Comments on: Open Standards

By: Redhatter’s Web Blog » Blog Archive » Lecture Slides… and how to NOT present them

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 11:16:53 +0000

[...] And I’m noticing there are some bad habits that lecturers seem to be keen on repeating… again, and again. Here’s some of my pet hates, as a student. These relate to the presentation of the material we’re given, the actual format they’re provided in is another matter. [...]

By: tom_a_sparks

tom_a_sparks — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 01:30:02 +0000

the way things are going the digital dark age is coming
”
The digital Dark Age is a term used to describe a possible future situation where it will be difficult or impossible to read historical documents, because they have been stored in an obsolete digital format. This could cause the period around the turn of the 21st century to be comparable to the Dark Ages during the Middle Ages in the sense that there will be a relative lack of written record. The term is not limited to text documents, but applies equally to photos, video, audio and other kinds of electronic documents.

The concern leading to the use of the term is that documents are stored on physical media which require special hardware in order to be read and that this hardware will not be available in a few decades from the time the document was created. An example is that already today the necessary disk drive to read a 5¼-inch floppy disk is not readily available. The digital Dark Age also applies to the problems which arise due to obsolete file formats. In this case it is the lack of the necessary software which causes problems when desiring to retrieve stored documents. One example is that a word processor document saved in the WordStar format popular in the 1980s cannot be read by software typically installed on modern PCs.
” -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Dark_Age

the best example of this is the BBC Domesday Project http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project
“Acorn BBC Master expanded with an SCSI controller and an additional coprocessor controlled a Philips VP415 “Domesday Player”, a specially-produced laserdisc player.”
“The software for the project was written in BCPL to make cross platform porting easier, although BCPL never attained the popularity that its early promise suggested it might.”
lucky this project was saved

By: Redhatter (VK4FSJL)

Redhatter (VK4FSJL) — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 01:39:56 +0000

Well… with .NET… it’s true that C# is an open standard… I believe there’s an ECMA standard that defines it.

However, VisualStudio.NET uses a proprietary system for defining projects, and in general, makes it quite difficult to work with other IDEs and platforms. This was my experience anyway, back when I was learning .NET for an IT subject in 2004.

I’m sure OpenOffice might be present on some workstations, but the fact is, lecturers aren’t using it. PDFCreator is also there, but again, lecturers aren’t using it. This is especially true in the Engineering department. I’ve pointed out their presence on many an occasion, with little success.

OpenOffice can open Microsoft Office documents, this is true, but with somewhat limited capabilities. I’ve had formulae totally messed up and diagrams made unintelligible when using OpenOffice — not good enough for my needs. This isn’t the fault of OpenOffice, but rather, the fault of Microsoft for making its format so difficult to implement.

As far as Windows Media codecs… yes, mplayer will play them, with win32codecs, which require an x86 processor. Tough luck if you use AMD64, or in my case, MIPS. In addition, they run damn awful even on x86. No thanks… there are perfectly servicable codecs they could use out there (such as x264, Theora…etc) and practically no reason why they couldn’t use them.

Up until very recently… WPA2 is no good to me. I’ve only *just* managed to upgrade to a card that can theoretically do WPA2. I normally use an Entrasys/Cabletron 802.11DS PCMCIA wireless card, a rebadge of the Orinoco Silver card. It doesn’t do WPA. It doesn’t even do 128-bit WEP — it does 40-bit WEP in hardware. Without WPA support natively, I can’t connect, so that network is useless to me. Prior to them moving to the Cisco VPN, they were using a system called BlueSocket, which was based on PPTP — quite trivial to set up and use. There’s also OpenVPN. Why they chose to move to the Cisco nonsense, I have no idea.

By: Appleman1234

Appleman1234 — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 00:39:52 +0000

This is a very good point, however I would like to mention the the .Net in 003 would have been fine with Scheme if they had used Nemerle (Superset of .Net C#, with Lisp constructs, this would have added consistency between the two units). I am not sure if you are aware of this but both the subjects you mentioned are from this year onwards teaching Python (Which seems to be an open source, open standard to me). As for the lack of OpenOffice inside the IT Faculty, I believe the Data Comm labs in S622 have Openoffice on their Ubuntu image.

Cisco VPN works fine with vpnc or kvpnc and Mplayer does play both the wma and wmv formats with win32codes package installed. C# is actually an open standard, hence the existence of Mono. QUT is also migrating from VPN to WPA2, but I find the VPN more robust with my bcm43xx or b43 wireless card. Sorry if this information disappoints, but it seems standards are being slowly improved in QUT, and people are finally responding to your feedback.

By: ColdWind

ColdWind — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 15:41:20 +0000

I feel the same when I’m expected to use MS Office formats, or worst, when I’m supposed to use a shiny feature of the very last MS Office version. Or when we use Oracle for just a tiny introduction to SQL, instead of using PostgreSQL or something that every student can have at home if he wants.

One of the worst cases was when I had to use a closed source CASE tool whith its own obscure closed format… such tool sucked badly at usability and I couldn’t use any alternative.

That being said, it depends on the department. There are professors who use open standards, open source, and even tools that dont’ suck.