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| Power to the Patients: Microsoft and Google Revolutionize Medical Records Greg Goth
IEEE Distributed Systems Online May 12, 2008 Network-enabled communication has revolutionized financial services,
retail sales, auctions, and business-to-business transactions. But one
of the largest global economy's sectors -- healthcare -- remains locked
in a technological netherworld, part paper, part digital, and almost
entirely user-unfriendly. It might take Google and Microsoft --
technology giants, but health-records neophytes -- to give networked and
interoperable electronic health records just the kick start they need
to escape the siloed and proprietary model now prevalent. The new
technologies, Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault, are classified
as personal health records (PHRs), which are a subset of
industry-recognized electronic health records (EHRs). Both companies
are now engaged in pilot programs with healthcare organizations regarded
as e-health pioneers. ...Full Story
 Indonesia adopts stringent "green" palm oil standard Reuters May 12, 2008 JAKARTA, May 7 (Reuters) - Indonesia, the world's biggest palm oil producer, plans to take firm measures aimed at ensuring palm oil firms meet stringent standards before labelling their products as eco-friendly, an industry watchdog said on Wednesday.
The rapidly expanding palm oil industry in Southeast Asia has come under attack by green groups for destroying rainforests and wildlife, as well the emission of greenhouse gases.
An industry-led initiative, the Round Table on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), has launched a green labelling certification process that includes commitments to preserve rainforests and wildlife and avoiding conflicts with indigenous people. ...Full Story
GNU/Linux: Source Code and Human Rights Bruce Byfield
Datamation.com May 12, 2008 ...All these personal rights are in aid of an even larger right -- the one alluded to in the Free Software Foundation's definition of "free" as "free as in speech." If freedom of speech is to have any meaning in the modern world, then accessibility to computers and the Internet is an inevitable corollary. Just as free speech is not served by one person buying an hour of prime time TV and a rival handing out photocopies on the street corners, so free speech becomes meaningless in the modern world without access to the Internet.
Without this access, people -- in fact, whole nations -- are cut off from not only convenient and efficient communication, but also much of the ongoing dialog in the modern world. Although the cost of hardware remains a problem, the rights inherent in FOSS go a long way towards enabling this access.
By using FOSS and claiming your rights as a consumer, you are also encouraging the spread of this access. You are supporting one of the few initiatives that give developing nations and the poor any hope of participating as equals in the modern world. That is why you should be using FOSS -- not, in the end because you have any interest in tinkering with code, but as a way of extending human rights and dignity. ...Full Story
Microsoft grows DAISY for blind computer users; Adobe wilts Eric Lai
Computerworld May 12, 2008 The release of an esoteric plug-in for a twenty-year-old piece of software normally doesn't merit much attention... except when the software is the ubiquitous Microsoft Word, and the add-on could have a major positive effect on the 1.5 million blind or visually impaired Americans who use computers, millions more like them around the globe, and, potentially, tens or hundreds of millions of people worldwide with developmental disabilities or reading problems.
Earlier this week, Microsoft announced the availability of a plug-in (downloadable from openxmlcommunity.org) that lets users of Word 2007, 2003 and XP easily save documents in the DAISY (Digital Accessible Information SYstem) XML format. ...Full Story
US warns China of 'technological isolation' Sydney Morning Herald May 10, 2008 The United States warned China Thursday that it risked "technological isolation" for developing unique technical standards of its own that also are shutting out foreign competition.
Despite widely accepted international standards, China developed standards mandated by government regulations amid a lack of transparency and due process, said Under Secretary of Commerce Christopher Padilla....
Many American companies have expressed concern about security standards for information technology products that made it costly for them to enter the Chinese market, said Padilla, who is policy chief for international commerce. ...Full Story
New DO-254 Industry Group Consortium Just Launched Press Release
PRLeap.com May 9, 2008 The world’s first and only dedicated DO-254 industry group consortium has been launched world wide. Rising from inception to the defacto critical avionics hardware standard in just six years, DO-254 certification is now a prerequisite for virtually all airborne hardware and systems.
