Fsf-friends August 2007

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Memo to Microsoft: Stop wasting our time! (Venky Hariharan's blog...)
by Frederick Noronha [फ़र ेदरिक नोर ोनया] 31 Aug '07

31 Aug '07

http://osindia.blogspot.com/2007/08/memo-to-microsoft-stop-wasting-our-time… Feedback to: venkyh(a)gmail.com Thursday, August 30, 2007 Memo to Microsoft: Stop wasting our time! Finally word is out and the Bureau of Indian Standards has confirmed that it will be submitting a "No with comments" vote to International Standards Organization on Microsoft's OOXML proposal. This brings to a temporary close five to six months of hectic legwork to prevent a sub-standard proposal from getting the coveted tag of an ISO standard. I doubt if Microsoft realises it, but its actions are only making it the Union Carbide of the global IT industry. Microsoft is the world's largest software company but if you flip through their 6000+ pages of OOXML documentation, you'll be justified in wondering how they grew so big if the rest of their work is as shoddy as OOXML. The extremely flawed proposal certainly does not befit its stature in the IT industry. But, does Microsoft learn from all the feedback given to it or does it learn anything from it. No. Humility and Microsoft are like oil and water -- never shall they mix. According to reports coming in from countries that are involved in the ISO vote on OOXML, Microsoft is busy stuffing the ballot boxes. Read Andy Updegrove's blog post The OOXML Vote: How Bad Can it Get? (Keep Counting). Originally, only 30 ISO members were supposed to vote on OOXML. However, as the September 2nd date for the final voting comes close, another ten more countries have joined the committee. Updegrove says: As someone who has spent a great part of my life working to support open standards over the past 20 years, I have to say that this is the most egregious, and far-reaching, example of playing the system to the advantage of a single company that I have ever seen. Breathtaking, in fact. That's assuming, of course, that I am right in supposing that all of these newbie countries vote "yes." I guess we'll just have to wait and see a few more days to learn whether that assumption is true. Want to place your bets? Sitting here in India, it is difficult to influence countries like Malta, Cyprus, Ecuador, Jamaica, Lebanon, Pakistan, Trinidad and Tobago, Turkey, Uruguay and Venezuela in the two days left before the final votes are submitted, but we shall try. I checked with the IT ministry in Pakistan and brought to their attention that Pakistan is now a "P" member of ISO which entitles it to vote on OOXML. This was news to them as they were not consulted on the OOXML issue. I hope that Pakistan's vote will be cast only after thoroughly reviewing the arguements for and against OOXML. Coming back to India, I am extremely proud of the fact that my country has voted against this proposal. To accept such a poor document would have been to denigrate the very meaning of "standards." The academia, the government bodies, industry organizations and non-profits like the Free Software Foundation spent countless hours debating and discussing this issue. Some of the best brains in India burnt the midnight oli to review this 6000 page proposal and the final consensus was that none of Microsoft's answers to the 201 technical issues raised was found satisfactory. I hope the Microsoft bosses in Redmond take note of this and make a genuine attempt to rectify the issues instead of trying to stuff the ballot boxes. For wasting the collective intellect of India's best IT brains, Microsoft and ECMA must be blacklisted. Just as a person with a bad credit history has to redeem himself or herself before applying for subsequent credit, any standards proposal submitted by these two organizations should be thoughly vetted before it is even accepted for review or voting in India. India has more pressing problems to tackle than OOXML. Therefore, Microsoft, please do us a big favor and stop wasting our time. Next time, do your homework before you submit something to India. PS: This is an old joke in the IT industry and shows how little Microsoft has changed in decades. Q. How many Microsoft engineers does it take to change a light bulb? A. None. Microsoft declares Darkness(TM) an industry standard. End of forward... -- Frederick Noronha Journalist http://fn.goa-india.org E: fred(a)bytesforall.org or fredericknoronha(a)gmail.com P: +91-832-2409490 M: +91-9970157402 Yahoo: fredericknoronha Skype: fredericknoronha GTalk: fredericknoronha Saligao 403511 Goa India http://www.linkedin.com/in/fredericknoronha

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The new look IRCTC now working with Firefox
by kanti jadia 30 Aug '07

