The funniest is the case of Seattle. Seattle offered rat bounties various times in the 19th century without incident, but in 1907, there was a minor scandal when a rat farm was discovered. As soon as this was reported in the press, of course, other people started doing the same thing. The City Council joked about taxing rat farms to pay for the rat bounty, then actually took it seriously enough to vote on it (they voted no), then finally eliminated the bounty. Less than 30 years later, during the Great Depression, they instituted a rat bounty into the Hoovervilles, and this time there was an explosion of rat farms. The press had a field day–starting with the Seattle Times, but spreading nationwide–laughing at the gullible Seattle government getting caught by the same scam twice. Other documented cases exist in French Colonial Hanoi in 1902 and Beijing in 1899. Given the popularity of rat bounties throughout history, it’s undoubtedly happened many more times.

However, many of the stories are clearly apocryphal. People in San Francisco occasionally misremember a bounty-related scandal from 1906; the actual story had nothing to do with rat farms, but rather with people enticing small children into hunting rats for them (at the time, people believed these rats were carrying the Plague) by trading candy for rat tails. In Los Angeles in 1903, some racist troublemakers blamed the Chinatown rat problem on local residents breeding rats for food (supposedly the Chinese considered rats a delicacy), and after the city offered a rat bounty, the story mutated into the Chinese breeding rats for the bounty, but there was no truth to either version.

After the Seattle scandal, journalists in New York and London began “reminding” people of similar events in their cities’ pasts, although there doesn’t seem to be any contemporary account of any of these events (although most of them are vague enough that it’s hard to prove either way, that doesn’t exactly lend them credibility). The Seattle Underground tour tells visitors a slightly distorted version of their first rat farming story, which is probably responsible for the recent spread of the story as a sort of urban legend that can be placed in any city at any time (including Ankh Morpork in the Discworld books).

I think the rat version is apocryphal, though it pops up occasionally, set in Singapore, or Dudley, England. I tried to make my version suitably fictitious, and in the style of a fairy tale.

Matusow obviously doesn’t travel overseas, or if he does, doesn’t bring any type of electrical appliance. Does he sincerely believe that life is better by having to have multiple adapters for the various types of electrical plugs used by different countries? I guess if you are in the business of making these adapters, the status quo is a lot better than if all the plugs were the same.

There they used trees.

Winter

However, maybe we should all forget about IBM Lotus SmartSuite. I can’t see it getting ported to Linux :-)

Perhaps we should ask Microsoft to consider the importance of pressuring the Peoples Republic of China to respect Microsoft’s IPR, if by analogy, wildly differing ISO standards on the same subject matter, are permissible and indeed, desirable. If the PRC has one idea of the value of IPR and Microsoft has another, that’s just the marketplace at work. On the other hand, if Microsoft succeeds in pressuring the PRC to adopt Microsoft’s views on IPR, then that is monopolistic abuse, according to “Microsoft exec talks patent politics”, 24 May 2007,
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39287221,00.htm

A choice quote:

“If standards meant that the first standard approved was the only one that you could use, then how would that differ from patents? You’re effectively saying this has now got a monopoly on how you will do things.”

Source:
ZDNet

But I wonder how this is possible with Microsoft reluctence to start a real interop project when you know that not even Office 2007 reads, writes and processes ECMA 376 documents.

For the record, Office 2007 reads, writes and processes Office 2007 documents which are extensions of ECMA 376 documents. The extensions are undocumented and, as Rob said, are the DNA of the Office 2007 source code implementation itself.

Heck, even Office 2007 compatibility mode is full of bugs. I have to worry about problems every week with regular Excel (.xls) files that open well in Excel 97-2003 and not well in Excel 2007. And vice versa.

The dirty trick in the whole MS XML interop initiatives? That it is real easy to start a new project, since the barrier is so low. See MS blogs these days, that’s all they are doing (of course, if you take further look at who is doing what, you’ll soon realize that these are paid MS consultants, or people who have a direct interest in trying to make MS look like the good guys). But the ease to start an interop project is by no mean an indication of the ability to successfully provide round-trip scenarios. Especially when round-trip scenarios involve direct infringements of Microsoft IP (i.e. all the undocumented pieces). Best example so far : Novell’s basic implementation of VBA macros.

Anyway, business as usual…

-Stephane Rodriguez

I think this is a case where both forsight and hindsight are 20/20. I have this nagging fear though, that the future will look back at us (the past) with dismay about the subject of standards. “Why didn’t somebody tell them it would be so much easier with one real standard instead of going through all that trouble.” They won’t see the legions battering away at Microsoft and Microsoft battering back with money, influence, power, lies and self preserving ignorance.

To those from the future who may be reading this in some archive, the outcome of this standards battle with Microsoft is not assured. We feel confident that we (the public) will win, but Microsoft is very powerful. In fact, they are the most powerful software vendor and one of the most powerful corporations in the world. Our only hope is to convince the weak willed and possibly paid-for politicians and bureaucrats that one standard is the best for all of us.

Richard Chapman