The main issue with PHP is highlighted here.
on
PHP 5.3 Released
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· Score: 1
The PHP development team has no vision, and they haven't ever had one. It's a hodgepodge that started out to be a "web perl" way back in the day, but then Java developers started using it and so 5 looked more and more Java-esque, but obviously being Java isn't their vision either.
Take the namespacing in this release. They are using the BACKSPACE as the namespace separator. It's f'ing awful and inconsistent, but they wanted to jam it into 5.3... even though Dimitri had a patch that would have used "::" for the separator, the PHP devs didn't want to use it because it would have to go in PHP 6.
That's because, just like the inconsistent library arguments, the PHP developer community, like it's user base, is "practical".. they will sacrifice correctness for easiness. It's the same reason there's no way to flip a php.ini directive and have annoying warnings/errors turned into exceptions instead... "It's hard (because our codebase is shitty.)"
PHP sucks, but it doesn't matter to most. It's too popular. But it does suck because there's no consistent vision for it.
The question is not whether or not someone wants to believe in the garbage pseudo-science that Hubbard spewed out of his lying maw. The question is whether or not the "Church of Scientology" is a racketeering and, one could argue, terrorist organization, and it most certainly is.
The "Church" is the real issue, I'm sorry I didn't make my veiw on that clear.
I'm certainly not defending religion in any manner here, but there is a difference. You can belong to a Christian church for 60 years without giving a dime to their cause, and really, I've never witnessed a Catholic, Lutheran, etc. minister/priest in all my years EVER say (paraphrasing) "You can get to heaven if you give us money."
You cannot, as in it's not allowed, belong to the "Church" of Scientology in any manner without paying them money, and lots of it. To obtain the highest level of Scientology requires thousands upon thousands of dollars (to be revealed Hubbard's half baked science fiction as their "revelations.")
If you're REALLY interested in why Scientology is different from a religion visit:
This is the most telling part of the article I think:
Last week, Henson unsuccessfully asked the judge to dismiss the prosecutor's case because the government showed bias by not investigating the deaths of Ashlee Shaner and Stacy Meyer. Both women died at the Golden Era Productions location.
Two women DIE in a Scientology facility and it's not even INVESTIGATED, while the man who is trying to get prosecutors to look at the case winds up convicted.
Odd? No, it's Scientology's usual MO. If you don't think so you've NEVER done any real research on the group.
It's NOT a religion and it didn't even START OUT as pretending to be one. It ONLY moved it's agenda to becoming a religion to avert charges to it's AMAZINGLY weak pseudo-science (fiction) base of ideas and to get TAX EXEMPTION status. And even THAT was only granted in the US after Scientology agreed to drop one of the MANY lawsuits it had filed with the IRS... AND Hubbard's wife and several followers were arrested, charged and JAILED with the largest known infiltration of the IRS in years as they gleaned information to use to threaten people opposed to their pyramid-scheme cult!
It's ALL THERE in the court records.
I have to say, if someone was following me around -- physically -- and making "jokes" about violence on the Internet, and was a known hater of my religion
Scientology is not a religion, it's part cult, part racketeer organization and part pyramid scheme. Please stop referring to it as a religion, you simply spread more misinformation.
Also, notice how the website erected to rally support for him (http://freehenson.tripod.com/) has mysteriously been ripped down.
If you can make that much doing nothing, what if we added some Web 2.0 sprinkle...
Some idiot decides that someone doing something simple that makes a lot of money could be better with some buzzwords. Total pointy hat management.
What he fails to see, of course, is that the profitability of domain parking was never in the "quality" of the appearence of the parked domain, but it was gotten by virtue of being the first people to snap up the most domains.
As mentioned in the article, most "domain parking companies" aren't grown, they're bought from companies that own domains already and then slowly added to by using automated tools to snatch up new good domains.
Actually, according to the transcript, the reason for the agreement to promote IE was not "symbiotic" or even stock-driven. Microsoft basically threatened to stop making Office for Mac unless Mac agreed to promote IE over Netscape.
ISV's are, in essence, Microsoft's customers. RMS is not a customer of Microsoft. That's the difference, really.
This is Microsoft employees saying their customers, the ones they're supposed to be developing good API's and such for, are pawns and they should never be catered to.
The agreement even states that Apple will encourage its employees to use Microsoft Internet Explorer for Macintosh for all Apple-sponsored events and will not promote another browser to its employees.
