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Oracle's OOo cards remain close to its vest I would have loved to have heard this speech first hand, given that the statement "OpenOffice.org, the Open Document Format and their customers" tells you nothing about how much Oracle cares about any of the three - only that it's enthusiasm (or total lack thereof) is equal. That, conjoined with the failure to announce any strategic intentions is troubling, although it is heartening that Bemmer attended the conference and apparently delivered an upbeat speech. That's more then OpenSolaris can say.Oracle veep backs software revolution at historic anniversary OpenOffice.org global conference
Press Release
OpenOffice.org September 2, 2010 - OpenOffice.org, the Open Document Format and their customers are equally important, Michael Bemmer, the Vice President and General Manager of Oracle Office, said at the annual international OpenOffice.org Conference on Wednesday 1st September. Although Bemmer did not divulge details of his company's future strategy he made it clear that the inexorable rise of OpenOffice.org will continue in the years ahead, in a speech entitled “A Decade of Success” at the plenary session of the annual international OpenOffice.org Conference in the Hungarian Parliament building.
This year's event was seen as the most important to date, as the international IT community awaited US industry giant Oracle's first statement on the future of OpenOffice.org since its acquisition of Sun Systems earlier in the year....Some 5,000 IT professionals have worked as volunteers on the OpenOffice.org project since Sun Microsystems launched it in the autumn of 2000. The latest version of the office software suite is used by hundreds of millions of people, with a 15-20% global market share, and is available in over 100 languages. More than a 100 speakers and around 300 guests are currently in the Hungarian capital for the three-day event, which has been organised by ODFA Hungary. ...Full Story
W3C Launches HTML Speech Incubator Group
W3C.org September 2, 2010 - W3C is pleased to announce the creation of the HTML Speech
Incubator Group, whose mission is to determine the feasibility
of integrating speech technology in HTML5 in a way that
leverages the capabilities of both speech and HTML (e.g., DOM)
to provide a high-quality, browser-independent
speech/multimodal experience while avoiding unnecessary
standards fragmentation or overlap. The following W3C Members
have sponsored the charter for this group: Voxeo, Microsoft,
Openstream, Google, AT&T, Mozilla. Read more about the
Incubator Activity, an initiative to foster development of
emerging Web-related technologies. Incubator Activity work is
not on the W3C standards track but in many cases serves as a
starting point for a future Working Group. ...Full Story
EmotionML: Will computers tap into your feelings?
Stephen Shankland
CNET.com September 1, 2010 - For all those who believe the computing industry is populated by people who are out of touch with the world of emotion, it's time to think again.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which standardizes many Web technologies, is working on formalizing emotional states in a way that computers can handle. The name of the specification, which in July reached second-draft status, is Emotion Markup Language. EmotionML combines the rigor of computer programming with the squishiness of human emotion....The idea is called affective computing in academic circles, and if it catches on, computer interactions could be very different. Avatar faces could show their human master's expression during computer chats. ...Computers could respond to your expressions as people do. Computer help technology like Microsoft's Clippy or a robot waiter could discern when to make themselves scarce....But there could be a dark side, too, opening new class of worries for those online.
Might a company target you with particular advertising if it knows you're jubilant or despairing?... ...Full Story
The Future of the Web Is a Matter of Semantics
Science Daily September 1, 2010 - ...Nikolaos Konstantinou of Athens Information Technology (AIT) and colleagues at the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), in Greece, state that after almost a decade of research, the fundamental concepts that would underpin a semantic web have matured, yet the average web user cannot yet take advantage of their full potential. They suggest that there are three main issues to be overcome before Web 3.0 emerges and they present a roadmap in their paper to explain how these must be addressed:... a lack of simplicity, integration with existing technologies and practices, and adoption by the web industry.
They suggest that ways to automatically add meta data to digital objects are now needed to make it possible to publish semantically rich content without manual intervention regardless of whether the "publisher" is a large corporation or an individual content creator. They also say that semantic technologies do not offer a substitute for current practices, rather a complement to them and that web engineers need not abandon experience but should build on it. Finally, the driving forces of the web industry should adopt semantic web technologies since their adoption entails a series of benefits both for the companies themselves as well as to the end users.... ...Full Story
You want WAPI with that? If you think rolling out a new cellphone is complicated in the West, try China, where cellphone vendors and carriers need to not only deal with the mainstream global standards, but with China's home-grown TD-SCDMA standard as well. Oh - and you better include WAPI security as well.
Motorola Brings Android to the Ming Phones in China
MobileTechReview.com August 31, 2010 - Motorola today introduced three new devices in China including MT810 for China Mobile's TD-SCDMA network, XT806 for China Telecom's CDMA-2000 network and A1680 for China Unicom's WCDMA network. The devices combine the Android smartphone experience with updated MING features and designs. Here is more info on the new Ming models:... ...Full Story
ANSI Launches Pilot ENERGY STAR® Accreditation Program
ANSI.org August 31, 2010 - The American National Standards Institute (ANSI), coordinator of the U.S. standards and conformity assessment system, today announced the launch of a new pilot accreditation program for certification bodies that seek recognition from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to certify products under the ENERGY STAR® Program.
