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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!?!
Paul Grosfield - the quicker picker upper.
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.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
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?
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...
Read the link.
1 05739574
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=20051016
The purpose of this petition is to quantify the customer demand for OpenDocument support. EndQuote
Jay | http://oldos.org
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.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
It means somewhere between 1 and 99,999,991 users.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
Supposedly they've come up with a cover that is effectively a Faraday cage. When the passport is closed it will severely impede RFID operation. If it works then it'd be much more effective for someone to come out in front of you with a knife and mug you for your passport than it would be to try to overpower the defenses built into the passport cover.
As far as I'm concerned, making it 'hard enough' to where it's more cost effective to resort to old fashioned brute force is just as good as not putting it in.
I'm not advocating in favor of this particular device either, but I'll admit that I'm kind of surprised that passports have been the way that they are for so incredibly long, when they're easily forged, easily modified, and probably fairly easily fraudulently applied for.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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...
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...
Put identity in the browser.
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".
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
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 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
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.
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.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.