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Standards
Industry Criticism
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Windows Phone 7: Don’t bother with this disaster | Mobilize – InfoWorld
“Microsoft needs to kill Windows Phone 7 and avoid further embarrassing itself by shipping this throwback. It’s not a question of whether Windows Phone 7 will fail — it will — but how long it will take Microsoft to admit the failure. For the company’s sake, the earlier it fesses up, the better.”
tags: windows phone
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Five Reasons You Don’t Need Microsoft Office 2010 – PCWorld Business Center
“So, the bottom line is this: forget Microsoft Office 2010. It’s not worth the money, the few updated features, the prolonged learning curves, the decreased efficiency, or the headaches.”
tags: microsoft office
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451 CAOS Theory » Judgment day for open source at Oracle
“There are signals of continued problems and dysfunction — namely lack of support, organization and communication — in the OpenSolaris community. This follows on a deterioration of the OS leadership and support since Oracle bought Sun Microsystems, including the elimination of OpenSolaris CDs, one of the things that made the open source version of Solaris more like Linux. “
tags: oracle opensolaris sun
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OpenSolaris board in OpenRevolt against Oracle | Deep Tech – CNET News
“One of Sun Microsystems’ ambitious dreams, a vibrant open-source community for the Solaris operating system to rival the Linux collective, is in serious danger of evaporating in the Oracle era. “
tags: opensolaris oracle sun
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Here are a few links to stories and blog entries about IBM’s announcement that it is adopting the Mozilla Firefox browser for internal use.
I talk a lot about software in this blog but most of the discussion is at the personal level: I tried this, I experimented with that. I hardly ever talk about what I use for doing my IBM business and more rarely still do I talk about IBM’s internal policies about software use. This entry is different, and gives you a bit of a view inside the company.
Like many individuals and members of organizations, IBMers use their browsers a lot for conducting business. Our desktop and laptop software environments have some common applications but also software specific to do our various jobs. And these jobs are varied, as there are about 400,000 IBM employees around the world.
Some of the software we all use shouldn’t surprise you since we make it, such as Lotus Notes, Lotus Sametime, and Lotus Symphony.
We’re officially adding a new piece of software to the list of default common applications we expect employees to use, and that’s the Mozilla Firefox browser.
Firefox has been around for years, of course. Today we already have thousands of employees using it on Linux, Mac, and Windows laptops and desktops, but we’re going to be adding thousands more users to the rolls.
Some of us started using it because it was new and fast and cool. I tried it for those reasons, but I still use it for the following ones:
- Firefox is stunningly standards compliant, and interoperability via open standards is key to IBM’s strategy.
- Firefox is open source and its development schedule is managed by a development community not beholden to one commercial entity.
- Firefox is secure and an international community of experts continues to develop and maintain it.
- Firefox is extensible and can be customized for particular applications and organizations, like IBM.
- Firefox is innovative and has forced the hand of browsers that came before and after it to add and improve speed and function.
While other browsers have come and gone, Firefox is now the gold standard for what an open, secure, and standards-compliant browser should be. We’ll continue to see this or that browser be faster or introduce new features, but then another will come along and be better still, including Firefox.
I think it was Firefox and its growth that reinvigorated the browser market as well as the web. That is, Firefox forced competitors to respond. Their software has gotten better and we have all benefited. We’ll see this again as Firefox continues to add even more support for HTML5.
So what does it mean for Firefox to be the default browser inside IBM? Any employee who is not now using Firefox will be strongly encouraged to use it as their default browser. All new computers will be provisioned with it. We will continue to strongly encourage our vendors who have browser-based software to fully support Firefox.
We’ll offer employee education and point our people to great online information, all of which will look wonderful in Firefox. IBM has contributed to the Firefox open source effort for many years and we’ll continue to do so.
There’s another reason we want to get as many of our employees using Firefox as soon as possible, and that is Cloud Computing. For the shift to the cloud to be successful, open standards must be used in the infrastructure, in the applications, and in the way people exchange data.
