For more than 200 years, moderns have sought to divine the life stories of the ancients through the practice of archaeology. Through such efforts, we can learn something about the quotidian existence of not only those prehistorians that left no written descriptions of their daily lives, but also of our more recent forebears, who rarely saw fit to tell us what they ate for breakfast or which penny dreadfuls and broadsheets they liked to read.
Of course, archaeology permits us at best to see through a glass very darkly. Not only are we limited by the vagaries of what has survived through fortuitous chance, but by the fact that few materials used in daily life are designed for long-term survival under harsh conditions. As a result, not much has been consistently preserved from before the last millennia other than a limited number of works of art, personal adornment and handwritten books, records and plays. For more, we must grub around in the ruins of palaces and hovels to see what has survived the unforgiving embrace of dirt, or search about in the more preserving, but much less accessible, chilly depths of the sea.
Hence, the farther back we look into the past, the less we are likely to find, and the more limited are the types of artifacts we can hope to discover. For a few hundred years of history, we may discover glass and metal, crockery and bones, and (particularly in arid regions), scraps of basketry and fabrics. For a while longer, there are seeds and pollens, stones and bones. But soon enough there are only enigmatic stone flakes and tools – not much from which to intuit how a people lived, what they knew, and how they understood themselves, their gods and the world around them.
Oracle's announcement yesterday of its "Unbreakable Linux 2.0" program, aimed squarely at Red Hat, understandably overshadowed another announcement Larry Ellison made in the same speech. The fact that Oracle will provide cut-rate support for Red Hat Linux is of course big news, and if you have any doubt that Oracle thinks so, too, check out Oracle's home page today , which is entirely dedicated to its Linux news (even featuring the commanding presence of a body-armored penguin with clear steroids-abuse issues). You'll find an audio link to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's speech there as well. And if you check out their News page, you'll see that as part of Oracle's media blitz, it issued a total of 8 press releases yesterday.
Naturally, you'll be able to find reams of news, prognostications and punditry on the Linux announcement all over the Web, so I'll focus my attention today on the press release that I find to be most interesting: the one that tracks Ellison's announcement in the same speech that Oracle has joined the Free Standards Group (FSG), at the highest level of membership. You can find that press release here. (Disclosure: FSG is a client of mine, and I'm also on its Board of Directors)
Why the FSG announcement is important has to do with why the FSG is important. You can begin to get a handle on that reality from the squib in the press release that summarizes what the FSG is all about:
The Free Standards Group is the standardization and certification authority for Linux. Without a commonly adopted standard, Linux could fragment, proving costly for ISVs to port their applications to the operating system and making it difficult for end users and Linux vendors alike. With the LSB, all parties - distribution vendors, ISVs and end users - benefit as it becomes easier and less costly for software vendors to target Linux, resulting in more applications available for the Linux platform. All major Linux commercial and community organizations support the Free Standards Group.
Stated even more simply, the FSG is an essential component in the Linux ecosystem. Without such a conscious and well-supported effort to keep Linux cohesive, it could fly apart. With the FSG, dynamism, creative evolution, multiplying distros and end-user freedom can continue to flourish.
Unicode marks the most significant advance in writing systems since the Phoenicians
James J. O'Donnell, Provost, Georgetown University
There are fundamental standards that are constantly in the news, such as XML (and its many offspring). And there are standards development organizations, like the W3C, that enjoy a high profile in part because of the importance of the technical domains that they serve. Some standards have even taken on socio-political significance, becoming pawns in international diplomacy, such as the root domains of the Internet, despite the fact that they are insignificant in size and design. .
But there are other standards that go largely unheralded, and are developed by consortia that are virtually never in the news, despite the vast social and technical significance of the standard in question. Perhaps chief among them is the Unicode, created and constantly extended by the Unicode Consortium, whose loyal and widely distributed team of contributors for the most part labor quietly in the background of information technology.
Notwithstanding the low profile of the Unicode and its creators, it is this standard that enables nearly all those living in the world today to communicate with each other in their native language character sets. It even permits the words of many of those that lived in the past to become accessible to those alive today in electronic form, and in their original character sets as well.
Standards are all around us. Being invisible, it's easy to forget they exist, because they generally work. Only when they don't - or when they threaten not to - do they tend to attract attention. One sad example of that reality was the subject of an excellent Nova special that focused on the role of construction and safety standards in the context of the failure of the Twin Towers on 9/11. And now, standards have become The Talk of the Town.
