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Submission + - Norway mandates open formats for government (edholden.com)

Submitted by

Random BedHead Ed

on Friday December 21, 2007 @01:38PM

Random BedHead Ed writes: "According to a few articles, the Kingdom of Norway has mandated the use of open formats for all government documents. The original press release is in Norwegian, but roughly translated (via The Inquirer via Groklaw):

"The government has decided that all information on governmental websites should be available in the open formats HTML, PDF or ODF. With this decision, the times when public documents were only available in Microsoft's Word format comes to an end."
The mandate also specifies that HTML should be use for general posting of information on the Web, PDF should be used when page layout must be preserved, and ODF should be used when providing forms for citizens to fill out."

Submission + - Norway mandates government use of ODF and PDF

Submitted by siDDis on Friday December 21, 2007 @05:29AM

siDDis writes: Earlier this year Slashdot mentioned that Norway moves towards mandatory use of ODF and PDF. Now it's confirmed that the Norwegian government has mandated the use of open document formats from January 1st, 2009.

There are three formats that have been mandated for all documentation between authorities, users and partners. HTML for all public information on the Web, PDF for all documents where layout needs to be preserved and ODF for all documents that the recipient is supposed to be able to edit. Documents may also be published in other formats, but they must always be available in either ODF or PDF.

Submission + - New Government, New Network?

Submitted by

renegadesx

on Sunday November 25, 2007 @09:56PM

renegadesx writes: "Australia has a new government lead by Kevin Rudd and the center-left Labor party in a landslide victory Saturday night. For months Mr Rudd has promised if elected he intends on bringing Australia up-to-date broadband capacity in establishing a Fiber to the Node (FTTN) infastructure nation wide.

What challenges await the new PM in establishing this? Telstra, who of course want to retain their monopoly over Australia's infastructure. Can Rudd and Telstra play nice in the interests of bringing Australia out of the stone age of DSL capabilities?

Time will tell, the Howard Government and Telstra did not get along at all. http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/15505/1086/"

Submission + - COD 4 price doubles on Steam for Australian gamers (on.net)

Submitted by ginji on Sunday November 25, 2007 @08:12PM

ginji writes: Activision has made Valve increase the price of Call of Duty 4 on Steam for Australian customers from USD49.95 (The same price US customers get it for) to USD88.50 saying that the original price was a mistake and it was supposed to be this the entire time.

For exactly the same content, delivered by exactly the same servers, at exactly the same cost to Activision, this price rise seems to be purely to make more money off the game through increased sales in brick and mortar stores, and those that are now stupid enough to buy it on Steam. The new price when converted into AUD, is above the recommended retail price of the physical media, and you don't get the manual or an actual DVD.

Submission + - Is benchmarking a website you don't own illegal? 2

Submitted by on Thursday September 06, 2007 @03:20PM

An anonymous reader writes: As a web developer, I'm constantly benchmarking my own sites to optimise for speed and stability. But recently, I was curious about the performance of a 3rd party website, and ran a benchmark against it. It was taking a while, so I went out to do some errands, and when I got back, the site was completely down, and had been for hours. I'd totally wiped them out, using nothing but ApacheBench.

My question is: is this illegal? I did nothing except request their own public URL, from one computer, a few thousand times. And yet, the effect was a total DOS. Could simply running AB be a crime, and can I expect the Feds at my door someday soon?

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