KDE's ISO Delegate Votes Yes to Office Open XML

This week saw the International Standards Organisation vote on adopting Office Open XML as a standard for office documents. KDE gained a representative late last year through our legal body KDE e.V. realising that the only way to ensure a fair process was to be part of it. Today our delegate voted yes to adopting the format as an international standard. "We have studied the standard hard and many changes have been made to it," said KDE's Supreme Leader Aaron Seigo "and following a $10,000 donation from an anonymous North American source we realised the market should decide the best formats to use, not technical bureaucrats".

The KOffice developers confirmed their support with Cyrille Burger saying, "The level of detail in this standard is very impressive, previous standards we had to deal with were less than half as expansive in their documentation. Working with a standard that makes such good use of previously established standards was also a main reason for the quick implementation in KOffice".

KDE founder Stephan Coolio was unavailable for comment because he was changing nappies.

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Comments

by LiquidFire (not verified)

Heh, the timestamp of the post still says March 31, though :)

Had me for a second as I was wondering what the hell :)

by Lirpa (not verified)

Finally! Now I can open that .docx thingies.

For some more MS interoperability it would be cool if KDE could support DirectX 11 in Plasma:

http://tech.slashdot.org/tech/08/03/31/1423247.shtml

A raytraced sun dial on the desktop would rock!

by JeanPaul (not verified)

I think any usable directX 11 support for the coming 4-5 years is not feasible, seeing the progress on directX 9 and 10 at this moment in Wine.

by Jonathan Thomas (not verified)

DirectX 9 support is pretty much complete. Well, not complete as in completely bug free, but all core functionality should be implemented.
DirectX 10 on the other hand is completely stubbed... But hey, that was just released.

by Santiago (not verified)

But why wait all that time for wine to catch up to directX11? We should demand raytraced thingies on plasma right NOW!!! even if it works only on Windows. That will motivate the linux hippies to improve their support to those innovative technologies.

by Riddle (not verified)

Uh, may I ask you 2 things:
1) What is raytracing?
2) DirectX is a Windows-specific technology, so by all rights, Linux has no business supporting it (Linux uses OpenGL which seems about >= DirectX). Wine-DirectX seems to be a loose-wrapper around OpenGL.

by Stefan Majewsky (not verified)

1) Raytracing AFAIK means that a virtual ray is send from each point of your view. It is reflected and thereby manipulated by objects in its way until it hits a light source. Then the effects are added on the source's color to get the pixel to display at this point of your view. (The ray may also go the other way, I do not know exactly.)

2) What you mean with "wrapper around OpenGL" is the Wine implementation of DirectDraw and Direct3D. There are more components like DirectPlay (comparable with GStreamer or Xine) and some other minor additions. DirectX is sort of a toolkit for Windows game programmers than just a rendering library.

by Riddle (not verified)

2) Wine HQ states that Wine DirectDraw (http://wiki.winehq.org/DirectDraw), if it can, uses OGL, and Wine Direct3D (http://wiki.winehq.org/WineD3D) is specifically described as "Wraps up OpenGL to implement an interface for use by Direct3D 7, 8 and 9". Also, (http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6847) says that "Wine does not implement any DirectPlay providers itself". Others, such as DirectShow (http://wiki.winehq.org/DirectShow), seem to use the native decoder libraries. So, in general, Wine DirectX is simply a wrapper on top of native libraries.

by luciano (not verified)

To be fair, KDE has had direct X11 support since ages...

by Tim (not verified)

Heh, not too nit-pick, but that should be "has had direct X11 support *for* ages..." I've seen loads of other people say "since ages". Why is that such a common mistake?

Hmm someone else obviously got annoyed by it!: http://www.usingenglish.com/poll/23.html

by Hias (not verified)

I can only tell for germans, but the "for" from above would be in this context in german "seit" which is more similar to "since". The most common mistake from germans is "become"<->"get", so don't be sureprised if you are in a steakhouse and you heare something like "when do I become my steak", because in german "bekommen" means "get"

by Diederik van de... (not verified)

It happens when people translate their foreign language to English.

In some foreign languages it's common to use construct like that. When translated literally, it becomes "since ages" which is incorrect English. Likewise, in Dutch you're "op school" which is literally translated "on school", not "at school". These prefixes are a hard part to learn English.

I think you can imagine now why people make these kind of mistakes. ;-)

by reader (not verified)

"It happens when people translate their foreign language to English."

...and vice versa.
When they, the Germans (or is Germen? German's, Germen's?) tranlate "We have a lot to do in 2008" from English into German, they say "Wir haben in 2008 viel zu tun". But that's wrong, it should be translated to "Wir haben 2008 viel zu tun." The same goes wit Apostrophes and Apostrophe's and Apo'strophe's, and with "seid"/"seit". And there is another one, wich I think is a failed translation. They say "Wenn jemand physikalischen Zugang zu einem Computer hat, kann er damit alles mögliche anstellen."
But that's wrong. It should read: "Wenn jemand physischen Zugang zu einem Computer hat, kann er damit alles mögliche anstellen."
In Germany we have clothing for "Men's", we have bakeries called "Back Shops" (and of course we have "Back Shop's" too) and we have "Coffee To Go" and so on. And "googeln" can be found in our dictionaries, as the verb for Google.

by MarcG (not verified)

Mad, the thing with the apostrophes is annoying to no end... especially when used with plural-s ... those f*ng german retards i have to live with!

by Robert Millan (not verified)

As if those .docx thingies had anything to do with Open XML ;-)

--
http://goodbye-microsoft.com/

by PaT (not verified)

You got me ;)

I was like, what the hell are they thinking? Are they going crazy?? And since when Seigo became "SUPREME" leader ;)

About 30 solid seconds of despair ;) Pheww....

by Lord Hippo (not verified)

"KDE's Supreme Leader Alan Psycho", surely?!

by Max (not verified)

So wait?