The opening pages of the New Yorker may seem like an unlikely venue for an essay on standards, given that the Talk section is usually dedicated to a consciously eclectic mix of editorial outrage and stylishly constructed vignettes celebrating the trivial. Nonetheless, the advent of competing next-generation DVD format players has inspired even the New Yorker to take notice. Of course, hundreds (and perhaps thousands) of articles on the same topic have already appeared almost everywhere else that they possibly could.
Be that as it may, the article in question is entitled "Standard-Bearers," and opens smartly in true Talk of the Town fashion as follows:
In 1888, at Thomas Edison's laboratory, in West Orange, New Jersey, a macabre event took place. While reporters watched, dogs were placed on a metal plate that had been hooked up to a thousand-volt alternating-current generator and electrocuted one by one. Edison wanted to convince the public that alternating current (which was offered by a competitor, Westinghouse) was too dangerous to be used in the home, and his own direct-current technology should be the national standard for electricity.
Edison's tactics may have been extreme, but his purpose would have been readily understood by the marketers of Sony's Blu-ray technology and those of Toshiba's HD DVDs: both companies are trying to convince us that their product will be the standard high-definition successor to DVDs.
The final version of the Office Open XML 1.0 draft was posted an hour or so ago at the Ecma site (the draft itself is dated simply "October 2006). The draft is the work of Technical Committee 45, a committee chartered "To Produce a formal Standard for office productivity documents which is fully compatible with the Office Open XML Formats."
As previously announced, the draft will be voted on at a December 7-8 Ecma meeting, at which votes to approve or disapprove (but not make changes) may be cast. After the anticipated approval, the draft will be submitted to ISO for consideration, as contemplated by the second task of TC 45's original charter: "To contribute the Ecma Office Open XML Formats standards to ISO/IEC JTC 1 for approval and adoption by ISO and IEC." That process will include a six month comment period during which national committees may vote for, against, or abstain, as well provide comments and requested changes that must be considered.
The five parts of the Open XML draft may be accessed from the Ecma Web site, and are labeled "Fundamentals," "Open Packaging Conventions," "Primer," "Markup Language Reference," and "Markup Compatibility and Extensibility." The documents are available in PDF as well as in two alternate formats: Tagged PDF (for better accessibility) and WorkprocessingML format. Curiously, they are not currently available in ODF.
The announcement that accompanies the Ecma draft that will be voted on in December reads as follows:
Ecma Office Open XML File Formats Standard - Final draft - 9th of October 2006
The Ecma International Technical Committee TC45 has been working to establish a standard for Office Open XML File Formats as described in its program of work at http://www.ecma-international.org/memento/TC45.htm. The committee's work began in December 2005, and has continued via weekly 2-hour conference calls and regular face-to-face meetings. [more]
According to a short "Tech Informer" article just posted at CIO.com, Ecma, the European IT standards organization on Monday may post "as early as Monday," the final approval draft of Open XML, the document format specification contributed to Ecma by Microsoft in an effort to counter the momentum behind the OASIS and ISO adopted ODF. Further details may be found in an informational Status Update posted at the Ecma Website, dated September 28, 2006, which reads in part as follows:
The [Open XML drafting] committee held its sixth face-to-face meeting on September 26-28, 2006, this time in Trondheim, Norway....During the meeting, the committee created the Final Draft of the Office Open XML v1.0 format. The committee, with representation from all Ecma member organizations actively participating in TC45 (Apple, Barclays Capital, BP, The British Library, Essilor, Intel, Microsoft, NextPage, Novell, Statoil, Toshiba, and the United States Library of Congress) unanimously approved the Final Draft standard and agreed to propose it to the General Assembly of Ecma International for publication as an Ecma standard. The Final Draft standard will be made publicly available on the Ecma web site in the coming days. The GA will vote on this proposal during the GA meeting December 7-8, 2006.
ODF was adopted by OASIS in May of 2005, and the voting window that resulted in ODF's approval by ISO, the International Organization for Standardization, closed on May 1of 2006. Given that the ISO process, from first submission to closure of the voting window takes 6 to 9 months, this would mean that the earliest that OpenXML could achieve comparable status to ODF (assuming that both the Ecma and ISO memberships voted in favor of adoption) would be in May to August of 2007.
In (another) sad day in Massachusetts, State CIO Louis Gutierrez submitted his resignation today to the Romney administration. Like his predecessor, Peter Quinn, Louis is a man of principle. And, like Peter, he is taking the high road by using his resignation to inform the citizens of Massachusetts of a regrettable lapse on the part of their elected representatives. In his letter of resignation to State Secretary of Administration and Finance Thomas Trimarco, he states:
IT innovation in Massachusetts state government ran out of steam in August, when the legislature closed its formal session without action on the IT and facilities bond. I am presiding over the dismantling of an IT investment program - over a decade in the evolution - that the legislative leadership appears unwilling to salvage at this time. I am therefore asking leave to relinquish my posts.... I have no remaining expectation of timely legislative action, and no continued appetite to watch the IT investment program lapse.
