In addition to the other issues, it takes a large team of people at NASA to use each rover. If they had another 20-30, the manpower allocation to driving these things around would be impractical. On the other hand, the DARPA Granc Challenge was actually completed this year, so it's possible that they'll be doing rovers that can drive themselves around before too long, which will be much more efficient in terms of support staff.
Of course, the success of the rover program doesn't just mean that the rovers are good designs, but also that the equipment in the rovers is good. Making a dozen more identical rovers is probably not worthwhile, but having devices you can debug and fix the software in from a different planet is a big win, and those solar panels are clearly a great part.
If you're the IT manager, it's your decision to make. The people who sign your checks don't have any way of evaluating whether your argument is good or not, because you're the top person with any clue about this stuff. The only person you have to run it by is the person who signs your purchase orders, and only if you're actually buying anything. If you ask for permission, and they say no, and the alternative fails, you're the one who gets fired.
But then you have to call the stored procedure with hardcoded SQL, and you need the argument to be handled properly. The right solution is to never escape anything, but always pass constants as bound arguments. It's actually easier and more maintainable than doing a lot of string concatenations, and is often faster (because the database can use a cached execution plan and doesn't have to reparse the SQL).
It turns out that, in order to get good RISC performance, you need to design a new architecture every few revisions. The RISC instruction set that the P4 uses is different from the P3, which is different from the P2, and so forth. The benefit of the way Intel does things is that, since they're emulating a CISC instruction set on a RISC core, they can switch to emulating the same CISC instruction set on a better RISC core, and nobody has to be told about the new architecture. The translation layer can optimize the input for the chip it's running on, and take advantage of things like how many registers the chip actually has and how many branch delay slots it uses. And it turns out to be easier to translate CISC into RISC than RISC into other RISC, because you've got a better idea of what the code is actually doing.
Of the people using any operating systems when you walk up to them on the street, 1 in 11 probably will be using Linux. It's a reasonably common embedded OS for smart phones, although it's completely hidden from the users. If you're making a phone with an entirely custom UI, Linux provides a nice programming environment, and you're not losing anything you want, anyway.
MIT seems to have done well in this year's Head of the Charles Regatta. Reports of opposing crew shells bursting into flames have been dismissed by experts as "pure myth", but spectators were annoyed to find that all of the good viewing locations on the Harvard Bridge were occupied for the duration of the event by MIT mechanical engineering students.
I don't think they've actually defined what they do for storm names 22+ in the year after they use Alpha. It's not like next year's 22nd storm can happen before they've decided, since they meet (to decide what names to retire and choose replacements) between seasons anyway. They only really need to have a plan for each individual year at the beginning of the year.
Actually, they have names for X, Y, and Z, but only for Northern East Pacific storms (and they're on a 2-year, rather than 6-year, cycle). Beats me as to why they've got 24 names for the Pacific side and 21 for the Atlantic side, when almost all of the storms in these areas are on the Atlantic (which is an east coast, and also has the big cyclone-generating area); all the major Pacific storms are in other parts of the ocean, where they get names from a different list.
In this case, it seems clear that Roche is not going to have any problem selling all of the drug that they can possibly make in the short term, and Taiwan is only going to make the stuff while there is a shortage, so the company doesn't lose any sales in the long term. It's not like people who were unable to get the drug when they came down with the flu will hang on, barely alive, for a while until enough of the drug can be produced for them. They'll either die, or they'll recover, and either way, they won't need the drug later.
People most want to listen to enough different music that it's not always repeating. The iPod does this, and PDAs don't have the storage. That's the entire mass market for devices. The Walkman was, at the time, more popular than computers, and now the iPod is more popular than PDAs.
Now, PDAs are actually reasonably popular, because they're good for keeping track of certain stuff. But they haven't gotten any better at that in 5 years, and everybody who needs one has one, so there's not a big market for new devices.
Well, in this case they're only selling Windows versions in stores, so it doesn't matter much. To run Q4 on Linux, you buy the box in a store, and you download the Linux binaries. (Or, if you just want to run a server, you just download the Linux binaries). Activision is responsible for putting the box in stores, and they're only doing the Windows thing.
Personally, I miss id games having a free first section, such that people don't buy the CD for the binaries, but only for the cross-platfrom data files. And you can test whether the game is going to work before you buy it, by playing the intro; maybe they should have a downloadable total conversion level in which you're in a computer store, and you have to find the Quake 4 box and leave, so that you can see if the binaries you've downloaded are working right before you actually buy the game.