Now, avionics hardware DO254 developers, suppliers, and manufacturers have a one-stop central repository for D0-254 facts, DO-254 whitepapers, DO-254 Engineers & DERs, and DO-254 certified or compliant products at www.do254.info. ...Full Story
The 'User Experience' of Warnings in the Emergency Alert System (EAS) Art Botterell
blog (courtesy of Robin Cover/XML Daily Newslink) May 9, 2008 "In the runup to the May 19, 2008 Emergency Alert System (EAS) Showdown
[Summit] in Washington, DC, most of the discussion has focused on the
nuts and bolts of moving the nation's broadcast alerts across digital
networks based on CAP. But CAP only defines the information 'payload'
of a warning. It doesn't specify how that information should be
presented over HD radio, digital TV, computers, PDAs, digital signage
or any of our various other windows into the infosphere. This is going
to become a crucial question in the very near future, I think. As
digitization drives broadcast content onto ever more diverse platforms
we're going to need to give these presentation/user interface issues as
much attention as we have to transport/relay-network design. ...Full Story
OGC and buildingSMART Alliance Issue CFP/RFQ for AECOO-Phase 1 Testbed Staff
Open Geospatial Consortium May 9, 2008 Staff, OGC Announcement
The buildingSMART alliance, the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC)
and Sponsors of the AECOO (Architecture, Engineering, Construction,
Owner and Operator) Testbed have today issued a Request for Quotation
(RFQ) and Call for Participation (CFP) for the AECOO-Phase 1 Testbed.
The testbed aims to foster business transformation as defined in the
United States National Building Information Modeling Standard, Part 1
(NBIMS) with technology for interoperability involving intelligent
building models with 3D geometric capabilities....
The initiative is based upon principles of 'Open Standardization' --
[being] "the reason for the success of the Internet, the World Wide
Web, e-Commerce, and the wireless revolution." The reason is simple:
our world is going through a communications revolution on top of a
computing revolution. In the context of this OGC initiative, Open
standardization means 'agreeing on a common definitions of terms and
names, attributes and properties of information.' At the fundamental
levels this type of open standardization has been developed by: (1)
buildingSMART International: IFC and IFD; (2) Associated General
Contractors with buildingSMART alliance: AGCxml; (3) International
Code Council: SmartCodes; (4) Construction Specification Institute:
OmniClass... Open standardization also means agreeing on common
means for communication — the actions of 'transmitting or
exchanging through a common system of symbols, signs or behavior
concerning that information and how it needs to be delivered,
presented or made capable'. ...Full Story
ITU TELECOM AFRICA focuses on a continent at a crossroads Press Release
ITU May 8, 2008 Geneva — ITU TELECOM AFRICA kicks off with the launch of ITU’s African Telecommunication / ICT Indicators 2008 report, which is an invaluable information tool to inform and guide policy-makers, investors, analysts and other observers of Africa’s telecommunications landscape. It contains an extensive overview of key sector developments, and includes a number of recommendations to sustain growth and deepen access to information and communication technologies (ICT) in the region.
In addition to the analytical section, the report includes 21 regional tables covering key telecommunication/ICT indicators (2006/2007 data), 53 individual country pages with a five year profile from 2003-2007, and a directory of telecommunication ministries, regulators and operators in the region.
Press Release
International Telecommunication Union
For immediate release Telephone: +41 22 730 6039
Telefax: +41 22 730 5933
E-mail: pressinfo
ITU TELECOM AFRICA focuses on a continent at a crossroads
ITU's African Telecommunication / ICT Indicators 2008 report to be launched in Cairo
ACCREDIT NOW
Geneva, 5 May 2008 — ITU TELECOM AFRICA kicks off with the launch of ITU’s African Telecommunication / ICT Indicators 2008 report, which is an invaluable information tool to inform and guide policy-makers, investors, analysts and other observers of Africa’s telecommunications landscape. It contains an extensive overview of key sector developments, and includes a number of recommendations to sustain growth and deepen access to information and communication technologies (ICT) in the region.
