So according to an InfoWorld article,

…legislators in Massachusetts, which in 2005 first required that all agencies would be forced to store public documents in non-proprietary formats like HTML or PDF, admitted in the discussion that they have not yet been able to provide tangible evidence that moving to an ODF system would deliver the financial savings some backers of the movement envision.

So one single state decides to change from a file format and suddenly faces the full might of the Microsoft marketing machine.  There are intrinsic benefits to using an open  format that accrue over the lifetime of a document, but the costs in the initial phase of changeover (the case in any transition) will outweigh the benefits. It would be doubly difficult of Massachusetts to account for its costs given the huge legal battle it has fought to date.

Its like looking into a startup six months after it hits the start line and saying, “why aren’t you profitable?”

Sean talks about long range bluetooth (the tease) and  then bursts our bubble, but the picture at the end of the article is priceless.

Here is Inch Beach in Dingle. Stunning, eh….

Unfortunately, it also doubles as a municipal cark park.

Danah Boyd wrote this insightful piece on class divisions on FaceBook and MySpace. The Internet went mental and threw back a lot of unstructured abuse and uninformed comment. She in turn has written a response to the shit storm.

Go Danah!

Headway Software have just released a new version of Structure 101, their graphical tool for analysing the internal structure of software. I did some work with Headway way back in the day and have always loved this tool. If you program in Java you should check it out.

heartbreakingly  beautiful  story of when men were men and shift right was king.

The “I’ll throw hardware at the problem” generation is reaping what they have sown and the crop is is called “global warming”.

But I have to say, the wordpress whysiwyg editor is still a piece of shit. Its 2007 lads (and lasses), get with the program and fix this boil on the bum of wordpress (an altogther satisfactory piece of software in all other respects).

Opsware goes out the door to HP for 1.6bn. We still love you Marc. Keep Ninging it.

I think I’d eat you if it wasn’t for this glass.