Showing headlines posted by Andy_Updegrove

Frank drove carefully down the jeep track through the wind-whipped, driving rain, periodically blinded by the vivid flashes of lightning that momentarily silhouetted mountains in the distance. This wasn’t the usual afternoon thunderstorm, where few raindrops survived the long descent through dry desert air without evaporating. This was the product of a full monsoon front sweeping up from the Gulf, the kind the ranchers relied on to refill their stockponds and green up the grass again for their cattle.

A year ago, thousands of you followed the cyber security adventures of Frank Adversego through to their surprising, cliff-hanger conclusion. As an election year approaches in the U.S., there's new evil afoot, and only Frank can get to the bottom of it.

With the Apache Foundation providing a new home, the question in many peoples' minds has been whether the bruised and abused remnant of the OpenOffice project would be able to get back on its feet, dust itself off, and regain its prior importance in the marketplace. Last week, the Apache Foundation put out a press release on this very subject.

Anyone paying attention to technology news lately knows that the Titans are clashing for control, or at least a share of the monetary rewards, in the mobile marketplace.

By anyone’s measure, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has been one of the most important and influential standards development organizations of the information technology age. Without its efforts, the Web would literally not exist as we know it. But times change, and with change, even venerable – indeed, especially venerable – institutions must change with it. Happily, the W3C is taking the plunge.

Poor OpenOffice. It’s been open source for so long, and yet its adoption and market importance has always lagged far behind that of peer software like Linux – despite the fact that it’s free and implements a standard (ODF) aggressively promoted by some of the most powerful technology countries in the world. Can this ever change?

Depending on your point of view, the daily news delivers up a glass either half empty or half full. In the short term, the negative impression can be particularly powerful, with disasters both natural and man-made arising with distressing regularity. But the glass can also be viewed as half full, and that can lead to a false sense of security.

Imagine you're a virtual archaeologist of the future reviewing last week's change logs for the Wikipedia entry for Paul Revere....

Cloud computing is all the rage today, with everyone from the U.S. Federal government to Apple herding us into a brave new world of remotely hosted data and services. As usual, we're rushing down a road before thinking about where it may lead.

Oh my goodness. It's happening again. Will there be anywhere to hide this time, or are we already trapped — tied like poor little Pauline to the railroad tracks as the engine of another high tech bubble barrels down upon us.

At intervals, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Department of Justice (DoJ) have undertaken public initiatives intended to support the standards development process from the antitrust perspective. Well, they're at it again.

It's 2011. Do you know where your Semantic Web is? Hmm. Good question. After so many years, one might wonder whether you should still care whether the Semantic Web ever makes it. Well, you should. Why? Because the more the Web is capable of doing, the more we can get out of it. And given how much we now rely on the Internet and the Web, we can't afford to allow either to be less than they are capable of being.

It’s very rare for me to write a blog entry directed solely at what someone else has written, but there’s an exception to every rule. This one is directed at a posting by Alex Brown (of ODF/OOXML fame), entitled UK Open Standards *Sigh*. 

It’s difficult to know where to begin in saying “goodbye” to Groklaw. What PJ and her many cohorts accomplished there has been unique in my experience. In many ways, Groklaw exemplified the transformational power that the Internet has brought to law, society, technology, and the advancement of all things open.

This morning brings news of what may become another new and important consortium – the Open Network Foundation (ONF). This time the goal is to adapt network architecture to streamline its interoperation with cloud computing. And while the news is intriguing, the way in which it has been broken is a bit odd, on which more below.

This week a new consortium was launched that may signal who will finally own the last great, unclaimed consumer computing platform – the automobile.

According to the Business Software Alliance, the UK government's new royalty-free standards policy will "inadvertently reduce choice, hinder innovation and increase the costs of e-government." 'Zat so?

The U.K. has become the latest country to conclude that for information and communications technology (ICT) procurement purposes, “open standards” means “royalty free standards.”

For some time now, I have been meaning to write a series of blog posts setting forth my views on best practices in forming and governing open source foundations.

Recently, the future of the SUSE Linux Project (as compared to the Novell commercial Linux distribution based on the work of that project) has become rather murky, as reported by Pamela Jones, at Groklaw. Apparently, Novell is facilitating some sort of spin out of the Project, which is good but peculiar news.