Google Sky: To Freely Go

Robert Scoble cried over Microsoft's upcoming WorldWide Telescope, and he may well not be alone, since I'm sure there will be some proprietary angles that push people towards viewing it under Windows. For the rest of us, Google has created the browser-based Google Sky: maybe not as breathtaking as Microsoft's, but at least it doesn't cost you the earth in terms of your freedom.

Mandriva Goes "Eee"

I've written many times, both on this blog and elsewhere, about the importance of the Asus Eee PC and its ultraportable siblings in terms of defining a new market sector that is deeply problematic for Microsoft. Here's a further sign of that machine's influence: one of the major distros explicitly supporting the Eee out of the box:

We at Mandriva noticed Asus's excellent Eee PC low-cost, miniature notebook taking the world by storm. Thanks to our work on the Intel Classmate PC, we already had extensive experience of working with this type of system, and it was simple to make Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring 100% Eee-friendly. The Eee comes with a capable Linux distribution, but should you reach its limitations or prefer to install your favourite distribution instead, Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring is ready. It supports all the Eee's hardware out of the box, with no configuration required, and the Mandriva configuration tools and applications have been tweaked to be friendly to the Eee's lower resolution screen.

(Via Eee Site.)

Usenix Conference Proceedings Free

Usenix is opening up:

All online conference proceedings are now freely available to everyone. This significant decision will allow universal access to some of the most important technical research in advanced computing. In making this move USENIX is setting the standard for open access to information, an essential part of its mission.

As far as I can tell, though, this is not free as in freedom, just free as in beer:

The Proceedings are published as a collective work, © 2008 by the USENIX Association. All Rights Reserved. Rights to individual papers remain with the author or the author's employer. Permission is granted for the noncommercial reproduction of the complete work for educational or research purposes.

(Via TechDirt.)

EU "Will Prefer Open Source Software"

This seems a rather low-key announcement of a suprisingly strong policy:

In a document published last week, the EC states among others that the Commission will prefer Open Source software for its new IT projects: "For all new development, where deployment and usage is foreseen by parties outside of the Commission Infrastructure, Open Source Software will be the preferred development and deployment platform."

According to the document, the EC is an early adopter of Open Source. A first strategy document on this type of software was presented in 2000. However, it is for the first time the European Commission publishes such a document. Valerie Rampie, spokesperson or Siim Kallas, the European commissioner who is responsible for administrative affairs, said the publication of the strategy is "mainly for information purposes".

The EC writes that its IT community early last year had adopted its Open Source strategy after "a thorough consultation within the community". Next from stating its preference for Open Source for new projects. the EC decided that "for all future IT developments and procurement procedures, the Commission shall promote the use of products that support open, well-documented standards. Interoperability is a critical issue for the Commission, and usage of well-established open standards is a key factor to achieve and endorse it.

Slightly curious that it moves anti-climactically from open source to open standards, with the dreaded "interoperability" - Microsoft's favouriate weasel-word - slithering in. I hope that there isn't anything Machiavellian happening in the EU shadows here.... (Via Simon Phipps.)

Update: And the US Navy, too.

A Digital Shadow in the Digital Universe

As a mathematician, I love numbers, and here are some pretty spectactular ones from IDC:

The IDC research shows that the digital universe — information that is either created, captured, or replicated in digital form — was 281 exabytes in 2007. In 2011, the amount of digital information produced in the year should equal nearly 1,800 exabytes, or 10 times that produced in 2006. The compound annual growth rate between now and 2011 is expected to be almost 60%.

Part of that digital universe is the digital data about us - our digital shadow as IDC dub it:

in 2007, when IDC developed the Personal Digital Footprint Calculator, launched this month, we discovered that only about half of the digital footprint would be related to individual actions — taking pictures, making VoIP phone calls, uploading videos to YouTube, downloading digital content, and so on.

We called the remainder “ambient” content. It is digital images of you on a surveillance camera and records in banking, brokerage, retail, airline, telephone, and medical databases. It is information about Web searches and general backup data. It is copies of hospital scans. In other words, it is information about you in cyberspace. Your digital shadow, if you will.

Talk about ghost in the machine....

