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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.
The new OpenDocument Fellowship is working with a petition to get Microsoft to implement the format. SIGN IT! http://www.opendocumentfellowship.org/petition/
Jay | http://oldos.org
For example, I've downloaded 10 myself - I'm sure many others have too.
There's no way to compare these numbers to the main competition (IE), so I'm not celebrating much myself.
ps First Post!?!
I read the text of the passport release earlier, and they claim to have addressed the privacy concerns but really haven't. The biggest problem is that a criminal could very easily grab all of your identity information without your knowledge. They assert that (I'm paraphrasing) "since the chip has no internal power source, it can't broadcast your identity". But that is a canard -- anyone who wants to read out your identity can simply use the same high-gain antenna to beam power your way as to pick up your passport's readout. Of course the protocols will be discovered -- at least by the people you don't want reading your passport.
All the more reason to stick your passport in the microwave with your new shirts from Wal-Mart.
Meanwhile, bop on over to www.house.gov and send a quick note of outrage to your representative!
For Flock to not open source their browser? By basing it on Firefox, doesn't the Mozilla Public License require that the changes to the source be distributed?
From the RFID passport link in the main article:
Based on that testing, the Department, in cooperation with the GPO,
will include an anti-skimming material in the front cover and spine of
the electronic passport that will mitigate the threat of skimming from
distances beyond the ten centimeters prescribed by the ISO 14443
technology, as long as the passport book is closed or nearly closed.
The Department will also implement Basic Access Control (BAC) to
mitigate further any potential threat of skimming or eavesdropping. BAC
recently has been adopted as a best practice by the ICAO New
Technologies Working Group and will soon be formally added to the ICAO
specifications. BAC utilizes a form of Personal Identification Number
(PIN) that must be physically read in order to unlock the data on the
chip. In this case, the PIN will be derived from the printed characters
from the second line of data on the Machine-Readable Zone that is
visibly printed on the passport data page. The BAC also results in the
communication between the chip and the reader being encrypted,
providing further protection.
There you have it - with an off-the-shelf reader you have to be within inches OR trick the user into opening the book, AND you have to type or scan in the encryption code.
This won't stop dishonest border guards from hiding a 2nd reader under their jacket and memorizing the secret codes, but it will stop the guy sitting in the row behind you on the airplane.
Now who was the wise guy who said only North Koreans needed RFID-enabled passports?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The built-in RFID leak-protection mechanism is a good start but it's not nearly enough for the Truly Paranoid [TM].
Who will be the first to try to patent a passport wallet made out of aluminum foil?
Who will trademark the name Passport Protector [TM]?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I'm all for using plain text a lot more, but using LaTeX as the only other format is foolish. Don't get me wrong, I love TeX, but it should, like Postscript/PDF be used for page layout, not for authoring content that is meant to be shared between individuals or applications.
We should use semantic markup to describe what the pieces of a document mean, not how they should look on the page, and then convert to TeX, Postscript, PCL, XSL FO, HTML, whatever, to create your output.
OpenDocument is the closest thing I've seen to a generic document model that can be used for common office documents (faxes, letters, proposals, etc.), and since it's XML, I can use XSLT to transform to or from it, something that you can't do with a page markup definition languages like Postscript or TeX.
[An aside: yes, yes, yes, I know you can create HTML, RTF, etc. from TeX and Postscript, and that's been a great help to me in the past, but the output is really not very usable except for layout, and you can't round trip the document, so you haven't really gained anything from the transformation. If you're trying to move from one layout-centric document type to another, whether it's between Word and LaTeX or whatever, it's often smarter to convert plain text and then mark them back up in your new format rather than use a converter. The result is always much better and it usually takes less time.]
Hah! As if Microsoft would even THINK ABOUT LaTeX. Look, Microsoft is struggling against (or is it US who are struggling against Microsoft for?) OpenDocument. LaTeX isn't even in their radar screen.
Besides, you forgot the reason for OpenDocument to exist: Inter-operability. And you also forgot its power: XML.