Africa marks unprecedented growth in mobile sector
Growth in Africa’s mobile sector has defied all predictions. Africa remains the region with the highest annual growth rate in mobile subscribers and added no less than 65 million new subscribers during 2007. At the beginning of 2008, there were over a quarter of a billion mobile subscribers on the continent. ...Full Story
Working group to define mobile memory Press Release
ElectronicsTalk.com May 8, 2008 ARM, Hynix Semiconductor, LG Electronics, Samsung Electronics, Silicon Image, Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications and STMicroelectronics have set up a working group to specify an open standard for next-generation memory interface technology targeting mobile devices This first-of-its-kind memory standard for dynamic random access memory (DRAM), named Serial Port Memory Technology (SPMT), will enable extended battery life, bandwidth flexibility, significantly reduced pin count, lower power demand and multiple ports by using a serial interface instead of the parallel interface commonly used in today's memory devices...The SPMT Working Group has been meeting since the third quarter of 2007 and is expected to organise a formal consortium later this year consisting of handset, memory and system-on-chip manufacturers and semiconductor IP providers with the intention of bringing the SPMT specification to the industry by the end of 2008. ...Full Story
Google: Unicode Conquers ASCII on the Web Stephen Shankland
CNET News.com May 8, 2008 ...Unicode
has overtaken ASCII as the most popular character encoding scheme on
the World Wide Web, [according to Mark Davis, Google's senior
international software architect]. Also vanquished at almost exactly
the same time was the Western European encoding. Unicode is a character
encoding standard that gracefully accommodates dozens of languages as
well as Roman characters with diacritical marks. ASCII, a tried-and true,
decades-old standard, is limited to 128 or 256 characters and has a hard
time extending beyond the range of a century-old Remington typewriter.
Google's a fan of Unicode Web sites. When it processes data from Web
sites, it converts it into Unicode first if it's not already there. That
improves international search abilities. ...Full Story
Microsoft DAISY XML Add-In and DAISY Pipeline Support Accessibility Staff
Microsoft May 9, 2008 Microsoft Corp. has joined with industry and advocacy group leaders
worldwide to launch new software that will make it easier for anyone
to create documents and content that will be accessible for blind
and print-disabled individuals. The new 'Save as DAISY XML' add-in,
designed for Microsoft Office Word 2007, Word 2003 and Word XP, allows
users to save Open XML-based text files into DAISY XML, the foundation
of the globally accepted DAISY Standard for reading and publishing
navigable multimedia content. The add-in was created through an open
source project with Microsoft, Sonata Software Ltd. and the Digital
Accessible Information SYstem (DAISY) Consortium and can be downloaded
by Microsoft Office Word users for free. ...Full Story
Don’t show me problems show me answers, and don’t show me them either! Rick Jelliffe
O'Reilly XML.com May 7, 2008 ...Poor old Alex Brown has been in and out of favour with the extreme anti-OOXML-ists (perhaps I should use a new acronym, such EAOOXMLista, to say for the hundred thousandth time that not every anti-OOXML person is extreme?) over the last few weeks....
So my take: Alex is right that the schema has a flaw, and right to point it out and offer a fix; Rob is right that it is unnecessary for this to be a static error (which is the positive point I would infer from his over-reacting blog), but wrong that the way to fix it is to turn off validating that constraint. ...Full Story
A Technology Consortium Plans a Wireless Network Matt Richtel
New York Times May 7, 2008 SAN FRANCISCO — A who’s who of technology and telecommunications companies plans to announce on Wednesday that it intends to build the first of a new generation of nationwide wireless data networks, according to several people briefed on the deal.
The consortium includes a disparate group of partners: Sprint Nextel, Google, Intel, Comcast, Time Warner and Clearwire.