I had no idea Apple had agreements like this.
Point taken, however, one of the main facets of fair use as it was incorporated into the Copyright Act of 1976 is for purposes of criticism and news reporting, which I think both cover this particular blog.
Even if the worst case scenario was discovered, for instance the blog was owned and operated by a competitor to this radio station in question, the length of the clips and the nature of the person presenting them seems to be in line with the purposes of "fair use of a copywright work."
How do you "take out of context" a 40 second clip about someone talking about frying someone on the electric chair because they don't like their political views (complete with moronic sound effects)?
I'm not at all surprised by the idiocy that goes on in the realm of talk radio, but all this guy did was put up clips to show ADVERTISERS that were paying for ads on this show what was going on.
If the quotes were defensible, ABC should have defended them. They didn't. And as people have pointed out, commenting on segments of shows like this with portions of the original broadcast is COMPLETELY legal under the Fair Use laws.
...I just realized I was responding to "Anonymous Coward." Doh.
The 2002 report has a less sensationalist headline and content, good find. (as well as not having a headline claiming "millions" dead and then detailing the 180 thousand dead.)
It's pretty clear scientists have no idea why this is happening, but everyone loves to say "global warming" with little to no evidence, and this is no different.
The gist of these articles is that similar to bears hibernating, these penguins molt and cannot swim anymore for short periods. Prior to this, they must fatten themselves up and when that doesn't happen, they can starve.
The same factors that spell a bad year for fishing in these areas can also spell starvation for these animals. Obviously, some argue that the fishing itself is a contributing factor, but environmental issues like currents seems to be the larger issue. If it was entirely tied to climate, you wouldn't see spikes in the deaths of these birds as noted in 1986, 2002, this year, etc. Also, we have very little data on earlier years, apparently.
This seems rather much ado about nothing, from my uneducated glances over the wording.
Basically, this agreement is saying that Microsoft won't wield patents against those contributing software to OpenSuSE until after the Microsoft-Novell deal runs out or you try to wield patents against MS themselves.
But, really, what was the situation before? Either you wrote software that DIDN'T violate MS patents, or you DID and just hoped like hell that they wouldn't use their patents to sue you. There is a false sense of security in violating MS patents because there is a perceived "MAD" policy of MS's patent farms versus IBM/Novell/etc.'s patents, but, realistically, there's no saying they'd come to your rescue if you contributed something to an open source project.
So really, how does this change the strategy of contributing to linux through open source projects or the kernel itself? Either don't violate patents or hope they won't wield them against you. Either route you choose hasn't been closed by this agreement between Microsoft and Novell.
Despite our involvement in Iran and Iraq, the middle east is a nightmare and it's NOT all our fault. Mistakes have been made, but blaming the US for everything that's happened there is not rational.
Firstly, the fact that terrorists and insurgents can make stuff up faster than we (and here I mean "we" as in the US or just, in general, non-terrorists and non-insurgents, for sake of argument) can counter with fact is probably a true statement. It's MUCH tougher to actually back things up with facts than just wild accusations and propoganda. That's for sure.
However, the idea that insurgents (note the lack of the word "terrorist" in D. Cheney's rhetoric, they've finally lost that argument) are using the internet to disrupt US this upcoming election is rather ballsy.
So what, Mr. Cheney, people voting for Democrats this time around are in league with insurgents and terrorists? These "new media" channels that influence insurgents so much are actually the mainstream media as well that are giving US citizens information?
I think it's a bit simpler in nature. I think that insurgents hate the US and they hate the US military and they HATE westerners in general because their economy is a quagmire of shit and it's easier to hate wealthy nations than it is to reform a poor government run by corrupt theologues. I think that the Bush Administration has simply put US citizens in the line of fire, for right or wrong, and US citizens don't like that.
Trying to correct fiction with fact is all good and well, but the "voting for Democrats is supporting terrorism" rhetoric is childish.
Re:Software developers upset that they suck...
on
Why Software Sucks
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· Score: 1
The people that didn't complain about the late, good software are the people who didn't give up on your product and move to a competitors that was available and complete. What percentage was that? For some businesses/products it may be low, for others it may be high.
But in general, programmers don't dictate the release date or the feature set of the products they implement.
