Standards, we just love them

Open standards are obviously the best, as they have had thousands of eyes on them…

“Suppose that I(x,a,b) denotes the indicator function that is 1 if and 0 otherwise”

OASIS Standard – Open Document Format for Office Applications Version 1.2 from 2011.

Beautifully clear, that… 8~) …has it ever acquired a meaningful rewrite?

This one was faithfully transliterated into LibreOffice documentation!

There is, I now see, a new V1.3 (ratified January 2020) where it is given as the rather more meaningful … is 1 if (a <= x <= b) … but that version of the standard isn’t well linked in yet.

LibreOffice spreadsheet function documentation still refers to the V1.2 standard.

I do use the LibreOffice spreadsheet, but haven’t explored it thoroughly. It’s done what I’ve needed well enough so far, but I’m certainly not exercising its capabilities extensively.

as they have had thousands of eyes on them…

That’s about as much a fallacy with documentation as with source code.
What it means is that you can read it without paying eye watering amounts of money to find the exact same gibberish.

Given the flaws that keep turning up in WiFi, and the abysmal mess that is WPS, I’m of the opinion that closed standards for that sort of thing is a bad idea.

Perhaps if it had been released as an RFC first, maybe somebody might have noticed that an eight bit pin is trivially hackable when one digit is a check value and the rest is split into two independent halves. There aren’t 10,000,000 combinations to test, there’s a mere 11,000. So rather than taking about four-five months to brute force with one guess per second (waiting on the AP replying), it could be done in about three hours. Firmware typically blocks this attack these days, but routers (bought or ISP supplied) aren’t known for being updated much.

There’s a good article today on El Reg regarding open source software: <https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/04/you_cannot_buy_software/>

And another article by Liam, quoting a former colleague of mine, now working at Citrix and seemingly keeping up his reputation for disruption – in a good way. https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/30/citrix_xen/

There’s a good article today on El Reg regarding open source software: <https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/04/you_cannot_buy_software/>

Most of it is a very questionable opinion article without bothering to even try to explain some of the more exotic views. Full of untrue generalizations. And a fair amount of rambling about irrelevant problems (for the end user, not for a religious FOSS zealot).

The idea of only using FOSS that is available for all three main systems is…extremely limiting. But the author uses a Mac, and relying on FOSS that is properly ported to MacOS is of course extremely limiting in itself. The idea that FOSS solves any of the problems he mentions for (some?) commercial apps is hilarious. Some do, some don’t – but some commercial apps don’t have the problems either. It is just not related to software being FOSS or commercial.

Oh, and software development is apparently hard because your computer/OS does not come with development tools anymore. Yeah, sure.

Very disappointed with this article.

I gave up halfway through as it was just getting crazy.

The company that I work for tried going open source. It was a complete disaster, and as I understand it, the guys who wrote the database that was losing products between sites were the “you have the source, you can fix it for your specific case” type. This is not how companies work.
We would scan stuff and this would be recorded in inventory at head office forty miles away (in the city), only about half the time it would be completely lost. The situation was so back the stock girls went back to paper records.

Came back after a long weekend to discover all Linux had been removed and all machines were now running Windows.
The Windows software worked, but not particularly well. In response, the actual developers came over (I think they were German?) to see what it is that we were doing and what the problems actually were. Two revisions later, it all works.

Probably cost a pretty penny compared to free software (all the Windows licences plus getting the actual developers out), but when something can’t keep track of inventory throughout the entire process representing a little over six digits a month, and we’re supposed to be full traceability plus ISO (bunches of numbers), the sad fact is that FOSS completely failed this use case.

Maybe it works for places that have a team of programmers. We aren’t a software company, I think there are only two or three full time geeks, and fixing somebody else’s software isn’t part of their job.

I’ve noticed El Reg has changed in recent times (and not just the annoying makeover), and not for the better.

At least Dabbs can be found at https://autosaveisforwimps.substack.com/

Your place at the time of that story sounds almost as bad as the UK government’s approach to software acquisition… Capita isn’t called Crapita for nothing…

I’m not sure whether the nerds sold management on open source, or whether beancounters were like “oh, it’s actually free”, but to put it simply it promised a lot but didn’t deliver.

Whereas Crapita is overpriced by a large factor, promises a lot and doesn’t deliver…

Proof, then, that when it comes to free or commercial – neither necessarily has any specific advantage.

For my part, I like the ability to access/tweak the source if necessary….but on the other hand this only works if one can obtain all the dependencies. That’s why I’ve never done anything with WebJames, never located all the right bits to get it to build. However Ovation. ;)
But then, I’m a nerd and not a business…

For my part, I like the ability to access/tweak the source if necessary

I’ve never got into that, not really being a C programmer. Never got into using libraries. C itself is trivially easy, but without a knowledge of libraries it’s useless. On the other hand, I get right into the innards of file formats, and write my own little apps to do this and that to files – these days in BBC BASIC, in the past in various different assembly languages up to and including early versions of ARM assembler. These days BASIC is fast enough for anything I want to do.

But then, I’m a nerd and not a business…

At work we picked up an open-source system to do X, then over the next decade or so we customised bits of it as required. In my opinion it worked well and must have saved us a decent chunk of money over that time.

Then one day we get told that they’ve bought an Enterprise System to replace the existing one. “Why?” we ask. “Because it can do Y.” “But if you give us a fortnight then we can make the current system do Y.” “Well we’ve already bought this other one.”

It seems that a manager went to a presentation about this new system and decided we must have it. It turns out that it’s hideously expensive, needs an annual rental, and only allows a limited number of users, so it seems lose-lose from my perspective…

so it seems lose-lose from my perspective…

And did he get canned…. or did he get a bonus? :/

Two years later the replacement system is still being configured and everyone’s still using the open source one, which is now languishing because “don’t waste time on that when we’re about to get a new one” has been the catchphrase for two years.