ENERGY STAR is a joint initiative of the EPA and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) that promotes energy-efficient products and practices. Because the ENERGY STAR products program has grown to encompass products in more than 60 categories and is relied upon by millions of Americans, EPA and DOE have put into place requirements for enhanced testing and verification....the EPA requires that third-party accreditation bodies operate in accordance with ISO/IEC 17011, Conformity assessment - General requirements for accreditation bodies accrediting conformity assessment bodies. Accreditation bodies must also be signatories to the International Accreditation Forum (IAF) Multilateral Recognition Arrangement (MLA) for Product Certification. ANSI is currently the only U.S. signatory to the IAF MLA for Product Certification.
The ANSI pilot program is designed to support the ENERGY STAR® Program through the independent, third-party accreditation of product certification bodies that evaluate and certify the activities of energy-efficient product manufacturers.... ...Full Story
Royalty-free H.264 may clear way for HTML5 standard
Lex Friedman
ComputerWorld August 31, 2010 - MPEG LA, the firm that controls licensing for a number of video and other standards, announced on Thursday that it will never charge any royalties for Internet video encoded using the H.264 standard that Apple favors, as long as that video is free to end-users....Just as with popular audio formats like MP3 and AAC, video formats aim to find the sweet spot between video quality and file size--they want to get as high as they can on the former, and as low as they can on the latter.
Much of the video on the Web these days is presented via Adobe's Flash technology...many popular Websites have made the move to support HTML5 video alongside or, in some cases, instead of Flash. HTML5 is the latest and greatest version of the Web's core markup language. The new HTML5 standard makes it possible for Websites to embed video that your computer can play without requiring a third-party plugin (like Flash)....the big browser developers couldn't agree on which video format the new tag in HTML5 should use: some sided with H.264, others with a format called Ogg Theora....The MPEG LA group, which owns the H.264 video codec, had declared that it wouldn't charge any royalty fees until 2016, but Mozilla and Opera were worried about what those future costs might be. Should H.264 video become a de facto Web standard in the meantime, the MPEG LA group would be in a position to charge a healthy fee for browser developers to keep using the format.... ...Full Story
Alliance Formed to Develop Electric Vehicles
CRIEnglish.com August 30, 2010 - China set up a new alliance on Wednesday to unify standards and speed up the research and development of home-made electric vehicles. China set up a new alliance on Wednesday to unify standards and speed up the research and development of home-made electric vehicles, the Beijing Times reported...The non-profit alliance is made up of 16 state-owned enterprises from relevant sectors, including China's top three oil companies, two top power grid operators, and three major automakers - China FAW Group Corp., Dongfeng Auto Corp., and Chang'an Auto Corp. ...Full Story
With Information Sharing, Context Is As Important As Content
Michael Daconta
Government Computer News August 27, 2010 - ...Given that modern development platforms can automatically generate code
to process XML documents, a narrow perspective can affect the exchange
and any code that processes that exchange. The new approach being
spearheaded by forward-thinking elements of the Army and Air Force is
to create the semantics first, via a high-fidelity data model called
an ontology, and then generate the XML schemas from that model.
Although not based on the Web Ontology Language, the National Information
Exchange Model (NIEM) takes a similar approach, in which the XML schemas
are generated from a database-backed data model. The contextual nature
of this approach is that the ontology uses a more top-down, enterprise
perspective to guide the inclusion of bottom-up exchanges. The heightened
awareness and use of context were mirrored on the commercial front by
Google's purchase of Metaweb and the company's Freebase entity graph.... ...Full Story
IETF Internet Draft: The Network Trouble Ticket Data Model
Dimitris Zisiadis, et al.
IETF.org August 27, 2010 - IETF has published an updated level -04 specification for the
Experimental Track "Network Trouble Ticket Data Model," which provides
an XML representation for conveying incident information across
administrative domains between parties that have an operational
responsibility of remediation or a watch-and-warning over a defined
constituency. The data model encodes information about hosts, networks,
and the services running on these systems; attack methodology and
associated forensic evidence; impact of the activity; and limited
approaches for documenting workflow.
Details: "The Network Trouble Ticket Data Model (NTTDM) aims to simplify
TT exchange within the boundaries of a Grid and to enhance the functional
cooperation of every Network operation Centre (NOC) and the Grid
Operation Centre (GOC). Community adoption of the NTTDM enhances trouble
resolution within the grid framework and imparts network status
cognisance by modelling collaboration and information exchange among
the operators.... ...Full Story
