When You Own the Market You Don't Have to Support Standards, Do You ...

Microsoft's comments on joining the OASIS project:

However, Simon Marks, Microsoft Office product manger, said that Microsoft would not be interested in joining if the technical committee produced "just another file format that panders to the lowest common denominator."

Marks said Microsoft is more interested in working with "customer defined" XML built using XSD 1.0, rather than interoperability between competing suites. File formats in Microsoft's up-coming Office 11 suite use XSD 1.0. [ Go ]

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Vignettes of a High Tech Move

I'm finishing the sale of a house and moving and here are some of the more funny things.  Well funny to me that is. You need to be a wee bit dweeby to find some of these funny:

• Finding an 80C85 notebook in the basement
• Running out of rope to tie something onto the car and saying "I Know!"
• Going into the basement and ripping out a 50' 10BaseT cable
• Tying a desk onto the car with said 10BaseT cable
• Wondering exactly what the tensile strength of 10BaseT cable is
• Morale of the Story: Said desk made it Boston to Belfast, ME without falling off or even wobbling.  Tensile strength is pretty damn good.  Thanks Bob Metcalfe! (who would no doubt cringe if he ever read this)
• Finding the 8088 laptop in a closet
• Realizing that as sad as it is you're not likely to ever use that Mac Plus again.  Not even as a fish tank. 
• Finding the 386sx plasma screen "laptop" in a closet (I've had barbells lighter)
• Looking over at the passenger seat next to you and thinking "Gee... My fuel injection has a bigger processor than my 1st 8 bit micro which perhaps I can Ebay so I won't just throw it out even though I should"
• 153 10BaseT cables
• Finding a Dell P90 laptop (Look Ma!  Almost all the Intel family in a mobile form factor)
• Parting out all the CPUs and RAM you found in all the obsolete computers "What great christmas ornaments these will make"
• Tossing a 1991 Mac PowerBook as "I already have a paperweight"
• Discovering just how many tools you own.  Not one, not two but three digital VOMs plus analog ones to boot.
• And an embarassingly large collection of hard drives in sizes ranging from 40 mb to > 14 gigs
• Carrying out an ATX style motherboard with Pentium II chip in it in a wicker basket and not even caring to put it in a static proof bag.  "Pshaw!  It's just another cpu"
• Being unwilling to throw out the disc masters for every single commercial software product you ever produced.  Even the 5.25" floppies with DOS apps on them.  "But I might have to support them someday .... he foolishly rationalizes"
• 18 IDE cables
• Good Will refusing to accept a Cisco Router
• Tossing an entire shoebox of 400KB and 800KB Mac floppies

Note: It was a big house and I've been through a number of businesses where hardware collected and acreted on my premises hence the collection of high tech junk.  The vast bulk of it is now gone.

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