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News By Category |
| New Standards etc. |
| | | DMTF Releases WS-Management Specification as a Final Standard
Staff| DMTF.org May 1, 2008DMTF 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 | | |
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New Initiatives |
| | | OGC and buildingSMART Alliance Issue CFP/RFQ for AECOO-Phase 1 Testbed
Staff| Open Geospatial Consortium May 9, 2008Staff, 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 | |
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| Intellectual Property Issues |
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| | | EU launches new Microsoft antitrust probe
Richard Waters| Financial Times.com January 14, 2008The European Commission on Monday opened its first new anti-trust campaign against Microsoft since the late 1990s,...The Commission said its investigation would focus on “allegations that a range of products have been unlawfully tied to sales of Microsoft’s dominant operating system”....Central to the new investigation will be Office, the widely-used suite of applications. According to ECIS, Microsoft has refused to disclose full information about file formats and other technology in Office, making it hard for rival software products to create files that can be exchanged easily with it. That in turn unfairly supports Windows, since Office does not run on the rival Linux operating system, according to ECIS.... ...Full Story | | |
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| Open Source |
| | | Linus Torvalds on Why Users Aren\'t Flocking to Linux
Scott Gilbertson| Wired.com February 8, 2008...according to Torvalds the reason Linux hasn't taken off is that most people are happy with the way things are. “If you act differently from Windows, even if you act in some ways better, it doesn’t matter; better is worse if it’s different.”
Torvalds also attributes much of the frustration with Windows Vista to this same idea. In other words, it’s not that Vista is worse than XP, but it’s different and that causes distress among users....But Torvalds thinks that can work to Linux's advantage:
"The desktop itself is something that people aren’t necessarily interested in new features and I think that actually is something that helps open source because now you can’t have one company that kind of tries to move the goal post because if it keeps trying to move the goal post, that’s just going to irritate that company’s own constituents." ...Full Story | | |
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| Who's Doing What to Whom |
| | | Microsoft struggling in aftermath of OOXML vote
Peter Judge| ZDNet UK March 5, 2008The Microsoft-created specification OOXML is struggling to achieve the two-thirds majority backing of ISO members in order for it to become a recognised standard, the aftermath of a high-profile meeting has revealed....The next stage in the process is for Microsoft, together with the organisation backing its specification, ECMA, to make the necessary changes to OOXML for 66 percent of ISO members to deem it worthy of becoming a proper standard. The company has until 29 March to make this happen or see the specification formally rejected....Microsoft now has one month to persuade enough national delegates to vote in favour of the specification, but [XML co-creator] Bray thinks this is very unlikely: "I totally don't believe that ECMA/Microsoft is going to be able to pull together a revised draft of this Frankenstein's monster in that timefra." ...Full Story | | |
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| Story Updates |
| | | China to get its own version of HD DVD, incompatible with the world standard
| HDTV.uk October 16, 2006In a bid to stop piracy and to provide a lower cost system and discs for the Chinese population, it has been confirmed by the DVD Forum that China will get its own HD DVD format which will be incompatible with the standard the rest of the world has adopted.The only difference is the modulation scheme. The Chinese version will use Four to Six Modulation instead of Eight to Twelve Modulation.
The financial motivation is that China's consumers have lower purchasing power compared to those in the US and Europe. Supposedly the anti-piracy measures will primarily stop trade of counterfeit discs between China and the rest of the world, as 'internal piracy' could still continue whatever format is adopted. ...Full Story | | |
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| Miscellaneous |
| | | 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 | | |
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| Standards and Your Business |
| | | Developing International Standards for Very Small Enterprises
C. Laporte, S. Alexandre, A. Renault| IEEE Computer March 28, 2008Industry recognizes that very small enterprises (VSEs) contribute
valuable products and services. In Europe, for example, 85 percent of
the IT sector's companies have only one to 10 employees....Studies and surveys confirm that current software engineering
standards do not address the needs of these organizations, especially
those with a low capability level. Compliance with standards such as
those from ISO and the IEEE is difficult if not impossible for them to
achieve. Subsequently, VSEs have no or very limited ways to be recognized ...Full Story | | |
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| Legislation/Regulation/Advocacy |
| | | Danish Agency Publishes Evaluation of SSO Open Standards Support
| Danish National IT and Telecom Agency April 8, 2008An April 03, 2008 press release from the Danish National IT and
Telecom Agency (IT- og Telestyrelsen) announced the publication of a
92-page report titled "Evaluation of Ten Standard Setting Organizations
with Regard to Open Standards." This special study by IDC was
commissioned to evaluate the degree of "openness" of the leading
standard setting organizations. The study was conducted in support of
the Danish parliament's "Parliamentary Resolution B103", unanimously
adopted on 02-June-2006, on the use of open standards for software in
the public sector. The Resolution instructed the Danish Government to
ensure that the public sector's use of information technology, including
the use of software, should be based on open standards. Ten standard
setting organizations were evaluated and all organizations had the
opportunity to review and comment on the evaluation of their organization.
The ten organizations are: CEN, Ecma, ETSI, IETF, ISO, ITU, NIST, OASIS,
OMG, and W3C. However, the concepts of openness and consensus
have been implemented using different models that relate to the type
of organization, their formal foundation and their degrees of
formalization. The definition of "open standards" was specified to
consist of three criteria: (1) The standard is fully documented and
accessible by public [Open documentation]; (2) The standard should be
free to implement without economical, political or legal restictions --
now as well as in the future [Open IPR, Open access, Open
interoperability]; (3) The standard is managed and maintained in an
open forum through an open process [Open meeting; Consensus; Due process;
Open change; Ongoing standards support]. ...Full Story | | |
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| Standards and Society |
| | | 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 | | |
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| New Consortia |
| | | The Open Source For IT Management
Sean Michael Kerner| InternetNews.com May 10, 2009A new open source-led effort wants to bring open choice to the systems management space. The OMC effort is starting off with a who's who of core open source systems management projects, including Nagios, Webmin, Zenoss, Emu Software's NetDirector, Qlusters openQRM and Symbiot's openSIMS.
Among the goals of the OMC is to help establish and utilize standards that allow for interoperability and integration of systems management solutions.
Promoting open source systems management solutions is another key goal and challenge for the OMC. ...Full Story | | |
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| Standards in Action |
| | | ANSI Celebrates the 2006 Winter Olympic Games
| ANSI.org February 19, 2009The origin of winter sports equipment dates back to 1000 BC when the first ice skates, fashioned from the bones and skins of reindeer, elks, and oxen, were donned to facilitate hunting across ice covered lakes. Precarious and unstable, these rudimentary skates were paired with poles to maintain balance. Winter sports, and the equipment used in these games, have seen great developments and diversification over time. Sports equipment today makes use of the most technologically advanced materials and designs to maximize speed, agility, and safety. Athletes depend on standards to ensure that sports equipment meets performance specifications and safety requirements. ...Full Story | | |
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| Mergers, Dissolutions etc. |
| | | ITAA, GEIA Announce Merger
Press Release| ITAA.org January 21, 2008Arlington, VA - The Boards of Directors of the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA) and the Government Electronics and Information Technology Association (GEIA) have voted to merge the groups’ memberships and programs, the associations announced today.
The merger will bring together nearly 400 technology companies to focus on public policy, business development, technology standards and market intelligence under the ITAA banner. The merger is expected to close on April 1. ...Full Story | | |
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| Quote of the Day |
The question behind the question, for a lot of the current OOXML debate, seems to be: can Microsoft really be trusted to behave? We shall see
| | | BRM Convenor Alex Brown, in a statement to ZDNet News UK...Full Story |
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