Group items tagged

Excellent article explaining the CPU war for the future of computing, as Intel and ARM square off.  Intel's x86 architecture dominates the era of client/server computing, with their famed WinTel alliance monopolizing desktop, notebook and server implementations.  But Microsoft was a no show with the merging mobile computing market, and now ARM is in position transition from their mobile dominance to challenge the desktop -notebook - server markets.   WinTel lost their shot at the mobile computing market, and now their legacy platforms are in play.  Good article!!! Well worth the read time  ................

Move over FlipBoard and QWiki and meet Needle.  The emerging market space for automating the process of collecting Web information to analyse, re-purpose and re-publish is getting crowded.   Needle is designed to: acquire data from multiple sources:  A simple tagging process quickly imports structured data from complex websites, XML feeds, and spreadsheets into a unified database of your design.merge, deduplicate and cleanse: Needle uses intelligent semantics to help you find and merge variant forms of the same record.  Your merges, edits and deletions persist even after the original data is refreshed from its source. merge, deduplicate and cleanse: Needle uses intelligent semantics to help you find and merge variant forms of the same record.  Your merges, edits and deletions persist even after the original data is refreshed from its source. build and publish custom data views: Use Needle's visual UI and powerful query language to configure exactly your desired view of the data, whether as a list, table, grid, or map.  Then, with one click, publish the data for others to see, or export a feed of the clean data to your own local database. Flipboard is famous for the slick republishing / packaging process focused on iOS devices.  Allows end users to choose sources. QWiki takes republishing to the extreme, blending voice over (from wikipedia text) with a slide show of multimedia information.  Edn user does not yet have control and selection of information sources with QWiki. The iOS Sports Illustrated app seems to be the starting point for "immersive webzines", with the NY Times close behind.  Very very slick packaging of basic Web information. Flipboard followed the iOS re-publishing wave with an end-user facing immersive webzine packaging design.  And now we have Needle. Still looking for a business document FlipBoard, where a "project" is packaged in a FlipBoard immersive container.  The iPack would be similar to an iPUB book with the added featur

Note: On April 12th, 2011 Needle was acquired by Google.

Well, not quite.  More IBM happy talk about interoperability and easy document interchange.  While i agree with the static versus interactive - collaborative document perspective, it's far more complicated. Today we have a world of "native"  docs and "visual" docs.   Native docs are bound to their authoring productivity environment, and are stubbornly NOT interchangeable.  Even for ODF and OOXML formats. Visual documents are spun from natives, and they are highly interchangeable, but interactively limited.  They lack the direct interaction of native authoring environments.  The Visual document phenomenon starts with PDF and the virtual print driver.  Any authoring application(s) in a productivity environment can print a PDF using the magic of the virtual print driver.   In 2008, when ISO stamped PDF with "accessibility tags", a new, highly interactive version of PDF was offically recognized.  We know this as "Tagged PDF".  And it has led the sweeping revolution of wide implementation of the paperless transaction process. The Visual Document phenomenon doesn't stop there.  The highly mobile WebKit revolution ushered in by the 2008 iPhone phenomenon led to wide acceptance of highly interactive and collaborative, but richly visual versions of SVG and HTML5-CSS3-JSON-JavaScript documents. Today we have SVG-HTML+ type visually immersive documents spun out of Server side publication presses such as FlipBoard, Cognito cComics, QWiki, Needle, Sports Illustrated, Push Pop Press, and TreeSaver to name but a few.   Clearly the visually immersive category of documents is exploding, but not for business - productivity documents.  Adobe has proposed a "CSS Regions" standard for richly immersive layout that might change that.  But mostly i think the problem for business documents, reports and forms is that they are "compound documents" bound to desktop productivity environments and workgroups. The great transition from desktop/workgroup productivity environme

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. 

The Florida case is particularly interesting because Florida is within the jurisdiction of the U.S. Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, which has just ruled that law enforcement must obtain a search warrant from a court before using equipment to determine a cell phone's location.  

