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Modernizr is a small and simple JavaScript library that helps you take advantage of emerging web technologies (CSS3, HTML 5) while still maintaining a fine level of control over older browsers that may not yet support these new technologies. Modernizr uses feature detection to test the current browser against upcoming features like rgba(), border-radius, CSS Transitions and many more. These are currently being implemented across browsers and with Modernizr you can start using them right now, with an easy way to control the fallbacks for browsers that don't yet support them. Additionally, Modernizr creates a self-titled global JavaScript object which contains properties for each feature; if a browser supports it, the property will evaluate true and if not, it will be false. Lastly, Modernizr also adds support for styling and printing HTML5 elements. This allows you to use more semantic, forward-looking elements such as , and without having to worry about them not working in Internet Explorer. Another great catch by Marbux!  He's on fire today.

[Blush.] Should be mentioned that Modernizr comes with an MIT-BSD dual license. So compatible with both GPL and proprietary apps.

Last September, Xerox launched a very expensive campaign to rebrand itself as a document management heavyweight. This week, Xerox's MFP rival, Ricoh (news, site), has just announced that it will be investing US$ 300 million over three years to "aggressively" accelerate its shift into the managed document services or outsourced document management space. Using its core hardware and software technologies, the shift will see Ricoh focusing not just on the provision of hardware and software, but offering entire document management services from capture to printing. At a press briefing held in New York, London and Tokyo earlier this week that underlined the global nature of the business shift, Ricoh said the US$ 300 million would be invested in its managed document services infrastructure with a revenue target of US$ 3.3 billion by 2013. Document Management Market Shift So, what is all this about? It seems simple enough - Ricoh has identified shifts in the document management market that are focused on better enterprise returns based on more efficient document management. No surprise there. However, what is surprising, is that Ricoh believes the shift is so profound that it is investing this amount of money in re-aligning its business.

Cloud Computing White Papers   The Open Group Cloud Work Group exists to create a common understanding among buyers and suppliers of how enterprises of all sizes and scales of operation can include Cloud Computing technology in a safe and secure way in their architectures to realize its significant cost, scalability, and agility benefits. It includes some of the industry's leading cloud providers and end-user organizations, collaborating on standard models and frameworks aimed at eliminating vendor lock-in for enterprises looking to benefit from Cloud products and services. The White Papers on this website form the current output of the Work Group. They are also available in PDF form from The Open Group bookstore for download and printing. Further papers will be added as the Work Group progresses. The initial focus of the Work Group is on business drivers for Cloud Computing, and this is reflected in the first items to appear: The Business Scenario Workshop Report White Paper: Building Return on Investment from Cloud Computing White Paper: Strengthening your Business Case for Using Cloud White Paper: Cloud Buyers' Decision Tree White Paper: Cloud Buyers' Requirements Questionnaire Further White Papers will address other key Work Group topics, including Architecture, Infrastructure, and Security.

Roger Black is a publication designer, and Filipe Fortes was the project manager for Microsoft's Windows Presentation Foundation - Silverlight project.  Today he specializes in dynamic layout algorithms written in Open Web JavaScript.  Roger is a reknown publication designer, and describes here the genesis behind TreeSaver.  Fascinating story certain to become a key explanation of how digital media ran away with the print publishing industry.   I'm wondering what kind of authoring tools will evolve that can publish directly into the TS JavaScript templates?   My first inclination would be to adapt OOo Impress.  It has an outline view, a notes editing capability, and provides a decent visual canvas.  The problem is that it's locked into "slides".  Can Impress be unlocked and flowing?  That might work. excerpt:  when Microsoft put together a dynamic page layout for The New York Times Reader, did they know that it was the future? It certainly wasn't the immediate present, since they couldn't pry the WPF visual layer off of Windows, leaving it a single-OS solution. (The Times' Reader later was taken up by Adobe, which at least got it to work on both Mac and PC.) Filipe Fortes, PM on the MS news client project, knew. I'd met him when the group invited me out to Redmond to help design the first templates for the Times. Later I saw him at the 2007 Mix conference in Vegas, and I asked him how to make the dynamic page size idea work multi-platform. He said, "We could do it in HTML."

