I fully support the project to move to ODF, and I don't want to sound like I'm souring on the poor souls who are trying to implement this, but what began as a promising project by one State (doubtless with many others watching) to move away from a proprietary document format to an ISO approved open standard document format, ODF, has deteriorated into using a third party plugin to Microsoft Word that "enables" ODF integration with Word.

Kind of.

Really what it does is allow a one-way transition from ODF to Word's DOC format. I don't see how Mass. can maintain that ODF will be their default format when the plugin in it's current state only allows you to import to Word DOC format and doesn't allow for native saving of documents from the "Save As" menu as ODF...

This is a big blow for ODF. It will show ODF to those who use it in the worst possible light. And rather than fixing the accessibility issues with OpenOffice (I really hope someone is doing this - this is Open Source after all, so implementing these kinds of things should be very easy), they've taken the easy way out and reverted to using Word with a crippled plugin.

I hope I'm wrong on this one. If progress away from proprietary Desktop OSes is to continue/start, the battle over document formats is only the first step. Or is it simply an indicator? Time will tell... 

I think there's a real opportunity here for AMD to step in and Open Source ATI's graphics drivers. It'd be great for the Linux community to know that they could get an AMD CPU and at the same time be confident of having an Open Source graphics driver.

This makes a big difference on laptops particularly, because Open Source graphics drivers make suspend/hibernate a lot easier to do. Which would be nice. 

 Without this, I'm very likely to make my next laptop purchase be an Intel chipset with an integrated graphics card. Enough to run XGL and a bunch of games would be fine for me, which seems very do-able.