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

A note on OpenDocument...

[oldosadmin]

The new OpenDocument Fellowship is working with a petition to get Microsoft to implement the format. SIGN IT! http://www.opendocumentfellowship.org/petition/

OSU Celebration

[mctk]

I can't think of any better way to say congratulations.

Seriously? Man, you're not planning my birthday party.

Re:OSU Celebration

[drinkypoo]

or maybe scantiliy clad ladies with fox masks.

...on fire.

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.

[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.

come on...

[mscnln]

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...

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.

Re:RFID justification is BS

[TWX]

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.

Wait.....Confused by parties....

[jabster]

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

That's not good enough

[LeonGeeste]

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.