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Slashback: OpenDocuments, RFID Passports, Firefox Celebration
Politics still muddying the water of the MA OpenDocument debate. The Commonwealth's Secretary of State William Galvin says he has "grave concerns" about the switch and told secretary of administration and finance Thomas Trimarco that "we will not be participating." Galvin is considered one of the strong candidates to run as a rival candidate for next year's gubernatorial race against incumbent Mitt Romney who supports the switch.
RFID passports still the best option. The US State Department released a final ruling on the issue of RFID technology to be included in all US passports after October 2006 which also contained some of the reasoning behind their move. Other technologies were apparently looked at and discarded due to the difficulty of implementation and several security measures have apparently been taken to try and placate the opposition.
Firefox fans at Oregon State celebrate 100 million downloads. CNet has a pictorial about a local OSU LUG that had a few interesting ways to celebrate the recent big numbers on the Firefox downloads page. Happy to show their support students both painted a giant Firefox logo and launched a weather balloon, I can't think of any better way to say congratulations.
DrDOS didn't really break, it just reverted. The FreeDOS folks have an update on their webpage stating that DrDOS 8.1 no longer exists and all links on the DrDOS webpage apparently point to DrDOS 7.03. There were some negative reactions to the release or 8.1 stating that it included software that it shouldn't have so for now the "band-aid" fix appears to be in place.
Flexbeta takes a look at Flock. Noting the roots of Flock in Mozilla's Firefox browser, the folks over at Flexbeta take a quick look at the additional functionality offered by this newcomer. This comes with the recent news that Flock has also decided to open source their browser. Looks like this Firefox offspring is fighting hard for some recognition of its own.
iTunes continues to take over the world. With the recent release of iTunes Australia and Apple's continued growth in the industry a recent announcement brings us "Standford on iTunes". This new service will give alumni and the general public access to a wide range of Stanford-specific digital audio content.
Paul Grosfield - the quicker picker upper.
Standford engineers have discovered...
"Standford on iTunes"
It appears ScuttleMonkey didn't just make a typo, but just has no clue that it is actually Stanford not Standford...
It means somewhere between 1 and 99,999,991 users.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
Hold on....The Democrats are opposed to ODF.....supporting a big business....thought....only.....Republicans....did that....
Damn. This must be Bush's fault somehow....
-john
Slashdot: you'll not find a more wretched collection of villainy and disreputable types...
100 million downloads is a good thing, but what exactly does it mean?
Well I didnt download it the other 999,999,990 times, so I gues it means that firefox kick ass!
serenity now!
And while were at it, let's all go back to doing everything from the command line! This whole WYSIWYG thing is waaay to complicated.
These new technologies seem to bring nothing but problems, especially when the existing formats work so well.
Which is exactly why I'm sticking to parchment and carrier pigeons. These new technologies mess up everything. Sure, instant messaging is a bitch, but at least there are no worries about different protocols!
Seriously, consider the fact that grandma has to use this.
What I'm trying to say is that I love you.
Even their website says "Copyright 2004" and their latest news item is dated 2003. Or has their site always been like that?
The punch line? He sent it as an attachment, in .DOC format. The fucker took around 256 KB to send an email which contained under 1 KB of content.
He was fired not very long thereafter. I remember one manager kept stating about him, "He spends too much travel time" (he was down the long hall and around the corner, and never picked up the phone, instead insisting on showing up in Scott's office and badgering him).
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
I think a good idea would be for them to truly find out how many people are using it. Make it so that when you download it, you have to state how many people it's for. And to make that accurate, you should have to give your SSN or whatever your country's national ID number is, and the ID number of everyone who you claim will use it. Then they can strike any duplicates. To make sure people don't give it away and distort the number, they could make the file encrypted such that it will only run if you register it. To confirm you're not using someone else's number, they could set up centers at DMV's (Department of Motor Vehicles) where you can verify that it's you before you can register it (and they'd have computers you'd use to register your copy).
To prevent people from compiling it on their own, they could close the source so that you can only run it through the official installer and only that would be counted in the tallies. To verify transparency, they should put all the names and ID numbers in a central database that everyone can access so that independent agencies can verify the names and contact people to be sure they're actually using it. This could all be funded by selling the contact information in the database to direct marketing organizations (the legitimate ones, not the ones who harass you).
This is the only way to get an accurate, scientific count of the true number of users.
Rank my idea: http://www.sinceslicedbread.com/node/531
Good point.
Of course this counter should only display INDETERMINATE.
In fact all counters can produce errors of this sort, so they should all display INDETERMINATE.
As a matter of fact, every counter in the entire world could have the same sort of errors, even clocks are not 100% correct, so every counter of any sort should simply display INDETERMINATE.
I mean if you can't guarantee 100% accuracy, then there is not point in even attempting to measure anything.
You should feel happy, you have made the world a better place.
(accidently posted this to someone who wasn't a moron)