Slashdot posts "An anonymous reader writes "The OASIS Group announces that the third Committee Draft [PDF] of the Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) v1.0 Specification has been approved as an OASIS Standard. The submission of the approved standard can be found at here. The OpenDocument format is intended to provide an open alternative to proprietary document formats including the popular DOC, XLS, and PPT formats used by Microsoft Office. Organizations and individuals that store their data in an open format avoid being locked in to a single software vendor, leaving them free to switch software if their current vendor goes out of business or changes their software or licensing terms to something less favorable."
That's great news! I was recently cleaning up some loose ends on my web site, and noticed that the oldest of my whitepapers at http://www.tedroche.com/papers.html were exported from MS Office 95 (I think) with the awful HTML that's hostile to most browsers. I went to open up the original documents in OpenOffice.org and found they could not be read. Just as predicted in "The Long Now," I have data locked up in a proprietary format I cannot read. I'm sure I can find a machine around here somewhere with the correct translators (and if I don't, in this case, it's no great loss) but it's disturbing to see bits on disks turned from information into random noise.
2:43:00 PM comment []
Still delighted with all of the new toys that Tiger has brought to my iMac. However, I've had a chance to run more of the apps I have installed and have run into a couple of glitches: Fugu, a free SCP client I mentioned here needed an upgrade to run under Tiger. Note that Apple seems to keep a pretty tight rein on their beta sites with NDAs until the product has actually shipped. NetNewsWire 1.0.8's preference page seems to be broken, but I haven't chased that one down yet, and think it's time I ought to get on the 2.0 beta, anyway. And Radio Userland is reporting that my web backup is failing to back up my May posts, for some reason. Also pursuing that with the Radio staff. Whether or not these are Tiger related or messed up because I "fixed file permissions" or because we had a thunderstorm two days ago is still to be determined. Still, no major glitches - mail, Safari and NeoOffice/J are rocking along. More as I figure it out...
12:25:26 PM comment []