The only thing in Java is HSQLDB (and, presumably, some trivial code to interface to it). So all you have to do is write a full-featured, file-backed, in process, SQL database in Python. Or you could write it in C++ and not require a language that OO doesn't already use.
(HSQLDB is a database that works a bit like MS Access, except that it works correctly, for cases where you want to have database files and send them to people in much the same way that you move spreadsheet files around, rather than use The Database Server with The Database on it. As far as I know, there aren't any other open source projects that do this.)
That's why you make sure the bank's certificate is signed with the public key that you get directly from the bank, not some authority that you can't trust. It's not like your bank is some random entity that you've never encountered before; you're already carrying around a physical object containing digital information from your bank (your ATM card). At the same time that they go to a two-factor scheme with a smart card, they can stick the bank's SSL certificate on the card.
At least in New England, many homes already use natural gas for heating and cooking; my home has a gas heaters, hot water heaters, dryer, and stoves, so it's a logical start for a home system. The odd thing for me wouldn't be having a gas appliance, it would be putting the car in the driveway.
Of course, natural gas is a limited resource, but this is really more of a transitional step until there are hydrogen fueling stations, allowing individuals to start using hydrogen-powered vehicles using only existing infrastructure.
Actually, since it's after 1.5, it's down at least 8/6. I believe this is due to their plans to replace most of the functionality of the browser with extensions.
But Linux does have abstraction in the filesystem layer, as the article mentions, same as Solaris and the BSDs. Really, at that point it makes a lot of sense, because you want a large number of different filesystems. And, for that matter, there's no getting around the fact that, since in UNIX everything is a file, there must be a bunch of different implementations of files. I don't recall any of them having a layer of indirection for memory management, but it is definitely not that sensible; there are a number of things processes can tell you about their memory, and there are multiple layers of structure due to supporting shared memory, but the kernel manages memory in general in a unified way, and the only thing you really want to do for special processes is let them lock their memory in RAM.
The main different between Linux and Solaris in philosophy is really in locking, where Linux tries to minimize lock depth (to make it likely that developers will get the locking right and avoid needing to lock a million locks to do anything), while Solaris goes for the finest-grained locking (to make it unlikely that things that don't absolutely have to block each other will). Of course, it turns out that it's a moot point; the bad stuff these days is cache line bouncing, which means that it's slow to acquire any lock that a different processor has had recently, and you practically never have actual contention if you do things reasonable.
The reason it isn't cheaper to buy a computer from HP with Linux than with Windows is that it doesn't save any company any money to not put Windows on a machine. Microsoft made a deal with HP to get a certain amount of money per machine they sell in return for letting them put OEM Windows on whatever machines they want. It would cost HP more to buy as many copies of Windows as they actually need, so this deal is in their favor. On Microsoft's end, it saves them money in accounting to let HP have however many copies of Windows they want, as opposed to having to sell them a particular number of copies. In fact, they only have to give HP one copy of Windows and the right to make more, so the OEM deal costs them less to produce than a bunch of copies of Windows.
The fundamental issue is that software is free to produce per unit; there are costs per version and per contract, and putting Linux on some computers and not putting Windows on those computers doesn't reduce either cost. For the same reason that additional copies of Linux don't cost Linux developers anything, additional OEM copies of Windows don't cost Microsoft anything. So there's no reason for any of the companies involved to charge you less for Linux than Windows. If you want to save on a computer with Linux, you need to get it from somebody who sells very few computers with Windows and spends less by buying individual copies than an OEM license would cost.
The real danger to Microsoft of using ODT is that it makes it much harder to force people to upgrade. With proprietary stuff, the default format in the latest version isn't supported by older versions, making it hard for people using older versions to avoid upgrading when they get documents from people with newer versions. If everyone is choosing ODT (either by default, or, more likely, by selecting it specifically), files from the new version will work fine in the old version, either because the format is the same, or because the format was updated in ways that maintain compatibilty, because it was done by people who want to keep things compatible.
This doesn't matter much for adoption of non-Microsoft products, but it does matter to Microsoft's income. It also makes it easier for individual users within an organization to use non-Microsoft products without having hassles getting them to interoperate with the rest of the organization (think using Firefox in a generally IE environment).