Notification of this article also appeared in the Diigo Document Wars Group..... WebODF...   An especially interesting project that was presented is WebODF, which wants to bring ODF to the web. Jos van den Oever started from the observation that a lot of office suites are moving into the "cloud". Examples are Microsoft Live Office, Google Docs, and Zoho. But where are the free software alternatives for the cloud? For OpenOffice.org, KOffice, AbiWord, and Gnumeric, there are none that have a cloud version with ODF support. That was the motivation for Jos to start a project to fill in this gap and let users view and edit ODF documents on the web without losing control of the document into some company's servers. The strategy Jos followed was to use just HTML and JavaScript for the web application. The application then loads the XML stream of the ODF document as is into the HTML document and puts it into the DOM tree. Styling is done by applying CSS rules that are directly derived from the and elements in the ODF document. That is how WebODF was born; it is a project with the initial goal of creating a simple ODF viewer and editor for offline and online use, implemented in HTML5. The small code base consists of one HTML5 file and eight JavaScript files, each of which is a few hundred lines of code. The most interesting part is that it doesn't need server-side code execution: the JavaScript code is executed in the user's browser and saving the document to the web server is done using WebDAV. It supports both the Gecko and WebKit HTML engines. There is also an implementation on top of QtWebKit, which is for better desktop integration, and an ODFKit implementation. This means that WebODF is an easy way to add ODF support to almost any application, be it in HTML, Gtk, or QML. KO GmbH has received funding from NLnet to improve the current WebODF prototype and see how far the idea goes. Interested readers can try the online demo

A new resource site for whistle-blowers. somewhat in the tradition of Wikileaks, but designed for encrypted communications between whistleblowers and journalists.  This one has an impressive board of advisors that includes several names I know and tend to trust, among them former whistle-blowers Daniel Ellsberg, Ray McGovern, Thomas Drake, William Binney, and Ann Wright. Leaked records can only be dropped from a web browser running the Tor anonymizer software and uses the SecureDrop system originally developed by Aaron Schwartz. They strongly recommend using the Tails secure operating system that can be installed to a thumb drive and leaves no tracks on the host machine. https://tails.boum.org/index.en.html Curious, I downloaded Tails and installed it to a virtual machine. It's a heavily customized version of Debian. It has a very nice Gnome desktop and blocks any attempt to connect to an external network by means other than installed software that demands encrypted communications. For example, web sites can only be viewed via the Tor anonymizing proxy network. It does take longer for web pages to load because they are moving over a chain of proxies, but even so it's faster than pages loaded in the dial-up modem days, even for web pages that are loaded with graphics, javascript, and other cruft. E.g., about 2 seconds for New York Times pages. All cookies are treated by default as session cookies so disappear when you close the page or the browser. I love my Linux Mint desktop, but I am thinking hard about switching that box to Tails. I've been looking for methods to send a lot more encrypted stuff down the pipe for NSA to store. Tails looks to make that not only easy, but unavoidable. From what I've gathered so far, if you want to install more software on Tails, it takes about an hour to create a customized version and then update your Tails installation from a new ISO file. Tails has a wonderful odor of having been designed for secure computing. Current

HTTPS connections don't work for you if you don't use them. If you're not using HTTPS Everywhere in your browser, you should be; it's your privacy that is at stake. And every encrypted communication you make adds to the backlog of encrypted data that NSA and other internet voyeurs must process as encrypted traffic; because cracking encrypted messages is computer resource intensive, the voyeurs do not have the resources to crack more than a tiny fraction. HTTPS is a free extension for Firefox, Chrome, and Opera. You can get it here. https://www.eff.org/HTTPS-everywhere

Control vs. Creativity.  As the ulitmate control freak, Ballmer was guanteed to crush the life out of Microsoft's most creative individuals and teams.  Gates was focused on Windows and MSOffice, and Ballmer on control.  That one-two punch made certain that Microsoft would not be a player in the next great wave of computing; The Cloud.   excerpt: This is yet another example of what I like to call the Wile E. Coyote syndrome. Like the unfortunate character in the old Warner Bros. cartoons, Microsoft now seems to be a company that has long since run off the cliff but, with legs spinning for all they are worth, doesn't know yet that it is ready to drop. Yet drop it most certainly will. Microsoft Win8 Tablet Is NOT a Game Changer Adam Hartung Contributor Snapshot: Steve Ballmer Follow (93) #44 Billionaires IDC Analyst: Microsoft's Surface Sizzle Needs Win8 Steak Daniel Nye Griffiths Contributor To understand how this happens, take a look at the work of Arnold J. Toynbee, a historian who studied the rise and fall of civilizations. He argued that a civilization flourishes when it motivates insiders and attracts outsiders with its creative dynamism and culture. The civilization breaks down when its leadership loses this creative capacity and gives way to, or transforms itself into, a dominant minority. When this happens, the driver of the civilization becomes control, not attraction. And it's precisely this switch from attraction to control that is the source of the breakdown. Interestingly, Toynbee says that the consequences may not be immediately apparent. A civilization can keep up momentum because the controls it puts in place generate some short-term efficiency. But eventually it will run its course and collapse, because no amount of control can replace the loss of collective creativity. Observe this in the corporate world by looking at the example of General Motors. G.M.'s 2009 bankruptcy came at the end of a long decline dating back to the early 197

