Showing headlines posted by Sander_Marechal

Caroline is a 2006 Volkswagen Passat, converted by a team from the Braunschweig University of Technology to be an autonomous vehicle. The car was a finalist in the legendary Darpa Grand Challenge, a US Defence Department-sponsored competition held every year or two in which driverless vehicles battle it out to see which can complete a set course in the fastest time.

The European Commission is investigating the process under which a key Microsoft document format could be adopted as an industry standard - a move that would carry significant commercial benefits for the software company. Officials at the European Commission's competition directorate have written to members of the International Organisation for Standardisation, asking how they prepared for votes in September and later this month on acceptance of Microsoft's OOXML document format as a worldwide standard. The ISO process has been widely criticised, however, with some members of national standards' bodies accusing Microsoft and its rivals of attempting to influence the vote.

IBM has teamed up with partners in Austria and Poland to offer Microsoft-free personal computers for the eastern European market, IBM said in a statement on Tuesday. International Business Machines Corp said it was offering the PCs based on the open-source Linux operating system together with Red Hat software distributor VDEL of Austria and Polish distributor and services firm LX Polska in response to demand from Russian IT chiefs.

Our initial thinking for IE8 involved showing pages requesting “Standards” mode in an IE7’s “Standards” mode, and requiring developers to ask for IE8’s actual “Standards” mode separately. We made this decision, informed by discussions with some leading web experts, with compatibility at the top of mind. In light of the Interoperability Principles, as well as feedback from the community, we’re choosing differently. Now, IE8 will show pages requesting “Standards” mode in IE8’s Standards mode. Developers who want their pages shown using IE8’s “IE7 Standards mode” will need to request that explicitly, using the http header/meta tag approach.

[Not FOSS news but important news nonetheless. Microsoft's original plan that would have locked us into a browser-specific web a la 1994 can be found here. - Sander]

Even in today's high-tech world of unified communications and wireless mobility, the idea of two kids with laptops sitting under a tree somewhere in Saharan Africa being able to exchange information without any kind of infrastructure or configuration, seems as wild an idea as the land they live in. But with the OLPC project, this scenario is rapidly becoming a widespread reality.

In our last blog posted on February 21, I proposed three test pitches for Microsoft to help judge the meaningfulness of its latest efforts to turn over a new leaf on interoperability. The first of these was to embrace the extant, multi-vendor ISO standard, ODF (Open Document Format) in lieu of its single vendor dominated efforts to create a new standard, OOXML (Office Open XML). The first pitch was thrown in Geneva last week at the ISO ballot resolution meetings on OOXML. And we can safely say: strike one!

[Michael also notes that the BRM was fully recorded in audio. I hope they get released within the next 30 days. - Sander]

There has been a long standing rumor regarding NASA running Fedora which all of us in the Fedora community have been always intrigued by. Is it true? What are they doing with it there? Why don't they run RHEL. Fortunately enough, a couple of weeks ago, I got to experience NASA behind the scenes, first hand, and hang out with the coolest members of the Fedora community, and find out the answer to these questions and lots more.

Here is the scenario: You have multiple developers logged into a Linux server which is running Apache and PHP using Vim to write PHP code. They’re using error_log and echo statements to debug their code. It takes forever, it’s tedious and can result in bugs from forgotten debug statements. You stare enviously at .NET programmers with fancy debuggers (while you snicker knowing that you edit 10x faster with Vim anyways). But still, you know there has to be a better way. There is.

I’ve been working with Linux for ten years now. I have seen issues come and I have seen them go. But there’s one issue that has always surprised me because it just seems to never go away: Suspend/Hibernate. I am always so surprised about this because it just seems like a fundamental issue on laptops - and let’s face it, laptops are standard issue for many people - you close the lid, the laptop suspends.

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has revealed he's a big fan of Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project but confessed that his own plans to switch entirely to the device have gone awry. Speaking today at the Broadband and Beyond conference in Sydney, Wozniak told delegates that despite early doubts, he believes that overall the project is making a positive contribution to developing economies.

