OASIS announced yesterday in Lyons, France, that it has launched a public Website "designed to serve as the official community gathering place and information resource for the OpenDocument Format (ODF)" sponsored by IBM, Sun Microsystems and, interestingly, Intel as well. According to the brief press release, readers are encouraged to contribute content. Editorial Guidelines can be found here.
The site already contains quite a few features, including Wikis, white papers, links to external resources, and so on. It's nicely done and easy to navigate, and while it's hardly comprehensive at this point, each heading has at least a page of material. Hopefully, these categories will be filled out with much of the substantial amount of data that has accumulated over the last year in particular.
It will be interesting not only to see how well this site catches on, given how many sites exist that have their own resources and following, including the ODF Alliance site, serving the public sector, and ODF Fellowship site, serving a general audience, the sites of the open source projects that support ODF, such as OpenOffice.org and many other sites and blogs that follow ODF regularly.
It will also be interesting to see how activity at this site compares to what goes on at OpenXMLDeveloper.org, a somewhat similar site launched by Microsoft back in March. According to the home page of the site, registered members reached the 500 mark last week. Data on traffice is here.
Microsoft has just posted the text of a new patent "promise not to assert " at its Website, and pledges that it will honor that promise with respect to 35 listed Web Services standards. The promise is similar in most substantive respects to the covenant not to assert patents that it issued last year with respect to its Office 2003 XML Reference Schema, with two important improvements intended to make it more clearly compatible with open source licensing. Those changes are to clarify that the promise not to assert any relevant patents extends to everyone in the distribution chain of a product, from the original vendor through to the end user, and to clarify that the promise covers a partial as well as a full implementation of a standard.
I learned about the new covenant from Microsoft yesterday, which provided me an advance copy of the covenant and the FAQ that accompanies it and an opportunity to ask questions about what it is intended to accomplish. I did have a few requests for clarifications that I'll incorporate below which may resolve some of the questions that might occur to you as well.
Of course, Microsoft (along with IBM and BEA) proposed most, if not all, of these standards to begin with, but I am still impressed with the new covenant, and am pleased to see that Microsoft is expanding its use of what I consider to be a highly desirable tool for facilitating the implementation of open standards, in particular where those standards are of interest to the open source community.
Nova aired an excellent program last night called Building on Ground Zero, and has what may be a long-term page set up here, with a variety of stories, slideshows and interviews on the same topic. The show was memorable for many reasons, one of which was its focus on both the importance as well as the economic calculus of standards. Another was the degree to which the US is lagging in the upgrading of crucial standards identified in the wake of the 9/11 catastrophe, although a number of Asian nations have apparently taken to heart the lessons learned five years ago today.
It's rare that standards are featured so prominently in a documentary, and even more unusual for them to be dealt with so clearly and intelligently. The WGBH team behind the Nova program derived much of its data from the detailed investigation performed by the National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) and the final recommendations of that agency. The 30 detailed recommendations offered by NIST cover a broad range of topics, including upgrading of materials, reexamining existing safety margins, improving communications, providing for more effective evacuation capabilities, and much more. Nova reports that implementing all of the engineering-related recommendations, if I recall correctly, would add a total of about 5% to total building costs.
Tellingly, the experts interviewed on the program conclude that the Twin Towers were not only adequately designed, but indeed had been engineered with a degree of ingenuity that permitted them to withstand the infernos set within them quite well before the towers ultimately collapsed. What failed, therefore, was not the design — but many of the standards to which the design was built.
Today is launch day for a new consortium I've been helping structure for the last several months — the PCI Security Standards Council, LLC. You should be happy to hear about this new organization, because its purpose is to tighten the security procedures that protect your financial data against theft and fraud, not only globally but on an end-to-end basis, from point of sale to debiting of your account.
The new organization was formed by the largest credit card brands in the world: MasterCard Worldwide, Visa International, American Express, Discover Financial Services, and JCB (a Japanese brand). At the heart of the organization is the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard, originally created prior to formation of PCI by aligning Visa's Account Information Security (AIS)/Cardholder Information Security (CISP) programs with MasterCard's Site Data Protection (SDP) program. Version 1.0 of the standard was contributed to the consortium for further evolution, maintenance and application. Version 1.1 is already completed, and becomes effective today.