The longstanding commitment of Mozilla to open standards and the quality of the implementation of them in Firefox gives us confidence that this is a solid, modern platform that should be part of IBM’s own internal transformation to significantly greater use of Cloud Computing. Examples of this already include Blue Insight, an internal cloud for business analytics, and LotusLive, for online collaboration.
It is not news that some IBM employees use Firefox. It is news that all IBM employees will be asked to use it as their default browser.
As you think about the browser you use at home and at work, consider the reasons we have stated for our move. It’s your choice, obviously, but Firefox is enterprise ready, and we’re ready to adopt it for our enterprise.
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Converting ODF to ePub
“With ODFToEPub everyone can write an e-book with full control over how it will look. All you need is a word processor that can produce a document in a format suitable for OpenOffice.”
tags: odf, ePub
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Digg is Deadd – Website Magazine – Website Magazine
“It was a good run, Digg.com. You certainly had a great idea and funneled plenty of Web traffic to opportunitstic and manipulative publishers.
Alas, the run is over. And it’s not coming back.”
tags: digg
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How to avoid being rude when using your iPad – CNN.com
“The iPad from Apple is the latest member of a new, multi-use generation of technology. It’s a book, it’s e-mail, it’s your social network or your office, it’s your music and your photos plus the apps for all of that.
And the more ways we can use a device, the more we’ll want to take a look at how using it affects those around us.”
tags: ipad, apple
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
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Gamers Mad at Sony for Yanking PS3’s Linux Compatibility
“A group of Linux users has filed suit against Sony, upset about the company yanking Linux capability from its PlayStation 3 (PS3) game console.
When PS3 made its debut in 2006, it gave users the option to run a so-called alternate operating system, something that couldn’t be said of Nintendo Wii or Xbox. The “Install Other OS” feature was popular among gamers who used Linux, the Unix operating system that is free to download.
But a software update released on April 1 neutered the option, labeling it a security risk. Although the update was technically optional, gamers who failed to install it would no longer be able to watch BluRay movies, play new games, or download copyright-protected videos from a central server.”
tags: linux, sony, ps3
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Providing Leadership on Standards to Address National Challenges | The White House
“To this end, I am joining my colleagues from the Office of Management and Budget—Vivek Kundra, U.S. Chief Information Officer, and Cass Sunstein, Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs—in establishing a Subcommittee on Standards under the National Science and Technology Council’s Committee on Technology.”
tags: standards, obama, government
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Warcraft on the iPad «
“World of Warcraft steaming to an iPad from Gaikai server over regular Wifi.”
tags: warcraft, ipad
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
The Open Document Format (ODF) became an OASIS standards five years ago on May 1. The ODF Alliance has prepared a document called “ODF Turns Five: A Look Back on the Journey to a Mature Open Standard Document Format” that gives a nice history.
I also recommend Rob Weir’s “ODF at 5 Years” which includes an evolving history of word processors.
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lovemachine » Blog Archive » Off the Grid
“The solar cell that made this all possible (on the right in the picture) is a flexible cell – folds up to the size/weight of a book – printed with some sort of crazy nano-tech process onto a rubber/plastic substrate. The solar cell, which you can buy here is about $600.”
tags: solar, energy
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ODF at 5 Years
“Five years ago today, on May 1st, 2005 OASIS approved Open Document Format 1.0 as an OASIS Standard. I’d like to take a few brief minutes to reflect on this milestone, but only a few. We’re busy at work in OASIS making final edits to ODF 1.2. We’re in our final weeks of that revision and it is “all hands on deck” to help address the remaining issues so we can send it out for final public review. But I hope I can be excused for a short diversion to mark this anniversary.”
