In 2004 the ever wonderful Clarke and Dawes did a very special (and still topical) MasterMind on John Howard and his governments history ((Those outside Australia may need to look up what a “non-core promise” is.)) and why they got re-elected.
Now they’re back for the 2007 election, with a quick quiz on “The achievements of the Howard Government” (links to a transcript and video streams of the broadcast) which is well worth watching!
After the previous reports of Microsoft stacking standards bodies, Andy Updegrove points out that there is now a far more insidious problem facing the ISO/IEC Standards Committee 34 as a result of its suddenly inflated membership.
The rules of the committee require at least 50% of the ‘P’ status members (not the observing members) return a vote in response to every ballot request (even an ‘abstain’ vote counts).
At the end of 2006 the committee had 23 members, having gained 5 over the previous 2 years.
By the time of the OOXML vote in September the number had more than doubled – and 22 new countries joined between April and the end of August, plus there were 11 new ‘P’ members.
The problem now is that none of the new ‘P’ members are bothering to vote – the last 3 ballots have failed because that 50% figure has not been hit. As Andy writes:
While I’m told that 90% of committee votes have achieved the necessary 50% return in the past, the current numbers tell a far different story: the three most recent (SC 34 N 870, SC 34 872 and SC 34 N 874) have all failed because of P member apathy. As I read the tallies at those links, only one recent P member responded to a single ballot, even after some ballots had been reissued for a second or even a third time. Had it not been necessary to include the new P members in the calculations, the second two votes would have passed (the first related to establishing a liaison relationship with another organization, and not a standard).
They haven’t even bothered to return an ‘abstain’ vote. This pretty much confirms that the only reason they could have joined the committee for was to vote “Yes (without comments)” on Microsofts OOXML proposal. 🙁
Andy then goes on to quote from the weekly memos of Secretariat Manager, Ken Holman, as in increasing desperation he tries to coax the new members into meeting their obligations and voting on ballots that are dieing from lack of interest. Here is the penultimate quote in the series to give you a flavour..
9/30/2007
You will see at that link that (as of Sunday evening) only 7 member bodies of our 38 participating members have actually submitted a ballot response….Since the recent influx of new P-members to SC 34, not a single ballot has been able to be processed…
It is critically important that P-members remember their obligations: if we do not get 20 responses per ballot, the work of SC 34 will grind to a halt….If you do not plan to participate in the work of SC 34, please consider changing your membership to Observer status. For those national bodies that joined in the interests of DIS 29500 Ecma 376 OOXML, remember that P-member/O-member status in SC 34 has no effect on attendance and voting at the Ballot Resolution Meeting being held in February. If this is your only interest, it would serve SC 34 well to change your membership status to O-member.
One wonders if they will suddenly spring back into life when Microsofts XPS standard arrives there.
The USGS is reporting a magnitude 6.8 earthquake off of the coast of the South Island of New Zealand, near the inlet to Milford Sound and 64 miles from Queenstown (which is a way inland).
You can get an idea of where it was from this Google Map link and it looks like the coastal area is all national park, with no settlements marked.
Some hot news in from New Scientist..
Clifford Woolf and his colleagues at Harvard Medical School have now discovered a way of blocking just the pain neurons using capsaicin – the active ingredient in chilli peppers – along with a version of lignocaine that can’t diffuse through cell membranes unassisted. [….] Woolf’s team is testing other chemicals that can activate the TRPV1 receptor, since people may not like the initial pain of a dose of chilli pepper. Tests on volunteers are expected within two years.
I can think of a couple of people who might want to volunteer for testing.. 🙂
The restaurant had been preparing Nam Prik Pao, a red-hot Thai dip which uses extra-hot chillies which are deliberately burnt. But the smell prompted several members of the public to call the emergency services.
Oops..
Recently LinuxWorld commissioned me to write an article on Emerging Linux Filesystems (the formatting is a bit different from the original I sent, but the slideshow of graphs now works) and have kindly given me permission to present a talk based on my work at the October Linux Users of Victoria (LUV) meeting.
So if you can make it you can hear about my experiences with ChunkFS, btrfs, NILFS, ext4, Reiser4 and ZFS/FUSE, as well as with ZFS under OpenSolaris (in this case Nexenta).
I’d also like to thank Dragan at Xenon Systems for the loan of a shiny, Linux friendly, test system!
This is a neat little spoof of the Federal Governments climate change propaganda by GetUp! in Australia. They’ve been raising money to try and get it aired during the AFL Grand Final tomorrow (Saturday 29th).
You can watch it on YouTube as well..
In 2003 Donna and I had the rare privilege of watching Marcel Marceau perform in Melbourne, and so it is very sad to hear that he has passed away today, aged 84. This former resistance fighter was a true artiste who could move an entire audience with the smallest of gestures and expressions. He, and his troupe, got a standing ovation that night.
The ABC has a transcript of a wonderful interview that Kerry O’Brien did with him in 2003 during that same tour, it is well worth a read, and ends with this wonderful quote:
The rest, as Hamlet said, is silence.
And I will do for the public this.
If only the video was there to watch what that last mime was..
Here’s the title of the press release: “The SCO Group Files Chapter 11 to Protect Assets as It Addresses Potential Financial and Legal Challenges”, which you can find here. They say reorganization “ensures business as usual.”
It may also act as a useful extra delaying tactic in the determination of how much they owe Novell in their trial..
Some of SCO’s remaining claims were yet to be decided at trial, which was to begin Sept. 17. The trial will be stayed under bankruptcy law, according to Novell public relations director Bruce Lowry. “We’ll be looking at our options,” he said.
A ballot on whether to publish the draft standard ISO/IEC DIS 29500, Information technology – Office Open XML file formats, as an International Standard by ISO (International Organization for Standardization) and IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) has not achieved the required number of votes for approval.
The official ISO press release is now available.
It’s good to see that trying to rort the standards process hasn’t worked this time, and a badly broken standard has not been foisted upon ISO through dubious means.