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Gary Edwards

What Cloud Means to Marketing Forecast - Nick Carr The Big Switch - 1 views

adage.com/...article

cloud-computing google grid-computing microsoft server-farms

shared by Gary Edwards on 22 Mar 08 - Cached
  • The gorilla in this nascent market is Google. It has been spending billions of dollars to build huge data centers, or "server farms," around the world, enabling it to run all sorts of consumer software and store enormous quantities of personal data. Combine that processing muscle with the company's dominance of web searching and advertising, and you have a juggernaut capable of redefining the software business on the media model.
Gary Edwards

California may join rush of states toward ODF - 0 views

www.computerworld.com/...article.do

iso microsoft msoffice oasis odf ooxml opendocument openxml xml

shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07 - Cached
  • Like the other two measures, the bill in the California Assembly doesn't list any specific document formats that could be used. But as in Minnesota and Texas, the introduction of such a bill appears to be another potential win for backers of the Open Document Format (ODF) for Office Applications.
  • Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07
     
    Good article about the opening salvo in what promises to be a long, hard fought war with Microsoft.  Unlike what has happened in the EU and Massachusetts, this time our friends in Redmond are politically facing off on the home turf of their powerful enemies in Silicon Valley, which stretches from the south of market area (SOMA) all the way down the San Francisco peninsula to San Jose, arching around the entire Bay area.

    If you thought it was raining dollars from Redmond in Massachusetts as the great monopolist moved to successfully shut down the entire Information Technology budget, including HomeLand Security projects, the battle of California promises to be the el nino of perfect storms.  I'm confident though that California CIO Clark Kelso and five star brigadiere general Bill Welty will stand tall against the storm.  I can hardly wait for the forces to move into place and the action begin.  What a show this is going to be.

    Meanwhile, what's at stake here is all the marbles of our digital future.  Forcing Microsoft to accept and fully implement the OpenDcoument XML file format is something the great monopolist has shown they will fight to the bitter end.  Brace yourselves!

Gary Edwards

Three Stages of XML Migration: The OpenDocument Challenge - 0 views

docs.google.com/View

iso microsoft msoffice oasis odf ooxml opendocument openxml xml

shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07 - Cached
  • "Open document formats: I get it! But how do I get there? Discuss."
  • Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07
     
    Eventually i suspect the truth will come out concerning ODF and the events in Massachusetts.  Migration is difficult and our friends in Redmond are not about to lend a hand.  The problem is the starting point, the MSOffice desktop productivity environment.  A starting point owned and controlled entirely by Microsoft.  The challenge is to get from the overwhelming dominance of proprietary Microsoft binary documents and into an open XML universal file format that any application, running on any platform can interactively read, render and write to.

    Microsoft has decided to keep secret the blueprint to these billions of binary documents, reserving exclusively for themselves the right to convert then to XML.  Of course, the only version of XML Microsoft will convert them to is the wholly owned and controlled OOXML file format. 

    Microsoft refuses to cooperate in any way with the conversion of these legacy binary documents to the only truly open XML universal file format, OASIS OpenDocument.  Which leaves the world with a near insolvable problem; how to get from where we are today, with the boot of a ruthless monopolist on the neck of our information and information processes, to where we really desire to be -  with our digital civilization in the hands of open standards, and out of the control of proprietary applications and platform vendors.

    This document describes what the OpenDocument Foundation learned in Massachusetts about the challenge of migrating to ODF. 

Gary Edwards

Microsoft attacks UK government decision to adopt ODF for document formats - 0 views

www.computerweekly.com/...adopt-ODF-for-document-formats

ODF Microsoft

shared by Gary Edwards on 23 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • the panel reached consensus that one standard is important to ensure interoperability and to allow users to collaborate effectively on the same document,” said the minutes
  • A subsequent meeting of the same panel also considered a detailed comparison of ODF and OOXML, citing concerns raised by one member. “We need to make sure there is sound reasoning to back up the decision as this may incur significant costs to some government departments. The comparison may be slightly skewed by concentrating solely on implementation of strict OOXML, which is an emerging standard similar to ODF 1.3, whilst considering implementations of all ODF versions. It ignores transitional OOXML which does have very wide support, arguably wider than ODF,” said the meeting minutes.
  • “LH described the issues identified in the [comparison] document and added that there has since been some confusion about support for OOXML strict in LibreOffice.  It appears that LibreOffice supports the standardised transitional OOXML, as well as a different Microsoft version of transitional OOXML,” the minutes stated.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Despite its obvious disappointment at the government’s decision, Microsoft was also keen to point out that its software does fully support ODF.
  • “The good news for Office users is that Office 365 and Office 2013 both have excellent support for the ODF file format, so their current and future investments in Office are safe.  In fact, Office 365 remains the only business productivity suite on the UK government’s G-Cloud that is accredited to the government’s own security classification of 'Official' and which also supports ODF,” said the Microsoft spokesman.
  • Government Digital Service director Mike Bracken
  • Gary Edwards on 23 Jul 14
     
    "Microsoft has attacked the UK government's decision to adopt ODF as its standard document format, saying it is "unclear" how UK citizens will benefit. The Cabinet Office announced its new policy yesterday, whereby Open Document Format (ODF) is immediately established as the standard for sharing documents across the public sector, with PDF and HTML also acceptable when viewing documents. SERGIGN - FOTOLIA The decision was a rejection of Microsoft's preference for Open XML (OOXML), the standard used by its Word software, which remains the dominant wordprocessor in government. "Microsoft notes the government's decision to restrict its support of the file formats it uses for sharing and collaboration to just ODF and HTML," said a spokesman for the software giant in a statement to Computer Weekly. "Microsoft believes it is unproven and unclear how UK citizens will benefit from the government's decision. We actively support a broad range of open standards, which is why, like Adobe has with the PDF file format, we now collaborate with many contributors to maintain the Open XML file format through independent and international standards bodies," it added"
Gary Edwards