tags: odf, standards
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
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WhiteHouse.gov Releases Open Source Code | The White House
“As part of our ongoing effort to develop an open platform for WhiteHouse.gov, we’re releasing some of the custom code we’ve developed. This code is available for anyone to review, use, or modify. We’re excited to see how developers across the world put our work to good use in their own applications.”
tags: whitehouse, open-source
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Tutorial: consuming Twitter’s real-time stream API in Python
“This tutorial will show you how to consume and process data from Twitter’s new streaming API. The code examples, which are written in the Python programming language, demonstrate how to establish a long-lived HTTP connection with PyCurl, buffer the incoming data, and process it to perform the basic message display functions of a Twitter client application. We will also take a close look at how the new streaming API differs from the existing polling-based REST API.”
tags: twitter, python, API, streaming
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Oracle now charging US$90 for ODF-Office plug-in – BusinessWeek
“Oracle has imposed a fee of US$90 per user on a plug-in for Microsoft Office that was available at no cost under Sun Microsystems’ ownership.
The tool allows Word, Excel and PowerPoint users to read, edit and save documents in the ODF (Open Document Format), which is used by the competing OpenOffice productivity suite.”
tags: oracle, odf
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Why I like Oracle’s $90 ODF Plugin
“We should want companies to invest in ODF tools. We should want the demand for ODF to be such that ODF-based goods and services have value, can be sold based on that value, and that there is competition again in the market, something we have not seen in this area in many years.”
tags: odf, oracle
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
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Document Freedom: How to know when you have it
“Today is Document Freedom Day. In the five years since Open Document Format (ODF) first was approved in OASIS we have certainly made progress, but there is still work remaining to be done. How will we know when we have arrived? At what point can we declare victory and say “Free at last”? I think that when we can agree that all of the following statements are true, then at that point we have achieved the substantial benefits of document freedom.”
tags: odf, document, freedom, standards, formats
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Second Life 2.0 goes live today – Massively
“As we previously predicted, the Second Life 2.0 viewer is going live today, meeting the originally slated release target of Q1 2010, if only by a few hours. The 2.0 viewer has been in public beta since 23 February.”
tags: second-life, virtual-world
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
In a post last week I noted that the presentations I produced ten years ago were more complicated than those I made and used today. Many of the whiz-bang features in presentation software are just not things that I use, such as transitions, sound, and animations. My slides end up in PDF more often that not.
Here’s one thing I really expected we would have licked by now: much better facilities for mixing and matching slides from existing presentations so that new ones could be created.
There are several possible levels to this:
- Slide import without screwing up or deleting content
- Slide import that actually tries to make things work in the new template, with decent results
- An interactive learning mode that guides the transition of slides from the old formats to the new
I’m usually thankful if I get the first, giddy with the second, and the third is science fiction as far as I’m concerned.
Assuming that we get the slide import problem fixed some day, there’s something else I really want. Imagine a general slide deck where most of the deck is useful to any audience. Some of the pages, however, need to have alternate forms such as products discussed, partners mentioned, customers referenced, and geographies discussed.
This is really a higher form of template where the “build” allows you to slide in the different versions of slides. In my case, for example, I could create a deck where the customer references were all from Asia Pacific and equally used Linux distributions from Red Hat and Novell.
To do this, I would need to understand where in the presentation the variations could occur. Then I need to have each set of versions have similar formatting and be constructed as easily as possible. Maybe something like mail-merge could work for the graphics and slide contents?
Each of the versions should be tagged or categorized so it would be easy to see which are the possibilities for each variable spot in the deck. Essentially, I would have a library of slides or slide data with some semantic tagging. This library needed to be maintained with slides or data added, deleted, or retagged.
Once I had this, I would expect a really nice deck building user interface to glue together the pieces for me.
So here is my challenge, particularly to those who are using ODF, the OpenDocument Format, and the ODF Toolkit: build all this. Forget for the moment about the presentation software, but rather the information on the slides, how to categorize the pieces, where the variable content is, and how the deck can be visually and semi-automatically constructed.