Re:Software developers upset that they suck...
on
Why Software Sucks
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· Score: 1
While I will preface this by saying that I am a software programmer, the fact of the matter is that programmers are really not to blame for all software problems. There are many issues that go into software being sub par. Customers sometimes ask for things without really knowing what they want until it's 80% implemented. Managers want stuff done yesterday and if it can't be done RIGHT "well, just move this over here and it will KINDA work."
But the actuality of all of it, despite parent's obvious annoyance with programmers, is that software is in INCREDIBLY high demand by an ENORMOUS amount of people so the entire process of it is rushed and pressure cooked. And in many cases, slightly inconvenient or quirky software that helps you get what you need done much faster than manually doing it yourself is far more useful than polished software that never arrives.
Nonetheless, missing out on the opportunity to socialize and discuss issues with a huge collection of people your own age is sad. College is a great place to meet friends, colleges and yes, mates. Once you go out into "the real world" the collection of people you are likely to interact with is not nearly as rich with opportunities to connect with people your age.
I, too, disliked the lack of quality education in college and quickly got a job that paid well and was fun. However, in retrospect I wish that I had lingered more and took the opportunity to plumb the vast social network that was University.
Re:Almost sounds like KDE 3...
on
GNOME 2.16 Released
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· Score: 4, Informative
Default KDE 3 takes up less memory and uses less resources to run than GNOME currently.
Run them side by side and see for yourself.
KDE is not bloated in comparison to GNOME.
I see people whining about Ubuntu. Frankly, its the first distro that works right out of the box with minimal config.
What rock have you been living under? SuSE has shipped a product that worked well out of the box for quite some time now. Mandriva has as well.
Ubuntu is easier to set up than like, Debian or Gentoo... but other than that, there's nothing that really makes it any more easy to use than a solid Deb install or even Fedora. It's all the same software.
At least SuSE and Mandriva (Mandrake) have added nice system tools.
On "Net Neutrality:"
It pits network owners such as Verizon and AT&T against the companies who buy their bandwidth, such as Google and Amazon, and it hinges on whether the network owners can charge extra to deliver certain kinds of bits -- bill more for streaming video, for example, than simpler data like text e-mail. ...If the Googles of the world win, the network owners will undoubtedly figure out some other way to raise prices.
No matter which way it goes, it means a new element of government regulation. And as far as who pays to build out the networks -- in the end, one way or another, most of the costs will still be passed on to the consumer.
My question is this, if it's simply about building and upgrading networks and the costs will be ultimately be passed on to the customer, why not just raise rates to those that purchase bandwidth accross the board? Why add the overhead of lobbying Congress to COMPLICATE the process of selling bandwidth?
The FBI's Trilogy program cost more than $535 million but failed to produce a usable case-management system for agents because of cost overruns and technical problems, according to the Government Accountability Office.
While Trilogy led to successful hardware upgrades and thousands of new PCs for bureau workers and agents, the final phase -- a software system called the Virtual Case File -- was abandoned last year. The FBI announced in March that it would spend an additional $425 million in an attempt to finish the job. The new system would be called "Sentinel."
I need to check the Government Accountability Office more often. It's good to know we're spending 1 billion dollars to found a, most likely, failed attempt at secure computing for the FBI. Doh.
First off, plugins like this were going to arise anyway. Look at (http://sourceforge.net/projects/aodl). This is a conversion program started in 2005. MS has just decided it would like to be "officially, but not too officially" in charge of it.
Interesting comments in the blog:
While we still aren't seeing a strong demand for ODF support from our corporate or consumer customers, it's now a bit different with governments. We've had some governments request that we help build solutions so that can use ODF for certain situations...
From my understanding this is more along the lines of "certain governments in all situations." But, hell, MS can probably win those markets back with an Open Office that supports ODF in some way, but as a plugin MS can blame the standard or the plugin writers (who are working on an Open project, remember, not a MS one!). Which brings us to:
Nobody wants a format that's constantly changing, so if you do decide to extend the format like OpenOffice did, what happens when ODF 2.0 comes out and it specifies that feature differently from how OpenOffice did it?
A little late to ask these questions isn't it? Why not just go to the OASIS site (http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php? wg_abbrev=odf-adoption) become a member, and get the standards set for the stuff you need? Oh. Because you really don't care, you're just doing "lip DIS-service" to ODF by pointing out the problems that all standards run into.
