From Newshounds, by Thomas K. Dye.

One of the instrumental figures behind the Commonwealth of Massachusetts' decision to use the OASIS OpenDocument standard as its official format for computer documentation was Peter Quinn, the Commonwealth's Chief Information Officer.

According to Infoworld, Peter Quinn has resigned.

This is hardly surprising. Microsoft has been pitching a fit ever since they learned that their closed, proprietary file format was passed over in favor of a format that any company selling a word processor could adopt without paying a damn thing to anyone, and shortly after the announcement was made Quinn was suddenly and mysteriously investigated for supposed improprieties concerning several out-of-state trips he made. The investigation ultimately found that he'd done nothing improper, but the damage, apparently, was done. Quinn has resigned, and it remains to be seen whether or not the Open Standards he trumpeted will remain in place in Massachusetts.

Alas, this turn of events is not particularly new when it comes to defying Microsoft. Remember Ed Curry.

From Lost and Found, by Matt Milligan. Nevermind what it is... look at the shiny.

You can almost set your watch to it: every year some president or spokesman from a company that isn't Microsoft makes the grandiose pronouncement that Personal Computers are dead, and that the successor to the PC just happens to be, by nothing more than fortuitous coincidence, something they happen to be selling at the time.

This time around it's Johnathan Schwartz, president of Sun Microsystems. Sun actually has a grand tradition of heralding the end of Personal Computers -- Sun has used the phrase "The Network Is the Computer" for years, trying to shift the focus of computer use to the internet, to programs that run over networks instead of on your hard drive... but I suspect they'd be happy with anything that would rip users away from Microsoft's lock on desktop computers and get them to focus on other ways to "do stuff with those computer things."

Of course, all these companies who talk about how the PC is going to be replaced by other things -- usually the internet or a business network -- try very hard to convince us that, from our perspective, nothing will actually "change." Our end-user experience will be exactly the same, they claim. We won't realize that when we boot up our machines we'll be reaching across the internet to retrieve all our data, access all our programs, and do all the things we've been doing with our computers. Write a note to a friend, write the great American novel, balance your checkbook, do your taxes... even, God forbid, publish a web comic, all of these things can be done with programs on the internet, through your web browser, via java applets or Microsoft .NET, or something else they haven't bothered to fill us in on, and -- here's the important part -- we'll never know the difference.

After carefully considering this Prophetic Vision of Silicon Developments Yet To Come, I have composed a response that I feel accurately sums up my opinion:

Bollocks.

From Help Desk, by yours truly.

Once upon a time there was a group named OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards), a

"not-for-profit, global consortium that drives the development, convergence and adoption of e-business standards."

The purpose of OASIS was, simply, to come up with a bunch of standards that its members would agree on, so that when business technology was built it would operate in such a way so that it would work everywhere. The groups sponsors included giants in the computer industry, such as Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and even Microsoft. The group would meet to try and work out, for example, a standard way to exchange information about security vulnerabilities of applications exposed to networks, or a universally accessable system for writing structured documents using SGML or XML. Things that were useful, in other words, for business that needed to transmit information from one place to another without worrying about whether or not the place receiving the information was going to understand what was being sent.

One day OASIS decided it would be a great idea if there was an open standard for word processing application suites that provided a universal file format for text documents, spreadsheets, charts, and graphics. This standard, which they called OpenDocument, was a royalty-free file format that used another standard, XML, as the way that information in these documents would be stored. Any word processing program could use this standard royalty-free, and any word processing program that did use this standard would be able to read a file created by any other word processing program that also supported this standard. Suddenly it was possible to focus on creating your information instead of worrying over which program to use to create it.

On May 23, 2005, OASIS' members approved the OpenDocument standard.

On August 29, 2005, Peter Quinn, Chief Information Officer of the Information Technology Division of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts announced that the state would use OpenDocument as its official documentation standard.

Shortly thereafter, Microsoft had a cow.

From Alice! by Michael McKay-Fleming.

What does a schoolyard bully practicing spin control at its most fundamental level have to do with the rest of this article? It illustrates what is becoming standard operating procedure in much of the computer industry: if someone writes something you don't like, threaten to beat them up. And to cover your bases, put that threat in writing as part of your product's license agreement.

There are plenty of companies that do this, and not just in the computer industry... but to start us out I'm going to pick on Microsoft.

Why pick on them, you ask? Because it's Microsoft. What a silly question.

From Soap on a Rope by Bob Roberds.

On August 2, 2005 Slashdot posted an odd submission about an article in IT Managers Journal describing a study that showed that IT workers in the United Kingdom are dissatisfied with their jobs.

Well... duh.

Next issue: IT Managers learn that their employees prefer eating lunch to troubleshooting faulty routers.