From the Standards Blog | Please Welcome Digistan On Wednesday, I introduced The Hague Declaration to those that visit this blog, promising to write again shortly to introduce the new organization that created the Declaration. That organization is called the Digital Standards Organization (Digistan, for short), and I'm pleased to say that I am one of its founders. In this entry, I'll give you my perceptions of what Digistan is all about, and what I hope it will accomplish.
You'll notice that I just used the words "my perceptions." This is for a number of reasons, the first being that this is still a very young organization that has taken shape, primarily via a listserv. I was welcomed onto the founders listserv on November 12, bringing the total number of participants to 13. Since then, that list has grown. As of today, there are 19 individuals that have agreed to publicly associate themselves with the organization as founders, and it would be fair to say that there is a broad range of views (from conservative to radical) represented in this cross section of experienced professionals. Together, we have been reaching consensus on various pieces of the still-incomplete and evolving puzzle, adding them to the Digistan site as sufficient agreement is reached to make them public, while still allowing the pieces to change to reflect continuing discussion.
The result is that the organization, to an extent, is not unlike the story of the five blind men touching the proverbial elephant, but with a twist. It would be more accurate to say that each of the blind men has arrived on the scene not to find a strange new creature, but rather bearing a piece of the elephant. Today, we are still completing the process of putting the beast together. For this reason, what I write in this entry should be regarded as my perceptions alone, and the rights of the other founders to describe their piece of the elephant, and their vision of the final product, must be preserved.
With all that said, what is innovative new animal we call "Digistan?" Here's how it feels to me....Full Story
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Web Accessibility for Older Users: A Literature Review Andrew Arch (ed)
W3C Technical Report May 17, 2008 The W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Education and Outreach Working
Group Working Group (EOWG) has published "Web Accessibility for Older
Users: A Literature Review" as a First Public Working Draft. Public
comment on this WD is invited through Wednesday 4-June-2008. The document
includes reviews and analysis of guidelines and articles covering the
requirements of people with Web accessibility needs related to ageing....Many countries
in Europe and elsewhere have legislation in place to reduce discrimination
against people with disabilities, both young and old, along with related
policies or guidelines applying to online services. Furthermore, the
European Union (EU) and the European Commission (EC) have programmes in
place to ensure that e-Inclusion for people with disabilities is enhanced
among the Member States, and it is also addressing the needs of the
elderly and other disadvantaged groups. In particular, they have agreed
to address the needs of older workers and elderly people by exploiting
the full potential of the internal market of information and
communications technology (ICT) services and products for the elderly,
amongst others by addressing demand fragmentation by promoting
interoperability through standards and common specifications where
appropriate. ...Full Story
IT manager complaints to the Danish Standard of OOXML Mads Elkaer
ComputerWorld.com (Denmark) May 16, 2008 Danish Standard has received the first official complaint against OOXML process.
The complaint comes from Jens Kjellerup, IT manager at the town executive for Children and Young People in Aarhus municipality, who sat with the technical committee, as Danish Standard reduced in assessing the Microsoft format OOXML was approved as an ISO standard. ...Full Story
SEC Proposes Requirement for Use of XBRL in Financial Reporting Staff
Securities and Exchange Commission (US) May 16, 2008 The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has voted to formally
propose using new technology to get important information to investors
faster, more reliably, and at a lower cost. At the center of the SEC
proposal is "interactive data": computer tags similar in function to
bar codes used to identify groceries and shipped packages. The
interactive data tags uniquely identify individual items in a company's
financial statement so they can be easily searched on the Internet,
downloaded into spreadsheets, reorganized in databases, and put to any
number of other comparative and analytical uses by investors, analysts,
and journalists. The proposed rule would require all U.S. companies to
provide financial information using interactive data beginning next
year for the largest companies, and within three years for all public
companies. According to SEC's John White, all of the technology is
coming together to make electronic filing a true analytical tool. The
staff has gathered valuable experience during the almost three years
that public companies have been submitting interactive data in our
voluntary filer program... The SEC's proposed schedule would require
companies using U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles with a
worldwide public float over $5 billion (approximately the 500 largest
companies) to make financial disclosures using interactive data
formatted in eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) for fiscal
periods ending in late 2008. If adopted, the first interactive data
provided under the new rules would be made public in early 2009. ...Full Story
Sir Tim Berners-Lee to Track Origins of Digital Content K.C. Jones
InformationWeek May 16, 2008 Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee has received a grant to create a
technology that will give users more information about the origins and
sources of digital content....According to the 2008 Winners
Reference: With the copious amounts of information (and misinformation)
on the Internet, the public needs more help finding fair, accurate and
contextual news. The plan: to design a way for content creators to add
information on their sources to their reports, as a form of source
tagging. For instance, a reporter could note that an article was based
on personal observations, interviews with eyewitnesses or specific,
original documents. Filters would then use this data ('the story behind
the story') to help find high-quality articles. ...Full Story
Harvey Schein, Promoter of Betamax at Sony, Dies at 80 Bruce Weber
