Latest News: From all Sources
New Industry Forum - Network Test Automation Forum - Advocates Collaboration and Interoperability of Vendor Test Tools
Press Release
NTAF.org – March 17, 2010: Leading companies from across the communications and networking industries including BreakingPoint Systems, BT, Cisco, Empirix, Ericsson, EXFO, Fanfare Software, Ixia, JDSU, Spirent Communications, and Verizon today announced that they have joined forces to form the Network Test Automation Forum (NTAF), www.ntaforum.org, a global effort designed to promote interoperability between test tools and to simplify lab automation efforts. With representation from service providers, network equipment manufacturers and test & measurement vendors, NTAF advocates a customer-centric, device-agnostic framework that reduces time, complexity, and cost of product test cycles.
NTAF represents a fundamental shift from the stand-alone and proprietary approaches to an open lab automation approach. The forum asks test equipment vendors to collaborate with their customers to define an open and advanced automation framework. Through the agreement and adoption of multi-vendor technical architectures for test automation systems, test engineers and lab managers will benefit from accelerated deployment of next generation network products and services.... ...Full Story
ICC, ASHRAE, USGBC and IES Announce Nation’s First Set of Model Codes and Standards for Green Building in the U.S.
ANSI.org – March 17, 2010: The International Code Council (ICC), the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE), the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), and the Illuminating Engineering Society of North America (IES) â€" all members of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) â€" have announced the launch of the International Green Construction Code (IGCC).
The IGCC represents the merger of two national efforts to develop adoptable and enforceable green building codes. It will provide the building industry with language that both broadens and strengthens building codes in a way that will accelerate the construction of high performance green buildings across the U.S.
For decades, ICC and ASHRAE have worked to develop codes and standards that become the industry standard of care for the design, construction, operations and maintenance of residential and commercial buildings in the U.S. and internationally. In coordination with the efforts of ICC and ASHRAE, USGBC has been leading a nationwide green building movement centered on the LEED Green Building Rating System since LEED was launched in 2000. The convergence of these efforts in the IGCC is perhaps the most significant development in the buildings industry in the past 10 years.... ...Full Story
Consensus Emerges for Key Web Application Standard
Stephen Shankland
CNET News.com – March 17, 2010: Browser makers, grappling with outmoded technology and a vision to
rebuild the Web as a foundation for applications, have begun converging
on a seemingly basic by very important element of cloud computing. That
ability is called local storage, and the new mechanism is called
Indexed DB....already it's won endorsements from
Microsoft, Mozilla, and Google, and together, Internet Explorer, Firefox,
and Chrome account for more than 90 percent of the usage on the Net today.
Standardization could come: advocates have worked Indexed DB into the
considerations of the W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium that
standardizes HTML and other Web technologies....Local storage lets
Web programmers save data onto computers where it's convenient for
processors to access. That can mean, for example, that some aspects of
Gmail and Google Docs can work while you're disconnected from the
network.... ...Full Story
Now a No-Evil Zone
Tim Bray
Ongoing (blog) – March 16, 2010: As of this morning I work for Google. The title is “Developer Advocate”. The focus is Android. Fun is expected....On Google · It’s now too big to be purely good or in fact purely anything. I’m sure that tendrils of stupidity and evil are even now finding interstitial breeding grounds whence they will emerge to cause grief. And there are some Google initiatives that I feel no urge to go near.
But there are those Ten Things and you know, I’m down with ’em. Unreservedly.
The reason I’m here is mostly Android. Which seems to me about as unambiguously a good thing as the tangled wrinkly human texture of the Net can sustain just now. Here’s why:... ...Full Story
OASIS Blue Member Section: Open Standards for Smart Energy Grids
OASIS.org – March 16, 2010: OASIS has announced the formation of a new Member Section, OASIS Blue,
which will bring together a variety of open standards projects related
to energy, intelligent buildings, and natural resources. OASIS Blue will
leverage the innovation of existing electronic commerce standards and
the power of the Internet to achieve meaningful sustainability. An
international effort, OASIS Blue incorporates work that has [been] identified
as a central deliverable for the U.S. government's strategic Smart Grid
initiative. OASIS Blue welcomes suggestions for forming new Committees
related to its mission....Several Technical Committees will coordinate efforts under OASIS Blue.
The Energy Interoperation Technical Committee...The Energy Market Information Exchange
(eMIX) Technical Committee...The Open Building Information
Exchange (oBIX) Technical Committee... ...Full Story
W3C Launches Decisions and Decision-Making Incubator Group
W3C.org – March 15, 2010: W3C is pleased to announce the creation of the Decisions and Decision-
Making Incubator Group. The mission of this XG is to determine the
requirements, use cases, and a representation of decisions and
decision-making in a collaborative and networked environment suitable
for leading to a potential standard for decision exchange, shared
situational awareness, and measurement of the speed, effectiveness,
and human factors of decision-making. Incubator Activity work is not
on the W3C standards track but in many cases serves as a starting point
for a future Working Group....Everyone makes important decisions in the daily
accomplishment of their duties. The aggregate of these decisions
constitutes the current state of their organization, and charts the
course for our future direction and progress. In a sense, our
decisions represent individuals and the organizations they represent.