The partners have put the value of the deal at $12 billion, a figure that includes radio spectrum and equipment provided by Sprint Nextel and Clearwire, and $3.2 billion from the others involved....The partnership of such fundamentally different companies underscores the convergence of Internet, entertainment and telecommunications services. ...Full Story
Industry Creates HomeGrid™ Forum to Develop Technology for Enjoying Multimedia Anywhere in the Home Press Release
Intel May 7, 2008 BEAVERTON, Ore.-- Infineon Technologies, Intel Corporation, Panasonic and Texas Instruments today announced the creation of HomeGrid Forum, which aims to promote and influence a single, next-generation worldwide standard for networking digital content, such as movies, music and pictures, over home wiring.
The forum will be a companion to ITU-T G.hn working group, supporting the interests of service providers, consumer electronics manufacturers, PC OEMs and other networking companies to create a single MAC and PHY protocol for transporting multimedia across a home's existing wiring to include coaxial cable, power lines and phone lines. HomeGrid Forum is contributing next-generation technology requirements to ITU-T G.hn, quickly developing consensus around one worldwide standard. ITU-T is the standardization sector providing global telecommunication standards in the International Telecommunication Union. ...Full Story
Adobe and Industry Leaders Establish Open Screen Project Press Release
Adobe May 7, 2008 For immediate release
Technology and Content Innovators to Drive Consistent Rich Internet Experiences Across Multiple Screens
SAN JOSE, Calif. — May 1, 2008 — Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced the Open Screen Project, supported by a group of industry leaders, including ARM, Chunghwa Telecom, Cisco, Intel, LG Electronics Inc., Marvell, Motorola, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, Qualcomm, Samsung Electronics Co., Sony Ericsson, Toshiba and Verizon Wireless. The project is dedicated to driving rich Internet experiences across televisions, personal computers, mobile devices, and consumer electronics. Also supporting the Open Screen Project are leading content providers, including BBC, MTV Networks, and NBC Universal, who want to reliably deliver rich Web and video experiences live and on-demand across a variety of devices.
The Open Screen Project is working to enable a consistent runtime environment -- taking advantage of Adobe® Flash® Player and, in the future, Adobe AIR™ -- that will remove barriers for developers and designers as they publish content and applications across desktops and devices, including phones, mobile Internet devices (MIDs), and set top boxes. The Open Screen Project will address potential technology fragmentation by enabling the runtime technology to be updated seamlessly over the air on mobile devices. The consistent runtime environment is intended to provide optimal performance across a variety of operating systems and devices, and ultimately provide the best experience to consumers. ...Full Story
OpenOffice.org 3 beta is ready for testing John McCreesh
OpenOffice.org May 7, 2008 The OpenOffice.org Community is pleased to announce that the public beta release of OpenOffice.org 3.0 is now available. This beta release is
made available to allow a broad user base to test and evaluate the next
major version of OpenOffice.org, but is not recommended for production
use at this stage....Behind the scenes, OpenOffice.org 3.0 will support the upcoming
OpenDocument Format (ODF) 1.2 standard, and is capable of opening files
created with MS-Office 2007 or MS-Office 2008 for Mac OS X (.docx,
.xlsx, .pptx, etc.). This is in addition to read and write support for
the MS-Office binary file formats (.doc, .xls, .ppt, etc.).
http://marketing.openoffice.org/3.0/featurelistbeta.html ...Full Story
OGC(R) and buildingSMART alliance(TM) Release RFQ/CFP for AECOO Testbed Press Release
The Earth Time May 6, 2008 WAYLAND, Mass. - (Business Wire) The buildingSMART alliance, the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC) and Sponsors of the AECOO (Architecture, Engineering, Construction, Owner and Operator) Testbed have today issued a Request for Quotation (RFQ) and Call for Participation (CFP) for the AECOO-Phase 1 Testbed. The testbed aims to foster business transformation as defined in the United States National Building Information Modeling Standard, Part 1 (NBIMS) with technology for interoperability involving intelligent building models with 3D geometric capabilities. Business and communications, quantity take-off for cost estimating, and energy analysis are considered as they relate to planning and design for a capital facility. These three topic areas were selected by the Sponsors to focus attention on defining workable information solutions and services for information visualization and sharing. ...Full Story
OpenDocument Fellowship receives development grants Jean Hollis Weber
O'Reilly Windows Dev Center May 6, 2008 The OpenDocument Fellowship has attracted nearly $40,000 (USD) in donations to help fund development projects under the Fellowship’s Targeted Donations Programme .