This last week someone on Facebook was bemoaning that he was turning 40 and yet we still didn’t have jetpacks. This presentation stuff isn’t rocket science, but we really should be much further along by now, in my opinion.
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Microsoft offers a Sophie’s Choice | Open Source | ZDNet.com
“You get one choice. You buy Microsoft and you’re locked into Microsoft. You can’t go back.
In Microsoft’s world its formats and open source are the two children, and you get to make one choice. Then you have to move on.”
tags: microsoft, open-source
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Meet Ubuntu Linux’s new CEO (Q&A) | Deep Tech – CNET News
“Being in the red now doesn’t mean that the company–funded in part by Shuttleworth’s proceeds from selling his earlier company, Thawte Consulting, to VeriSign for $575 million in 2000–doesn’t plan to be in the black. Canonical has three main businesses: selling server management services to companies using Ubuntu Linux; working with original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) such as Hewlett-Packard or processor companies that need help with Linux; and most recently, an Internet-based tool for buying and synchronizing music files and other personal data.”
tags: linux, ubuntu
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Prototype $200 Tablet Runs Android, Chromium OS, Linux – PCWorld
“What Freescale announced, and demoed in the video below, is the i.MX51. It is a 7-inch tablet that comes in multiple colors, and can run three different operating systems: Android, Chromium OS, or Linux. The demo tablet is used with a keyboard and mouse, but touch features exists as well – The Chrome Source reports that there was another demo tablet running a capacitive touch version of Linux.”
tags: tablet, linux
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IBM hopes to make mobile devices more accessible | Cutting Edge – CNET News
“IBM is embarking on a research project to design mobile gadgets that are easier to use for people who have disabilities or aren’t fully literate.”
tags: ibm, mobile, accessibility
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Selecting an Open Source Operating System
“There’s a large selection of free and open source (FOSS) operating systems available these days, and choosing the right one for any given circumstance can be quite a challenge. This article is intended to help you pick the best operating system for your needs and experience level. Although this article is geared primarily toward those who have little to no experience with FOSS operating systems, we’ve included some pointers for more savvy open source users – say, those who use a FOSS operating system at home and would like to deploy one on the job.”
tags: open-source
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
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Second Life’s virtual money can become real-life cash – washingtonpost.com
“Last year, as the physical economy withered, Second Life’s economy blossomed, with user-to-user transactions topping $567 million in actual U.S. currency, a 65 percent jump over 2008. About 770,000 unique users made repeat visits to Second Life in December, and the users, known as residents, cashed out $55 million of their Second Life earnings last year, transferring that money to PayPal accounts.”
tags: second-life, virtual-world
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What to expect from HTML 5 | Developer World – InfoWorld
“HTML 5 aims to change all that. When it is finalized, the new standard will include tags and APIs for improved interactivity, multimedia, and localization. As experimental support for HTML 5 features has crept into the current crop of Web browsers, some developers have even begun voicing hope that this new, modernized HTML will free them from reliance on proprietary plug-ins such as Flash, QuickTime, and Silverlight.”
tags: HTML
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Major League Baseball to Stream ESPN Events – NYTimes.com
“ESPN had previously used the services of Move Networks, based in American Fork, Utah. But Move’s system required that customers download a special video player that uses Microsoft’s Silverlight technology, said John Kosner, senior vice president of ESPN Digital Media. The network wanted to make its site easier to use by moving to a supplier that used Adobe’s popular Flash software, which operates within the Web browser.”
tags: baseball, espn, silverlight, microsoft
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
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W3C pulls former Novell CTO for CEO spot
“Filling a position left open since 2008, former Novell CTO Jeffrey Jaffe has taken on the role of chief executive officer for the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium).”