In a message sent to staff, Gutierrez struck a more personal note, and also elaborated on his reasons for submitting his resignation at this time:
When I joined ITD this year, I anticipated many challenges. It was my intention to navigate them through the start of the next administration. One scenario I found it hard to imagine, though, was the lapse in the bond funding that sustains most state IT investment....
Because I have no remaining expectation of near-term action on the IT Bond, I have offered Secretary Trimarco my resignation, effective 30 days from now. It is my hope through this resignation to provide one additional window onto the situation, which I trust will someday be resolved, but which stands to set the state's IT investment program back many steps the longer the lapse persists.
It had been six long weeks since I returned from a backcountry trip to Utah, and six exhausting weeks at that. Thoroughly drained, it was high time to leave my demons behind (or try to), and seek comfort in the clean fall air of the White Mountains of New Hampshire.
Saturday morning found me not on a trail that would lead to the dramatic viewpoints popular at peak-foliage time, but instead on one that would thread the valleys between the peaks, meander past beaver ponds, and eventually bring me back to my point of departure, suitably (I hoped) refreshed.
The landscape I explored all that day proved to be unexpectedly spectral, haunted by the shadows of countless thousands of dead birches that loomed above a maturing understory of hemlock, spruce and maple. The explanation for their presence was not hard to guess: birch is a "pioneer" species with small, easily wind-borne seeds that sprout into seedlings that not only tolerate, but demand bright sunlight to survive. Throughout the west, aspens are the opportunists that retake the clearings. But in these northeastern woods, it is birch that is most likely to colonize areas burned by fire, or (like this) clearcut by man.
But birch is not a long-lived tree. The thousands of pioneers that together sprouted on these mountainsides a century ago had now together died, their reforesting mission accomplished. In the years that followed, their twigs rotted and dropped, and then their larger branches. Now, like hapless lepers, they raised only blunted limbs to the sky.
Following a ten hour, acrimonious debate, the U.S. Senate voted 63 to 34 yesterday to approve a measure that would confirm that detainees can be deprived of certain rights to contest their detention; would bar certain interrogation techniques; but would allow the President to determine whether other techniques would or would not constitute violations of the applicable Geneva Convention. Concurrently, the United Nations is debating what actions, if any, to take to defend those in danger of starvation, disease and violent death in Darfur.
Today, it seems that the progress towards consensus on human rights, and agreement on effective mechanisms to guarantee those rights, is at best lagging. As a result, I've dedicated the September issue of the Consortium Standards Bulletin to the topic of Standards and the Human Rights Crisis. You can view the entire issue here, and the editorial is reproduced below.
NATURAL LAW AND HUMAN RIGHTS
We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness…And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm Reliance on the Protection of the divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.
The American Declaration of Indepence (1776)
In contrast to 1776, the idea of human rights is today often addressed as a relative rather than an absolute concept. Despite the fact that the modern concept of democracy was in part based upon a belief that human beings possess "unalienable rights," even democratic governments today disagree on how such rights must be honored in the breach. As a result, only scattered, selective, and in some cases haphazard mechanisms exist to permit the global community to intervene (if so inclined) to protect the rights of the individual against the powers of the state.
Remember the phrase, "Internet Speed?"
Wasn't that a phrase from the Bubble Years, when Everything Changed, and if you didn't Get It you Were History? Now, of course, Internet Speed, as a phrase, is So Last Century.
Except when it comes to on-line journalism.
This blog entry is in part a mea culpa account from the blogging trenches. Mea Culpa, because the first draft of my last blog entry turns out to have been very inaccurate. But only partly "my bad," because it was consistent with a reliable source, andI corrected it very quickly when I learned that it was wide of the mark. Still, the experience is salutary, and worth recording in some detail for what it indicates about contemporary on-line journalism (something I've written about from time to time before, to link to just a few prior stories), and particularly for those that are required to pump out many stories a day under the new on-line model of single-screen, rat-a-tat reportage.
This particular morality play began early this morning, when at around 6:30 AM I read a story by Steve Lohr in the print version of the New York Times headlined:
Hoping to be a Model, I.B.M. Will Put Its Patent Filings Online
Wow, I thought — IBM will put all of its 40,000 patent filings on line! Does that include confidential applications as well? Here's what the first line of the story said: