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ext3 is also a journaling file system. Perhaps you meant ext2?

I'm not sure you want to run fsck on an unclean shutdown on your nice big database partition either. Maybe using a journaled file system isn't such a bad idea. Also, it can be much faster for certain workloads:

http://en.oreilly.com/oscon2009/public/schedule/detail/8432
http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/HP_ProLiant_DL380_G5_Tuning_Guide

Note that while sequential writes could be much slower with journaled file systems, random writes were typically much faster. This is what one would expect, given how journaled file systems work.

In fact, I did a review on a collection of non-superhero comics today and was thoroughly impressed with the kinds of issues people are tackling out there with comic books

The Japanese, and to a lesser extent East Asian, Manga industry has been doing things like this for decades. Issues from the topical to the seemingly unpresentable. Remember the manga guide to statistics. By contrast, the now stagnant meme of superheros has proven itself utterly unable to discuss any topic that does not somehow involve men in leotards fist fighting one another.

The biggest problem with the western comic book industry is that it is not seen as a legitimate medium for adult discouse. It is not seen this way because publishers and writers deliberately market and censor their products for consumption by teenagers with their parents approval. The utter stagnancy of the American comic book industries is a testament to how successful this strategy has been in killing creativity. How many generations of artists have spent their lives drawing comics of characters invented by people 70 years ago?

Comics are a very legitimate medium, and a very powerful one. When the 9-11 commission sought a way to present their mammoth 571 page report to the wider public, they turned to the medium of comic books. Some people had the gall to ridicule them, but it was an incredibly brave and shrewd decision. The graphic novel of the findings is a power educational tool against the inevitable 9-11 conspiracy theorists. It was, all things considered, the single best way to tell the story of that day.

Comics are a medium of human communication. So is cartoon animation. The industrialisation of the comic book and animation industries in the Western world has robbed us of this medium. Because of the paranoia of 1950's American society, and the capitulation of the industry to hysteria like Comics Code Authority, the power of the medium comics, seen daily in newspapers across the country, is unable to be brought to bear in any arguments above the briefest of lengths. We are living with the bad decisions made by people 60 years ago and the effect of industry monopolisation and we are worse off because of it.

I strongly doubt you actually built your own radio - anyone with sufficient ability to do so would also realize that such a task would very quickly be not remotely worth the effort. See Leonard Read's I, Pencil for the classic case regarding that.

And more apropos, few could claim to have contributed as much to OSS, and to understand it as deeply, as Linus Torvalds. And yet, even he - though obviously quite capable - prefers distros that make things simple and do most of the things for him.

Install your own radio? Sure, simple enough. Take an LCD, a circuit board, and a bunch of circuit components and create a useful and functional radio? Man, why the hell would you? Would be fun, yeah - but fun for something sitting on your desk. For something that is in your car and that you actually want to take cds, give them back when you want (and without scratches), handles the special nature of dual-signal FM to create stereo, etc? To do that by yourself, the best-case scenario would put you exponentially higher in cost for the same features. Worst case, same exponential cost - with fewer features.

Did I mention no one is stopping you from unlocking your iPhone?

"Intellectual Property and Open Source" It goes over the different licenses and how to open source with profit. http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596517960/

The $18 million contract was for recovery.gov, not usaspending.gov.

Oh, that's right! I get them confused (wonder why).

usaspending.gov is the site run by our old buddy Vivek Kundra. You know, the guy with the impressive resume that, it turns out, includes impressive CIO positions at companies where he was the only employee. Impressive.

The "warmer" sound of analog records is generally believed on both sides of the argument to be an artifact of harmonic distortion and signal compression. This phenomenon of a preference for the sound of a beloved lower-fidelity technology is not new; a 1963 review of RCA Dynagroove recordings notes that "some listeners object to the ultra-smooth sound as ... sterile ... such distortion-forming sounds as those produced by loud brasses are eliminated at the expense of fidelity. They prefer for a climactic fortissimo to blast their machines ..."

Yeah, it's true that there's some pretty lame stuff on the bioinformatics side too--- especially the early stuff has a feel of "hey guys what is computer", with books like Beginning Perl for Biologists.

Regardless of the quality of the book, I can't bring myself to read anything with such a trashy subtitle. Anything claiming that it's "What ${SOMEONE} Doesn't Want You To Know" comes off as paranoid conspiracy-theory crap. ${THEY} don't want you to know about homeopathic remedies or engines that run on water; it's not surprising that ${THEY} don't want you to know the TRUTH about COMPUTER SECURITY either!

I'm ashamed of you, O'Reilly. You used to be good. I do notice that the subtitle in the image of the book's cover (here, on Amazon, and on the O'Reilly site) reads "The Ultimate Insider's Guide to Network Security", which, aside from the hyperbolic "Ultimate", is much better. I hope the paranoid version was a working title, and got changed to the sane one before publication.

Fine, *process* your stuff on the laptop, for which you may need all kinds of horsepower. But the files themselves shouldn't be there; have your apps access them remotely.

Working with multi-megabyte files that are stored non-locally can be very tedious. The frame size of 35mm film is 24×36mm or 1.34×1.42 inches. My scanner scans at 6400dpi with a colour depth of 48 bits. A Photoshop file can be hundreds of megabytes. Non-destructive editors such as Apple's Aperture or Adobe Lightroom can balloon file sizes. Storage solutions for pro photographers can easily reach terabytes.

Quite simply working on files stored non-locally can be prohibitive.

Falcon

was a bipartisan bill, as one of the co-sponsors, Sen Snowe, Olympia J. [ME], is a member of the GOP.

Olympia Snowe votes with Democrats more than Republicans. She was one of the only three Republicans in the Senate and House that voted on the $787 billion spending bill. One of those "Republicans," Arlen Specter, is now a Democrat.

Here is a visualization which performs an energy minimization mapping to group politicians by their voting record.

You can clearly see where Olympia Snowe votes in relation to the two parties. Saying this bill is bi-partisan is a more than a bit of a stretch.

Anyways, anyone know some GOOD AS2 documentation or GUI tools? It needs to support AS2 (and only AS2 apparently).

I don't know about tools, but O'Reilly has a few books about AS2: Essential ActionScript 2.0 and ActionScript for Flash MX: The Definitive Guide, Second Edition.

Now I can't say for sure that they'll meet your needs, but at least you'll have a language reference.

You may also find MING useful, it's a library for coding Flash apps. More info at: Ming Flash Examples and Tutorials.

And I assume you've seen the OSFlash site.

Anyways, anyone know some GOOD AS2 documentation or GUI tools? It needs to support AS2 (and only AS2 apparently).

I don't know about tools, but O'Reilly has a few books about AS2: Essential ActionScript 2.0 and ActionScript for Flash MX: The Definitive Guide, Second Edition.

Now I can't say for sure that they'll meet your needs, but at least you'll have a language reference.

You may also find MING useful, it's a library for coding Flash apps. More info at: Ming Flash Examples and Tutorials.

And I assume you've seen the OSFlash site.

In the short run, the Google Book Search settlement will unquestionably bring about greater access to books collected by major research libraries over the years. But it is very worrisome that this agreement, which was negotiated in secret by Google and a few lawyers working for the Authors Guild and AAP (who will, by the way, get up to $45.5 million in fees for their work on the settlement--more than all of the authors combined!), will create two complementary monopolies with exclusive rights over a research corpus of this magnitude. Monopolies are prone to engage in many abuses.

The Book Search agreement is not really a settlement of a dispute over whether scanning books to index them is fair use. It is a major restructuring of the book industry's future without meaningful government oversight. The market for digitized orphan books could be competitive, but will not be if this settlement is approved as is.

Please check out such books as Mercurial: The Definitive Guide and Real World Haskell. They were freely available when being written and remain such, but in the same time both books were published as usual (on paper) by O'Reilly:

http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596800673/
http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596514983/

The source code used to create the books is also available. So you may use the same work flow.

Please check out such books as Mercurial: The Definitive Guide and Real World Haskell. They were freely available when being written and remain such, but in the same time both books were published as usual (on paper) by O'Reilly:

http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596800673/
http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596514983/

The source code used to create the books is also available. So you may use the same work flow.

I understand O'Reilly publishes a number of books under "various forms of 'open' copyright".

O'Reilly has published a number of Open Books--books with various forms of "open" copyright--over the years. The reasons for "opening" copyright, as well as the specific license agreements under which they are opened, are as varied as our authors.

Perhaps a book was outdated enough to be put out of print, yet some people still needed the information it covered. Or the author or subject of a book felt strongly that it should be published under a particular open copyright.

Really, after even getting one book out the door, the very next question from any publisher is likely to be "What else do you have?" Even if you haven't ever published a book before you can do exactly what you described right here. Just follow the guidelines to the letter and you will get a fair reading, or that was my experience. I nearly fell over when they accepted my proposal, and this is just how I did it.

My experience publishing a book with O'Reilly was just about perfect. The editors were smart, well-informed and deep enough to catch even binary encoding typos in protocol descriptions, and even though my coauthor and I had looked for critique by just everyone we could talk into it, the mandatory peer review process gave us a great chance to hear what people who had no vested interest in protecting our feelings had to say about the book in its nearly finished form. We made significant changes for the better from the editors' edits and suggestions and peer review questions and criticism. I would recommend O'Reilly to anyone with a technical book.

One thing to be aware of, O'Reilly prefers to start from scratch rather than getting a completed manuscript. They have very strict submission guidelines (down to specific styles in the document) that feed into their automated typesetting process. It's worth the effort to do it their way, because it eliminates plenty of opportunities for error and confusion.

I had an awesome experience with O'Reilly for my book iMovie '09 & iDVD: The Missing Manual. (Working with David Pogue was obviously super cool.) My editor, Pete Meyers was great: helpful, responsive, and professional. The publishing deal was good, especially considering it was my first book. O'Reilly also has excellent resources once the book is out, including a web site for authors that has promotion tools and up-to-date information on book sales. It's hard to imagine a publisher reasonably doing more than O'Reilly does.

JavaScript is the most awful excuse for a scripting language I have ever tried to work with

Never used Perl, eh?

You should read "JavaScript: The Good Parts". I used to think JavaScript was crap, but that book converted me. Sure, JavaScript is no Ruby, but it's a pretty good language with a few rough edges and only a couple of fundamental misfeatures... a bit like Python really.

> I'm having trouble coming up with a goal where biological chemicals are the answer.

Proteins are the language of cells. Many diseases have a basis in this messaging going wrong. You could e.g. create a protein molecule that seeks out incorrectly operating cells and patches their DNA, or simply finds the errant protein and binds with it or even changes it.

There are tools for designing molecules on your PC:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_Design_software

In practice if you did design an uberdrug on your PC you'd get a lab to make it for you, but for the amateur home chemist this is an awesome book:
http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596514921/

Quick answer:

Introduction to Information & Communication Technology - Using Free Software and Open Technologies
Edited By: Will Brady
http://openbookproject.net/courses/intro2ict/index.xhtml

The Non-nerds Guide to Computers
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Non-nerds_Guide_to_Computers

But seriously spend half an hour going through results of Google search on these terms: open textbooks computing

You will have to go through the texts yourself but there are many out there at many different levels.

Here are the main resources.

Wikibooks
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Subject:Computing
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Non-nerds_Guide_to_Computers
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Computers_for_Beginners

Flat World Knowledge
http://www.flatworldknowledge.com/

MIT Open Courseware
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_OpenCourseWare
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Computer-Science/index.htm

Make Textbooks Affordable open textbooks
http://www.maketextbooksaffordable.org/statement.asp?id2=37833

Student PIRGs
http://www.studentpirgs.org/open-textbooks-catalog#computersci

List at Walla Walla Community College
http://www.wwcc.edu/CMS/index.php?id=2835

The Assayer free books list
http://theassayer.org/
http://www.theassayer.org/cgi-bin/asbrowsesubject.cgi?class=Q#freeclassQAc

California Learning Resource Network (only math and science)
http://clrn.org/FDTI/index.cfm

OER Consortium
http://oerconsortium.org/discipline-specific/#Computer

Open Book Project
http://openbookproject.net/
http://www.openbookproject.net/courses/

Introduction to Information & Communication Technology - Using Free Software and Open Technologies
Edited By: Will Brady
http://openbookproject.net/courses/intro2ict/index.xhtml

O'Reilly Open Books
http://oreilly.com/openbook/

Textbook Revolution
http://www.textbookrevolution.org/index.php/Book:Lists/Subjects/Computer_Science

http://www.opentextbook.org/
http://freelearning.bccampus.ca/openTextbook.php?page_id=221&bookmark=Computing

Musical keyboard, running linux? Hey, no problem, here you go:

http://digitalmedia.oreilly.com/2005/11/09/inside-the-korg-oasys.html

Sure would be nice to afford one of these...sigh....oh, well, back to QWERTY...:-)

Idiot...

http://digitalmedia.oreilly.com/2005/11/09/inside-the-korg-oasys.html

Oh, I dunno...I think there are several professional musicians using linux...they just don't know it!

http://digitalmedia.oreilly.com/2005/11/09/inside-the-korg-oasys.html

Care to read what RMS says [fsf.org] on the subject? He says he specifically put in the "anti-TiVo" clause because while you can get the source code you can NOT run it on the TiVo.

Yes, exactly.

The entire point of the GPL is to make sure that people can edit the software they use (refer back to the semi-famous "RMS and a bad printer driver" story), or more particularly, to guarantee them some basic freedoms about what they can do with that software. If, after editing, they can't use it anymore, then that's a problem.

What those edits involve has absolutely no bearing on that central point.

If TiVo didn't want to have people able to edit the code running on the TiVo unit, they shouldn't have released it under the GPL - including, if necessary, not re-using already-GPLed code from other people. They discovered a loophole by which they could fulfill the letter of the GPL but not its intent or spirit - allow people to edit the code, but not run it. RMS quite naturally wanted to close that loophole, to prevent them or others from doing the same thing in the future; the GPLv3 was his way of doing so.

(And no, "but you *can* edit it, you just can't run it afterwards" doesn't fly - because at that point, you're no longer editing the code you *are* running, you're editing code you *aren't* running and never will be able to run.)

In that case, Google is completely nuts.

Think this video of Bill O'Rielly's Tongue-Lashing from Eben Moglen states the case very well. Over the last decade pragmatists have made various deals with the non free software world. None of them are prospering now. Companies like Novell are going the same way the non free Unix companies went, hung separately instead of hanging together in freedom. Those who have stayed closer to freedom have done better. It seems, in retrospect, that the purists were more practical after all.

Think this video of Bill O'Rielly's Tongue-Lashing from Eben Moglen states the case very well. Over the last decade pragmatists have made various deals with the non free software world. None of them are prospering now. Companies like Novell are going the same way the non free Unix companies went, hung separately instead of hanging together in freedom. Those who have stayed closer to freedom have done better. It seems, in retrospect, that the purists were more practical after all.

I'm not going to assume you even have a geek card, because your google-fu is so weak.

ECCE LIBRO II CONTINENTUR

Srsly. Google '"Geek atlas" table of contents'. First link.

The table of contents enumerates 128 chapters, indexing from 1 to 128. So your assumption that all geeks count from zero is unfounded.

If you, in fact, possess a geek card, please report for re-certification.

Blah blah blah, theoretically and all that.

There's no benefit to a micro-kernel in these so-called ring -1 attacks. None.

Feel free to read the debate, or the previous Slashdot discussions or consider Linus' previous famous quote: Microkernels are like masturbation, it feels good but it doesn't accomplish anything.