The New York Times May 15, 2008 Harvey L. Schein, who led the Sony Corporation of America in the 1970s and doubled its size in spite of championing the failed Betamax video recording system and clashing with Sony’s top Japanese executives, died Wednesday in Manhattan....Among the first Americans to reach the upper echelons of a major Japanese company, Mr. Schein led Sony America from 1972 to 1978, and his tenure was both successful and stormy. In the middle of it in 1976, Sony brought to market the Betamax, its first portable videocassette recorder. The machine, and its recording-and-playing format, initiated a famous corporate battle that the company lost after a rival company, JVC, developed a different format, the Video Home System (or VHS), which became the industry standard....[A]larmed by what they saw as the parasitic nature of the home recording of television programs and fearing that people who recorded television shows to watch later would never tune in to reruns, MCA/Universal and Walt Disney Productions filed suit against Sony, charging copyright infringement and asking for an injunction against sales of the Betamax....Sidney Sheinberg, the president of MCA/Universal,... called him a “highwayman.” ...Full Story
Defining "open standards": The Digital Standards Organization (digistan.org) David A. Wheeler
Blog May 15, 2008 Lots of people agree that we need "open standards" in information technology. The problem is, there are a lot of snake-oil salesmen who are trying to (re)define that term to mean "whatever proprietary product I'm selling"....So I'm delighted to have discovered the Digital Standards Organization (digistan.org)....I think making standards available at no-charge is no longer a nicety; it is a necessity for a specification to be a truly open standard. When there were only a few standards, and all products were developed by large big-budget corporations, a $100 standard was not a big deal. But today there are a vast array of standards; simply buying "all relevant standards" is becoming prohibitive...The world has changed. In today's world, "publish" means "freely available over the Internet without having to register for it"; if you can't Google it, it doesn't exist. The cost of putting a specification on a public web server is essentially petty cash, and not doing so means that many (if not most) of the specification's potential users cannot use it. ...Full Story
Google, IBM, Red Hat, Sun and "the great left-wing conspiracy" Dennis Byron
IT Investment Research May 15, 2008 Another anti-Microsoft (MSFT) front group has emerged in favor of “free and open standards,” hyping what it calls the Hague Declaration and making some absurd connection to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights....Unbelievably it calls itself Digistan, apparently to indentify with the fascist terrorists based in countries and regions using the Farsi-based suffix “stan.”
All of these front groups percolate around about two dozen individuals, mostly European. The vast left-wing conspiracy of George Soros works around the edges of their mostly web-site-only organizations. But there is a profit motive. Some seem to exist to raise money from public companies in order to hold conferences at excellent venues. Others run consulting companies to advise governments how to follow “free and open standards” or law firms that write licenses that follow “free and open standards.” [AU: Drat! My true motivations have been discovered!] Only if these lefties could be time warped back to the last century so that they could ‘fight the right’ in Spain (or sit in the Les Deux Maggot and talk about fighting the right in Spain). Then the rest of us could avoid having our tax dollars wasted and our share values diminished.... ...Full Story
Verizon Wireless to introduce Linux phones Peter Svensson
Forbes.com May 15, 2008 Verizon Wireless is backing a free operating system that competes with programs from Microsoft Corp., Google Inc. and Qualcomm Inc. and expects it to become the "preferred" software on its network.
It's the first U.S. carrier to join the LiMo Foundation, ...Kyle Malady, vice president of network for Verizon, said he expects the company to sell both simple and "smart" phones using LiMo next year...."We expect that Linux Mobile will rapidly become our preferred operating system," Malady said....
But the company is not adopting LiMo to the exclusion of other operating systems, he added - it now sells phones with a variety of operating systems, and expects to continue doing so. ...Full Story
China's Homegrown Audio Video Coding and Decoding Standard, AVS, has Attracted Much Industry Interest Since its Release Press Release
Research and Markets May 15, 2008 DUBLIN, Ireland--Research and Markets has announced the addition of Opportunities and Challenges for the AVS Standard in China to their [research offerings].
China's homegrown audio video coding and decoding standard, AVS (Audio Video coding Standard) has attracted much industry interest since its release. Due to the pervasiveness of digital multimedia applications, and the enormous potential of the Chinese digital TV, IPTV (Internet Protocol Television), and mobile phone TV markets, the industries are holding positive attitudes towards the future of AVS. In January 2006 the Standardization Administration of China approved the AVS as the national audio/video coding standard, and took effect in March 2006. With increasing adoption of AVS in China, the standard will begin to make an impact on the industry chain. The report analyzes current development of the AVS standard and services in China. ...Full Story
The standard that was not and the Hague Declaration Charles-H Schulz
Moved By Freedom - Powered by Standards May 14, 2008 ...In short, what does the Hague Declaration and the Digital Standards Group stand for? The Hague Declaration ackowledges the growing role of information technologies in the daily lives of citizens, businesses and governments worldwide. This growing importance should not be understimated, and neither should the amount of our rights and civic processes be underestimated too. This is how the Hague Declaration makes the case for the use of openness and freedom in software and networks, and does it by recommending the use of Free and Open Source Software and Open Standards. In fact, Open Standards, more than Open Source, is the focus of the Digital Standards Group. It thus calls governments and vendors to realize both the challenge and the opportunity of Open Standards as technology now governs increasing portions of our political, civic, and social lives.
By doing so, the Hague Declaration continues a worldwide conversation that has started with the development of OpenDocument Format. This conversation is far to be over; in fact, it is just starting, and everybody should take part in it, as vendors are rushing to propose evermore proprietary solutions relying on closed specifications, ultimately forcing us to relinquish our control over our data and our rights.
We hope you will join us by signing this manifesto. ...Full Story
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