Ubuntu Live Stats

I am a sucker for live information - Web pages that change in real time. This probably goes back to an earlier truly sad proclivity to watch disc defragmenters for fun. My latest fave is the wonderful Ubuntu Live Stats:

The main idea behind this project is to reflect the enormous activity Ubuntu has on all fronts. We parse every data source we think is interesting to show you how much the community is working and display it in an easy-to-read format.

Comune di Milano = Microsoft's Mugs

Here's an extraordinary - and extraordinarily depressing - story from Stefano Maffulli about the Comune di Milano (roughly the Milan city council) pushing to its citizens some free services from Microsoft for, er, free:

Incomprensibile: perché il Comune si fa veicolo di pubblicità per Microsoft senza avere niente in cambio? Si sono resi conto gli alti dirigenti del Comune che la maggior parte di quei servizi sono già offerti da Microsoft (e da Yahoo e Google e Tiscali ecc ecc) gratuitamente? Che valore sperano di offrire così ai cittadini?

[Unbelievable: why is the Comune providing publicity for Microsoft without getting anything in return? Don't the eminences of the Comune realise that the majority of those services are already offered by Microsoft (and by Yahoo and Google and Tiscali etc. etc.) free of charge? What do they hope to offer of value to citizens acting like this?]

Google Tools We Can't Use

Tantalising:

A web seminar Google held yesterday at KMWorld Magazine offered a great deal of insight into how Google manages projects and communication internally. The presentation by Google followed an employee through his first few weeks at the company, explaining the many tools he’s using: from the Google intranet MOMA, the Google Ideas site and Google Caribou Alpha, to Google Experts Search, “Googler Search,” and Google Apps.

OSS in Russia

Wondering what was happening on the free software front in Russia? Wonder no more:

Recent interest towards FOSS from the Russian government has boosted commercial activity in this field. No longer than a year ago there was no single large company that would say it is capable of doing FOSS system integration projects. Now there are three, and the number will probably grow.

Nobody is particularly sure about how to do business with FOSS, but it is already evident that it can be done somehow. That is why the larger ones are jumping on the bandwagon simply not to be late.

Tough Times for Patent Troll Tracker

Just this morning we were lamenting the fact that the formerly anonymous Patent Troll Tracker had shut down his blog, but now we know why. It appears that two patent attorneys in East Texas have sued him and Cisco for defamation. One of the attorneys happens to also be the son of the judge who helped make Marshall, Texas famous as a favorite for patent holders. The details on the case suggest that this lawsuit may have been the reason that Rick Frenkel outed himself, as it was actually filed back in November and used as a way to unmask the Troll Tracker.

Tough it out, Troll Tracker....

BPM + ECM = BPP

On Open Enterprise blog.

The Inventor of Email Uses...Thunderbird

Of course:

He uses Thunderbird, an e-mail application developed by Mozilla, the company which distributes the Firefox web browser, but he also has a Gmail account.

He said he once had to use Outlook – “I didn’t find it particularly attractive”, and that for a time he blocked all incoming messages from Hotmail, “because they used to carry a lot of viruses – though they’ve clamped down on that.”

(Via David Ascher.)

The Economics of Information Security

On Open Enterprise blog.

Open Enterprise Interview: Mary Lou Jepsen

On Open Enterprise blog.

OpenSpimes

Open what?

A "spime" (the word -- a contraction of "space" and "time" -- was coined by sci-fi writer Bruce Sterling) is an object that, thanks to GPS and sensors, is aware of where and when it is, and can record and communicate these data. OpenSpimes are designed to allow everyone to record and visualize environmental (or other) data, to store them, publish them, blog them, compare them, mix and mash them up.

The first spime they've designed is a smart application of distributed computing in the service of sustainability. It can measure the CO2 level in parts-per-million in the surrounding air, and through a bluetooth link to a cell phone (or an alternative link to a laptop or other wireless channels) can relay that information back to the OpenSpime servers. There they can be mashed up and aggregated on Google Maps in almost-real-time.