One donation will be used to reward volunteers from the OASIS ODF Formula subcommittee for their continuing work on the formula specification. The other donations are targeted at development projects. The Fellowship is producing an “ODF toolkit” for developers, and a light-weight ODF viewer. ...Full Story
This promises to run on for awhile: Being not technical by training, this is over my head, but those who can follow it may want to tune in to the two dueling blog entries noted below, and the comments appended to each. The series begins with BRM Convenor Alex Brown reporting on the results of a conformance test that he applied to assess OfficeOpen 2.4.0 to ISO 26300 (ODF 1.0) (an earlier blog entry reported on his using the same test to compare Office 2007 to ISO 29500 (OOXML)). Rob Weir filed the folloiwng reply, challenging Alex's results. I see a comment at the end of Alex's post promising "to put Rob right in a follow-on posting." It appears that this is likely to run on for some time...ODF 1.0 and OpenOffice.org: a conformance smoke test Alex Brown
Griffin Brown Weblog May 5, 2008 Following on from the recent smoke test of Office 2007 conformance to ISO/IEC 29500 here, as promised, is a repeat of the exercise using ISO/IEC 26300 (ODF 1.0).
Like OOXML, ODF has (sensibly) a schema defined using RELAX NG (ISO/IEC 19757-2). This schema is published in the standard itself and is available for download from OASIS....
Conclusion
- Again, only tentative conclusions can be drawn from a smoke test...For ISO/IEC 26300:2006 (ODF) in general, we can say that the standard itself has a defect which prevents any document claiming validity from being actually valid. Consequently, there are no XML documents in existence which are valid to ISO ODF.
- Even if the schema is fixed, we can see that OpenOffice.org 2.4.0 does not produce valid XML documents. This is to be expected and is a mirror-case of what was found for MS Office 2007: while MS Office has not caught up with the ISO standard, OpenOffice has rather bypassed it (it aims at its consortium standard, just as MS Office does)....
I suspect ...this [blog entry will not] receive as much attention as the one reporting findings on MS Office's XML! Let's see.
For the record, I did not link to Alex's blog entry on the OOXML test ...Full Story
ODF Validation for Dummies Rob Weir
An Antic Disposition May 5, 2008 So when testing ODF, what did Alex do? Did he use the ODF 1.0 specification as a test case, a document that the OASIS TC might have had the opportunity to give a similar level of attention to? No, he did not, although that would have validated perfectly, as I've demonstrated above. Instead, Alex uses the OOXML specification, a document which by his own testing is not valid OOXML, then converts it into the proprietary .DOC binary format, then translates that binary format into ODF and then tries to validate the results with the ODF 1.0 schema (i.e., the wrong version of the ODF schema since OpenOffice 2.4.0's output is clearly declared as ODF 1.1), and then applies a non-applicable, non-standard DTD Compatibility constraint test during the Relax NG validation. ...Full Story
Call for Papers John McCreesh
OpenOffice.org Maty 5, 2008 The OpenOffice.org Community invites potential speakers to submit proposals for papers for OOoCon 2008. Whether you are a seasoned presenter, or have never stood up in public before, if you have something interesting to share about OpenOffice.org - we want to hear from you. Please note the Conference language is English.
OOoCon 2008 will see the biggest concentration of OOo developers ever assembled in one location on this planet. For this reason, we particularly welcome proposals from developers with information to share with fellow developers, from how to get started with simple extensions, through to the deep, dirty, and downright technical aspects of hacking the OpenOffice.org codebase.
Papers are also welcomed on any topic of interest to the Community:... ...Full Story
Digg makes official its adoption of a 'semantic Web' standard Scott M. Fulton, III
BetaNews.com Mary 5, 2008 ...Digg's involvement in [the Semantic Web] came by way of a very brief announcement on its company blog yesterday, where principal member Steve Williams wrote, "We've added RDFa, making Digg part of the 'semantic web' where Web pages become more sophisticated, beyond simply words and pictures."