Anyone with an XML parser can read opendocument. But to read LaTeX, you need a complicated parser.
OpenDocument can be transformed into HTML with an XSLT template automatically. Heck, you could render OpenDocument with Internet Explorer! (With the appropriate XSL stylesheet, of course)
Also, any XML can be transformed into PDF via XSL:FO.
You could put a bunch of OpenDocument files and index them from with a simple program that supports XML.
The point of OpenDocument is that it's EASY to handle. The EZPublish content management system ALREADY supports importing and exporting of OpenDocument files. Heck, there's even a C++ IDE that can export the sourcefiles (syntax-highlighted) to OpenDocument.
I don't care how much you're fond of LaTeX. Is it powerful? Yes. But is it popular? Is it easy to implement?
Sorry, but I think you're stuck a few years behind.
I'm betting that it also doesn't count all of the installs from verious Linux venders. Auto-updated Redhat, gentoo, ...
It was me, I did it, I moved your cheese
Yes, and they won't care. Massachusetts has long been known for having the best politicians money can buy.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
"Spreadsheets, graphs, presentations" are areas where LaTeX excells. I like to use gnumeric to layout my data, and gnumeric or (heavy lifting) octave for calculations, but then saving from gnumeric to latex gives infinte control of presentation. For highschool quality reports, sure, print from the spreadsheet. For anything real (try to publish to a peer reviewed journal using .doc!) use latex. For graphs, use R. It is exceptional. But again, tie it all together in latex.
:-)
a single-file container format so exchange is easy which means you want a built in tarball roller? Not a bad idea. Anybody want to add a button to Kile's File/Save?
user interface that regular users can migrate to which requires you define "regular users". I agree that for highschool, and even lower division work, office products are fine. Business, all technical users, and upper division students should be able to use better tools. (Try KDE's Kile.)
macro language!!! *snort* Do you have any clue what latex even *is*? Have you heard of TeX? Did you know that LaTeX is a set of macros?
integration with other office formats is good to great for gnumeric and abiword, OpenOffice, and KOffice. Try selecting the "save as" button. It works
So unless by "regular users" you mean grandmas who have trouble sending email, or people who just want to write a quick letter, I think you underestimate LaTeX.
This probably isn't very relevant -- I presume what you mean is that he sent it as a Microsoft Word document. Back in 1994 I remember that the .DOC format was more well known for being plain ASCII text --- it was a common extension for electronic software user manuals everywhere.
Somewhere along the line, Microsoft decided to make it the default extension for Microsoft Word. I'm not sure if it was used in Word for DOS, but Word for Windows certainly became much more popular than the DOS one had ever been for all sorts of reasons. One of them was perhaps that shortly after Word for Windows was released, wherever it was installed, people who double-clicked on a .doc file in Windows would then be opening it on Word... never mind that it was plain ASCII text.
Point one, petition signatures do not equate to customer demand. Note the word 'customer'. I.e., the claim is that, if enough CUSTOMERS request the feature, then a future version MIGHT contain the requested feature.
Point two. The state of Massachusetts IS a current customer, and IS demanding this 'feature' and Microsoft is, so far, refusing to include it in any future version. So much for claims of "...will support the OpenDocument format in MS Office if there is customer demand."
Once their claim has been PROVEN FALSE, additional appeals based on that claim (as in this petition) are doomed from the start.
Acts of massive stupidity are almost never covered by warranty. --me.
Using the number of downloads to measure popularity of a product is like using software lines of code (SLOC) to measure productivity of a developer. Looking closely at these numbers and the individual cases will reveal that these numbers are not accurate measures. On the other hand, when taken over a long term and with appropriate statistical analysis, the SLOC has been used to predict costs and time involved in implementing new software features, products, and enhancements.
Call it a paradox of the universe, but using low-quality metrics as a predictor for the future is better than making a wild guess with no metrics. This works because while x-y=0 may be false, if x-y=b within a given margin, you can still use this information as a good predictor.