excerpt: The trend in Office development is the migration of solutions away from in-application scripted processing toward more data-centric development. Of course this is a primary purpose of Open XML, and it is great to see the amount of activity in this area. We've seen customers scripting Word in a server environment to batch process / print documents or for other automation tasks. In reality Word isn't built to do that on a large scale, it is better to work directly against the document rather than via the application whenever possible. The Open XML SDK unlocks a "whole nuther" environment for document processing, and gets you out of the business of scripting client apps on servers to do the work of a true server application (not to mention the licensing problems created by installing Office on a server). comment:  Gray makes a very important point here.  The dominance of the desktop based MSOffice Productivity Environment was largely based the embedded logic driving "in-process" documents that was application and platform (Win32 API) specific.  Tear open any of these workgroup-workflow oriented compound documents and you find application specific scripts, macros, OLE, data bindings, security settings and other application specific settings.  These internal components are certain to break whenever these highly interactive and "live" compound documents are converted to another format, or application use.  This is how MSOffice documents and the business processes they represent become "bound" to the MSOffice Productivity Environment. What Gray is pointing to here is that Microsoft is moving the legacy Productivity Environment to an MSWeb based center where OpenXML, Silverlight, CAML, XAML and a number of other .NET-WPF technologies become the workgroup drivers.  The key applications for the MS WebStack are Exchange/SharePoint/SQL Server.  To make this move, documents had to be separated from the legacy desktop Productivity Environment settings. Note th

Is Adobe AiR a Virtual Desktop?  We expect a VD to run an alien OS and those OS specific applications.  With AiR 2.0 it seems Adobe has ditched the "OS" component of a VD, and the OS specific applications, but is quite capable of running AiR based applications and information services that would otherwise have been designed for a specific OS environment.   Another way of looking at this would be to say that VD's are designed to run existing OS and OS specific applications, while AiR is desinged to run newly written OS independent applications that have one very important advantage over legacy applications and information systems;  AiR speaks the language of the Web 3.0.   This is WebKit HTML5-CSS3 with an advanced but Air specific version of JavaScript called "ActionScript".  What Adobe doesn't do is provide support for other critically important aspects of the WebKit interactive Web 3.0 model: support for Canvas/SVG!  Adobe continues to push the proprietary SWF interactive vector graphics format.   Note that Microsoft's Silverlight universal runtime does not support anything in the WebKit Web 3.0 model!  It's all proprietary. excerpt: For the first time since 2007, Adobe has updated its Air platform, released recently in beta with a slew of new features. The features include support for detection of mass storage devices, advanced networking capabilities, ability to open a file with its default application, improved cross-platform printing, and a bunch of other things that you probably won't really notice in any other way other than your Adobe working significantly more efficiently and smoothly than before. The 2.0 version of Air also will be able to support HTML5 and CSS3, due to an upgrade of its WebKit. Developers will also be happy to know that they can create Air applications that can be installed through a native installer. Air's changes have seen it morph into something of an 'operating system sitting on an operating system'. According

I was surprised to learn that Florian's native document parser is a JSON like ripper of OpenXML visual objects.  He doesn't wrestle with structured objects, but simply treats everything as a visual object.  NOOXML might be closer to a virtual print driver than a OpenXML ripper.   So this has me rethinking the OCR/Scan methods used to rip paper documents to create Tagged PDF "structured object" versions.  Structured objects can easily be converted to interactive HTML-CSS or SVG.  Today Google released an OCR enhanced Android gDOCS app.  Not sure if it uses the Bricolage/Bento algorithm, but that would be an interesting approach. excerpt: the Bricolage algorithm for transferring design and content between Web pages. Bricolage employs a novel, structured-prediction technique that learns to create coherent mappings between pages by training on human-generated exemplars. The produced mappings are then used to automatically transfer the content from one page into the style and layout of another. We show that Bricolage can learn to accurately reproduce human page mappings, and that it provides a general, efficient, and automatic technique for retargeting content between a variety of real Web pages.

This is a must see discussion!!!! Especially if you've seen the Ted Nelson series of talks at Google. (Ted Nelson invented Hypertext, and continues to promote the XANDU view of highly graphical and interactive computing based on an advanced "digital" document model). Jen-Hsu fully embraces the sugarplum document model, dissing i a gentle way the legacy of x86 text-number processing designed to replace typewritters and calculators to produce the same printed document.

Nvidia has also announced an ION based board optimized for the Google Android Mobile-Telecommunications OS!