If Microsoft had gone to OASIS and said "Look we really love this ODF stuff, but to interoperate properly with Office, it would have to support feature X, Y and Z, at least in theory" it would have happened for SURE. However, they were betting that once MS said "hey we won't support ODF" then the "turncoat" governmental offices that had demanded ODF would say "oh... well... poo" and go back to Office.
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The PHP development team has no vision, and they haven't ever had one. It's a hodgepodge that started out to be a "web perl" way back in the day, but then Java developers started using it and so 5 looked more and more Java-esque, but obviously being Java isn't their vision either. Take the namespacing in this release. They are using the BACKSPACE as the namespace separator. It's f'ing awful and inconsistent, but they wanted to jam it into 5.3 ... even though Dimitri had a patch that would have used "::" for the separator, the PHP devs didn't want to use it because it would have to go in PHP 6.
That's because, just like the inconsistent library arguments, the PHP developer community, like it's user base, is "practical" .. they will sacrifice correctness for easiness. It's the same reason there's no way to flip a php.ini directive and have annoying warnings/errors turned into exceptions instead... "It's hard (because our codebase is shitty.)"
PHP sucks, but it doesn't matter to most. It's too popular. But it does suck because there's no consistent vision for it.
The question is not whether or not someone wants to believe in the garbage pseudo-science that Hubbard spewed out of his lying maw. The question is whether or not the "Church of Scientology" is a racketeering and, one could argue, terrorist organization, and it most certainly is.
The "Church" is the real issue, I'm sorry I didn't make my veiw on that clear.
I'm certainly not defending religion in any manner here, but there is a difference. You can belong to a Christian church for 60 years without giving a dime to their cause, and really, I've never witnessed a Catholic, Lutheran, etc. minister/priest in all my years EVER say (paraphrasing) "You can get to heaven if you give us money."
You cannot, as in it's not allowed, belong to the "Church" of Scientology in any manner without paying them money, and lots of it. To obtain the highest level of Scientology requires thousands upon thousands of dollars (to be revealed Hubbard's half baked science fiction as their "revelations.")
If you're REALLY interested in why Scientology is different from a religion visit:
http://www.xenu.net/
and of course:
http://www.caic.org.au/
Two women DIE in a Scientology facility and it's not even INVESTIGATED, while the man who is trying to get prosecutors to look at the case winds up convicted.
Odd? No, it's Scientology's usual MO. If you don't think so you've NEVER done any real research on the group.
It's NOT a religion and it didn't even START OUT as pretending to be one. It ONLY moved it's agenda to becoming a religion to avert charges to it's AMAZINGLY weak pseudo-science (fiction) base of ideas and to get TAX EXEMPTION status. And even THAT was only granted in the US after Scientology agreed to drop one of the MANY lawsuits it had filed with the IRS ... AND Hubbard's wife and several followers were arrested, charged and JAILED with the largest known infiltration of the IRS in years as they gleaned information to use to threaten people opposed to their pyramid-scheme cult!
It's ALL THERE in the court records.
Scientology is not a religion, it's part cult, part racketeer organization and part pyramid scheme. Please stop referring to it as a religion, you simply spread more misinformation.
Also, notice how the website erected to rally support for him (http://freehenson.tripod.com/) has mysteriously been ripped down.
What he fails to see, of course, is that the profitability of domain parking was never in the "quality" of the appearence of the parked domain, but it was gotten by virtue of being the first people to snap up the most domains.
As mentioned in the article, most "domain parking companies" aren't grown, they're bought from companies that own domains already and then slowly added to by using automated tools to snatch up new good domains.
How is this article
Actually, according to the transcript, the reason for the agreement to promote IE was not "symbiotic" or even stock-driven. Microsoft basically threatened to stop making Office for Mac unless Mac agreed to promote IE over Netscape.
ISV's are, in essence, Microsoft's customers. RMS is not a customer of Microsoft. That's the difference, really.
This is Microsoft employees saying their customers, the ones they're supposed to be developing good API's and such for, are pawns and they should never be catered to.
The agreement even states that Apple will encourage its employees to use Microsoft Internet Explorer for Macintosh for all Apple-sponsored events and will not promote another browser to its employees. I had no idea Apple had agreements like this.
Point taken, however, one of the main facets of fair use as it was incorporated into the Copyright Act of 1976 is for purposes of criticism and news reporting, which I think both cover this particular blog.