Good discussion, but it really deserves a more in-depth thrashing.  The basic concept is that a perfect storm of mobility, cloud-computing and HTML5-JavaScript has set the stage for a major, massive shift in application development.  The shift from C++ to Java is now being replaced by a greater shift from Java and C++ to JavaScript-JSON-HTML5. Interesting, but i continue to insist that the greater "Perfect Storm" triggered in 2008, is causing a platform shift from client/server computing to full on, must have "cloud-computing".   There are three major "waves"; platform shifts in the history of computing at work here.  The first wave was "Mainframe computing", otherwise known as server/terminal.  The second wave was that of "client/server" computing, where the Windows desktop eventually came to totally dominate and control the "client" side of the client/server equation. The third wave began with the Internet, and the dominance of the WWW protocols, interfaces, methods and formats.  The Web provides the foundation for the third great Wave of Cloud-Computing. The Perfect Storm of 2008 lit the fuse of the third Wave of computing.  Key to the 2008 Perfect Storm is the world wide financial collapse that put enormous pressure on businesses to cut cost and improve productivity; to do more with less, or die.  The survival maxim quickly became do more with less people - which is the most effective form of "productivity".  The nature of the collapse itself, and the kind of centralized, all powerful bailout-fascists governments that rose during the financial collapse, guaranteed that labor costs would rise dramatically while also being "uncertain".  Think government controlled healthcare. The other aspects of the 2008 Perfect Storm are mobility, HTML5, cloud-computing platform availability, and, the ISO standardization of "tagged" PDF.   The mobility bomb kicked off in late 2007, with the introduction of the Apple iPhone.  No further explanation needed :) Th

Quick review of different sync-share-store services, starting with DropBox and ending with three Open Source services. Very interesting. Things have progressed since I last worked on the SurDocs project for Sursen. No mention in this review of file formats, conversion or viewing issues. I do know that CrocoDoc is used by near every sync-share-store service to convert documents to either pdf or html formats for viewing. No servie however has been able to hit the "native document" sweet spot. Not even SurDocs - which was the whole purpose behind the project!!! "Native Documents" means that the document is in it's native / original application format. That format is needed for the round tripping and reloading of the document. Although most sync-share-store services work with MSOffice OXML formatted documents, only Microsoft provides a true "native" format viewer (Office 365). Office 365 enables direct edit, view and collaboration on native documents. Which is an enormous advantage given that conversion of any sort is guaranteed to "break" a native document and disrupt any related business processes or round tripping need. It was here that SurDoc was to provide a break-through technology. Sadly, we're still waiting :( excerpt: The availability of cheap, easy-to-use and accessible cloud file-sharing services means users have more freedom and choice than ever before. Dropbox pioneered simplicity and ease of use, and so quickly picked up users inside the enterprise. Similar services have followed Dropbox's lead and now there are dozens, including well-known ones such as Google Drive, SkyDrive and Ubuntu One. cloud.jpg Valdis Filks , research director at analyst firm Gartner explained the appeal of cloud file-sharing services. Filks said: "Enterprise employees use Dropbox and Google because they are consumer products that are simple to use, can be purchased without officially requesting new infrastructure or budget expenditure, and can be installed qu

Odd that the reporter mentions the importance of security near the top of the article but gives that topic such short shrift in his evaluation of the services. For example, "secured by 256-bit AES encryption" is meaningless without discussing other factors such as: [i] who creates the encryption keys and on which side of the server/client divide; and [ii] the service's ability to decrypt the customer's content. Encrypt/decryt must be done on the client side using unique keys that are unknown to the service, else security is broken and if the service does business in the U.S. or any of its territories or possessions, it is subject to gagged orders to turn over the decrypted customer information. My wisdom so far is to avoid file sync services to the extent you can, boycott U.S. services until the spy agencies are encaged, and reward services that provide good security from nations with more respect for digital privacy, to give U.S.-based services an incentive to lobby *effectively* on behalf of their customer's privacy in Congress. The proof that they are not doing so is the complete absence of bills in Congress that would deal effectively with the abuse by U.S. spy agencies. From that standpoint, the Switzerland-based http://wuala.com/ file sync service is looking pretty good so far. I'm using it.

