In Sweden we switch to good time (daylight wise) in the early spring and we switch off the good time over to bad time in late October (the 28th this year).
Seriously, the non-daylight savings time is not good for us not even during winter. We’d be much better off with GMT+2 all the time.
I’m not sure this is because we’re this far up north in this particular time zone (Central European Time), or if perhaps most citizens in it feel the same. And if they do, would that imply that most of the people in neighboring zones also think they have the wrong time?
I’m going to China for a week in October. I have a few things I feel I better figure out while I’m there, including:
Exactly how evil is the internet censorship and filtering for ordinary tourists such as me. A laptop and some network tools should be enough to tell, as the hotel boasts free internet access…
Time zone stuff. China has a single time zone for the entire country, which by itself is fascinating for such a huge area. And when looking at a time zone map, you can see that the country picked a time zone that is the equivalent of western Australia, which seems to be a lot of sense for the east coast of China. So, the western parts of China are terribly off. The question is: do the people ignore the time and follow the light, or do they obey the time and spend parts of the lives in more darkness than what they otherwise would? If you go north/south at the eastern and western edges of China, you’ll end up in time zones that are five hours apart!
Chinese typing is with glyphs; some tens of thousands of different ones. In a Chinese dictionary, like a Chinese to English one, how do they sort the Chinese words? I mean, glyphs just have got to be very hard to sort in a logical manner?! Or how do they find the words?
There’s this saying that a picture is worth more than a thousand words… The picture above is a cropped rip-off linked from the groklaw-article this picture will take you to. It is quite simply the OOXML standard suggestion next to the ODF one.
IDG reports that yesterday SIS announced that the voting on August 27 was invalid since they say that they have information that indicates one of the voting organizations participated with more than one vote.
With the big official ISO voting coming up already now on Sunday September 2nd, there isn’t enough time for SIS to make a revote so the Swedish official take on the OOXML will be… “no vote”.
With the proved very inefficient working methods of SIS, I figure this is the best outcome anyway since a revote now would just make a senseless race from both camps to register new members to be able to buy the outcome of the next vote!
Microsoft announced that an employee of theirs offered monetary compensation for voting their way and one suspects it has something to do with this invalidating business…
It seems the French OOXML discussions was a lot of fun as well: “something resembling a bar-fight” !
As Marcus Rejås blogged and has been mentioned already by mainstream “media” such as IDG, Microsoft and its allies managed to buy themselves a favorable vote from Sweden in the OOXML debacle.
For our Swedish readers, I can’t but to show this funny picture I found on the SIS web site:
(gone)
The text in that circle on the right says “buy standards by clicking on your area”… and boy, did they!
(Updates: further Swedish details in DN and ekot.)
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