Norwegian Minister: Proprietary Formats No Longer Acceptable in Communication with Government

andwest.com ^ | Monday, 27 June 2005

[N3WBI3]

OSS PING

If you are interested in a new OSS ping list please mail me

[N3WBI3]

I dont think this will much hurt MS as they ahve been moving to open up their formats a bit at a time for the past couple of years..

[Red Badger]

I'd tell'em to go pound lutefisk in their....uh ....ears..........

[Red Badger]

The Power of Lutefisk
"Lutefisk" is an infamous Norwegian dish composed of fish soaked in lye. Want to know more?

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From: clays@panix.com (Clay Shirky)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban
Subject: Ode to Lutefisk (Long)
Date: Sun, 04 Dec 1994 09:11:19 -0500


It is my wont when travelling to forgo the touristic in favor of the real, to pesuade my kind hosts, whoever they may be, that an evening in the local, imbibing pints of whatever the natives use as intoxicants, would be more interesting than another espresso in another place called Cafe Opera. Chiefest among my interests is the Favorite Dish: the plate, cup, or bowl of whatever stuff my hosts consider most representative of the regions virtues. As I just finished a week's work in Oslo, this dish was of course lutefisk.

(snd f/x: organ music in minor key - cresc. and out.)

The Norwegians are remarkably single-minded in their attachment to the stuff. Every one of them would launch themselves into a hydrophobic frenzy of praise on the mere mention of the word. Though these panegyrics were as varied as they were fulsome, they shared one element in common. Every testimonial to the recondite deliciousness of cod soaked in lye ended with the phrase "...but I only eat it once a year."

When I pressed my hosts as to _why_ they would voluntarily forswear what was by all accounts the tastiest fish dish since pussy 364 days a year, each of them said "Oh, you can't eat lutefisk more than once a year." (Their unanmity on this particular point carried with it the same finality as the answers you get when casually asking a Scientologist about L. Ron's untimely demise.)

Despite my misgivings from these interlocutions however, there was nothing for it but to actually try the stuff, as it was clearly the local delicacy. A plan was hatched whereby my hosts and I would distill ourselves to a nearby brasserie, and I would order something tame like reindeer steak, and they would order lutefisk. The portions at this particular establishment were large, they assured me, and when I discovered for myself how scrumptious jellied fish tasted, I could have an adequate amount from each of their plates to satiate my taste for this new-found treat.

Ah, but the best laid plans... My hostess, clearly feeling in a holiday mood (and perhaps further cheered by my immanent departure as their house guest) proceeded to order lutefisks all round.

"But I was going to order reinde..."

"Nonononono," she said, "you must have your own lutefisk. It would be rude to bring you to Norway and not give you your own lutefisk."

My mumbled suggestion that I had never been one to stand on formality went unnoticed, and moments later, somewhere in the kitchen, there was a lutefisk with my name on it.

The waitress, having conveyed this order to the chef, returned with a bottle and three shot glasses and spent some time interogating my host. He laughed as she left, and I asked what she said.

"Oh she said 'Is the American _really_ going to eat lutefisk?' and when I told her you were, she said that it takes some time to get used to it."

"How long?" I asked.

"Well, she said a couple of years." replied my host.

In the meantime, my hostess was busily decanting a clear liquid into the shot glass and passing it my way. When I learned that it was aquavit, I demurred, as I intended to get some writing done on the train.

"Oh no," said my hostess, donning the smile polite people use when giving an order, "you _must_ have aquavit with lutefisk."

To understand the relationship between aquavit and lutefisk, here's an experiment you can do at home. In addition to aquavit, you will need a slice of lemon, a cracker, a dishtowel, ketchup, a piece of lettuce, some caviar, and a Kit-Kat candy bar.

1. Take a shot aquavit.
2. Take two. (They're small.)
3. Put a bit of caviar on a bit of lettuce.
4. Put the lettuce on a cracker.
5. Squeeze some lemon juice on the caviar.
6. Pour some ketchup on the Kit-Kat bar.
7. Tie the dishtowel around your eyes.


If you can taste the difference between caviar on a cracker and ketchup on a Kit-Kat while blindfolded, you have not had enough aquavit to be ready for lutefisk. Return to step one.

The first real sign of trouble was when a plate arrived and was set in front of my host, sitting to my left. It contained a collection of dark and aromatic food stuffs of a variety of textures. Having steeled myself for an encounter with a pale jelly, I was puzzled at its appearance, and I leaned over to get a better look.