"At its Ideas Summit in New York, Google has announced that it is working on developing a browser extension that will act as an easy-to-use way to bypass country-specific Internet censorship and make connections safer and more private. Safer connections The tool, which was developed by the University of Washington and seeded by Google, is at its core a peer-to-peer personalized virtual private network (VPN) that redirects Internet traffic coming from an initial, less secure connection through a second, trusted connection, and then encrypts the pathway between the two terminals. Whenever you access the Internet, the connection is routed through a number of terminals. At each step of the way the connection may be blocked, surveilled, or even tampered with (especially if the data is not encrypted). On the whole, the safety and privacy of your data is only as good as the weakest link in the chain. Google's solution with uProxy was to develop a tool that makes it much easier to make an unsafe connection more secure, with the help of a trusted friend. The software, which will be available as a Chrome and Firefox extension to begin with, can use existing social networks like Facebook or Google Hangouts to help find users who already have uProxy installed on their system. If two users agree to use the service in tandem, the software can begin to make data connections safer. How it works Let's assume that Alice, who lives in a country with an Internet censorship problem such as China or Iran, contacts Bob, who has much safer, or uncensored, or unmonitored access to the Internet. Bob agrees to act as a proxy for Alice, and as long as his browser is open, Alice's outgoing web traffic will now be routed through Bob's connection, and so she'll now be able to access websites that she wouldn't otherwise be able to reach on her own. The connection between Alice and Bob is also encrypted. To an external observer looking at Bob's connection, it would appear that he is simply s

Another take on it from EFF: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/10/europes-court-justice-nsa-surveilance Expected since the Court's Advocate General released an opinion last week, presaging today's opinion.  Very big bucks involved behind the scenes because removing U.S.-based internet companies from the scene in the E.U. would pave the way for growth of E.U.-based companies.  The way forward for the U.S. companies is even more dicey because of a case now pending in the U.S.  The Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is about to decide a related case in which Microsoft was ordered by the lower court to produce email records stored on a server in Ireland. . Should the Second Circuit uphold the order and the Supreme Court deny review, then under the principles announced today by the Court in the E.U., no U.S.-based company could ever be allowed to have "possession, custody, or control" of the data of E.U. citizens. You can bet that the E.U. case will weigh heavily in the Second Circuit's deliberations.  The E.U. decision is by far and away the largest legal event yet flowing out of the Edward Snowden disclosures, tectonic in scale. Up to now, Congress has succeeded in confining all NSA reforms to apply only to U.S. citizens. But now the large U.S. internet companies, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Dropbox, etc., face the loss of all Europe as a market. Congress *will* be forced by their lobbying power to extend privacy protections to "non-U.S. persons."  Thank you again, Edward Snowden.

We can all learn a lot of lessons from the history of DDE/OLE/ OLE3/COM /ActiveX/DCOM /COM+ (you can start reading up on Wikipedia to get some background) and how we went from everyone using best-of-breed standalone apps to one integrated, nearly monolithic Office. It basically all started with copy and paste. People who never spent a lot of time in singletasking, character-mode operating environments like the DOS command line don't recall that simply copying-and-pasting information between apps was difficult at the time. And part of the revelation of Windows for mainstream users (or Mac, for leading-edge tech fans), was being able to easily share data in that way. This was different than what Unix users were used to with the command-line pipe, or from what most applications do with feeds today, in allowing structured information flows between applications. There's a desire to combine data from different sources in an arbitrary way, and to have the user interface display the appropriate tools for whatever context you're in. The dominant model here, probably because of the influence of the early PARC demos, is to have toolbars or UI widgets change depending on what kind of content you're manipulating. Microsoft was really into this in the early 90s with OLE2, where your Word toolbars would morph into Excel toolbars if you double-clicked on an embedded spreadsheet. It was ungainly and ugly and slow, especially if you had less than an exorbitant 8MB of RAM, but the idea was pretty cool. And it still is. People are so focused on data formats and feeds that they're ignoring consensus around UI interoperability. The Atom API and Metaweblog API give me a good-enough interface if I want to treat a discrete chunk of information (like a blog post) as an undifferentiated blob. But all the erstwhile spec work around microformats and structured blogging (I forget which one is for XML and which one's for XHTML) doesn't seem to have addressed user experience or editing behavior