But Williams is actually an active proponent of Digg's involvement in new and emerging standards, as demonstrated by his announcement last January of its entry into the DataPortability project, the gathering place for standards efforts in the field of data exchange, of which RSS and RDF are two prominent members....
The possibility exists for a kind of mega-meta-source to emerge from Digg, where interesting news topics are associated with cataloged resources. But for that to actually work, someone has to manage those resources -- and that effort will take a level of humanpower and resources of another kind (the kind symbolized with "$") that RDF won't provide even the most ambitious sites just on its own. ...Full Story
Microsoft Ships Expression Studio 2 Tools Paul Krill
InfoWorld May 3, 2008 Microsoft has announced the release of its Expression 2 Studio design
tools, which provide application design capabilities to complement
application development capabilities of the company's Visual Studio
toolset. Leveraging XAML, the products in Expression Studio can be
used to build standards-based and Microsoft Silverlight Web experiences.
Windows Vista and .Net Framework 3.5 client applications also can be
designed. The tools are said to be 'Standards Based' -- "built to
translate your visual layouts into fully compliant pages using your
choice of versions of XHTML, CSS, XML and XSLT." XAML "is a declarative
XML-based language that defines objects and their properties in XML. ...Full Story
NOAA Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS) Implements OGC Standards Staff
Open Geospatial Consortium May 2, 2008 The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC) announced that the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) program Integrated Ocean
Observing System (IOOS) is implementing a number of OGC standards. The
Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS) is a multidisciplinary system
designed to enhance our ability to collect, deliver, and use ocean
information. The goal is to provide continuous data on our open oceans,
coastal waters, and Great Lakes in the formats, rates, and scales
required by scientists, managers, businesses, governments, and the
public to support research and inform decision-making. NOAA will begin
the effort by establishing interoperable access to online databases
maintained by the National Weather Service (NWS) National Data Buoy
Center (NDBC), the National Ocean Service (NOS) Center for Operational
Oceanographic Products and Services (CO-OPS) and the National
Environmental Satellite Data Information Service (NESDIS) CoastWatch
Program. This will be accomplished using web service interface and
encoding standards developed by the OGC....Through the emerging Global
Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS), NOAA is working with its
federal partners, more than 70 countries and the European Commission
to develop a global monitoring network that is as integrated as the
planet it observes, predicts and protects. ...Full Story
W3C Launches New Product Modelling Incubator Group Staff
W3C.org May 2, 2008 W3C has announced the creation of a new Product Modelling Incubator
Group to identify a basic ontology for product modelling....Per the charter, the SWOP and S-TEN projects, with the POSC Caesar
Association, believe that it is possible to define a small core of
basic classes and properties for product modelling. The European SWOP
project is developing end-user product ontologies for product data
based on an upper ontology called PMO for Product Modelling Ontology.
The construction industry sector is one of the application areas, and
these ontologies will be related to the Industry Foundation Classes
(IFC) of the International Association for Interoperability (IAI). The
European S-TEN project is developing ontologies for technical and
environmental networks (such as piping or electricity networks and
river basins). These ontologies will be related to the information
models for product data within ISO 10303 (STEP) and for process plants
within ISO 15926.... ...Full Story
OASIS Forms Telecommunications Services Member Section (OASIS Telecom) Staff
OASIS.org May 1, 2008 OASIS announced the formation of a new Telecommunications Services
Member Section (OASIS Telecom) "to pave the way for a new business model
that will make telecommunications services more intelligent, deployable,
and easy to consume." Through the formation and oversight of new technical
committees, OASIS Telecom will work to optimize the Web services stack
for telecommunications industry and develop common data models to enable
the seamless exchange of information between networks and between the
network and application domains. OASIS Telecom members will also align
work already in place at OASIS and in the telecommunications community
on identity and naming. ...Full Story
Standard setting illuminated: Stephe Walli is one of the most experienced and thoughtful (an all too rare combination) commentators I know. His time in the trenches extends back to 1989 and includes acting as a document editor at ISO. In this piece, he contrasts the strategies of three major vendors in three different standards efforts that were of great commercial value to these vendors, drawing lessons from their decisions, and conclusions from their respective degrees of success and failure. An illuminating and timely read.Understanding Technology Standardization Efforts Stephe Walli
Once More Unto the Breach May 1, 2008 Technology standardization is commercial diplomacy and the purpose of individual players (as with all
diplomats) is to expand one's area of economic influence while defending sovereign territory.