The PCI DSS establishes a set of principles for maintenance of security, accompanied by requirements for demonstrating that those principles have been effective met and maintained. The standard addresses the establishment, maintenance, and monitoring of security measures for each type of participant in the transaction process, including merchants, processors, point-of-sale (POS) vendors and financial institutions, and includes requirements for security management, policies, procedures, network architecture, software design, among other requirements. By agreeing on a common standard, all participants in the credit extension and clearance process will have a single rulebook to operate under, providing greater efficiency and lower compliance costs for those being assessed, and greater certainty for those relying on their security practices.
After ten days of staying off the beaten track in Arizona and Utah, I decided to make an exception and visit a few of the slot canyons for which this part of the country is justly famous. Like many other visitors to the Grand Staircase of the Escalante National Monument,I chose Dry Forks Coyote Gulch, a drainage in the southeast corner of the Monument, into which three slot canyons empty in rapid succession: Peekaboo, Spooky, and Brimstone.
Upstream of where the trail enters, Dry Gulch itself becomes a slot canyon that can be followed for miles. Anywhere else, it would be an attraction in its own right, but its easy, winding path pales in comparison to the drama of the serpentine, and sometimes almost impassable, corridors of its more famous tributary slots.
Although I had not seen a soul in a week of wanderings in the Escalante, there were already three vehicles at the trailhead when I arrived early in the morning; there were three more by the time I left. And no surprise, because each of the slot canyons that can be accessed less than a mile from the trailhead is spectacular in its own right.
Like most visitors, I scaled Peekaboo first. The canyon enters from the north, emerging as a narrow cleft ten feet up the stone wall of the main canyon. After clambering up (using handholds) the canyon wall, and then up and over a modest pouroff, you work your way gradually uphill for .25 miles, past fins, dry whirlpools and modest pouroffs, looking up on occasion through arches that span the narrow canyon. At times, you need not only all of your arms and legs, but your back (and some ingenuity) as well to span, brace and lift yourself up and over obstructions. Eventually you emerge into the gravelly wash above, from which it's less than a half-mile hike due east to reach the next wash, which almost immediately dives down into the bedrock to form Spooky - the second slot canyon.
The big idea is to give [knowledge] workers access to a roles-based environment where information, business process, workflow, and collaboration with fellow workers are all done “in context.”
- Ken Bisconti, IBM VP, Workplace, Portal and Collaboration Software
In this fourth in-depth interview focusing on ODF-compliant office productivity suites, I interview IBM's Ken Bisconti, Vice President, Workplace, Portal and Collaboration Software. Unlike the prior interviews, however, this interview focuses not on a traditional office suite, but on a service within a series of products and technologies — the ODF-compliant editors included in IBM's innovative Workplace office collaboration environment.
IBM Workplace is an example of a type of next generation information environment that is being promoted by many major IT analysts, each of which has coined its own name for the new paradigm that it is promoting. For Forrester Research, that name is the "Information Workplace." For Gartner, it is the "High-Performance Workplace" . IDC calls it the "Enterprise Workplace," and also (rather grandly) "a long-awaited gift to the information worker from the IT community."
The same basic vision is shared by each of these analysts. Forrester describes its new paradigm in part as follows:
The information workplace (IW) will be much simpler, yet richer than today's tools by incorporating contextual, role-based information from business systems, applications and processes; delivering voice, documents, rich media, process models, business intelligence, and real-time analytics; integrating just-in-time eLearning; and fostering collaboration. Using a service-oriented architecture, the IW will be rich with presence awareness, information rights, and personalization, and it will provide offline and online support to a plethora of devices.
For the last five years, memory technology developer Rambus has been locked in litigation with chip vendors Infineon, Samsung, Micron, and Hynix - and the Federal Trade Commission, which brought an action against Rambus. All of these suits involved their joint involvement in standard setting activities in JEDEC. The four chip vendors accused Rambus of setting a "submarine patent" trap for them in the JEDEC process, while Rambus accused them of a price fixing conspiracy.
