newspeak

via El Universal – DF – DF: 70% de reos, por robo de mercancías.

This is a really interesting article. El U is famed for being a, well, trashy version of a newspaper, kind of like The Sun but with a distinctive Mexican twist. (I grew up with some of this….) So it’s not uncommon to find an article touting the importance of sunscreen and illustrated by a gallery of bikini-clad big-breasted women. Sigh. (And it very much participates in the general campaign to distract attention from the collapse of large sections of society in Mex.)

But it also does real journalism. Like this article, which points out that, in Mexico City, the capital, of the 41K prisoners 70% are incarcerated for minor robbery, often for food, clothes and other personal articles. And it seems that the principal store robbed is WalMart, an unfortunate choice: WalMart prosecutes even the most minor thefts to prison, without pardon, according to internal policy.

Is this a useful or constructive policy? I doubt it.

Avoiding layoffs motivates South Tyrol province-wide switch | Joinup.

KwaMoja: Africa and Open Source software.

OpenOffice in Italian Emilia-Romagna to save 2 million | Joinup.

This datum follows on the heels of a second day of record downloads of Apache OpenOffice. On 9 October, we recorded 241,987 downloads; on Monday, 233,070. These are, as I and others noted, impressive numbers.

But how impressive? We used to claim, in the days of OOo, that there were roughly 100M users of OOo and many times that of downloads. (This is not counting those who obtain their OOo from installed Linux distributions or who get one CDROM and then install it in an enterprise.)

Well, Rob Weir, of IBM, and with the AOO project (as am I), gave an insightful response to a query of mine posted to the public dev@openoffice.apache.org list:

Do we have any ideas how the other openoffice versions are doing in terms of download ? if they publish their numbers we could think about a blog post telling about the total number, that must be impressive. 

Some of them did publish download numbers, but stopped doing so after AOO 3.4.0 was released and we started publishing our numbers.

But it is hard to come up with apples-to-apples comparisons.  For example, Linux users get LO with their distro.  They don’t download.

LO has been available for 3 years, but AOO for only 18 months.  We’re counting only full installs, LO is counting — well, we really don’t know.   The products have different update cycles, so it is hard to convert downloads into users. (If you have many small releases then each user will generate several downloads).  Differences like this make it hard to compare the two.

But one approach is to look at Windows downloads from 3rd party websites, like download.com.  This avoids all of the above problems. If you look there you see that in the last week AOO has been downloaded 21,850 times, and LibreOffice 2,664 times.

But from the perspective of ODF editors, Microsoft has pretty good ODF support now as well, so the true number of ODF editor installs is probably near 1 billion now.

The U.S. Cities With the Most Leftover to Spend … After Paying for Housing – Richard Florida – The Atlantic Cities.

Thai kids find free tablets hard to swallow as govt scheme hits trouble • The Register.

“Thailand’s ambitious One Tablet Per Child project appears to have gone slightly off the rails after reports emerged that 30 per cent of devices have broken down barely a year after the initiative was begun.”

The point is that quality counts. Cost is also something that ought to be measured along an axis of time that is seemingly being ignored here.

Wal-Mart’s Asia chief executive, Scott Price, said this week that the new law’s regulations requiring foreign retailers to buy 30 percent of products from local small and medium-size businesses are the “critical stumbling block” to opening its trademark consumer stores.

via Wal-Mart Puts India Plan on Hold – NYTimes.com.

Pandoc – About pandoc.

Mobile Reporting: Which Tools Work Best? › Communication Breakdown.

Cookisto lets you buy your neighbours’ leftovers – Your Community.

Note:

1. “But if you’re looking to join the site right away, take note: the service is only available for now in Athens, Greece, and will be available in London, England, next month.”