Open XML larger than LHC documentation

Summary:

CERN's Large Hadron Collider, the world's greatest experiment particle accelerator for quantum physics built in Geneva, is being compared to Open XML.

Open XML larger than LHC

podmokle 01 Sep 2008 07:59

A blogger points out that the documentation for the LHC just comprises 1600 pages. The LHC was built by the CERN and it the world's largest particle accelerator. Open XML's documentation is far more complex. The LHC took ten years to get set up. How long would it take to fully implement Open XML?

What is wrong with the comparison?

While the amount of documentation for Open XML is large, too large, we put emphasis on the size of the corpus as it is written in a documentation style we referred to as "rice pudding". It feeds you well, yes it does, but it's no "real meal". The efficiency of open xml documentation had no good carbon footprint and we exposed serious shortcomings where you would expect the interesting parts.

Generally speaking it was important to us that size does not matter. It does however matter when you expect competitors to implement the standard. The number of pages of the LHC documentation as opposed to the size of the Open XML corpus carries no relevant meaning.

What do they have in common?

The LHC is expected to let "strange things happen" which is the reason why some lunatics oppose the LHC and expect literally the end of the worlds. The public communication around the LHC stressed they wanted to recreate a near-big bang scenario which makes some persons suspicious. The experimental Open XML format had some strange idiosyncratic elements and weird things happened during the ISO process.
Benjamin coined the phrase to compare the Open XML process with physics and thought of the experiments you can make in a classic environment with materia in between the liquid, solid or gazoid phases: "When you increase the pressure strange things happen." The BRM for Open XML took also part in Geneva. Neither the LHC nor Open XML are the end of the world. In fact they are just the beginning of a New World. Our sincere hope is that as of Open XML it will be the unconditional surrender of the format and a landrush move towards open standards and open document format (ODF). The process towards more open and interoperable standards which go beyond ISO started at CERN where Tim Berners-Lee launched the web revolution with its html standard, an early example of a open standards.

Last edited on 01 Sep 2008 16:42 by arebenti Show more

Re: Open XML larger than LHC

jhhdk 01 Sep 2008 12:40

The LHC is expected to let "strange things happen" which is the reason why some lunatics oppose the LHC and expect literally the end of the worlds.

When particles collide in particle accelrators all kinetic energy is briefly transformed into mass ie. when colliding two electrons or positrons (don't remember which) at close to light speed they will briefly become a single particle with a mass equal that of an entire gold atom. What lunatics fear is that if you get sufficiently close to light speed the particle created will be a singularity (ie black hole) which will consume our planet and solar system in an instant. The only reassurance scientists have given is: "What we're doing in LHC is not different from what happens in the Sun in theory so if it could happen it probably already would have in the sun."