"While the move to ODF seems to offer clear benefits to the Massachusetts government and citizens in general, a move to ODF and a change in office application has significant accessibility implications for people with disabilities. Today people with disabilities are predominantly on the Microsoft Windows desktop. The proportion on Windows increases further when you look at employees of the Executive Branch of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. When it comes to the move to ODF for people with disabilities, there are
two basic questions to ask."
UPDATE: ODF turned into nothing but a forgotton political football in the Massachusetts Senate today when Senator William Morrissey pulled his own amendment to S 2256 and replaced it with
something even worse.
GNOME 2.13.2 has been
released. Odd-numbered versions of GNOME represent developmental branches, hence this is the second development release on the road towards GNOME 2.14 in March 2006. You can compile this new test release using
these jhbuild modulesets. Now, can you hear the new
Zipdisk Mount Error Dialog HIG-compliant console beep?
"
Sun Studio 11 software is the latest release of optimizing compilers and tools for the C, C++ and Fortran developer. This release delivers the highest optimizations and the best performance in the development of scalable 32-bit and 64-bit applications on Sun's newest hardware platforms including the latest multi-core UltraSPARC, x64 and x86 platforms. And Sun Studio 11 software now removes the price barrier and is available for free."
OpenDocument got a lot of publicity lately. StarOffice 8 and OpenOffice.org 2.0 finally arrived, and all the other makers of office suites (with the notable exception of Microsoft) have started implementing the new standard into their programs. Massachusetts recently decided to use OpenDocument as the standard file format, effectively locking out MS Office as soon as January 1st, 2007. Other countries are on their way to do the same. Also, OpenDocument recently got submitted to become an ISO standard.
The Bush administration and its critics at a UN summit have
inked a broad agreement on global Internet management that will preclude any dramatic showdown this week. By signing the
statement (.pdf), the Bush administration formally endorsed the creation of an 'Internet Governance Forum' that will meet for the first time in 2006 under the auspices of the UN. The forum is meant to be a central point for global discussions of everything from computer security and online crime to spam and other 'misuses of the Internet.' What the agreement does not do is require the US to relinquish its unique influence over the Internet's operations.
Submitted by Frank Suhn
2005-11-16
Zeta
"An operating system without an office suite is limited in its mass market appeal, making this a fairly serious issue. When yellowTAB decided to update ZETA's compiler, much thought was given to this problem in particular, and finally an answer made itself
clear."
Microsoft Virtual Server Release 2 has begun shipping to manufacturers and is due for general release in the first week of December with a new pricing model and a number of new features, most notably
formal support for Linux.
"Technically, Linux already worked on Virtual Server, but with R2 we have formalised support, and we will continue to support Linux in the future," said Bob Muglia, who recently took over as senior vice-president of Microsoft's server and tools division.
A database containing more than 500 software patents and backed by big-name vendors has been
posted online to foster development of litigation-free open source. Open Source Development Labs has launched its Patent Commons Project with backing from IBM - the industry's largest holder of technology patents - Computer Associates International, Novell, Red Hat, Intel and Sun Microsystems.
"If Microsoft offers a superior product to Linux then why would they need a 'Get the Facts' campaign? Just about any time a major publication runs a story about Linux, Microsoft gets them to place a 'Get the Facts' advertisement nearby and often right in the middle of the story. That seems pretty suspect to me. Do you ever wonder if publications run Linux stories just to garner Microsoft's ad money? Or have you considered that desperate times call for desperate measures? It makes me
wonder."
"At Supercomputing 2005, AMD and Sun today
announced that the Tokyo Institute of Technology is creating Japan's largest supercomputer on a foundation of Sun. The system is based on Sun Fire x64 (x86, 64-bit) servers with 10,480 AMD Opteron processor cores (totaling more than 50 trillion floating point operations per second (teraFLOPS)), Sun and NEC storage technologies and NEC's integration expertise as well as ClearSpeed's Advance accelerator boards."
Oxygen is the new icon theme being created for KDE4. Everything started in March 2005 when a bunch of KDE contributors met in Berlin to form the Appeal Project with the goal to promote KDE related projects and to push the open source desktop to another level. Oxygen aims to bring a modern, cool and very usable and consistent icon theme, in SVG format.
Sun today released its next generation filesystem,
ZFS a few minutes ago by
pushing out the "community" (i.e. testing) build 27 of OpenSolaris in
source and
binary form. You can take a look at the
homepage,
documentation,
source code
tour, and a
"getting
started" screencast demo.
Java 2 Platform Standard Edition (J2SE) 5.0 Release 3
includes version 1.5.0_05 and improves functionality of J2SE 5.0 on Mac OS X v 10.4 Tiger 10.4.2 and later. This release does not replace the existing installation of J2SE 1.4.2. You can change the preferred Java version for applications and applets by using the new Java Preferences utility.
Microsoft announces that the next version of Exchange, its upcoming Windows Server "Longhorn" SBS and its Centro infrastructure solution for midsize businesses
will only be released as 64-bit.
Submitted by Samuel Kielek
2005-11-16
Solaris
Oracle
selects the Solaris 10 Operating System as its preferred Open Source 64-bit development and deployment environment.
ExtremeTech is featuring
a How-To on building an OSx86 MacIntel machine that boots both OS X and Windows. On the same hardware, OS X booted almost three times faster than Windows, yet was a disappointment when playing certain games.
Update: One more article
about it.
Sun's Looking Glass 3D desktop can
now be executed on any machine which supports Java Web Start.
I recently bought one of the new dual core PowerMacs. Having used the machine for a couple of weeks, I thought I would share some of my observations and feelings about it. First, let me get my biases out in the open. I have, for about four years, very happily used Linux on my desktop. Doing so has made me very comfortable with the UNIX environment in general, and with GNOME specifically. During that time, I have used OS X machines on a regular basis, so I am quite comfortable in that environment as well. Since I switched to Linux, I have not used Windows for anything more than the occasional bit of software testing or lab work, and generally feel quite uncomfortable with it. Thus, this article is very much written from the perspective of someone who finds OS X and Linux pleasing on principle. I implore the reader to make his own value judgments based on my comments.
Graphics performance, which has long been an afterthought for most corporate PCs and many consumers, will move to the forefront with the launch of Windows Vista, Microsoft's next Windows operating system. Vista, due late next year,
will offer four different themes, including the well-publicized three-dimensional Aero Glass with transparent windows.
This article looks at the impact of schema evolution on the application and walks the reader through a usage scenario to illustrate the ease of setting up a PHP environment; the ease of integrating
DB2 native XML functionality with PHP applications, including Web services written in PHP and XQuery.
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