Microsoft pushes Trade Secrets Bill - 1 views

thestack.com/...trade-secrets-act-2015-support

Trade-secret-legislation Microsoft Patents Microsoft-Patent-Consortium

shared by Gary Edwards on 09 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • A spokesman for the Microsoft On The Issues website has expressed the company’s support for new legislation that would reform the legal framework for companies wishing to protect their trade secrets in a cloud-centric world where such information is frequently forced to reside on networks. In the post Microsoft’s Assistant General Counsel of IP Policy & Strategy Jule Sigall rallies behind business and academic concerns supporting the proposed Defend Trade Secrets Act 2015 (DTSA), which goes before the United States Senate Judiciary Committee today. Sigall, who is also Associate General Counsel for Copyright in Microsoft’s Legal & Corporate Affairs department, makes an ardent case for reform of the current legislation, as furnished by the Uniform Trade Secrets Act (UTSA). UTSA’s provisions are argued to be fractured, and rendered ineffective both by the inability of plaintiffs to pursue suits in federal courts (despite trade secret infractions being Federal by nature), and by the fact that not all states have adopted or instituted all the measures provided by the legislation. Additionally the limited provision for redress in international cases of trade secret theft are to be addressed.
  • Sigall presents the case of Microsoft’s Cortana AI as an example of why new legislation is necessary: ‘[Behind] Cortana sits a vast amount of technology developed or enhanced in-house by Microsoft – voice recognition; language translation; reactive and predictive algorithms that can synthesize context, location and data, and interface with the vast resources of the Bing search engine index; and a complex array of cloud servers to crunch and serve data in real time. This technology represents tens of thousands of hours of research, trial and error, and continued improvement as Cortana is adapted for new devices and new scenarios’
  • Sigall argues that better protection procedures for trade secrets, the only form of IP which currently lacks comprehensive cover in law, is essential for start-ups whose ideas, business plans and even customer lists may constitute the only marketable value of a company that is just in the stage of consolidating. ‘A trade secret is unique among forms of intellectual property in how it is legally protected. While it is a federal crime to steal a trade secret, a business that has its trade secrets stolen must rely on state law to pursue a civil remedy. Owners of copyrights, patents, and trademarks can go to federal court to protect their property and seek damages when their property has been infringed, but trade secret owners do not have access to such a federal remedy.’
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Defend Trade Secrets Act 2015 contains [PDF] significant material from its doomed predecessor of 12 months ago, and one of its boldest initiatives is the extension of ex parte seizures, instituted in UTSA in a more limited form (particularly in the 1985 amendment to the Uniform Law Commission’s 1979 initial legislation). An ex parte seizure provides a kind of restraining order or injunction on disputed information, or even the dissemination of knowledge about whether the information is disputed, and places it under federal protection on the plaintiff’s behalf.
  • Microsoft had a hard time adjusting to the open source revolution, particularly in regard to the PC/Mac Office product which at one time represented the most successful and ubiquitous software in the world, and the many legal and semantic wrangles over the closed-source nature of Office formats such as Word led ultimately to a hybridised open source .docx format which is still argued to not be the OpenXML that was promised.
  • According to Sigall the state-by-state system currently in place was ‘simply not built with the digital world in mind’, and calls for ‘A uniform, national standard for protection’ which does not stop at state lines or even national borders.
  • In practical terms this seems likely to extend the circumstances under which information about leaks, hacks or thefts of information can be made the subject of gag orders for legal reasons, since it brings trade secrets into the same legal framework as other forms of intellectual property which enjoy more comprehensive coverage and recourse in law. The bill would also extend the purview of the 1996 Economic Espionage Act to take in a more rigorously conceived concept of ‘trade secrets’.
  • Even with the issues clear, the risk of disproportionate or over-reaching response in the event of the new bill passing successfully through congress in 2016 (it is unlikely to pass this year) is clear enough that the lack of network discussion about it is quite surprising. Essentially DTSA represents the same kind of proposed ‘judicial fast track’ – though in favour of corporations instead of governments – that has outraged so many commenters in the wake of the November 13th Paris attacks.
  • Silence in court Amongst its more quotidian clauses, the Defend Trade Secrets Act 2015 effectively offers corporate plaintiffs increased opportunity to federalise disputed private material in cases involving trade secrets, with all the penalties for infraction associated with that change of status – and far greater scope for sub judice orders likely to contain and conceal future breaches of information.
  • Eric Goldman of the Santa Clara University School of Law has just published a paper outlining the risks of extending ex parte seizures in the manner that DTSA 2015 proposes. Goldman writes that ‘the Seizure Provision does not solve many, if any, problems. In light of the remedies already available to trade secret owners in ex parte temporary restraining orders (TROs), the Seizure Provision purports to apply to only a narrow set of additional circumstances. In exchange for that modest benefit, the Seizure Provision creates the risk of anti-competitive seizures and seizures that cause substantial collateral damage to innocent third parties. To discourage such abuses, the Act imposes procedural safeguards and creates a cause of action for wrongful seizures. Unfortunately, those safeguards are miscalibrated to achieve the desired protections against abusive seizures.’
  • Paul Merrell on 09 Dec 15
     
    Lots of possible Constitutional issues lurking. The Constitution creates only two types of intellectual property, patents and copyrights. "(P)roperty interests . . . are not created by the Constitution. Rather, they are created and their dimensions are defined by existing rules or understandings that stem from an independent source such as state law." Ruckelshaus v. Monsanto Co., 467 US 986 (1984), https://goo.gl/ZljO1H (trade secrets case). The traditional source of rights in trade secrets have been state law. Thus there is a state's rights issue lurking in this legislation, a question whether the federal government is invading the States' police power, an "our federalism" question.
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