You are trying to reinvent docbook. Not only is everything you want done, it is implemented in several tools (XMLMind and oXygen are two I know of), has a standard method of converting it to any form you want (XSL, XSLT, XSL-FO), and there are tools that are already written to take advantage of those standards (Apache FOP being a FLOSS one). The latest version of DocBook uses XML namespaces, so you can mix in other markup languages as well; the canonical example is DocBook + MathML + SVG, which covers 99.9% of the math/science based literature out there. BTW, if you DO plan on going down this path, I suggest picking up a copy of XSLT, 2nd edition by Doug Tidwell. The latest version of the DocBook book is supposed to be out in August; don't buy the version currently on sale, it is 10 years old, and does NOT cover the current version of DocBook.

The twitter book costs.12-14$ + shipping.
Here's a free copy of tim's first book, the one that turned him into a writer.
"My first book, Frank Herbert, is online at http://tim.oreilly.com/sci-fi/herbert/."
It's about the author of Dune,
and it's one of the best pieces of literary criticism I've ever read.

"Oh, I'll get an O'Reilly book - they're never shit!"

Those days have long passed. For example:

• Internet Annoyances : A book on how to make your internet experience "stress free"
• Facebook Cookbook : how to make facebook apps and how to market them
• How to keep your boss from sinking your project : 24 pages of glorious advice
• Pragmatic Thinking and Learning : To copy paste selective parts of the description - We all know how to work with software and hardware, but what about wetware-our own brains? -snip- you'll see how to become more expert. -snip- You'll learn about different brain functions -snip- including the one simple habit that separates the geniuses from the "wanna-bes."

I predict in the next 5 years O'Reilly will release the following quality books:

• Mathematics Cookbook : 100 simple recipes for additions and subtractions
• Javascript Popup Programming : learn how to use jquery or prototype in exciting new ways to market your products
• Editing Config Files : a book about config files, with endless lists of config file examples and how to best approach editing them
• Brownnosing cookbook : 100 original ways to make your boss uncomfortable
• The definitive guide on server maintenance : 200 pages of lore dealing with removing dust from fans

Moral of the story, don't judge a book by it's cover, but not by it's publisher either.

"Oh, I'll get an O'Reilly book - they're never shit!"

Those days have long passed. For example:

• Internet Annoyances : A book on how to make your internet experience "stress free"
• Facebook Cookbook : how to make facebook apps and how to market them
• How to keep your boss from sinking your project : 24 pages of glorious advice
• Pragmatic Thinking and Learning : To copy paste selective parts of the description - We all know how to work with software and hardware, but what about wetware-our own brains? -snip- you'll see how to become more expert. -snip- You'll learn about different brain functions -snip- including the one simple habit that separates the geniuses from the "wanna-bes."

I predict in the next 5 years O'Reilly will release the following quality books:

• Mathematics Cookbook : 100 simple recipes for additions and subtractions
• Javascript Popup Programming : learn how to use jquery or prototype in exciting new ways to market your products
• Editing Config Files : a book about config files, with endless lists of config file examples and how to best approach editing them
• Brownnosing cookbook : 100 original ways to make your boss uncomfortable
• The definitive guide on server maintenance : 200 pages of lore dealing with removing dust from fans

Moral of the story, don't judge a book by it's cover, but not by it's publisher either.

"Oh, I'll get an O'Reilly book - they're never shit!"

Those days have long passed. For example:

• Internet Annoyances : A book on how to make your internet experience "stress free"
• Facebook Cookbook : how to make facebook apps and how to market them
• How to keep your boss from sinking your project : 24 pages of glorious advice
• Pragmatic Thinking and Learning : To copy paste selective parts of the description - We all know how to work with software and hardware, but what about wetware-our own brains? -snip- you'll see how to become more expert. -snip- You'll learn about different brain functions -snip- including the one simple habit that separates the geniuses from the "wanna-bes."

I predict in the next 5 years O'Reilly will release the following quality books:

• Mathematics Cookbook : 100 simple recipes for additions and subtractions
• Javascript Popup Programming : learn how to use jquery or prototype in exciting new ways to market your products
• Editing Config Files : a book about config files, with endless lists of config file examples and how to best approach editing them
• Brownnosing cookbook : 100 original ways to make your boss uncomfortable
• The definitive guide on server maintenance : 200 pages of lore dealing with removing dust from fans

Moral of the story, don't judge a book by it's cover, but not by it's publisher either.

