From the category archives:

Standards

A Standard I Would Use: Auto Unsubscribe

August 19, 2009

I don’t get a lot of spam, at least not in the traditional sense of “unsolicited commercial email”. But I do get a lot of solicitations from online retailers with whom I have done business. As we all know, even a single order can trigger weekly emails. Multiply that by all places [...]

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Where’s Rob?

October 7, 2008

Alex Brown is saddened that I did not attend the JTC1/SC34 Plenary in Korea last week. You can view his photo essay and lament on my absence here.
[A] question being asked along the committee corridors by perplexed NB members is whether IBM has withdrawn its staff from participation SC 34. I have no idea, [...]

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Standards Words

May 6, 2008

Introduction
There are several words, more widely used than understood, that recur frequently when discussing standards. Specification and standardization requires us precisely to describe technology in such a way that practitioners in that field can achieve the goals set out in the standard. But this precision is only perfectly intelligible to those [...]

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Embrace the Reality and Logic of Choice

April 30, 2008

Another neo-colonialist press release from Microsoft’s CompTIA lobbying arm, this time inveighing against South Africa’s adoption of ODF as a national standard. One way to point out the absurdity of their logic is to replace the reference to ODF with references to any other useful standard that a government might adopt, like electrical standards.
When [...]

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Sinclair’s Syndrome

April 17, 2008

A curious FAQ put up by an unnamed ISO staffer on MS-OOXML. Question #1 expresses concerns about Fast Tracking a 6,000 page specification, a concern which a large number of NB’s also expressed during the DIS process. Rather than deal honestly with this question, the ISO FAQ says:
The number of pages of a [...]

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New Paths in Standardization

April 2, 2008

The world should be pleased to note, that with the approval of ISO/IEC 29500, Microsoft’s Vector Markup Language (VML), after failing to be approved by the W3C in 1998 and after being neglected for the better part of a decade, is now also ISO-approved. Thus VML becomes the first and only standard [...]

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Seeking Open Standards Activists

March 25, 2008

Some thoughts for Document Freedom Day 2008.
Back a few weeks ago in Geneva, OpenForum Europe hosted an evening of mini-talks and a discussion panel with various well-known personalities in our field: Vint Cerf, Bob Sutor, Andy Updegrove and Håkon Lie. I wasn’t able to comment on the event at the time, [...]

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What every engineer knows

January 25, 2008

Let’s work through a few hypothetical “what if” scenarios to illustrate some common engineering themes related to quality control and the inherent stresses between those who build, those who test, and those who sell. Every engineer is deeply familiar with these patterns, but I believe even the general reader will understand the dynamics better [...]

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A Brief History of Open

January 3, 2008

Circa 1700 BC, the Babylonian king Hammurabi ordered the laws of his kingdom be engraved on a black stone slab and displayed in the city center for all to see. This was mostly for show, since the number of people who could read Akkadian cuneiform were probably as small then as now. But [...]

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The Piemen of Erie

January 2, 2008

An interesting historical anecdote to relate, from our nation’s industrial adolescence, a tale with relevance today when we discuss standards.
The year was 1853 and the place was Erie, Pennsylvania, a town at the junction of two incompatible rail gauges. This gauge incompatibility was inefficient and frustrating, but the citizens of Erie loved it, and [...]

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