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Slashback: OpenDocuments, RFID Passports, Firefox Celebration

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the it's-bad-if-i-can-leverage-that-for-political-office dept.

Slashback tonight brings updates and continuations of recent Slashdot stories including a continuation of the Massachusetts document format debate, a response from the US State Department on RFID passports, a unique celebration of Firefox's 100 millionth download, and more.

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.

2 of 197 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Too much controversy. by Noksagt · · Score: 3, Informative
    This is the minimum of what's needed in an office suite
    Right--you are arguing different philosophies. LaTeX could certainly be part of some monolithic Office Suite, but it is already very good at what it does. It may even be better than you give it credit for.
    Spreadsheets
    See the EMACS file as a proof of concept. Something similar could be written in TeX.
    graphs
    PSTricks & other packages let you add graphs which are generated on the fly.
    presentations
    I actually like LaTeX Beamer quite a bit--the PDF presentations are fantastic.

    Does LaTeX excel at any of these? Probably not. But why not do, as others do, and choose tools which DO excel at them.
    a single-file container format so exchange is easy. OpenDocument has it. HTML and LaTeX fails it;
    Just zip the needed files together, as OpenDoc does....
    * a user interface that regular users can migrate to. OpenDocument has it. HTML has it. LaTeX fails it;
    These are file formats. Not interfaces. There are friendly HTML and LaTeX authoring tools.
    * macro language (admitedly not standardised in OpenDocument). OpenDocument has it. LaTeX fails it;
    This is laughable. LaTeX is VERY scriptable.
    * integration with other office formats such as OleDB datasources. OpenDocument has it. LaTeX fails.
    No, again--the programs that grok OpenDoc have it. Not the format itself. There are LaTeX tools which can pull data from a database.
  2. Firefox, Flock and Flexbeta by hackwrench · · Score: 3, Informative

    I always use the latest nightly build so I don't know how they count that.

    I notice that the Flexbeta review is not comparing Flock to the latest nightly builds of Firefox because some features the latest nightly builds have that are similar to Flock's are missing from the screenshots. They are giving Flock credit for features Flock may have inherited from the Firefox codebase.