Posts by Doctor Syntax 42414 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"who was probably flogging state secrets to a foreign entity"
Not supported by the evidence nor, AFAICS, believed by the prosecution but no doubt you have the usual clearer vision than those who have dealt with the case at greater length.
And that can apply to questions that don't require much expertise at all. I'm not sure if it's been superseded but the standard book from my student days for identifying British seed-bearing plants stands about 2" thick, printed on thin paper and consists of a key, mostly binary but sometimes offering more choices, and s series of descriptions to check. It represented the combined knowledge of three leading botanists of the time. It's the sort of thing you might end up with if you asked a group of experts to codify their knowledge in their particular domain.
Following it you could, in a few minutes, identify an oak tree assuming it was in flower. A machine could probably follow it although it would have to do quite a bit of image analysis to answer the questions in the key. OTOH most people in Britain will be able to identify an oak tree from just the leaf at a glance. We don't identify things we know, nor diagnose things in our area of expertise, by following a decision tree - we just know them and it's very difficult to put how we know into words in a way that can be communicated to another human let alone a learning machine.
You just don't grok it at all, do you? Let's look at your post:
" their auto-upgraded (strictly no choice) mail client and collaborative filesystem"
What mail client and collaborative software will they be using in future? It doesn't say in TFA. You seem to be making some assumption not in evidence, including that auto-upgrades can't be blocked at the firewall.
"start to methodically stuff LibreOffice integration in carefully-crafted-to-be-unfathomable ways?"
You seem to be assuming that whatever they use would do that. Again, no evidence that it would or even that they'd choose something that would.
Remember they're doing this to get away from any dependency on Microsoft online services so you can discount Exchange and if you discount Exchange then you can probably also discount Outlook because there'd be no reason to retain it, especially, given, as you point out, this is subject to upgrades from Microsoft.
The conversation is going to be more along the lines of:
Minister: We're going to move away from Microsoft Office to a FOSS alternative, Libre Office.
Manager: Why?
Minister: {Statement of government policy relating to data sovereignty which should be too well known by el Reg readers to state in full here but as this is Denmark might also mention Greenland}
Manager: But I don't know how to use that.
Minister: This department exists to introduce digital technology to the rest of the government. You are telling me you don't have the skills to work here.
Manager:
"As a corporation, decide what you're doing; tell people it is happening; then do it decisively."
Even more so in this case. This is a government dept. and the project is driven by the minister. It's the department digitising the rest of the government so being the one who says you can't handle it is not going to be a good look and ultimately it's going to be the department that decides which way the rest of the govt. is going to go.
Part of the objective seems to be to get away from dependence on any commercial provider so that wouldn't count although it at least European in origin. However, if you want the ribbon interface in LibreOffice then from the main menu it's View>User Interface... Click Tabbed, click Apply
"I'd say that in year or two some high ranking official will come in and throw a fit about how they want Office back"
In this case it's likely they will be referred to the minister* who has made this a policy. Declaring that you can't manage to use what the minister herself is using might result in questions as to exactly how this high rank is justified.
* For avoidance of doubt, that means higher ranking.
"Entities flogging e-books produced from scans of theses or academic publications may be caught out by this"
Judging by spams to soc.genealogy.medieval before the Google wrecking ball I gained the impression that many doing this were neither interested in legality, so won't be affected, and were unable to tell the difference between medieval and medical.
Why would they not? Times have changed. Nobody in Denmark is going to take a US company's shmoozing seriously these days. There's no reason why they wouldn't be able to make it work. If there are edge cases in the form of really complex spreadsheets they might have to take a look and replace them with properly written and stable solutions.
Goof news. But the English language article cited contains this remarkable passage:
But changing to user-driven open source systems is also not without challenges, Damsgaard noted.
“If you don’t have a member of staff who can develop the system, you can’t implement it,” he said.
This is FUD. That would only apply if they need specific modifications. It's something that FOSS makes possible but with a mature product such as LibreOffice this is unlikely; after all they've been using MS products without such modifications for years (I'm guessing here but it seems a pretty sound guess).
The worst I ever say was really short lengths in the postal address fields. The users were just wrapping one address line into the next - it was all they could do. I think it was because the program was Cobollox with a lot of thinking held over from the days of tape. They had a fixed record length and it was applied to everything. Only N characters available for addresses. Allow for 4 lines and N/4 is what you get. 16 characters (or whatever it was) should be enough for anyone.
I suspect that some of these problems can often be laid at the door of ISO 9000 and its friends and relations.
Scene: Quality manual is being written
Wallah 1. We come to minimum experience need for any job.
Wallah 2. It can't be just anybody. All jobs must be done with somebody with good experience.
Wallay 3. How about 5 years?
Wallah 2. Sounds good to me. Should that be the current version of whatever it is they're using?
Wallah 3. That must be right. In fact current versions of anything should always be used.
Wallah 2. I'll go along with that.
Wallah 1. And me. I'll put that down.
And hence we have a requirement to use stuff which is never more than 2 years old and those needing it need to have been using it for at least 5 years.
There always seemed to be a problem that if a file was written by Office N in its default format and tent to a user of Office N - m where m was any positive integer then Office N - m would barf at it so as to get the user to upgrade.
I've even seen a heavily macroed Word 3 document capable of freezing to the point of Big Red Switch time a PC not running the exact same version of 3, just on attempting to open it. (LibreOffice wouldn't open it either but not so terminally.)
"So they came up with a simpler local-only replacement for Wayland that can be accessed over VNC or rdesktop, which is all they need."
Don't you mean a replacement for X.11?
As for Microsoft forcing an update from 95 to 97 they'd been playing that game all the way with every release since 1.0. AFAICS the change to XML was forced on them because of demands from USG or wherever that they follow a standard so they invented a standard to follow; best to draw a veil over how it became an ISO "open" standard.
" It's a dead language, so doesn't evolve over time any more."
It did evolve, however. The classical Latin taught in schools wasn't the same as vernacular Latin which evolved into Italian, French etc. It also evolved into medieval Latin which would be found in older legal documents. From school I remember that the function of "and" was a suffix, "-que" but in, say, baptismal registers it's "et" or "ac".
As it happens our local archives had an open day today. Digital archiving was discussed. The current thinking seems to be not to trust media, reading hardware or file formats but to copy and, where applicable, translate formats to new technology as it becomes available. This is the attitude of people who really care about long term information storage.
Examples were shown of text on parchment with a mention of HMG promoting parchment making because they still write Acts on it. My experience of older texts on parchment is that the parchment darkens and what was blue-black ink fades until they're about the same colour. Indian ink is more legible. I suspect Mylar might be as durable as a substrate. Mylar tracing film takes Indian ink nicely.
IME it's usually a function key with, if you're lucky an obscurely place miniscule LED indicator labelled with an incomprehensible icon. Just for lack of clarity it's called "aeroplane mode" and the function key, if labelled at all, will have a 'plane icon. It will be even more easily pressed than a slide switch on the side and although you've been caught out by it previously is fresh every time.