Actually, that sounds like something Rockstar would actually do. It's kind of long and rambling, and doesn't involve an enemy that would particularly fight back, so it would need some extra stuff, like an army of child soldiers trained by the video game industry. After all, one kid, already in prison, doesn't make an interesting challenge. And destroying stores could be interesting, but they've already made that game. If the video game industry and the Army turned out to be working together, it would even be pretty close to Max Payne, aside from lacking a vague explanation as to why this random guy is at all competant at fighting with random weapons.
Of course, nobody would buy it, because everybody knows that a game is going to be really lame if the level designer starts by modelling his workplace.
The thing I liked about it was that it starts with that basis, but then the whole quest might have just been a weird dream and not actually important; nothing that was supposed to have happened outside the dream world (fighting with her father, destroying drawings, etc) seems to have actually happened, Mom doesn't seem to have been affected or particularly saved, the guy she meets doesn't recognize her, and so forth.
I think it's a great subversive movie. She wants to run away from the circus to real life, and then has this real life sequence: something stressful happens, people try to deal with it, you have nightmares if you go to sleep during a traumatic event. Sometimes things just happen, and it's nobody's fault. You think it's a movie, and therefore will have a plot, but it's actually like real life, and doesn't follow that logic. The dream has thematic elements (a quest, an enemy, obstacles, portants, foreshadowing, etc), but that's all just an illusion. In the real world, you're still nervous when the doctor calls, and all your effort in the dream doesn't affect the outcome at all.
I almost think that they should have done it with multiple endings (like Clue in the theaters), where her Mom dies in some prints and survives in others, and there's no way to know until that point which will happen.
The particular thing the article is talking about is actually scheduling policies. Solaris lets you specify a lot of different policies, whereas Linux and FreeBSD limit you to only a sensible subset. My guess is that Sun had customers who demanded some dumb scheduling policies, and had to meet these demands, while Linux sysadmins have enough to do without mucking with system performance in at best marginal and generally imperceptable ways.
Linux does understand hyperthreading, but it has some different effects. The main one is that it will try to keep physical processors from being idle, so it migrates tasks away from all running on different virtual processors on the same physical processor.
It also has extensive support for machines with various topologies, under the general category of NUMA, which is presumably the same area as what he describes for Solaris. This is necessary for getting reasonable performance on a lot of the big (>32 processor) and modular machines.
There is also support for "processor sets", which, in the Linux terminology, is a system administration concept for giving portions of a large machine to different processes and changing it around dynamically. (I suspect that this is really what "processor sets" in Solaris is about, and either he's confused, or the user is responsible for arranging this to match the configuration of the machine)
I think you have to admit that the iPod Photo was a flop; they don't have any current models with built-in cameras (the photo feature gets photos from a real digital camera), and I haven't heard of it being a big seller. So the Video is clearly not their first bad move, and a bad move is clearly not so big a deal.
My expectation is that the video feature will be a flop; if people buy the video iPods, it'll be because they're the only currently-available 10G+ models. But if they don't buy the video iPods, they'll buy the nano instead, so it won't matter too much to Apple's bottom line (particularly as Apple's production capacity is low enough that they don't end up with much unsold stock, even if something flops).
But the video feature isn't the selling point of the video iPods (which Apple sells as the regular "iPod"); the main thing is that they increased the storage at the same price. The reason to add the video feature is so that they can get it into the market, such that, in a couple of years, most people who have full-size iPods can play video on them. Then they can come up with something to take advantage of the ability, and have a market for it already.
Since that article was written, they launched a new satellite, as the article mentions at the end. This is the first of the new series, currently in testing and scheduled to be launched as older satellites fail. When the article was written, it was a vaguely reasonable concern that they didn't yet have new satellites ready to send. Also, it's traditional to post stories on a topic in chronological order, so that they make sense.
The Massachusetts IT Department has a FAQ about the decision.
The Massachusetts decision doesn't apply to anything other than documents produced by the Executive Department. Citizens can do whatever they want. Other departments can do whatever they want. Your customers can do whatever they want. The only burden on anybody else is that, if they want to read documents produced by the Executive Department, they'll need some way to read them. But this is always true, and you'll certainly have more choices for ways to read these documents in OpenDocument format than, for example, the new Microsoft XML format. For example, with OpenDocument and a free converter, you can read them in practically any version of Word; with Microsoft's, you need the latest Office to do anything with it.
Surely if you think that citizens and agencies should be free to use whatever format they want, the State shouldn't be restricted in what format it uses. It's decided that OpenDocument is what it wants to use.