"Oh," said my host, "that's not lutefisk. I changed my mind and ordered the juletid plate. Its is pork and sausages."

"But you're leaving for New York tomorrow, so tonight is your last chance to have lutefisk this year" I pointed out.

"Oh well," he said, tucking into what looked like a very tasty pork chop.

Shortly thereafter the two remaining plates arrived, each containing the lutefisk itself, boiled potatoes, and a mash of peas from which all the color had been expertly tortured. There was also a garnish of a slice of cucumber, a wedge of lemon, and a sliver of red pepper.

"This is bullshit!" said my hostess, snatching the garnish off her plate.

"What's wrong," I asked, "not enough lemon?"

"No, a plate of lutefisk should be totally gray!"

Indeed, with the removal of the garnish, it was totally gray, and waiting for me to dig in. There being no time like the present, I tore a forkful away from the cod carcass and lifted it to my mouth.

"Wait," said my host, "you can't eat it like that!"

"OK," I said, "how should I eat it?"

"Mash up your potatoes, and then mix a bit of lutefisk in, and then add some bacon." he said, handing me a tureen filled to the brim with bacon bits floating in fat.

I began to strain some of the bits out of the tureen. "No, not like that, like this" he said, snatching up the tureen and pouring three fingers of pure bacon grease directly over the beige mush I had made from the potatoes and lutefisk already on my plate.

"Now can I eat it?"

"No, not yet, you have to mix in the mustard."

"And the pepper" added my hostess, "you have to have lutefisk with lots and lots of pepper. And then you have to eat it right away, because if it gets cold its horrible."

They proceeded to add pepper and mustard in amounts I felt were more apporpriate to ingredients rather than flavors, but no matter. At this point what I had was an undercooked hash brown with mustard on it, flavored with a little bit of lutefisk. "How bad could it be?" I thought to myself as I lifted my fork to my mouth.

The moment every traveller lives for is the native dinner where, throwing caution to the wind and plunging into a local delicacy which ought by rights to be disgusting, one discovers that it is not only delicious but that it also contradicts a previously held prejudice about food, that it expands ones culinary horizons to include surprising new smells, tastes, and textures.

Lutefisk is not such a dish.

Lutefisk is instead pretty much what you'd expect of jellied cod; it is a foul and odiferous goo, whose gelatinous texture and rancid oily taste are locked in spirited competition to see which can be the more responsible for rendering the whole completely inedble.

How to describe that first bite? Its a bit like describing passing a kidneystone to the uninitiated. If you are talking to someone else who has lived through the experience, a nod will suffice to acknowledge your shared pain, but to explain it to the person who has not been there, mere words seem inadequate to the task. So it is with lutefisk. One could bandy about the time honored phrases like "nauseating sordid gunk", "unimaginably horrific", "lasting psychological damage", but these seem hollow when applied to the task at hand. I will have to resort to a recipe for a kind of metaphorical lutefisk, to describe the experience. Take marshmallows made without sugar, blend them together with overcooked Japanese noodles, and then bathe the whole liberally in acetone. Let it marinate in cod liver oil for several days at room temprature. When it has achieved the appropriate consistency (though the word "appropriate" is somewhat problematic here), heat it to just above lukewarm, sprinkle in thousands of tiny, sharp, invisible fish bones, and serve.

The waitress, returning to clear our plates, surveyed the half-eaten goo I had left.

She nodded conspiritorially at me, said something to my host, and left.

"What'd she say?, I asked.

"Oh, she said 'I never eat lutefisk either. It tastes like python.'"

Clay "I think my mistake was in using the dishtowel: you need to drink enough aquavit so you can't tell the difference between caviar on a cracker and ketchup on a Kit-Kat with your eyes open" Shirky

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@Man, World-Class Data Snuggler / First Interskate Productions / atman@ecst.csuchico.edu

[N3WBI3]

Naa, Microsoft would be stupid not to open up their file format, not that I am fond the the euro's but I think they are right in wanting government communications to be in a file format one does not need a particular application to read..

A government using .doc, or .pdf is a defacto endorsement of that product and forces whoever wants to read the doing of their government to use a particular private corporations product. Microsoft has shown signs in recent years of understanding this and I don't think well see any compliance problems from them..

[muir_redwoods]

"....or become irrelevant to the Norwegian Government."