"Oh, I'll get an O'Reilly book - they're never shit!"

Those days have long passed. For example:

• Internet Annoyances : A book on how to make your internet experience "stress free"
• Facebook Cookbook : how to make facebook apps and how to market them
• How to keep your boss from sinking your project : 24 pages of glorious advice
• Pragmatic Thinking and Learning : To copy paste selective parts of the description - We all know how to work with software and hardware, but what about wetware-our own brains? -snip- you'll see how to become more expert. -snip- You'll learn about different brain functions -snip- including the one simple habit that separates the geniuses from the "wanna-bes."

I predict in the next 5 years O'Reilly will release the following quality books:

• Mathematics Cookbook : 100 simple recipes for additions and subtractions
• Javascript Popup Programming : learn how to use jquery or prototype in exciting new ways to market your products
• Editing Config Files : a book about config files, with endless lists of config file examples and how to best approach editing them
• Brownnosing cookbook : 100 original ways to make your boss uncomfortable
• The definitive guide on server maintenance : 200 pages of lore dealing with removing dust from fans

Moral of the story, don't judge a book by it's cover, but not by it's publisher either.

I also love the sound of cassettes, but poll a bunch of teenagers today and they'll find the cold compression artifacts of 128kbps mp3s more comfortable than the warm buzzy hiss of your old tapes.

I dunno... maybe buy/borrow a book, and improve?
 
It's a competitive market out there. Skills pay the bills.

"While the entire HTML 5 standard is years or more from adoption, there are many powerful features available in browsers today. In fact, five key next-generation features are already available in the latest (sometimes experimental) browser builds from Firefox, Opera, Safari, and Google Chrome. (Microsoft has announced that it will support HTML 5, and as Vic noted, "We eagerly await evidence of that.") Here's Vic's HTML 5 scorecard:

http://radar.oreilly.com/upload/2009/05/html5.png "

http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/05/google-bets-big-on-html-5.html

"While the entire HTML 5 standard is years or more from adoption, there are many powerful features available in browsers today. In fact, five key next-generation features are already available in the latest (sometimes experimental) browser builds from Firefox, Opera, Safari, and Google Chrome. (Microsoft has announced that it will support HTML 5, and as Vic noted, "We eagerly await evidence of that.") Here's Vic's HTML 5 scorecard:

http://radar.oreilly.com/upload/2009/05/html5.png "

http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/05/google-bets-big-on-html-5.html

Oh, wait, they did, like a decade ago.
 

There is an O'Reilly book from 9 years ago devoted to parallelism in Oracle, which might be a little hard to locate, since it is oddly titled Oracle Parallel Processing (ISBN 1-56592-701-X)
 

Of course, since Microsoft would never consider patenting something that wasn't new and novel, that Oracle can't be considered prior art... I can't help but to wonder if, after their patents are awarded, Microsoft might discover that Oracle has been using these newly-patented technologies for more than a decade without paying license fees.
 

After all, it should be impossible for a DBMS to benefit from a multiprocessor machine without infringing.
 

Microsoft alone has several major and radically different GUI APIs, and there are several common third party ones in addition to that.

Windows has Win32. Things like MFC are simply abstractions on top of Win32. And the Win32 API has evolved since the early 90s - yet remains backwards compatible. A programmer can use any abstraction he likes, but the core Win32 API it uses is has remained consistent. A Win32 binary works across all compatible systems - there is no need to compile separate binaries for Windows 2000, Windows 7, etc. Compare to Linux, where using binary software not compiled specifically for each distribution is often discouraged...

Firefox 3 didn't compile in RHEL/CentOS 4 with the shipped versions of libraries - and RHEL 4 is from 2005.

The complaint doesn't say anything about any drivers. Like I said, it only covers the GNU tools distributed by Linksys that the FSF owns the copyright to.

