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late last year -- can be resolved. "We have more confidence in Microsoft than we would have 10 years ago," says Schmidt. "But it always makes sense to look at the security implications, the value back to the customer, and those kind of issues."
The DOT's ban on Vista, Internet Explorer 7, and Office 2007 applies to 15,000 computer users at DOT proper who are currently running the Windows XP Professional operating system. The memo indicates that a similar ban is in effect at the Federal Aviation Administration, which has 45,000 desktop users.
Compatibility with existing applications appears to be the Transportation Department's major concern. According to a separate memo, a number of key software applications and utilities in use in various branches of the department aren't Vista compatible. Among them are Aspen 2.8.1, ISS 2.11, ProVu 3.1.1, and Capri 6.5, according to a memo issued by staffers at the DOT's Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration.
Any prolonged ban on new Microsoft technologies by the federal government could have a significant impact on the software maker's bottom line, as Microsoft sells millions of dollars in software to the feds annually.
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OOXML was designed for the high fidelity conversion of those billions of legacy MSOffice documents. ODF was not.
What's interesting here is that Andy is correctly pointing out that the ODF vednors refuse to compromise on the innovative ways OpenOffice differs from MSOffice. The innovations involve the different ways OpenOffice implements basic docuemnt structures such as lists, sections, fields, tables and page dynamics. MSOffic euses an older method of implementation.
When converting legacy MSOffice documents to ODF, the fidelity breaks down wherever these strucutral features are present. The key point here is that these strucutral differentials are exactly related to how OpenOffice and MSOffice differ in their implementation methods. It's an application difference beign expressed at the file format level!!!!!!!!!!!
The ODF vendors refuse to compromise with their application level innovations. The result of this is that billions of MSOffice docuemnts cannot be converted to ODF without significant loss of information.
Which is to say: both ODF and OOXML are application specific formats. Worse, neither ODF or OOXML specify the syntax and semantics of layout!!! They only specify the syntax. Developers must study OpenOffice and MSDOffice to figure out how presentation (layout) is achieved.
This stands in stark contrast to the W3C's Compound Document Format (CDF). CDF provides a very generic, application independent separation of content (XHTML) and presentation (CSS), where the presentation layer is entirely specified. CSS is highly portable because it is completely specified and totally application indepen