Posted on 09/29/2005 8:52:01 PM PDT by Golden Eagle
The broader media usually take little interest in public policy debates about technology, but they’re missing a big story in Massachusetts.
The technology trades, blogs and industry are buzzing about a monumental policy shift in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Officials in the state have proposed a new policy that mandates that every state technology system use only applications designed around OpenDocument file formats.
Such a policy might seem like something that should concern only a small group of technology professionals, but in fact the implications are staggering and far-reaching. The policy promises to burden taxpayers with new costs and to disrupt how state agencies interact with citizens, businesses and organizations.
Worse, the policy represents an attack on market-based competition, which in turn will hurt innovation. The state has a disaster in the making.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Legal worries? He means they want to see the US patent system destroyed, and this is their way of circumventing it.
shrieking?
Please, all you do is make exuses and label people 'commies'.
And you fail to answer even a basic question: what kind of technology experience do you have?
You call that a 'personal attack' in an effort to avoid answering the question.
Allowing open access to public records is liberal? Preserving records in a format which someone can work with 100 years from now is liberal?
Quite so. Personally, I'm disappointed in Fox's blatant disregard for something so obvious as the fact that the author of the piece is in bed with a group funded (at least in part) by Microsoft. As flashbunny pointed out, discovering this reality was truly trivial.
I thought FNC was supposed to have more integrity than, say, CNN. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that it doesn't.
Mass officials have been quoted as saying PDF files meet the state standards. Please point me to some free software for creating PDF files.
{getting into the cone of silence} Shhhhh, I support 5 MACS and they run great. {getting out of the cone of silence}
In Brass Buzzard's world, anyone who doesn't bow and quiver before the Almighty Microsoft is either Liberal, Communist or a Hippy. Depends on whether or not he doesn't like you, really hates you, or simply detests your thinking for yourself.
Uh, File->Save As
It's what the adolescents of the board call me since they always lose any attempted arguments on the merits. Typical liberal behavior, obviously.
In Open Office, "File | Export as PDF"
http://www.primopdf.com/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/
http://www.pdf995.com/
it's called google.
You type something into it, and it finds it for you.
Those are just the first three. There are more, including software like html2pdf.
All free.
I thought ad hominem is what you were accusing others of in this thread. I disagreed with the anti-trust lawsuits brought against Microsoft. As a free market capitalist I don't support anti-trust legislation as it's just a club for the politically connected to control markets with.
Back to the point you're trying to distract from with ad hominems against me, this 'editorial' was written by MS to misrepresent OpenDocument. Absolutely nothing stops MS from making OpenDocument a file type that their applications can read and write in addition to their own proprietary formats. Microsoft just fears it won't have MA taxpayers stuck on it's useless Office product upgrade cycle anymore when their are free word processors and spreadsheet programs available to use.
Hmm, here's one of the icons of the open source movement, Eric Raymond, writing for front page magazine.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=19658
Yes there are a lot of leftists in the "open source" movement, but in reality the "open source" movement is libertarian in nature. BTW, if you haven't noticed free republic is ran on Apache and not IIS. It's probably coded in Perl too.
Thanks for the decoding. : )
(((enabling Tempest shielding))) Confidentially, I've got two SPARCs, one Mac, and fourteen Intel systems running Linux & OpenBSD. It's a hobby! (((disabling Tempest shielding)))
Oof. Lovely day. Fnord.
hah. lose arguments?
Only if the judges come from the bizarro world.
I'm still waiting. This time I'll ask you directly:
What experience do you have in either the technology (software design, computers) or internet fields? What is your area of expertise that gives you knowledge of the good or bad points of open standards?
I simply post facts like the ones in the above article. The romper room antics and children who seem to have lost their parents are hardly damaging to my position, but make yours look exactly like what it is - anarchists who favor liberal policies like the ones currently proposed in Mass.
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