(no subject)
Apr. 5th, 2008 02:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lordshipmayhemThe alarm started at 13:49. I'll close this blog entry when the damn thing stops again.
It's on P3, which means this alarm is gently (?) serenading the entire complex: three towers, three sets of stacked strata townhouses - 1,423 units in total.
Just stopped at 14:02. Waiting for them to announce that "the fire department has declared the emergency over". That's a lucky 13 minutes of ear-busting bong-bong-bong.
Speaking of emergencies, it seems that the emergency that Microsoft had of getting OOXML set as a standard has attracted the unwanted kind of attention. The European Community's hard-as-nails anti-trust regulators have begun a formal investigation of alleged irregularities. They can't force the ISO to retract this badly borked "standard" (ISO is headquartered in Geneva, and Switzerland isn't an EC country), but they can make life quite uncomfortable for them. And they can make life mind-numbingly expensive for Microsoft.
And as someone pointed out, not even Microsoft's latest version of Office uses OOXML as defined by the ISO. Nobody does. There are zero instances of applications using it, and several dozen that not only can use ODF, but do so by default. And they're available for several platforms, from Windows Vista (if you have a big enough computer to do more than just run the operating system...) to OS X to Puppy Linux (which fits on a business-card-sized CD)
And I'm still blogging because it's 14:09 and we're still waiting for the announcement.
And 14:10, we get the announcement. The Fire Department has declared the emergency over. Beep, beep, beep. Eight minutes of "waiiiit for it!"
It's on P3, which means this alarm is gently (?) serenading the entire complex: three towers, three sets of stacked strata townhouses - 1,423 units in total.
Just stopped at 14:02. Waiting for them to announce that "the fire department has declared the emergency over". That's a lucky 13 minutes of ear-busting bong-bong-bong.
Speaking of emergencies, it seems that the emergency that Microsoft had of getting OOXML set as a standard has attracted the unwanted kind of attention. The European Community's hard-as-nails anti-trust regulators have begun a formal investigation of alleged irregularities. They can't force the ISO to retract this badly borked "standard" (ISO is headquartered in Geneva, and Switzerland isn't an EC country), but they can make life quite uncomfortable for them. And they can make life mind-numbingly expensive for Microsoft.
And as someone pointed out, not even Microsoft's latest version of Office uses OOXML as defined by the ISO. Nobody does. There are zero instances of applications using it, and several dozen that not only can use ODF, but do so by default. And they're available for several platforms, from Windows Vista (if you have a big enough computer to do more than just run the operating system...) to OS X to Puppy Linux (which fits on a business-card-sized CD)
And I'm still blogging because it's 14:09 and we're still waiting for the announcement.
And 14:10, we get the announcement. The Fire Department has declared the emergency over. Beep, beep, beep. Eight minutes of "waiiiit for it!"