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In addition to the other issues, it takes a large team of people at NASA to use each rover. If they had another 20-30, the manpower allocation to driving these things around would be impractical. On the other hand, the DARPA Granc Challenge was actually completed this year, so it's possible that they'll be doing rovers that can drive themselves around before too long, which will be much more efficient in terms of support staff.
Of course, the success of the rover program doesn't just mean that the rovers are good designs, but also that the equipment in the rovers is good. Making a dozen more identical rovers is probably not worthwhile, but having devices you can debug and fix the software in from a different planet is a big win, and those solar panels are clearly a great part.
If you're the IT manager, it's your decision to make. The people who sign your checks don't have any way of evaluating whether your argument is good or not, because you're the top person with any clue about this stuff. The only person you have to run it by is the person who signs your purchase orders, and only if you're actually buying anything. If you ask for permission, and they say no, and the alternative fails, you're the one who gets fired.
But then you have to call the stored procedure with hardcoded SQL, and you need the argument to be handled properly. The right solution is to never escape anything, but always pass constants as bound arguments. It's actually easier and more maintainable than doing a lot of string concatenations, and is often faster (because the database can use a cached execution plan and doesn't have to reparse the SQL).
It turns out that, in order to get good RISC performance, you need to design a new architecture every few revisions. The RISC instruction set that the P4 uses is different from the P3, which is different from the P2, and so forth. The benefit of the way Intel does things is that, since they're emulating a CISC instruction set on a RISC core, they can switch to emulating the same CISC instruction set on a better RISC core, and nobody has to be told about the new architecture. The translation layer can optimize the input for the chip it's running on, and take advantage of things like how many registers the chip actually has and how many branch delay slots it uses. And it turns out to be easier to translate CISC into RISC than RISC into other RISC, because you've got a better idea of what the code is actually doing.
Of the people using any operating systems when you walk up to them on the street, 1 in 11 probably will be using Linux. It's a reasonably common embedded OS for smart phones, although it's completely hidden from the users. If you're making a phone with an entirely custom UI, Linux provides a nice programming environment, and you're not losing anything you want, anyway.
MIT seems to have done well in this year's Head of the Charles Regatta. Reports of opposing crew shells bursting into flames have been dismissed by experts as "pure myth", but spectators were annoyed to find that all of the good viewing locations on the Harvard Bridge were occupied for the duration of the event by MIT mechanical engineering students.
I don't think they've actually defined what they do for storm names 22+ in the year after they use Alpha. It's not like next year's 22nd storm can happen before they've decided, since they meet (to decide what names to retire and choose replacements) between seasons anyway. They only really need to have a plan for each individual year at the beginning of the year.
Actually, they have names for X, Y, and Z, but only for Northern East Pacific storms (and they're on a 2-year, rather than 6-year, cycle). Beats me as to why they've got 24 names for the Pacific side and 21 for the Atlantic side, when almost all of the storms in these areas are on the Atlantic (which is an east coast, and also has the big cyclone-generating area); all the major Pacific storms are in other parts of the ocean, where they get names from a different list.
In this case, it seems clear that Roche is not going to have any problem selling all of the drug that they can possibly make in the short term, and Taiwan is only going to make the stuff while there is a shortage, so the company doesn't lose any sales in the long term. It's not like people who were unable to get the drug when they came down with the flu will hang on, barely alive, for a while until enough of the drug can be produced for them. They'll either die, or they'll recover, and either way, they won't need the drug later.
People most want to listen to enough different music that it's not always repeating. The iPod does this, and PDAs don't have the storage. That's the entire mass market for devices. The Walkman was, at the time, more popular than computers, and now the iPod is more popular than PDAs.
Now, PDAs are actually reasonably popular, because they're good for keeping track of certain stuff. But they haven't gotten any better at that in 5 years, and everybody who needs one has one, so there's not a big market for new devices.
Well, in this case they're only selling Windows versions in stores, so it doesn't matter much. To run Q4 on Linux, you buy the box in a store, and you download the Linux binaries. (Or, if you just want to run a server, you just download the Linux binaries). Activision is responsible for putting the box in stores, and they're only doing the Windows thing.
Personally, I miss id games having a free first section, such that people don't buy the CD for the binaries, but only for the cross-platfrom data files. And you can test whether the game is going to work before you buy it, by playing the intro; maybe they should have a downloadable total conversion level in which you're in a computer store, and you have to find the Quake 4 box and leave, so that you can see if the binaries you've downloaded are working right before you actually buy the game.