For a number of years, Rambus won most, although not all of the legal battles, including in its initial round against the FTC. But a month ago, the Commissioners of the FTC unanimously overturned the ruling in favor of Rambus earlier handed down by an FTC Administrative Law Judge, and held Rambus liable. You can read more about that ruling, and the background of the various Rambus suits here.
The echoes of the FTC decision are still reverberating. First, it helped Foundry Networks, which recently brought a "son of Rambus" suit against French telecommunications giant Alcatel. Since the FTC verdict, multiple class action lawsuits have been filed against Rambus on behalf of purchasers of SDRAM chips, seeking recovery of the premium added to the price of those chips in order to pay the royalties Rambus demanded to license the undisclosed patent.
Now, Broadcom has announced that it may cite the FTC verdict to revive an antitrust suit against its rival, Qualcom, according to Bloomberg News. That action was dismissed a few days ago.
You have been warned
Entire text of a sign on a Lake District mountain road
Safe backcountry driving is one part experience and three parts caution and good sense. If you exercise the latter, there's no reason to get into trouble while acquiring the former. In this installment I'll provide some rules to keep in mind to keep you out of trouble, as well as offer some practical driving tips for driving in the southwest. While I'm hardly an expert or professional driver, I have driven several thousand miles of unpaved backcountry roads over the past ten years, and pass along what I've observed in that time for you to test on your own.
The first thing to keep in mind is that once you leave a paved road, you should assume that you're on your own. Cell phones will rarely work, and the more isolated your destination, the less likely it is that anyone is going to happen by to help if you're stuck, broken down, or out of gas. As a result, it's up to you to avoid any of those things happening, and it's also up to you to make the type of preparations that will get you out of a fix if you end up in one anyway.
As you'd expect, paved roads don't often reach the places that are most off the beaten track. Getting to the backcountry therefore means using the right tool for the job, which will often be a four-wheel drive vehicle. This next set of blog entries is for those of you that have no experience with four-wheel driving on really lousy roads, but have a hankering to give it a try. I'll start with some advice on choosing the right chariot for your adventure.
Not so very long ago, that would have been very simple, in the sense that you'd know exactly what to look for. That's because there were only two choices: Jeeps (as in the registered trademark vehicle, not in the generic way the term is sometimes used) and pickup trucks. The former were built to go anywhere, with no compromises for comfort, and the latter were built to do heavy, high clearance work. Finding a place that rented a Jeep might not be easy, but at least everyone knew what you were talking about.
Today, however, there are many different types of cars that do some, most, or all of the same jobs. That's good, because the old Jeeps weren't built to carry much gear, and you don't always need a vehicle that can leap mountains in a single bound. But it's bad in that the choices become more complicated, and it's therefore easier to end up with the wrong tool for the job.
We need a refuge even though we may never need to go there. I may never in my life get to Alaska,...but I am grateful that it is there. We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope
Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire
This morning I decided to forego my usual breakfast banquet of a stale donut with coffee and head into town for a more substantial repast, an uplink to the Internet, and a chance to ask a question or two about things I'd seen.
On my way into town I heard part of a BBC broadcast focused on the perennial efforts of the current administration in Washington to open up the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge to oil exploration and production. The panel comprised the expected mix: a Sierra Club representative, an advocate of drilling, and a third party presumed to occupy the middle ground.
There wasn't anything particularly new about the interchange, which was civil, although vigorous on both sides. What struck me, as always, was the impassioned view of the industry advocate that we must begin exploitation in Alaska now because conservation efforts require too much time to take effect — an argument I have heard for so long that such efforts could easily have taken hold many times over ever since first this rationale was raised.
I was also struck by the fact that no one mentioned the amount of time it would take to explore, extract, and build transshipment facilities (pipelines? A port terminal with the capacity to store hundreds of millions of gallons of crude until ships can collect it during ice-out in summer?) Could actually bringing Alaskan Wildlife Refuge oil into the Lower Forty Eight conceivably take less than a decade?