30 Aug '07

Today i got a pleasant surprise. I had sent the following mail to care at irctc.co.in on 20th Aug. " Dear Sir/Madam, Let me take this opportunity to congratulate you on the excellent appeal of the website for www.irctc.co.in. The new colour scheme looks great and the site really appears pleasing. There are some problems as well. The site design has not taken into account a lot of desirable features which are considered mandatory on the internet. 1. The main page does not work with Firefox. Firefox is one of the most widely used browsers on the internet.It is very disappointing that a website of such high regard does not support Firefox. 2. If we see the validation of the site for W3C norms , it fails miserably.The validation service can be accessed from http://validator.w3.org/. The following are critical issues shown by the validator a . No Character Encoding Found! Falling back to UTF-8. I was not able to extract a character encoding labeling from any of the valid sources for such information. Without encoding information it is impossible to reliably validate the document. I'm falling back to the "UTF-8" encoding and will attempt to perform the validation, but this is likely to fail for all non-trivial documents. Read the FAQ entry on character encoding for more details and pointers on how to fix this problem with your document. This shows the blank disregard for standards. Without solving this critical problem we cannot validate the site on other parameters. If as another example we run the validator on http://www.irctc.co.in/helpandinfo.html We get 106 unique errors. I recommend use of anybrowser ( http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/ ) design recommendations accessible via the URL :http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/abdesign.html 3. Do not introduce blinking ads on any page of the website as they are really a pain on the eyes and do not serve any purpose. This will help the web designers and administrators to make IRCTC.CO.IN <http://irctc.co.in/> a very usable website for the entire country. With the number of visitors going up by the hour its imperative that the largest employer in the world also listen to its humble customers. " And am happy to see that they care. This definitely is something which was done after feedback from various people. The W3C validator still does not work , but they have done some checks on Firefox it seems, Regards Kanti

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On copyright violations...
by Sajith T S 29 Aug '07

29 Aug '07

Hi! Surely this topic must be of interest to this list? Background is this: my friend Arun had posted a photograph of his family's Onam celebrations last year, in flickr.com, under a modest Creative Commons attribution license. http://www.flickr.com/photos/maxaud/234884178/ Recently we came across the same image posted in another website, with no attribution and no copyright information, with a "BizHat.com" layer over it. In fine MS Comic Sans font, no less. It is posted by a user called "gallery", with no user information on their profile page. http://gallery.bizhat.com/showphoto.php/photo/54916 In fact they have quite a large collection of images there. I would be surprised if they are the actual copyright holders of a fraction of those. The website has listed no contact info, other than a feedback form. (But there's whois, as always...) Arun has written to the website, and we're waiting to see what's coming out of it. I would like to seek your advice on what can be done under such circumstances, under prevailing copyright laws/norms. And perhaps more imporantly, what can be done to raise awareness: come to think of it, perhaps the website owners are too naive to know that it is actually wrong to use someone else's work this way? Cheers, Sajith. -- Your friends will know you better in the first minute you meet than your acquaintances will know you in a thousand years. -- Richard Bach, "Illusions"

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Re: [Ilugc] irctc.co.in - best viewed in ie 5.5?
by ம. ஸ்ரீ ராமதாஸ் 29 Aug '07

29 Aug '07

Yahoo.. ;-) appears that they have rectified it.. except for the notification in the footer.. :-) and one from irctc customer care commented in my blog entry.. here is it.. http://amachu.wordpress.com/2007/08/21/irctccoin-not-compatible-with-firefo… :-) -- அன்புடன், ஆமாச்சு. http://amachu.net வாழிய செந்தமிழ்! வாழ்கநற் றமிழர்! வாழிய பாரத மணித்திரு நாடு!

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gnu articles in Thamizh..
by ம. ஸ்ரீ ராமதாஸ் 29 Aug '07

29 Aug '07

Hi, the following articles at GNU's website are now available in Thamizh.. 1. http://www.gnu.org/home.ta.shtml 2. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.ta.html 3. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-free.ta.html 4. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-doc.ta.html 5. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/schools.ta.html 6. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.ta.html 7. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.ta.html I request someone to find a place for these at fsf.org.in also. Thank you. -- அன்புடன், ஆமாச்சு. http://amachu.net வாழிய செந்தமிழ்! வாழ்கநற் றமிழர்! வாழிய பாரத மணித்திரு நாடு!

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Fwd: Website in Firefox
by Vijay Kumar 29 Aug '07

29 Aug '07

Here is the reply from IRCTC. ---------------------------- Original Message ---------------------------- Subject: Fwd: Website in Firefox From: "rajni hasija" <rajni_hasija1969(a)yahoo.co.in> Date: Thu, August 23, 2007 10:21 am To: vijaykumar(a)bravegnu.org Cc: "Amit Hardi" <amithardi(a)gmail.com> "Ramakant Tiwari" <rktiwari(a)irctc.co.in> -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dear Mr Vijay We are working on Firefox too. WE'll provide this facility soon. Regards Rajni Hasija GGM /ITS Vijay Kumar <vijaykumar(a)bravegnu.org> wrote: Date: Wed, 22 Aug 2007 21:47:48 +0530 (IST) Subject: Website in Firefox From: "Vijay Kumar" <vijaykumar(a)bravegnu.org> To: amitpandey(a)irctc.co.in, amitkumar(a)irctc.co.in, sanjay(a)irctc.co.in *********************** No virus was detected in the attachment no filename Your mail has been scanned by InterScan. ***********-*********** Dear Sir, the train reservation page http://www.irctc.co.in/helpandinfo.html does not display correctly (and is almost unusable) in Firefox. Firefox is a free and widely used web browser, providing support for it will make your website accessible to many people. BTW, there are a lot of people who do not use Internet Explorer for various reasons - security, affordability (of Windows license) and license restrictions. Such people use alternative operating systems like GNU/Linux. So please do not design the website for viewing in Internet Explorer alone, and please make necessary modifications so that the website is viewable in Firefox as well. Regards, Vijay --------------------------------- DELETE button is history. Unlimited mail storage is just a click away.

