Slashback: OpenDocuments, RFID Passports, Firefox Celebration

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.

Comments

Too much controversy.

[CyricZ]

Indeed, if there's one thing that we can learn from this whole OpenDocument debacle, it's that we should instead use LaTeX and plaintext.

Plaintext emails and memos work just fine. LaTeX is fantastic for more complex documents. And you can even output PDFs of documents, if you really want to make viewing easy and exact.

These new technologies seem to bring nothing but problems, especially when the existing formats work so well.

Re:Too much controversy.

[laughingcoyote]

Parent is not a troll, I get stuff in HTML and .doc and .rtf all the time that uses no formatting at all that couldn't be done in plaintext. (Line breaks, and...that's about it.) It's silly, it wastes bandwidth, it wastes space, and it wastes time. Even most of the posts I see here, despite the fact HTML is usable, make use of nothing but good old text and line breaks. Most of the correspondence I receive is the same. I do encourage people to send me stuff in plaintext unless they really need the formatting capability, and then to send it in OpenDocument.

Re:Too much controversy.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the minimum of what's needed in an office suite,

• Spreadsheets, graphs, presentations, OpenDocument has it. LaTeX fails it.
• a single-file container format so exchange is easy. OpenDocument has it. HTML and LaTeX fails it;
• a user interface that regular users can migrate to. OpenDocument has it. HTML has it. LaTeX fails it;
• macro language (admitedly not standardised in OpenDocument). OpenDocument has it. LaTeX fails it;
• integration with other office formats such as OleDB datasources. OpenDocument has it. LaTeX fails.

The people willing to forsake all that are 1% of people. You're in the 1%. This isn't a topic you understand, you're out of touch with regular users, and please don't talk about it.

Re:Too much controversy.

[Coryoth]

Before we start, I agree with you entirely: LaTeX is a silly option as any sort of replacement for OpenDocument formats, and the person who suggested it was a fool. I ought to clear up a few points however. ...presentations, OpenDocument has it. LaTeX fails it.

LaTeX actually does exceptionally good presentations if you actually know how to use it. There are some packages out there to help, or you can simply roll your own to get the best results. In fact LaTeX offers something no Office suite I've ever seen does: the ability to have a single document that is both the presentation and the full paper report at the mere toggle a switch.

I think the biggest problem is that the basic LaTeX slides package sucks (it was designed for OHP transparencies) and some of the other presentation pakages are a little underwhelming in terms of visual flair. In practice it is quite easy to quickly design "templates" (in practice documentclasses) that look as good or better than anything I've seen PowerPoint produce - I've even written the better part of a GUI tool to let you drag and drop images and text to design one - but it takes a little know how which, apparently, most LaTeX presenters don't have.

LaTeX represents a damn fine solution to the issue of presentations, especially when you are doing one as a summary of more detailed paper report.

macro language (admitedly not standardised in OpenDocument). OpenDocument has it. LaTeX fails it;

What exactly do you think TeX is? TeX is a macro language. It may not have the "live updates" that you seem to have in mind, but that more to do with the compilation step rather than any lack of macro capability of TeX's part. Run TeX again and you'll get all your updates/changes magically propogating through.

Jedidiah.

About ODF, Mass.

[GreyWolf3000]

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

I hardly think this will be a big issue in the election for Massachusetts voters, but if it becomes one, this will be a huge way to get non-techies to identify problems with the Microsoft monopoly. If this issue somehow becomes a big (if not the biggest) factor in this election, we can expect ODF to come up in elections all over the place.

Re:About ODF, Mass.

[max born]

Be interesting to see if William Galvin receives any campaign finance contributions from Microsoft when he runs.

If he does, I trust you'll do your duty as a citizen and enlighten the electorate with a few well written letters to the editors of the major Mass. newspapers. Ordinary folks may not know about ODF but they'll certainly know corruption when they see it.

Peace

Re:A note on OpenDocument...

[Bellum Aeternus]

MS isn't a government institution, you can't just petition them into doing something. They'll only do it if it something that will improve their bottom line. So far, they haven't felt that open standards do that. Perhaps, they'll see the error of their ways - but a petition won't make MS do anything.

Just thought I'd point out the obvious.

Re:Firefox fans ... celebrate 100 million download

[char1iecha1k]

This may sound dumb but....

If you assume that this happens with all software, then you just have to assume total downloads is an arbitary figure and use it to compare with other downloads?

RTFL

[oldosadmin]

Read the link.

Quote: Microsoft has stated that they will support the OpenDocument format in MS Office if there is customer demand:

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200510161 05739574

The purpose of this petition is to quantify the customer demand for OpenDocument support. EndQuote

Re:Firefox fans ... celebrate 100 million download

[CyricZ]

This comes up every time such stats are mentioned.

First of all, they don't track downloads via the update feature of Firefox.

Second, while you've downloaded it ten times, there are many businesses and schools who have installed it on hundreds of workstations from a single download. So it may be one of those things that balances out in the end.

And finally, it's not so much about the exact number. It's about the general magnitude of the number. Even if they're 10 million downloads off either way, that's still an impressive number of people to reach.

Huh?

[sH4RD]

This comes with the recent news that Flock has also decided to open source their browser.

They had a choice?

Oops Someone dosn't have a clue

[jfmiller]

Pacheco expressed his concern that OpenDocument would not be usable by people with disabilities, and his committee is holding a hearing at the State House to discuss the format. However, it's not clear whether Pacheco's moves will have any effect.

If he thinks that the closed format of MSOffice is usable by people with disabilities he has another thought coming.

JFMILLER

Re:RFID justification is BS

[Daengbo]

My gf just renewed her passport in Thailand and got one of theire brand new "ePassports," which includes RFID. Although there are a million privacy adn security issues, her main interest was that it is so much prettier than her last one...

Re:RFID justification is BS

[Anonymous Coward]

The more people that are enabled to steal your "identity" (meaning pretend to be you when they commit fraud) the more privacy you will have, since nobody will be able to accurately track you electronically.

Re:100 million downloads? I guess numbers do lie

[TinyManCan]

By displays pages correctly you mean "Is broken in the same ways IE is."

Re:Firefox fans ... celebrate 100 million download

[Bogtha]

Second, while you've downloaded it ten times, there are many businesses and schools who have installed it on hundreds of workstations from a single download. So it may be one of those things that balances out in the end.

No. If you have x unknown amount of additional downloads that shouldn't be counted, and y number of installations that weren't counted, then the odds of x - y = 0 (the hypothesis that it "balances out in the end") seems extremely unlikely.

Why is there this fascination with using all kinds of contorted non-logic to try and derive statistics from data that just can't support it? If you don't have the facts, the right thing to do is hold your hands up and say "I don't know", and the wrong thing to do is say "well because we don't know how many we undercount by and how many we overcount by, we'll just sweep logic under the rug and pretend that it "balances out".

Big "Kidnap Me" Sign

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

RFID's in passports are one of the dumbest anti-terrorism ideas to make it past the drawing board. It has already been demonstrated that so-called "short-range" RFID tags can be read up to 70 feet away with easily attainable current technology, the tools will only get more sensitive as time passes.

The "anti-skimming material" that the Dept of State references will make it harder to get exact bits off the RFID, but it sure won't stop someone from being able to at least tell if you have one of these RFID passports in your pocket.

Carrying your passport around with you (as you are required to do in most foreign countries) will be the equivalent of wearing a big sign on your back that says, "Get Your Grudge On! Kidnap Me! I'm an American!"

Short of sending hundreds of legit blank passports directly to Osama, I can't think of a passport plan likely to enable more terrorism than this cockamamie scheme.