I'm sure that's got them quaking in their boots. What is the impact if one becomes irrelevant to an irrelevancy?

[The KG9 Kid]

I downloaded the full text of Minister Meyer's presentation, but it was archived in non-standard GZIP CRC-64 encapsulation inside a .TAR file encoded in .LZH format, so I gave up trying to open it.

They did say it'll be available next month on 300k 5.25" floppy, though.

[N3WBI3]

lol.. Yea I wish they would just say open and not "non-propriatary"

[N3WBI3]

Well fisrt norway, and then the sweeds, and then the swiss... and then where are you ;)

[monkeybrau]

"... every Norwegian citizen will be provided with a personal electronic ID as a replacement for the numerous use-ids and passwords currently used throughout."

No thanks! You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to know what's wrong with this policy.

Their widespread forced adoption of open-source products to do everything they do now, in that timeline, will be chaos. I will be watching with

[monkeybrau]

Upon closer reading, i guess they have until 2006 to come up with a "plan" so might be a while before I get to eat any popcorn.

[N3WBI3]

Their widespread forced adoption of open-source products to do everything they do now, in that timeline, will be chaos. I will be watching with

Naa this ain't an opensource problem, this is a poor policy problem. You dont think if there was no opensource software the good people of Norway would not have to go to a single ID for "their convenience" just using a closed source system?

[N3WBI3]

Go ahead and enjoy your bag right now, it out to be fun to see the euro's surrender a freedom while saying American are repressed... When they impliment it, ill buy you a bag..

[monkeybrau]

I agree, open-source is not the problem. I thought I read that they had until 2006 to get all their systems converted and was predicting an integration disaster.

The single user ID is for "their" convenience, not for your privacy.

[rogue yam]

A government using .doc, or .pdf is a defacto endorsement of that product and forces whoever wants to read the doing of their government to use a particular private corporations product.

Just so, and certainly to be avoided! Clearly the preferred alternative is to have every government agency worldwide develop its own operating systems, etc. and then give them all away for free. It is the very definition of insanity to allow private corporations the power to create useful products at their own expense, and then compete freely with other corporations' products until there is a clear industry leader, and then have government agencies simply buy that product off of the shelf and use it to perform vital government functions. What were we thinking when we adopted this crazy model to begin with? Thank you, Norway!

[The KG9 Kid]

There's no better portable document format than Adobe's .PDF, end of discussion. Nothing else even comes close; not Ghostscript, not Autodesk's hideously poor document archival format.

What the hell does this minister propose as an alternative?

[N3WBI3]

Just so, and certainly to be avoided! Clearly the preferred alternative is to have every government agency worldwide develop its own operating systems, etc. and then give them all away for free.

ok im a bit slow but how do you get the above from

A government using .doc, or .pdf is a defacto endorsement of that product and forces whoever wants to read the doing of their government to use a particular private corporations product.

I dont care if they all run windows, what I care about is that I don't have to run X corps' word processor, y corps' on-line document viewer, Z corps' browser, and A corps' operating system. Clearly the solution is not a bunch of operating systems, but a handful of open document formats.

It is the very definition of insanity to allow private corporations the power to create useful products at their own expense, and then compete freely with other corporations' products until there is a clear industry leader, and then have government agencies simply buy that product off of the shelf and use it to perform vital government functions.

No one is saying that a corporation does not have the right to make whatever format with whatever license they want, to think that is whats going on (at least in my post) is insanity. It would be as stupid as me narrowing your position to mean that the government should not have to share any of its documents with the people of that nation. I think the Constitution and any copies of it should be kept under a locked key that only people with a certain amount of money to buy a copy of the key.

[N3WBI3]

Dont know right now, I do know that an open format for documents is as not as important in government work as translating the Bible into German was for Christianity. It is however the same concept, let all the people no matter what OS, or word processor they run have access to the information

[Renfield]

The Danes also have their national dish. I don't have Danish vowels on my keyboard, so I can't spell it precisely here, but the pronunciation is something like "Roth-groll-meth-flootheh", with all the "th's" sounding like the "th" in our word "the"; it's strawberries cooked in a potato-starch gruel, accompanied with a bit of thick cream. While somewhat bland, the taste is not bad; but it has the exact appearance and texture of bloody mucous. The Danes get a big kick out of watching foreigners try to eat it. They also serve, at breakfast, a cheese that has the exact odor of human excrement.