This paper presents an economic overview of the motivation for technology interoperability standards,
because many have the wrong understanding of the drivers in technology standardization. It then gives a
few key examples of how to think about standards from a business strategic perspective using IBM and
Linux, Microsoft and ODF (as the counter example), and Sun and Java as an interesting example that spans
a dozen years and both the standards and open source worlds. ...Full Story
DMTF Releases WS-Management Specification as a Final Standard Staff
DMTF.org May 1, 2008 DMTF announced that its Web Services for Management (WS-Management)
standard has been ratified Final. Since its debut in April 2006,
WS-Management has been successfully implemented in a wide range of
products from DMTF member companies -- moving it from a Preliminary
to Final Standard. IT managers benefit from WS-Management because
deployments that support the standard will enable them to remotely
access devices on their networks -- everything from desktop and
mobile systems and servers today, to power management and virtualized
environments in the future. WS-Management helps reduce the cost and
complexity of IT management by leveraging Internet protocols and
standards to manage diverse deployments of the Common Information
Model (CIM) instrumented devices. ...Full Story
W3C Call for Implementations: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Staff
W3C.org May 1, 2008 W3C announced that the "Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)
2.0" is ready for developers and designers to test in Web content
and Web applications....WCAG addresses accessibility
of Web content for people with disabilities and many elderly users,
and is one of three Web accessibility guidelines produced by W3C's
Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). WCAG 2.0 provides a stable
foundation for accessibility of Web content and Web applications, and
supporting documents enable it to be used flexibly across the broad
range of Web technologies and environments in today's Web...."WCAG 2.0 has
been developed with extensive community input. We've worked very hard,
including publishing twelve Working Drafts and addressing more than
3000 comments, in order to ensure that WCAG 2.0 meets the need for an
updated international standard with which national and local Web
accessibility guidelines can harmonize." ...Full Story
W3C Call for Implementations: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Staff
W3C.org May 1, 2008 W3C announced that the "Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)
2.0" is ready for developers and designers to test in Web content
and Web applications....WCAG addresses accessibility
of Web content for people with disabilities and many elderly users,
and is one of three Web accessibility guidelines produced by W3C's
Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). WCAG 2.0 provides a stable
foundation for accessibility of Web content and Web applications, and
supporting documents enable it to be used flexibly across the broad
range of Web technologies and environments in today's Web...."WCAG 2.0 has
been developed with extensive community input. We've worked very hard,
including publishing twelve Working Drafts and addressing more than
3000 comments, in order to ensure that WCAG 2.0 meets the need for an
updated international standard with which national and local Web
accessibility guidelines can harmonize." ...Full Story
BSI faces High Court challenge over OOXML U-turn Kelly Fiveash
The Register May 1, 2008 The UK's Unix User Group (UKUUG) has convinced the High Court to carry out a judicial review of the British Standard Institute's decision to vote in favour of Microsoft's controversial Office Open XML (OOXML) specification.
The UKUUG is calling for the BSI to reverse its vote at the International Standards Organisation (ISO), which approved OOXML as a standard early last month – in the face of fierce opposition from open source fanciers....The legal challenge being mounted at the High Court has backing from a number of British open-istas including the Open Source Consortium (OSC)....However, even if legal action against the BSI leads to the UK standards body being forced, in the form of mandatory orders, to withdraw its vote to the ISO, its impact could be muted. ...Full Story
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