael Alderete.
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