Even if the worst case scenario was discovered, for instance the blog was owned and operated by a competitor to this radio station in question, the length of the clips and the nature of the person presenting them seems to be in line with the purposes of "fair use of a copywright work."
How do you "take out of context" a 40 second clip about someone talking about frying someone on the electric chair because they don't like their political views (complete with moronic sound effects)?
...I just realized I was responding to "Anonymous Coward." Doh.
I'm not at all surprised by the idiocy that goes on in the realm of talk radio, but all this guy did was put up clips to show ADVERTISERS that were paying for ads on this show what was going on.
If the quotes were defensible, ABC should have defended them. They didn't. And as people have pointed out, commenting on segments of shows like this with portions of the original broadcast is COMPLETELY legal under the Fair Use laws.
The 2002 report has a less sensationalist headline and content, good find. (as well as not having a headline claiming "millions" dead and then detailing the 180 thousand dead.)
It's pretty clear scientists have no idea why this is happening, but everyone loves to say "global warming" with little to no evidence, and this is no different.
The gist of these articles is that similar to bears hibernating, these penguins molt and cannot swim anymore for short periods. Prior to this, they must fatten themselves up and when that doesn't happen, they can starve.
The same factors that spell a bad year for fishing in these areas can also spell starvation for these animals. Obviously, some argue that the fishing itself is a contributing factor, but environmental issues like currents seems to be the larger issue. If it was entirely tied to climate, you wouldn't see spikes in the deaths of these birds as noted in 1986, 2002, this year, etc. Also, we have very little data on earlier years, apparently.
This seems rather much ado about nothing, from my uneducated glances over the wording.
Basically, this agreement is saying that Microsoft won't wield patents against those contributing software to OpenSuSE until after the Microsoft-Novell deal runs out or you try to wield patents against MS themselves.
But, really, what was the situation before? Either you wrote software that DIDN'T violate MS patents, or you DID and just hoped like hell that they wouldn't use their patents to sue you. There is a false sense of security in violating MS patents because there is a perceived "MAD" policy of MS's patent farms versus IBM/Novell/etc.'s patents, but, realistically, there's no saying they'd come to your rescue if you contributed something to an open source project.
So really, how does this change the strategy of contributing to linux through open source projects or the kernel itself? Either don't violate patents or hope they won't wield them against you. Either route you choose hasn't been closed by this agreement between Microsoft and Novell.
Despite our involvement in Iran and Iraq, the middle east is a nightmare and it's NOT all our fault. Mistakes have been made, but blaming the US for everything that's happened there is not rational.
Firstly, the fact that terrorists and insurgents can make stuff up faster than we (and here I mean "we" as in the US or just, in general, non-terrorists and non-insurgents, for sake of argument) can counter with fact is probably a true statement. It's MUCH tougher to actually back things up with facts than just wild accusations and propoganda. That's for sure.
However, the idea that insurgents (note the lack of the word "terrorist" in D. Cheney's rhetoric, they've finally lost that argument) are using the internet to disrupt US this upcoming election is rather ballsy.
So what, Mr. Cheney, people voting for Democrats this time around are in league with insurgents and terrorists? These "new media" channels that influence insurgents so much are actually the mainstream media as well that are giving US citizens information?
I think it's a bit simpler in nature. I think that insurgents hate the US and they hate the US military and they HATE westerners in general because their economy is a quagmire of shit and it's easier to hate wealthy nations than it is to reform a poor government run by corrupt theologues. I think that the Bush Administration has simply put US citizens in the line of fire, for right or wrong, and US citizens don't like that.
Trying to correct fiction with fact is all good and well, but the "voting for Democrats is supporting terrorism" rhetoric is childish.
The people that didn't complain about the late, good software are the people who didn't give up on your product and move to a competitors that was available and complete. What percentage was that? For some businesses/products it may be low, for others it may be high.
But in general, programmers don't dictate the release date or the feature set of the products they implement.
While I will preface this by saying that I am a software programmer, the fact of the matter is that programmers are really not to blame for all software problems. There are many issues that go into software being sub par. Customers sometimes ask for things without really knowing what they want until it's 80% implemented. Managers want stuff done yesterday and if it can't be done RIGHT "well, just move this over here and it will KINDA work."