The only thing in Java is HSQLDB (and, presumably, some trivial code to interface to it). So all you have to do is write a full-featured, file-backed, in process, SQL database in Python. Or you could write it in C++ and not require a language that OO doesn't already use.
(HSQLDB is a database that works a bit like MS Access, except that it works correctly, for cases where you want to have database files and send them to people in much the same way that you move spreadsheet files around, rather than use The Database Server with The Database on it. As far as I know, there aren't any other open source projects that do this.)
That's why you make sure the bank's certificate is signed with the public key that you get directly from the bank, not some authority that you can't trust. It's not like your bank is some random entity that you've never encountered before; you're already carrying around a physical object containing digital information from your bank (your ATM card). At the same time that they go to a two-factor scheme with a smart card, they can stick the bank's SSL certificate on the card.
At least in New England, many homes already use natural gas for heating and cooking; my home has a gas heaters, hot water heaters, dryer, and stoves, so it's a logical start for a home system. The odd thing for me wouldn't be having a gas appliance, it would be putting the car in the driveway.
Of course, natural gas is a limited resource, but this is really more of a transitional step until there are hydrogen fueling stations, allowing individuals to start using hydrogen-powered vehicles using only existing infrastructure.
Actually, since it's after 1.5, it's down at least 8/6. I believe this is due to their plans to replace most of the functionality of the browser with extensions.
But Linux does have abstraction in the filesystem layer, as the article mentions, same as Solaris and the BSDs. Really, at that point it makes a lot of sense, because you want a large number of different filesystems. And, for that matter, there's no getting around the fact that, since in UNIX everything is a file, there must be a bunch of different implementations of files. I don't recall any of them having a layer of indirection for memory management, but it is definitely not that sensible; there are a number of things processes can tell you about their memory, and there are multiple layers of structure due to supporting shared memory, but the kernel manages memory in general in a unified way, and the only thing you really want to do for special processes is let them lock their memory in RAM.
The main different between Linux and Solaris in philosophy is really in locking, where Linux tries to minimize lock depth (to make it likely that developers will get the locking right and avoid needing to lock a million locks to do anything), while Solaris goes for the finest-grained locking (to make it unlikely that things that don't absolutely have to block each other will). Of course, it turns out that it's a moot point; the bad stuff these days is cache line bouncing, which means that it's slow to acquire any lock that a different processor has had recently, and you practically never have actual contention if you do things reasonable.
The reason it isn't cheaper to buy a computer from HP with Linux than with Windows is that it doesn't save any company any money to not put Windows on a machine. Microsoft made a deal with HP to get a certain amount of money per machine they sell in return for letting them put OEM Windows on whatever machines they want. It would cost HP more to buy as many copies of Windows as they actually need, so this deal is in their favor. On Microsoft's end, it saves them money in accounting to let HP have however many copies of Windows they want, as opposed to having to sell them a particular number of copies. In fact, they only have to give HP one copy of Windows and the right to make more, so the OEM deal costs them less to produce than a bunch of copies of Windows.
The fundamental issue is that software is free to produce per unit; there are costs per version and per contract, and putting Linux on some computers and not putting Windows on those computers doesn't reduce either cost. For the same reason that additional copies of Linux don't cost Linux developers anything, additional OEM copies of Windows don't cost Microsoft anything. So there's no reason for any of the companies involved to charge you less for Linux than Windows. If you want to save on a computer with Linux, you need to get it from somebody who sells very few computers with Windows and spends less by buying individual copies than an OEM license would cost.
The real danger to Microsoft of using ODT is that it makes it much harder to force people to upgrade. With proprietary stuff, the default format in the latest version isn't supported by older versions, making it hard for people using older versions to avoid upgrading when they get documents from people with newer versions. If everyone is choosing ODT (either by default, or, more likely, by selecting it specifically), files from the new version will work fine in the old version, either because the format is the same, or because the format was updated in ways that maintain compatibilty, because it was done by people who want to keep things compatible.
This doesn't matter much for adoption of non-Microsoft products, but it does matter to Microsoft's income. It also makes it easier for individual users within an organization to use non-Microsoft products without having hassles getting them to interoperate with the rest of the organization (think using Firefox in a generally IE environment).
