Linked by Eugenia Loli on Thu 24th Aug 2006 16:33 UTC
Massachusetts will begin using OpenDocument as the default document format later this year as planned, but it will be sticking with Microsoft Office in the near term, the state's top tech executive said.
Permalink for comment 155906
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
News
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/18/13 22:33 UTC
Official Apple statement on PRISM and privacy: "Regardless of the circumstances, our Legal team conducts an evaluation of each request and, only if appropriate, we retrieve and deliver the narrowest possible set of information to the authorities. In fact, from time to time when we see inconsistencies or inaccuracies in a request, we will refuse to fulfill it." This is basically Apple re-publishing their earlier statement in a more official manner. You either believe it, or you don't.
Linked by Anonymous on 06/18/13 22:26 UTC
The open source Contiki operating system and its commercial Thingsquare distribution are making strides towards the connected home. According to a Computerworld article, a new LED light bulb manufacturer is putting small computers into their light bulbs. Each computer runs the Contiki OS, which gives each bulb an IP address and allows them to be controlled with a smartphone application. To connect the bulbs to the application, the bulbs use both Wi-Fi and the much lower power IEEE 802.15.4 mesh technology.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/18/13 22:25 UTC
"Google asked the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on Tuesday to ease long-standing gag orders over data requests it makes, arguing that the company has a constitutional right to speak about information it's forced to give the government. The legal filing, which cites the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech, is the latest move by the California-based tech giant to protect its reputation in the aftermath of news reports about sweeping National Security Agency surveillance of Internet traffic." Draining the ditch after the cow has drowned in it.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/18/13 17:45 UTC
"I can't find one person who has been using the Nexus 7 for an extended period of time, and hasn't seen a massive downgrade in performance. Just what kind of downgrade are we talking here? I cannot pick up my Nexus 7 without experiencing problems like a lag of ten seconds, or more, just to rotate the display; touches refusing to acknowledged; stuttering notification panel actions; and unresponsive apps." Fully and utterly agreed. My Nexus 7 was blazing-fast and awesome for a few months, and at some point, it just started sucking. Just like that. I've tried loads of ROMs, and nothing helps.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/18/13 17:32 UTC, submitted by poundsmack
A new release of the hobby operating system MenuetOS! The release notes are a bit non-descript, but you'll have to take what you can get: "updates and improvements (picview, httpc, ehci, ...)".
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/17/13 17:58 UTC
"The Internet is one of the most transformative technologies of our lifetimes. But for 2 out of every 3 people on earth, a fast, affordable Internet connection is still out of reach. And this is far from being a solved problem. There are many terrestrial challenges to Internet connectivity - jungles, archipelagos, mountains. There are also major cost challenges. Right now, for example, in most of the countries in the southern hemisphere, the cost of an Internet connection is more than a month's income. Solving these problems isn't simply a question of time: it requires looking at the problem of access from new angles. So today we're unveiling our latest moonshot from Google[x]: balloon-powered Internet access." Insane.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/17/13 17:52 UTC
"MineAssemble is a tiny bootable Minecraft clone written partly in x86 assembly. I made it first and foremost because a university assignment required me to implement a game in assembly for a computer systems course. Because I had never implemented anything more complex than a 'Hello World' bootloader before, I decided I wanted to learn about writing my own kernel code at the same time. Note that the goal of this project was not to write highly efficient hand-optimized assembly code, but rather to have fun and write code that balances readability and speed. This is primarily accomplished by proper commenting and consistent code structuring." Just cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/14/13 21:03 UTC
Jon Rubinstein, former CEO of Palm: "Well, I'm not sure I would have sold the company to HP. That's for sure. Talk about a waste. Not that I had any choice because when you sell a company you don't get to decide that. Obviously, the board and shareholders decide that. If we had known they were just going to shut it down and never really give it a chance to flourish, what would have been the point of selling the company? I think the deal we had with Verizon really hurt us, but who knew that at the time? These things are all hindsight."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/14/13 20:46 UTC
"And so it is with Dell's Alienware X51 R2, a small form factor gaming PC in console digs. It's shaped similar to Microsoft's Xbox 360 Slim, and though it's slightly larger than either a 360 or PlayStation 3, the X51 R2 would be right at home in a living room setting nestled next to a large screen TV. Indeed, it's adept at running Steam's Big Picture mode, and if your primary objective is to play games in the living room, go ahead and consider the X51 R2 a hybrid game console." This is obviously not the only machine like this - still, these are very valid console alternatives even for those that don't like being hunched over with a cramped WASD-claw. Also, PC gamers among us: could you get away with the $699 model for gaming?
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/14/13 17:32 UTC
From Bloomberg: "Microsoft, the world's largest software company, provides intelligence agencies with information about bugs in its popular software before it publicly releases a fix, according to two people familiar with the process. That information can be used to protect government computers and to access the computers of terrorists or military foes." The lid has officially been blown off.More News »
Sponsored Links
Member since:
2006-07-04
OpenXML is an open standard. As such, one can guarantee the fidelity of documents converted between OpenXML and ODF (as much as can be, anyway, since ODF doesnt' support all of MS's features). In the case of using the MS sponsored plugins, OpenXML is merely a temporary intermediate format. Someone starts Word, opens an ODF file, it's converted on the fly to a temporary OpenXML file, Word opens that file, and converts the data to its own internal structures. The reverse happens when saving to ODF.
How does the "good" ODF plugin work when reading an ODF file from Word? Does it convert the file to .doc then feed that .doc file to Word? What's the difference (besides the fact that the ODF to DOC conversion is based on OO.o's DOC support, which is faulty for complex files)?
Oh, and your main complaint when you mistakenly said that Office 2007 was required was that users would have to *pay* for Office 2007, so using MS's ODF plugin wasn't free as in beer. Now you're chaning your story to say that you're concerned about lockin (which, as I've show above, makes no sense).
And you keep spreading the myth that OpenXML is a Windows-only format. It's not. MacBU is working on adding OpenXML to Mac Office as we speak, so it works on Macs. Apple is one of the sponsors of OpenXML, so that practically guarantees that it works on Macs. Novell's Gnumeric spreadsheet already supports OpenXML, so OpenXML works on Linux.
And before you start talking about ActiveX controls and whatnot, please try to explain away the fact that the Windows version of OO.o supports OLE, a windows only technology, and therefore OO.o can produce ODF files containing windows-only stuff (that being, OLE objects). What happens when such a file is opened on another platform? The app must deal with the stuff it doesn't understand or support (i.e. the OLE objects) by ignoring it, keeping it around as a blob, or whatever. It's the same with OpenXML. If an OpenXML file contains ActiveX controls, OLE objects (which are pretty much the same thing in that they're both embedded COM objects), or other Windows-only stuff (if there are any other Windows only stuff that can be saved; I don't know of any), and an app on another platform must open the document, then the app must deal with those things in the same way and ODF app would have to deal with OLE objects stored by the Windows version of OO.o.
Edited 2006-08-25 15:57