Well, the BRM is over and I can only describe the week as a lot of technical work and a lot of great people I was lucky enough to meet and exchange ideas with. The objective of the BRM was to work with all of the National Body delegations in the room and improve the specification on a technical level -- and that we did. There were many technical changes the delegates made to really get consensus on some of the more challenging issues, but all of these passed overwhelmingly once they were updated. The process really worked (it was very cool).

[I wonder, is he really so delusion that he believes what he writes? Or has the man no moral bone left in his body? After reading all the other BRM reports here, make up your own mind. - Sander]

Amazon has finally released their MP3 downloader for Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, and OpenSUSE. Now Linux users can legally download entire DRM free albums. They had to do it song-by-song before, which ends up costing more.

I'm just back from Geneva, where delegations from 32 National Bodies (NB's), plus Ecma, met for five days at the CICG. Present were 104 delegates in a large, double room with tables four deep, in two sections arrayed in a chevron. As we reached mid week, we were presented with a set of ballot choices, to deal with the responses that could not be discussed during the meeting, for lack of time, which would at the current rate of processing amount to 800-900 of the 1,027. We were told that these options are not in the Directives and that we have been given these choices because ITTF "needs to act in the best interests of the IEC". I don't quite get it, but there appears to be some concern over what the press would think if the BRM did not handle all of the comments.

Google has made a donation to assist FSFE's Freedom Task Force with delivering training courses, attending conferences and localising documents. "The Freedom Task Force is working to foster effective legal infrastructure for Free Software in Europe. A great deal of our work is based on engaging directly with people and Google's contribution will allow us to do this more effectively," says Shane Coughlan, FTF Coordinator. "Training, physical presence in countries and providing materials in local languages are essential aspects of building a coherent pan-European community."

Groklaw's Sean Daly had an opportunity to meet Vint Cerf, Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google, at OpenForum Europe last week. Mr. Cerf, known as the Father of the Internet because of being the co-designer with Robert Kahn of TCP/IP protocols and the basic architecture of the Internet, was gracious enough to answer some email questions Sean propounded regarding the future of the Internet, standards in general, and OOXML in particular. Like many others this week, Cerf has been giving the standards process considerable thought, and he concludes in connection with OOXML that "Internet users deserve better handling of global Internet standards."

If you hadn't guessed from the headline, and as rumored just an hour ago, there's 9-inches of LCD on this thing. Actually, 8.9, but who's counting? We found out that and a few other little tidbits about this Eee PC "New Generation" at the ASUS booth just now, but for the most part the 9-inch Eee PC is quite similar to its 7-inch forebearer.

I have been one of the two Greek delegates to the OOXML Ballot Resolution Meeting (BRM). Lots of things have already been written about the meeting. I will not repeat them here, but will only make a few clarifications on things that I think are not well understood.

[Probably the most detailed report I've seen so far on the misproceedings last week. - Sander]

ISO delegates working to standardize Open Office XML created new rules on the fly to cover the fact they failed to discuss nearly 80 per cent of the 1,100 questions submitted about the document specification format because they ran out of time during their five-day meeting in Geneva.

After I had first Kubuntu impressions using a VMware image I finally did it. My SuSE 10.2 partition was wipped out and Kubuntu 7.10 "Gutsy Gibbon" has been installed. This happened several weeks ago. In the meatime I found several pleasant surprises while enjoying a Kubuntu installation for my daily work. However where light is there are also shadows. This article supplements my initial review. I will use the same categories, where I feel there are updates worth mentioning as well as some new ones. Please consider this article as a delta to my first impressions. To get a full understanding of this review, please read my first Kubuntu impressions first.

Linux Game Publishing, the company behind porting such games to Linux as Cold War and X2: The Threat, has prepared a new Linux GUI installer for its forthcoming titles. While this new installer doesn't feature any overwhelming additions, it has been written finally to use GTK2 and other new functionality for this setup utility. Linux Game Publishing announced this new installer on their closed beta mailing list yesterday for their X3: Reunion port. This new LGP setup utility will also be used in their future titles, and we imagine even Bandits: Phoenix Rising.