But the actuality of all of it, despite parent's obvious annoyance with programmers, is that software is in INCREDIBLY high demand by an ENORMOUS amount of people so the entire process of it is rushed and pressure cooked. And in many cases, slightly inconvenient or quirky software that helps you get what you need done much faster than manually doing it yourself is far more useful than polished software that never arrives.
Nonetheless, missing out on the opportunity to socialize and discuss issues with a huge collection of people your own age is sad. College is a great place to meet friends, colleges and yes, mates. Once you go out into "the real world" the collection of people you are likely to interact with is not nearly as rich with opportunities to connect with people your age.
I, too, disliked the lack of quality education in college and quickly got a job that paid well and was fun. However, in retrospect I wish that I had lingered more and took the opportunity to plumb the vast social network that was University.
Default KDE 3 takes up less memory and uses less resources to run than GNOME currently. Run them side by side and see for yourself. KDE is not bloated in comparison to GNOME.
Sad to see Ubuntu fans modding down my comment, a legitimate opinion, because they don't like it. :(
Go wreck someone else's karma.
I see people whining about Ubuntu. Frankly, its the first distro that works right out of the box with minimal config.
What rock have you been living under? SuSE has shipped a product that worked well out of the box for quite some time now. Mandriva has as well.
Ubuntu is easier to set up than like, Debian or Gentoo... but other than that, there's nothing that really makes it any more easy to use than a solid Deb install or even Fedora. It's all the same software.
At least SuSE and Mandriva (Mandrake) have added nice system tools.
On "Net Neutrality:"
...If the Googles of the world win, the network owners will undoubtedly figure out some other way to raise prices.
No matter which way it goes, it means a new element of government regulation. And as far as who pays to build out the networks -- in the end, one way or another, most of the costs will still be passed on to the consumer.
It pits network owners such as Verizon and AT&T against the companies who buy their bandwidth, such as Google and Amazon, and it hinges on whether the network owners can charge extra to deliver certain kinds of bits -- bill more for streaming video, for example, than simpler data like text e-mail.
My question is this, if it's simply about building and upgrading networks and the costs will be ultimately be passed on to the customer, why not just raise rates to those that purchase bandwidth accross the board? Why add the overhead of lobbying Congress to COMPLICATE the process of selling bandwidth?
The FBI's Trilogy program cost more than $535 million but failed to produce a usable case-management system for agents because of cost overruns and technical problems, according to the Government Accountability Office. While Trilogy led to successful hardware upgrades and thousands of new PCs for bureau workers and agents, the final phase -- a software system called the Virtual Case File -- was abandoned last year. The FBI announced in March that it would spend an additional $425 million in an attempt to finish the job. The new system would be called "Sentinel."
I need to check the Government Accountability Office more often. It's good to know we're spending 1 billion dollars to found a, most likely, failed attempt at secure computing for the FBI. Doh.
First off, plugins like this were going to arise anyway. Look at (http://sourceforge.net/projects/aodl). This is a conversion program started in 2005. MS has just decided it would like to be "officially, but not too officially" in charge of it.
? wg_abbrev=odf-adoption) become a member, and get the standards set for the stuff you need? Oh. Because you really don't care, you're just doing "lip DIS-service" to ODF by pointing out the problems that all standards run into.
Interesting comments in the blog:
While we still aren't seeing a strong demand for ODF support from our corporate or consumer customers, it's now a bit different with governments. We've had some governments request that we help build solutions so that can use ODF for certain situations...
From my understanding this is more along the lines of "certain governments in all situations." But, hell, MS can probably win those markets back with an Open Office that supports ODF in some way, but as a plugin MS can blame the standard or the plugin writers (who are working on an Open project, remember, not a MS one!). Which brings us to:
Nobody wants a format that's constantly changing, so if you do decide to extend the format like OpenOffice did, what happens when ODF 2.0 comes out and it specifies that feature differently from how OpenOffice did it?
A little late to ask these questions isn't it? Why not just go to the OASIS site (http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php
If Microsoft had gone to OASIS and said "Look we really love this ODF stuff, but to interoperate properly with Office, it would have to support feature X, Y and Z, at least in theory" it would have happened for SURE. However, they were betting that once MS said "hey we won't support ODF" then the "turncoat" governmental offices that had demanded ODF would say "oh... well... poo" and go back to Office.