Kudos to OpenMoko

OpenMoko opens up even more:

OpenMoko, makers of the first true open source phone (previously blogged here), have recently expanded the meaning of ‘open source design’ by licensing the CAD (computer-aided design) files for their flagship model, the Neo1973, under a CC BY-SA license. In doing so, OpenMoko not only allow industrial designers a peek inside the Neo1973 to see how it works, but also show a keen understanding of the power community efforts can have in creating a better end-user experience.

Hyperactive Hyperic

On Open Enterprise blog.

EU: Ewww on Patented Software Standards

Digital Majority News points us to a fine hidalgo asking a key question about the EU's policy on software standards:

The 'European ICT crossroads: A new direction for global success' conference organised by the Commission's DG Enterprise and Industry on 12 February 2008 could turn out to have been a decisive moment for communications and information in the EU. The idea contained in the conference's title, at least, should be a turning point. It also embodies the very essence of what could be seen as the ideal framework for a wideranging and open discussion – without pre-formed ideas – on defining a European strategy on communications, in the search for tools and systems, with a major potential for the future, that are and within the grasp of a greater number of citizens. However, a quick assessment of the discussion document reveals certain worrying features, indicative of a certain tendency towards standardisation by means of patents, which in practice involve the exclusion of free software which is available free of charge. The document clearly supports the (F)RAND option with regard to managing intellectual property rights, which in practice implies not only that a choice has been made beforehand, but furthermore that this choice favours a system which benefits, and is in the hands of, the large software developing companies, rather than users.

Indicative of this is the fact that the original Spanish question is only available in English as a Microsoft Word document....

First Dirac Video Codec May or May Not Be Available

The BBC's Dirac is:

a general-purpose video compression family suitable for everything from internet streaming to HDTV and electronic cinema.

and

a very versatile video compression family. It includes a range of tools which gives flexibility in performance to match the environment.

Appropriately enough, "the world's first high performance implementation of Dirac" has been made by none other than the Schrödinger project:

The final specification of Dirac became available on 21st of January 2008 and now the Schrödinger project is proud to announce an implementation of that specification. Schrödinger core is implemented in ANSI C with further assembly level optimisations privided through the liboil optimisation library. The Schrödinger decoding and encoding components offer a stable ABI for developers which will enable easy integration of Dirac support for application and media framework developers. The Schrödinger project also includes a set of GStreamer plugins as an example of how to use the Schrödinger library in a modern multimedia framework.

The release of the Schrodinger library will significantly reduce the the time required to include Dirac support in multimedia applications, therefore reducing the barrier to adoption substantially.

Probably.

Windows 7: Out of Luck

Microsoft to date has said little about Windows 7, which had been in development under the code name Blackcomb. It's generally believed that the OS will ship in the 2010 timeframe.

That's one year after the federal government's oversight of Microsoft is now slated to expire. As a result, the Technical Committee is trying to get its hands on as much Windows 7 code as it can as soon as possible. "The TC has begun to review Windows 7 itself. Microsoft recently supplied the TC with a build of Windows 7, and is discussing TC testing going forward," the report stated.

Luckily for us, the EU's interest has no cut-off date....

Open Letter to America

Since some of America's top minds are apparently having a bit of bother deciding this one, I thought the following personal experiences might help. (Via Craig Murray.)

Update: Not that we can talk, of course.

Canonical's GNU Bazaar

On Open Enterprise blog.

Why Enterprises Should Fight Software Patents

On Open Enterprise blog.

What Microsoft Groks Not

The other Microsoft Bill on open-sourcing Windows:

Open sourcing Windows is more hassle than it's worth and Microsoft sees little gain in releasing code, according to the man leading Microsoft's server marketing and platform strategy.

Microsoft general manager Bill Hilf has said the Windows source code is "irrelevant for what people want".

But what you seem not to understand, Bill, is that opening up helps *you* make Windows better, which is hardly "irrelevant for what people want."

Of Book Bankruptcy

Here's a poignant post about realising that book you have cradled within you for the last years not only will never get written, but doesn't need writing (BTDTGTTS). It concludes:

And to you reading this, keep up the good fight for open, secure and private computing, but remember the words of George Eliot, which still adorn my old domain's home page:

Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.

When I do have something to say that relates to this blog's past themes, I will say it here, at least for now. I'm definitely a wiser man for all I've tried to achieve, but now I need to get back to work.