There was an issue about a version of GCC with modifications for Broadcom's bcm4710 chipset. I don't know if that was covered in this settlement (the complaint does mention GCC), but those changes wouldn't be a part of the driver itself.

Before you judge on this issue, it helps to read comments by various involved parts - those raising the issue to attention, MS people who have implemented ODF, and informed commenters outside this dispute. So, here's a bunch of links to start with.

First of all, a series of blog post by OASIS' Rob Weir (who's criticizing MSOffice) and Microsoft's Doug Mahugh (who's defending it) that evolved into a kind of a public discussion on the issue. Here they are in chronological / meaningful reading order:

http://www.robweir.com/blog/2009/05/update-on-odf-spreadsheet.html
http://blogs.msdn.com/dmahugh/archive/2009/05/05/odf-spreadsheet-interoperability.aspx
http://www.robweir.com/blog/2009/05/follow-up-on-excel-2007-sp2s-odf.html
http://blogs.msdn.com/dmahugh/archive/2009/05/09/1-2-1.aspx
http://www.robweir.com/blog/2009/05/battle-for-odf-interoperability.html

Then there's some outside commentary. I've taken the following links from comments in Doug's blog posts, and they tend to either be neutral or side with MS on this, so it may not be a representative sample. If you have any representing informed argument for the other side (e.g. by members of ODF committee, or ODF implementers - in general, people who know the ins and outs of the spec, and can accurately judge on its wording and intent - not random blogosphere FUD from either side), please mention them in replies.

http://ajg.math.concordia.ab.ca/?p=4
http://adjb.net/post/Notes-on-Document-Conformance-and-Portability-4.aspx
http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2009/05/odf-11-formula-support-in-office-sp2.html

http://oreilly.com/oreilly/author/ch02.html#tools

Generally the answer is; the people doing the hiring, being time-serving lackies, don't want anyone working for them that is smarter then them. And being non-techies themselves, risk losing control or looking stupid, as in a new techie-CTO would wonder why they got their job. The best way of getting found out is to hire a non-techie CTO and keep recycling the real IT staff .:)

'Industry experience does little to prepare you for the additional complexities of working within the bounds of government .. Chopra has demonstrated that he has these skills .. Try a few of these Virginia technology initiatives on for size:'

* the first officially-approved open source textbook in the country, the Physics Flexbook.

* integrating iTunes U with Virginia's state education assessment framework;

* the Learning Apps Development Challenge, a competition for the best iPhone and iPod Touch applications for middle-school math teaching;

* a Ning-based social network to connect clinicians working in small health care offices in remote locations;

* a state-funded "venture capital fund" to allow government agencies to try out risky but promising new approaches to delivering their services or improving their productivity;

* a lightweight approval and testing process that allows the government to try out new technologies before making a full, expensive commitment.
- unquote -

If he's not a techie, then who actually created these ?

We all discussed Aneesh Chopra on /. a month ago, folks. No less than Tim O'Reilly has vouched for him as a technological bad-ass. Read that. Read the comments. Then return here and carry on. There's no need for us to have to re-learn who this guy is every time he's written about here.

As a Brit, this appointment won't affect me directly. But indirectly US Government policy has an important global effect. I'll be watching closely to see whether ODF becomes widely used as a document format by the US Federal Government.

The ODF Alliance have welcomed the appointment, as have Tim O'Reilly and a host of other people so I'm hopeful that it will turn out to be a good thing

(1) get another job, (2) sue people, or (3) invent some magic spell?

directly to understanding:

I don't think that people are out to screw me personally.

The temptation to save a few dollars by grabbing a free copy of the textbook is very understandable to me.

?

I think there's just something plain broken about the search engine results.

Ok, I was going to see if you have metadata tags for search engines but .... I can't find your book on your publishers site even. When I search for it nothing matching your description comes up. How can you expect Google and Yahoo! to index your pages when your publisher can't? I'm not attacking you but I just spent five minutes trying to find your book by going to your publisher and going to Amazon but since you're not the main author, I'm having a really really hard time!