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Hurd Hacking Camp 07
by Praveen A 24 Aug '07

24 Aug '07

Hi, The GNU System (aka GNU/Hurd) hackers are meeting up at MES college Kuttippuram to discuss future plans with L1X installer and other GNU Hurd related works. For registration and more information see http://fci.wikia.com/wiki/Malappuram/MESCE/Hurd_Hacking_Camp_07 There is no charge for the meet. Pre requisite: read The GNU Hurd FAQ http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/faq.en.html Regards Praveen -- പ്രവീണ് അരിമ്പ്രത്തൊടിയില് Join The DRM Elimination Crew Now! http://fci.wikia.com/wiki/Anti-DRM-Campaign

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War of formats: India shows thumbs-down to Microsoft
by Frederick Noronha [फ़र ेदरिक नोर ोनया] 24 Aug '07

24 Aug '07

Posted by Vinayak Hegde <vinayakh(a)gmail.com> at GII-India http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Infotech/Software/ India_throws_Microsoft_open_format_out_of_the_window/articleshow/2305780.cms (url has wrapped) NEW DELHI: India on Thursday gave Microsoft a thumbs-down in the war of standards for office documents. In a tense meeting at Delhi's Manak Bhawan, the 21-member technical committee decided that India will vote a 'no' against Microsoft's Open Office Extensible Mark Up Language (OOXML) standard at the International Standards Organisation (ISO) in Geneva on September 2. "We unanimously agree on the disapproval of OOXML with comments. The same will be submitted to ISO," National Informatics Centre head and BIS technical committee chairperson Nita Verma said after a marathon meeting that lasted over six hours. There was no need for a voting as only Infosys Technologies and CSI supported Microsoft. The Open Document Format (ODF) alliance, enjoying widespread support from academia and corporates like Oracle, IBM, Red Hat, Sun Microsystems, Google, were in a jubilant mood having succeeded in stalling OOXML from being accepted as a standard in India. Microsoft said it respect's the government's decision. "There were only three options `Yes', `No' and `Abstain' to be taken and we respect the government's decision," Microsoft's legal affairs head Rakesh Bakshi said. He, however, added that India's 'No' vote will become a 'Yes' if Microsoft is able to resolve all technical issues with OOXML before the ballot resolution committee of ISO. Prof DB Phatak of IIT Mumbai, who was instrumental in conducting the meetings, looked relieved after being flooded with calls from both camps over the week. Speaking to ET outside the BIS premises, the Microsoft camp complained that when ODF was being standardised by ISO, they did not oppose it and now the ODF camp refused to return the favour. ODF supporters said they would have no problems with OOXML if all the 200 technical issues were taken care of. Amongst hectic lobbying from both camps, the US government on Thursday said that it will abstain from voting. China has already voted a 'No' against Microsoft, while Malaysia, Denmark and Switzerland are supporting the software major. A global alliance of Sun-IBM, Oracle, Google, Red Hat have ganged up against Microsoft which is being supported by Apple, Quark, Accenture and Novell. On Indian soil, Infosys, HCL, Skelta, Sonata Software and Sify have come out in support of Microsoft. September 2 is the last date to submit the vote with comments to ISO. About 123 counties are participating in the vote. Votes from most are still to come. Canada, Czech Republic, Iran, Japan, Libya, Cuba, New Zealand, UK are likely to back the IBM-Sun's ODF Alliance. On the other hand, Belgium, Finland, Italy, Spain, Brazil, Singapore, Korea, France and Australia are likely to abstain from voting. -- Frederick Noronha Journalist http://fn.goa-india.org E: fred(a)bytesforall.org or fredericknoronha(a)gmail.com P: +91-832-2409490 M: +91-9970157402 Yahoo: fredericknoronha Skype: fredericknoronha GTalk: fredericknoronha 784, Sonarbhat, Near Lourdes Convent, Saligao 403511 Goa India

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india votes against ooxml
by Nagarjuna G. 24 Aug '07

24 Aug '07

India votes against ooxml unanimously. the decision of the committee was to disapprove ooxml with comments. The final meeting took place today after 3pm for about an hour and half, and no voting took place. -- Nagarjuna G. nagarjun(a)gnu.org.in

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irctc.co.in - best viewed in ie 5.5?
by ம. ஸ்ரீ ராமதாஸ் 22 Aug '07

22 Aug '07

hi all, it was all working fine till i found them changed their interface today.. and the link below troubles.. in firefox.. http://www.irctc.co.in/helpandinfo.html regards -- அன்புடன், ஆமாச்சு. http://amachu.net வாழிய செந்தமிழ்! வாழ்கநற் றமிழர்! வாழிய பாரத மணித்திரு நாடு!

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Fsf-friends August 2007