Haven't yet explored to see what's beneath the marketing hype. And I'm less than excited about the Skype with its NSA tendrils being the vehicle of audio translations of human languages. But given the progress in: [i] automated translations of human texts; [ii] audio screenreaders; and [iii] voice-to-text transcription, this is one we saw coming. Slap the three technologies together and wait until processing power catches up to what's needed to produce a marketable experience. After all, the StarTrek scriptwriters saw this coming too.   Ray Kurzweil, now at Google, should get a lot of the pioneer credit here. His revolutionary optical character recognition algorithms soon found themselves redeployed in text-to-speech synthesis and speech recognition technology. From Wikipedia: "Kurzweil was the principal inventor of the first CCD flatbed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first commercial text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer Kurzweil K250 capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition." Not bad for a guy the same age as my younger brother. But Microsoft's announcement here may be more vaporware than hardware in production and lines of executable code. Microsoft has a long history of vaporware announcements to persuade potential customers to hold off on riding with the competition.  And the Softies undoubtedly know that Google's human language text translation capabilities are way out in front and that the voice to text and text to speech API methods have already found a comfortable home in Android and Chromebook. What does Microsoft have that's ready to ship if anything? I'll check it out tomorrow. 

" CANADIAN SPIES COLLECT DOMESTIC EMAILS IN SECRET SECURITY SWEEP BY RYAN GALLAGHER AND GLENN GREENWALD @rj_gallagher@ggreenwald YESTERDAY AT 2:02 AM SHARE TWITTER FACEBOOK GOOGLE EMAIL PRINT POPULAR EXCLUSIVE: TSA ISSUES SECRET WARNING ON 'CATASTROPHIC' THREAT TO AVIATION CHICAGO'S "BLACK SITE" DETAINEES SPEAK OUT WHY DOES THE FBI HAVE TO MANUFACTURE ITS OWN PLOTS IF TERRORISM AND ISIS ARE SUCH GRAVE THREATS? NET NEUTRALITY IS HERE - THANKS TO AN UNPRECEDENTED GUERRILLA ACTIVISM CAMPAIGN HOW SPIES STOLE THE KEYS TO THE ENCRYPTION CASTLE Canada's electronic surveillance agency is covertly monitoring vast amounts of Canadians' emails as part of a sweeping domestic cybersecurity operation, according to top-secret documents. The surveillance initiative, revealed Wednesday by CBC News in collaboration with The Intercept, is sifting through millions of emails sent to Canadian government agencies and departments, archiving details about them on a database for months or even years. The data mining operation is carried out by the Communications Security Establishment, or CSE, Canada's equivalent of the National Security Agency. Its existence is disclosed in documents obtained by The Intercept from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. The emails are vacuumed up by the Canadian agency as part of its mandate to defend against hacking attacks and malware targeting government computers. It relies on a system codenamed PONY EXPRESS to analyze the messages in a bid to detect potential cyber threats. Last year, CSE acknowledged it collected some private communications as part of cybersecurity efforts. But it refused to divulge the number of communications being stored or to explain for how long any intercepted messages would be retained. Now, the Snowden documents shine a light for the first time on the huge scope of the operation - exposing the controversial details the government withheld from the public. Under Canada's criminal code, CSE is no

The European Community's Court of Justice decision in the Safe Harbor case --- and Edward Snowden --- are now officially downgrading the U.S. as a cloud data center location. NSA is good business for Europeans looking to displace American cloud service providers, as evidenced by Microsoft's decision. The legal test is whether Microsoft has "possession, custody, or control" of the data. From the info given in the article, it seems that Microsoft has done its best to dodge that bullet by moving data centers to Germany and placing their data under the control of a European company. Do ownership of the hardware and profits from their rent mean that Microsoft still has "possession, custody, or control" of the data? The fine print of the agreement with Deutsche Telekom and the customer EULAs will get a thorough going over by the Dept. of Justice for evidence of Microsoft "control" of the data. That will be the crucial legal issue. The data centers in Germany may pass the test. But the notion that data centers in the UK can offer privacy is laughable; the UK's legal authority for GCHQ makes it even easier to get the data than the NSA can in the U.S.  It doesn't even require a court order. 

there is no requirement of screens. Depending on the fabric being used, there may be a possible requirement of pre-treating the fabric to ensure that the color is more long- lasting and available in a larger range of shades.

I've been looking for a permanent online home for a couple of historical works I co-authored. My guidiing criterion has been the best chance of the works' long-term survival in a publicly-accessible form after my death. I think I may have just found my solution.