tags: novell, w3c
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Second Life’s virtual money can become real-life cash – washingtonpost.com
“Last year, as the physical economy withered, Second Life’s economy blossomed, with user-to-user transactions topping $567 million in actual U.S. currency, a 65 percent jump over 2008. About 770,000 unique users made repeat visits to Second Life in December, and the users, known as residents, cashed out $55 million of their Second Life earnings last year, transferring that money to PayPal accounts.”
tags: second-life, virtual-world
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What to expect from HTML 5 | Developer World – InfoWorld
“HTML 5 aims to change all that. When it is finalized, the new standard will include tags and APIs for improved interactivity, multimedia, and localization. As experimental support for HTML 5 features has crept into the current crop of Web browsers, some developers have even begun voicing hope that this new, modernized HTML will free them from reliance on proprietary plug-ins such as Flash, QuickTime, and Silverlight.”
tags: HTML
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Major League Baseball to Stream ESPN Events – NYTimes.com
“ESPN had previously used the services of Move Networks, based in American Fork, Utah. But Move’s system required that customers download a special video player that uses Microsoft’s Silverlight technology, said John Kosner, senior vice president of ESPN Digital Media. The network wanted to make its site easier to use by moving to a supplier that used Adobe’s popular Flash software, which operates within the Web browser.”
tags: baseball, espn, silverlight, microsoft
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
IBM just released Lotus Symphony 3 Beta 2:
Lotus Symphony 3 Beta 2 represents a major new advancement for our Lotus Symphony users. Based on current OpenOffice.org 3 code stream. Lotus Symphony 3 Beta 2 offers loads of new features and capabilities and improved file fidelity. The Lotus Symphony team is excited to get it out to you and get your feedback.
This is a very big upgrade as is indicated by the jump from version 1.3 to version 3. The beta is available for Linux desktops, Mac OS X, and even Windows.
Also see the ZDNet blog entry “IBM launches Lotus Symphony 3 beta; Office alternatives pile up” by Larry Dignan for some screen shots.
I was having a conversation today with a friend and somehow we got onto the topic of support for ODF, the Open Document Format, in WordPress. Drupal has some import support for ODF word processing files and that effort appears to be quite active (in the sense that there was an update to the module yesterday).
Thinking of WordPress as a content management system, importing an ODF file means taking a word processing, presentation, or spreadsheet document and putting into a form that can be saved and displayed by WordPress, either in a blog post or a standalone page. For simple text, this would mean translating to HTML. Doing a bit more work, it could mean using HTML and CSS for formatting. Getting even fancier, it could incorporate extra JavaScript or PHP code to handle spreadsheets in a live manner.
Import is hard because you need to be able to do something with anything that’s in any document. If you can’t handle something, you had better tell the user what you decided to discard. A minimal import for word processing files, as I mentioned above, might respect all words in the text, paragraph structure, bold, italic, colors, headings, and a few other simple things. In this case I would think of the import as “take this file and do something sensible, if not perfect, with it.”
Export is easier to imagine. Given the range of things that can be done in WordPress posts and pages, I would think that only a relatively small subset of ODF would be needed beyond the packaging and some straightforward text markup. Here I would take as my model “what would this WordPress page look like if I printed it, and what ODF file would I have to create to generate equivalent output?”
Given this, I would tackle the export to ODF feature first, but there is a core question that needs to be answered. Why? That is, given a web page generated by WordPress, why do you need to generate ODF form? I must admit I’m somewhat strapped to come up with good reasons, though I could probably make up a couple.
It is more interesting to consider how to take documents created in ODF by something like Lotus Symphony and then import them into WordPress for publishing. That’s the key word: publishing. So though the problem is harder, having various ways of importing documents into WordPress from ODF would likely be much more useful.
Assuming this as the preferred direction of work and looking at how WordPress can be extended, it’s worthwhile to ask what you might do with plugins or themes to make the import even better. While I like the idea of the result being theme independent, having one or two plugins that added some cool support for imported spreadsheets or presentations could potentially be quite nice.
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