Is this a joke?

I thought the world was against Microsoft's Office Open XML. Wasn't it?
I'm royally confused. I thought ODF was the open standard and Open XML wasn't. Did something change in the last month I stopped paying attention to the whole ODF vs. OOXML debate?

Why does KDE like OOXML now?

Must be an April fool's joke early..

by Jonathan Thomas (not verified)

I think it's April in most of the Western Hemisphere now. This is obviously an April Fools joke.

by nobody (not verified)

assuming you want to discount all of the americas.

by Debian User (not verified)

Most of the americas are fools all days, aren't they?

Yours,
Kay

by Bobby (not verified)

Time to switch to Gnome! :D :D

by moltonel (not verified)

What, and miss out on the OOXML functionality ? :p

by JackieBrown (not verified)

It's supported through mono

I am reading this on the 4th the the 1st a dim memory.

This scared the crap out of me.

by Ian Monroe (not verified)

How is it that people are confused by the fact that the whole world doesn't exist in their timezone /every year/ on April 1st.

by Patcito (not verified)

They should have linked the Supreme Leader part to this http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1196/747230218_ce3f728204.jpg?v=0 :D

by Ian Monroe (not verified)

Agreed.

by Paulo Cesar (not verified)

You almost got me :P

by chris.w (not verified)

Me too... but the part with the 10.000 $ donation made it obvious.

by Sebastian Kuegler (not verified)

And not "founder ... Coolio ... changing nappies"? :-)

by Phil (not verified)

Does that mean he was changing his own nappies, or someone elses?

by Vladislav (not verified)

happy april fools day everybody :)

by Anand Vaidya (not verified)

For a moment I was shocked, that our beloved KDE Project can make such grave judgemental error.

But I was relieved after seeing the date on my plasma Clock.

:-)

Regards
Anand

by Bruno Laturner (not verified)

Bah, komrade Jonathan just missed the chance to name komrade Seigo our Supreme Kommander.

Hopefully our faithful debugger KG[d]B agents will correct this bug.

by fred (not verified)

Bah, I woke up this morning and saw this news, WTF?? But then I realized that this is 1st of April :D - Only the date in the dot.news is still 31 March.

Btw "Cyrille Burger" and "Stephan Coolio"? But why Aaron Seigo's name is the only correct one, not became for example Aaron Siege? :)

by Aaron Seigo (not verified)

two possibilities:

1) to make it seem just real enough to real you in at the start
2) my name is already funny enough / a joke as it is.

my money's on #2 ;)

by Bobby (not verified)

Have you ever read the book Ninja?

Maybe one more possibility?

3) The author was afraid he would be kicked out from KDE e.v if he made fun of our Supreme Leader's name :D

just kidding :)

by Jucato (not verified)

"Aaron Siego" would have been a good but subtle prank. :P

by Riddle (not verified)

APRIL FOOLS!!!

... and following a $10,000 donation from an anonymous NA source ...
And who could that be! ;)

by Winter (not verified)

I just love this community. Rock on!

by Kartik Mistry (not verified)

I was waiting from long time when KOffice starting .docx format support. I will not move to OO.o to KOffice.

Thanks! KDE!

;)

by BCook2 (not verified)

Is The Author Playing A Cruel April Fools Joke? I Think So....
PS: The Anonymous NA Donor Must Be M$

by Ben (not verified)

Oh my fucking god, that was the WORST prank ever! I started yelling "NO! NO!" when I saw the description, then went "What?" to the "anonymous 10k donation".

Wow. You really had me there.

by Stefan L (not verified)

$10,000 is very cheap. I think KDE's support is more worth than this. Others got several 100 million Dollars to abandon the antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft in Europe. Why KDE took only $10,000?

by Bobby (not verified)

Maybe Mr Seigo needed a new MAC Air? In any case 10,000 is better than nothing at all :D

by Andrey (not verified)

I almost cry when I was reading this! I even thought to remove all KDE traces from my PC. Oh the Humanity!

You are so mean! ;D

PS: In my country April's Fools is in December 28th. I wasn't aware of the joke 'cause I didn't expect it at all! Gosh, you almost kill me!

by Thiago Macieira (not verified)

I hope your country calls it something different than April Fools then :-)

But it could make an interesting story. Headline: "April Fools to be celebrated in December". Quote: "April Fools in April is just too mundane, people already known what to expect. So we decided to have it in December, when people really aren't expecting it."

by Tim Gollnik (not verified)

>I hope your country calls it something different than April Fools then :-)

You made my day!

by Fede (not verified)

I was thinking the same when reading the parent post :) . Here in Spain, and I guess the same applies to Latin America, it's called 'Innocent's Day', or 'Innocent Saint's Day', but overall is the equivalent to April's Fools... Imagine how confused we are with these kind of news until we realize it's your pranks day ;) .