Author archive

http://www.iso.org/iso/pressrelease.htm?refid=Ref1123 (ISO press release)

ISO/IEC DIS 29500, Information technology – Office Open XML file formats, has received the necessary number of votes for approval as an ISO/IEC International Standard.

But the challenges are probably on their way.

Microsoft’s director of corporate standards, Jason Matusow, wrote in a blog on Tuesday that challenges to the overall process will likely come. The source? IBM.

Now there’s a two-month period for the national bodies to lodge their complaints. Scroll to the bottom of The Australian’s article for the vote breakdown by country.

The final vote will be tallied today, but by most counts, Microsoft got enough votes for OOXML to pass. Until the official report, we have plenty of articles to read about how things went on Friday, and quite a few people in agreement that OOXML standard will tarnish ISO.

Groklaw covers what it calls “irregularities” in the voting process in Germany, Norway, and Croatia: » Read more

Rob Weir has a great objective comparison of ODF and OOXML. He created word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation graphics, each in OOXML and ODF formats. He presents a table comparing how each of the formats treated the very simple request for red, right-aligned text. Weir concludes:

The results speak for themselves.

What is the engineering justification for this horror? I have no doubt that this accurately reflects the internals of Microsoft Office, and shows how these three applications have been developed by three different, isolated teams. But is this a suitable foundation for an International Standard? Does this represent a reasonable engineering judgment? ODF uses the W3C’s XSL-FO vocabulary for text styling, and uses this vocabulary consistently. OOXML’s representation, on the other hand, appear incompatible with any deliberate design methodology.

Peter Calveley requested a re-examination of Amazon.com’s one-click patent, often held up as an example of the type of ridiculous things that are getting patents and, by extension, the mess the US patent office has become.

The patent office got it right. The one-click patent has been rejected.

I had only requested the USPTO look at claims 11, 14, 15, 16, 17, 21 and 22 but the Office Action rejects claims 11-26 and claims 1-5 as well!

Amazon has the opportunity to respond to the Patent Office’s rejection, but third party requests for reexamination, like the one I filed, result in having the subject patent either modified or completely revoked about 2/3 of the time.

Read a little more about the background of the request.

Ian Rogers of Yahoo! Music has posted both a great presentation and a great promise:

If the licensing labels offer their content to Yahoo! put more barriers in front of the users, I’m not interested. Do what you feel you need to do for your business, I’ll be polite, say thank you, and decline to sign. I won’t let Yahoo! invest any more money in consumer inconvenience. I will tell Yahoo! to give the money they were going to give me to build awesome media applications to Yahoo! Mail or Answers or some other deserving endeavor. I personally don’t have any more time to give and can’t bear to see any more money spent on pathetic attempts for control instead of building consumer value. Life’s too short. I want to delight consumers, not bum them out.

Go read this great summary of the last eight years of digital music and Rogers’ vision for the music industry’s future.

Lawrence Lessig, founder and CEO of Creative Commons, reflects on the last five years since the birth of this concept called Creative Commons, meant to “better reflect the views of many artists, authors, educators, and scientists.”

Just as the DRM-filled, iTunes competitor wannabes Virgin Digital and Sony’s Connect drown quiet deaths in the pool of online music, web giant Amazon jumps right in.

The Silicon Valley Insider weighs in on its pros and cons:

The downsides: The store doesn’t work nearly as quickly or smoothly as iTunes, almost certainly because it is browser-based. Navigation is clumsy, and getting a good sense of what’s in the store is pretty tough — it’s a hunt-and-peck operation. Amazon wants you to install its own MP3 downloader, which you’ll need if you’re buying an entire album. And its catalog isn’t as robust as iTunes’, even when comparing offerings from the same labels: EMI, for instance, sells the Rolling Stones’ Let It Bleed via iTunes, but Amazon only seems to have the Stone’s later-era music.

The upside: The songs Amazon does sell are usually priced at 89 cents to 99 cents a piece (though some cost more), they download reasonably quickly — and they work on iTunes. You haven’t been able to say that about any other digital music store up till now, and it’s potentially a huge deal: Amazon can now offer music as an impulse purchase to its customers — and provide the labels with their first realistic Apple alternative.

From reading the reviews out so far, media fans appear to have forgiven Amazon for the messiness of Unbox and in general are pretty pleased with the new music offering. How’s it working out for you?

A lot of us have had the experience of having a parent who tells their friends, “My kid works with computers.” Friends nod and smile at the child’s apparent brilliance, and somebody reminisces about punch cards. Then you start working on open source projects. Mom is not so impressed. The friends are confused. You’re working for free on something you’re going to give away? “Son, I don’t understand!”

Today on his blog, Stephen Walli explains the economics of open source. It certainly doesn’t explain all of the motivations and mechanics of open source projects, but it’s a start. Send it to your mom.

Individual projects behave as markets from one perspective, and code is currency, the medium of exchange. Just like all economic exchanges, the contributor offers something they value less (a fragment of code solving a particular need) for something they value more (the functioning software package in its entirety). Nobody is working for free in an economic sense.

And if turns out that Mom really digs the idea once she understands it, you can send her to Open Source God, a recently posted list of open source projects for all your software needs. There are a million of those lists, but this is one of the best I’ve seen.

SpiralFrog debuts with free, ad-supported music downloads

The good: SpiralFrog spent a year overcoming music licensing issues and finally launched with over 700,000 songs and 3,500 music videos, all for free.

The bad: The service requires you to live in the U.S. or Canada and to use Windows Media Player 10 or 11 under Windows XP or Vista. Why?

The ugly: DRM. If you don’t log in and look at ads at least once a month, all the music you’ve downloaded will be disabled. You can’t burn the music to a CD or put it on your iPod or Zune. SpiralFrog songs will play only on Windows Digital Rights Management players with the Windows “PlaysForSure” logo.

So the music is free, in exchange for your email address, age, gender, and your ZIP code or province/territory code, plus your monthly return to the site and limited usage options. If it keeps getting used like this, “free” is going to need another entry in the dictionary so we know what it means.

The band Nine Inch Nails, led by Trent Reznor, was already known for using the Internet to market music in creative ways and encouraging fans to download songs rather than buy pirated CDs. Then the RIAA tried to get them to stop being so gosh-darn friendly. Now their fans have released a band-sanctioned free remix album. Reznor put out the multitrack files they needed, and the community responded.

Nine Inch Nails’ Open Source Remix Album Available as Free Torrent

Over the past few months, “multiple judges” at 9inchnails.com listened to over 200 submissions to the Nine Inch Nails open source remix contest and the 21 best remixes are now free to download via torrent or stream via the website.

Download the tracks for free. Trent wants you to.