Actually, that sounds like something Rockstar would actually do. It's kind of long and rambling, and doesn't involve an enemy that would particularly fight back, so it would need some extra stuff, like an army of child soldiers trained by the video game industry. After all, one kid, already in prison, doesn't make an interesting challenge. And destroying stores could be interesting, but they've already made that game. If the video game industry and the Army turned out to be working together, it would even be pretty close to Max Payne, aside from lacking a vague explanation as to why this random guy is at all competant at fighting with random weapons.
Of course, nobody would buy it, because everybody knows that a game is going to be really lame if the level designer starts by modelling his workplace.
The thing I liked about it was that it starts with that basis, but then the whole quest might have just been a weird dream and not actually important; nothing that was supposed to have happened outside the dream world (fighting with her father, destroying drawings, etc) seems to have actually happened, Mom doesn't seem to have been affected or particularly saved, the guy she meets doesn't recognize her, and so forth.
I think it's a great subversive movie. She wants to run away from the circus to real life, and then has this real life sequence: something stressful happens, people try to deal with it, you have nightmares if you go to sleep during a traumatic event. Sometimes things just happen, and it's nobody's fault. You think it's a movie, and therefore will have a plot, but it's actually like real life, and doesn't follow that logic. The dream has thematic elements (a quest, an enemy, obstacles, portants, foreshadowing, etc), but that's all just an illusion. In the real world, you're still nervous when the doctor calls, and all your effort in the dream doesn't affect the outcome at all.
I almost think that they should have done it with multiple endings (like Clue in the theaters), where her Mom dies in some prints and survives in others, and there's no way to know until that point which will happen.
The particular thing the article is talking about is actually scheduling policies. Solaris lets you specify a lot of different policies, whereas Linux and FreeBSD limit you to only a sensible subset. My guess is that Sun had customers who demanded some dumb scheduling policies, and had to meet these demands, while Linux sysadmins have enough to do without mucking with system performance in at best marginal and generally imperceptable ways.
Linux does understand hyperthreading, but it has some different effects. The main one is that it will try to keep physical processors from being idle, so it migrates tasks away from all running on different virtual processors on the same physical processor.
It also has extensive support for machines with various topologies, under the general category of NUMA, which is presumably the same area as what he describes for Solaris. This is necessary for getting reasonable performance on a lot of the big (>32 processor) and modular machines.
There is also support for "processor sets", which, in the Linux terminology, is a system administration concept for giving portions of a large machine to different processes and changing it around dynamically. (I suspect that this is really what "processor sets" in Solaris is about, and either he's confused, or the user is responsible for arranging this to match the configuration of the machine)
I think you have to admit that the iPod Photo was a flop; they don't have any current models with built-in cameras (the photo feature gets photos from a real digital camera), and I haven't heard of it being a big seller. So the Video is clearly not their first bad move, and a bad move is clearly not so big a deal.
My expectation is that the video feature will be a flop; if people buy the video iPods, it'll be because they're the only currently-available 10G+ models. But if they don't buy the video iPods, they'll buy the nano instead, so it won't matter too much to Apple's bottom line (particularly as Apple's production capacity is low enough that they don't end up with much unsold stock, even if something flops).
But the video feature isn't the selling point of the video iPods (which Apple sells as the regular "iPod"); the main thing is that they increased the storage at the same price. The reason to add the video feature is so that they can get it into the market, such that, in a couple of years, most people who have full-size iPods can play video on them. Then they can come up with something to take advantage of the ability, and have a market for it already.
Since that article was written, they launched a new satellite, as the article mentions at the end. This is the first of the new series, currently in testing and scheduled to be launched as older satellites fail. When the article was written, it was a vaguely reasonable concern that they didn't yet have new satellites ready to send. Also, it's traditional to post stories on a topic in chronological order, so that they make sense.
The Massachusetts IT Department has a FAQ about the decision.
The Massachusetts decision doesn't apply to anything other than documents produced by the Executive Department. Citizens can do whatever they want. Other departments can do whatever they want. Your customers can do whatever they want. The only burden on anybody else is that, if they want to read documents produced by the Executive Department, they'll need some way to read them. But this is always true, and you'll certainly have more choices for ways to read these documents in OpenDocument format than, for example, the new Microsoft XML format. For example, with OpenDocument and a free converter, you can read them in practically any version of Word; with Microsoft's, you need the latest Office to do anything with it.
Surely if you think that citizens and agencies should be free to use whatever format they want, the State shouldn't be restricted in what format it uses. It's decided that OpenDocument is what it wants to use.