Wednesday, November 15, 2006

A Word of caution:
Recently I was browing net and came across this article by Stallman popularly known as RMS.I thought this could be one more anti-propreitery article by him. But one of the link in his article opened my eyes. Its about MS Word format.
I usually wondered why companies demand resume to be sent as Word document. Honestly speaking the document won't appear as neatly as we had written. Say I use Office 2000 for writing my CV company uses Word 97!. My document may not open at all. Even if it opens It may not display properly. We are using products of same company, but MS keeps on changing the .doc file structure.Even if you have a licenced version of Office97 you can't read a document written with Office 2000. It annoys. To read that piece of document do I have to pay MS for upgrade? This is outrageous.
If you think you can use some open/free software to read .doc files a word of caution again.MS is planning to use a propreitery XML extension to encode .doc files. If some company provides a software to read such .doc files can be suied by MS!
Thats not all RMS gives a link to BBC site article
According to this article, sensitive data from your system may leakout from a piece of word doc!Read it to believe it.
When I heard of IBM initiating an Open Document Type movement, I thought its another MS killer act by Big Blue. It may be true but Its justifiable. We can't let our sensitive data to be leaked with just an ASCII file encoded in MS style.
Let's fight back. Ask company's to accept pdf resumes. Are they going to edit our resume? If not then why on earth they want our resume in editable format?
Let's use ODT,plain text or PDF only.
Long live freedom!

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