The effective representation, management, evaluation, and sharing of
these decisions determines the success of the enterprise. Especially
in a distributed, self-organizing, networked environment where digital
media are the main interaction between members, distribution and
tracking of decisions is particularly important for understanding
what others are doing. Our decisions serve as information-work products;
both as inputs and outputs....In case the group decides that a
particular technology is ripe for further standardization at the W3C,
the group will consider preparing a W3C member submission and/or propose
a W3C group charter to be considered by the W3C. ...Full Story
OASIS Public Review for The State of ODF Interoperability Version 1.0
Robert Weir
OASIS.org – March 15, 2010: Members of the OASIS Open Document Format Interoperability and
Conformance (OIC) Technical Committee have submitted an approved
Committee Draft "The State of ODF Interoperability Version 1.0" for
public review through May 08, 2010. OASIS encourages feedback from
potential users, developers and others, whether OASIS members or not,
for the sake of improving the interoperability and quality of this
OASIS work. Interested parties are also invited to join the TC as it
continues to further development of its specifications....The OASIS ODF
Technical Committee1 is currently working on ODF 1.2.
The OASIS ODF Interoperability and Conformance (OIC) TC was created
in October 2008 with the stated purpose 'to produce materials and
host events that will help implementors create applications which
conform the ODF standard and which are able to interoperate.'
The charter of the OIC TC also calls for it to periodically review
the state of conformance and interoperability among ODF implementations,
to report on 'overall trends in conformance and interoperability', to
note 'areas of accomplishment as well as areas needing improvement'
and to 'recommend prioritized activities for advancing the state of
conformance and interoperability among ODF implementations.' This
State of ODF Interoperability report is the first of the OIC TC's
reports on interoperability, and as such provides an overview of the
topic and discusses the baseline level of achievement....This report
discusses interoperability with respect to the OASIS OpenDocument
Format (ODF) and notes specific areas where implementors might focus
in order to improve interoperability among ODF-supporting applications. ...Full Story
Increase Mobile Broadband Infrastructure Density Tenfold
Press Release
EarthTimes – March 12, 2010: A new initiative named Beyond Next-Generation Mobile Broadband (BuNGee) aimed at a tenfold increase of mobile broadband infrastructure capacity density has been launched. The €4.7 million initiative is funded in large part by the European Commission and will draw upon collaboration among the consortium members comprising European service providers, technology equipment vendors, universities, and research organizations.
Organized under the Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development (FP7), the BuNGee consortium’s primary objective will be to increase the overall mobile network infrastructure capacity density to well beyond what current technologies are promising, targeting the challenging goal of 1 Giga bit per second per square kilometer.... ...Full Story
Court Reaffirms I4i's Patent Win Against Microsoft
Nancy Gohring
IDG News Service – March 12, 2010: The U.S. Federal Court of Appeals has once again upheld a jury's verdict that Microsoft willfully infringed on patents awarded to i4i.
The verdict, which the appeals court first affirmed in December, required Microsoft to pay more than US$240 million in damages and forced it to remove a feature in versions of Microsoft Word 2007 starting in January. Microsoft had been charged with infringing a patent owned by i4i with a feature in Word 2003 and 2007 that lets people create custom XML documents....The panel will now circulate the document to the rest of the judges on the appeals court, who will decide whether to take up Microsoft's request for an en banc review. If they do, that would mean that all 12 appeals court judges will reconsider the case....If the judges decide against an en banc review, Microsoft can ask the Supreme Court to hear the case, [i4A's] Owen said.... ...Full Story
OGC Announces Earth Observation Profile for Web-based Catalogue Services
Open Geospatial Consortium – March 12, 2010: The Open Geospatial Consortium has announced adoption and availability
of the "OGC Catalogue Services Standard Extension Package for ebRIM
Application Profile: Earth Observation Products", and also the related
"Geography Markup Language (GML) Application Schema for EO Products."
Together, these standards, when implemented, will enable more efficient
data publishing and discovery for a wide range of stakeholders who
provide and use data generated by satellite-borne and aerial radar,
optical and atmospheric sensors.... ...Full Story
NIST Publishes Open Vulnerability and Assessment Language (OVAL) Validation Program Test Requirements Specification
John Banghart, Stephen Quinn, David Waltermire (eds), NIST Report
NIST – March 12, 2010: Open Vulnerability and Assessment Language (OVAL) Validation
Program Test Requirements." The report defines the requirements and
associated test procedures necessary for products to achieve one or
more Open Vulnerability and Assessment Language (OVAL) Validations.
Validation is awarded based on testing a defined set of OVAL
capabilities by independent laboratories that have been accredited
for OVAL testing by the NIST National Voluntary Laboratory
Accreditation Program (NVLAP).
Open Vulnerability and Assessment Language (OVAL) is an information
security community standard to promote open and publicly available
security content, and to standardize the transfer of this information
across security tools and services. The OVAL Language is an XML
specification for exchanging technical details on how to check systems
for security-related software flaws, configuration issues, and patches.
The OVAL Language standardizes the three main steps of the assessment
process: representing configuration information of systems for testing;
analyzing the system for the presence of the specified machine state
(vulnerability, configuration, patch state, etc.); and reporting the
results of the assessment. In this way, OVAL enables open and publicly
available security content and standardizes the transfer of this content
across the entire spectrum of information security tools and services.
OVAL is maintained by the MITRE Corporation... ...Full Story
Elliott Said to Plan Sale of Novell Business If Offer Succeeds
Aaron Ricadela
Bloomberg News – March 11, 2010: Elliott Associates LP, the fund manager that made an unsolicited $2 billion offer for Novell Inc., would sell the NetWare networking-software unit if its bid succeeds, a person familiar with the matter said.
Elliott, which owns about 8.5 percent of Novell stock, would also try to run the company more efficiently and bring about $400 million in cash that Novell holds off shore to the U.S., said the person, who asked not to be identified because details of Elliott’s offer haven’t been made public. Elliott may also try to find a buyer for Novell’s business that specializes in an open-source operating system, the person said.... ...Full Story
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