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* Posts by Andre Caldas

5 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Jan 2008

A week in the life of Open XML

Andre Caldas
IT Angle

@Adam

Adam,

You are making some confusion. It is a different situation having many formats and all of them being a ISO standard.

You also ignore the fact that being a de-facto standard (which OOXML is not) is no excuse for being approved as ISO standard over some corrupted/broken process. No technical merits (if you insist in believing them) is an excuse for corruption. It IS VERY RELEVANT if ISO is being used just to leverage market dominance in detriment of others.

To keep converting files using plugins is really stupid. It's always ODF users the burden to convert forth and back (and fix the conversion problems). I have a policy not to convert ODF documents for others. I always suggest them to install Open Office in order to use ODF.

André Caldas.

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Microsoft puts dusty, old Office code on web

Andre Caldas
Stop

@Greg Flamering

So, we should just use base64 for jpeg and claim it is just plain ascii!

No... I had one idea, let's just represent anything as a combination of the characters 0 and 1. Every interoperability problem will be automatically solved as we will be using just a tiny subset of plain ascii.

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Andre Caldas
Dead Vulture

Reason for fast-track.

Why is is on a fast-track anyway?

So, because Microsoft was not far-sighted enough to start implementing the proposed ISO standard that was on track for 5 years - besides having a chair in the committee, then it is an excuse for putting the Microsoft standard into a fast-track?

Oh, God! We need a new standard very quick because Microsoft did not try to implement the real standard!!

Putting it on a fast-track can becompared to a government saying: "The government doesn't have time for this so called democracy because the government deals with really important 'real-world' stuff and does not have the time to do things properly." Let's just give Microsoft full power to decide what should be and what should not be the standard. After all, it is an urgent matter: We are in 2008, and the product is called Office2007! We need to make it the standard as fast as we can.

(The dead bird is the democratic ISO process)

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Andre Caldas
Paris Hilton

TeX (@Greg)

"TeX has been around for more than thirty years. It is a simple standard, anyone can write a TeX parser and it is well-documented. The file format is PLAIN ASCII."

The file format is not PLAIN ASCII, you dumb. It is TeX, as you said yourself!

If you use TeX and I use MathXYZ, then we do not use the same "standard". And we certainly do not use an "international standard" for representing formulas.

(I don't know why I am using Paris. I don't know her and actually have no reason to believe she is stupid)

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The OLPC XO laptop

Andre Caldas
Happy

@Rafael

Rafael,

I'm Brazilian, too. You seem to ignore the fact that there are many Brazils... besides the Brazil you live in, there is a Brazil where people don't have electricity. There is a Brazil where people value community, culture and education, where children travel a lot just to go to school.

Having a computer does not imply it will be used in some "wrong way". Basically you are saying it's not worth doing anything since students are inherently bad.

Brazil needs a lot of work in education, I know. But if you say "quilombolas" (former communities of slaves who had escaped), "indios" (native), "favelados" (people who live in "favelas": http://www.bartleby.com/61/60/F0056000.html) do not deserve/need to have access to information/technology, then you remind me of that song "a gente não quer só comida, a gente quer comida, diversão, balé" - "we (people) don't want just food, we want food, entertainment, ballet".

Inclusão digital (reducing the digital-divide) is an important theme nowadays. There is a big difference between giving tools, imposing constraints on how it should be used, when it should be used and who is the authority that decides what should be done with it, and how it is supposed to be kept, reminding the user, every time that what s/he receives, s/he receives as a "favour"; and allow the person to have full ability to exercise its creativity and its citizenship (not a favour, a right). This has implications on how the individual sees itself and its community.

Inclusão digital is a kind of "inclusão social" (reducing the social-divide). Then maybe we will have people with conscience, able to take political decisions instead of repeating the values of their dominant class. It's not just about teaching computing to children (so, I don't think your experience applies here). It is a tool for citizenship.

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