Whether a patent constitutes "property" in the U.S. is an issue on which the Supreme Court has apparently never ruled. However, there is no question that the nation's founders viewed it only as a government-granted privilege, not a "property" right. The U.S. Supreme Court quoted Thomas Jefferson on the topic: Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from any body. VI Writings of Thomas Jefferson, at 18

Enterprise cloud storage provider Box.net is launching a new version of its software that includes a front-facing interface built from scratch and additional mobile features, the company announced today. The new Box.net interface is a mash-up of micro-blogging activity streams like FriendFeed and online storage like Dropbox. Box users can drag and drop files from their computer directly onto the site to send files into cloud storage. There are also folders that are synched up directly with the cloud, like Dropbox, that automatically update files as they are changed. Users can preview those files directly within Box.net - and the software supports a lot of file formats. Box developer Kim Lockhart showed off the capabilities by opening up Adobe Illustrator files within the web interface and previewing other files from Photoshop and the like. Whenever any file is viewed, commented on or changed, Box.net users get an update on their activity feed. "This basically kills the software problem," Lockhart said. "You can view files like illustrator files and pretty much anything else as we move forward without ever having to have the software." The idea was to remake the front-facing application from scratch because it was becoming too complicated with too many features. Box.net released a new update just about every week last year and added more and more features, and that was clouding up the service and making it too complicated for some end users, said Box.net CEO Aaron Levie. While Box is mainly focused on the enterprise, Levie said Box had plenty of potential in the consumer space - to compete with cloud storage providers like Dropbox and the like.

The home business and small office sectors are leading the adoption of Cloud computing services, with business spending on Cloud services predicted to surpass $13 Billion by 2014. Cloud computing enables businesses to access computer servers and data storage over the Internet and internal networks, allowing them to lower data costs and move content more nimbly. One of the key concerns over adoption of Cloud services to date has been security issues. Recent research from the IT Governance Institute (ITGI) in the US suggested companies were holding back on Cloud investments over fears for the security of their data in the Cloud. Half of the 834 executives from 21 countries polled said they were delaying Cloud implementation because of security concerns, and over a third said they were waiting to get the full value from installed systems. Research by IDC confirmed this view, with organisations claiming identity management and access control over who has access to Cloud data was a worrying factor, along with governance issues over privacy and compliance of both Cloud data and apps. Nevertheless, the fast-growing trend has been seen to be boosting demand for infrastructure and fueling consolidation in the data-storage sector. According to the In-Stat report which forecasts trends in cloud computing and managed hosting spending in the US, the growth in Cloud Computing will be 'staggering', rising from a figure of less than 3 billion currently.

Real-time co-creation and co-editing: With Novell Vibe, people in your organization can author and edit online documents together, character by character, in real time. Teams can dramatically accelerate the completion of projects that used to take weeks. Because collaboration unfolds in a shared workspace, no one has to manually merge content from multiple contributors to create a unified, finished document. Enterprise social messaging: As easy to use as Facebook or Twitter, Novell Vibe consolidates direct messages, chat, blogs and wikis from within Novell Vibe into one message stream. Creating new groups and inviting members from inside or outside your organization is as simple as sending an e-mail. You can even jumpstart ad-hoc conversations in seconds to tackle projects that can't wait. File synchronization and management: Files on your desktop, regardless of authoring application, can be synchronized to the Novell Vibe file repository based in the cloud. As a result, users always work with the latest versions of important files on their desktops and in Novell Vibe. The Novell Vibe unified message stream: Direct messages, social feeds and group conversations from within Novell Vibe are unified in one intuitive interface. This eliminates the need to constantly switch between locations to see all your content. Using powerful filtering, sorting and tagging capabilities, you can determine exactly what you want to see and whom you want to follow. Advanced information management: Novell Vibe keeps a persistent record of all your work and conversations. Its comprehensive search function quickly locates files, messages, attachments, groups and people to save time and boost productivity.