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IBM

ODF Toolkit Announced 71

Sweetshark writes "IBM and Sun joined at the 2008 OpenOffice.org conference in Beijing to announce the ODF Toolkit Union. The ODF Toolkit project will be independent of the development at OpenOffice.org, and will operate under the liberal Apache license. It goes from small tools that simplify using ODF in the software development process to large ODF Java and .NET libraries that can be used within other projects. 'The future of accessing and distributing software is here today,' said Michael Bemmer, senior director of Collaboration Engineering at Sun. 'It is no longer an acceptable business practice to have silos of office document data stored in proprietary formats. The industry has moved forward and is replacing the silos with business content, such as on-premise business applications, software solutions offered over the Internet and applications supported by mobile devices that are critical in Service Oriented Architectures.' Will this help ODF to make inroads in the business world after the successes on the desktops of users at home?"
Media

Submission + - Jonathan Lethem on Plagiarism

tmalone writes: This month's Harper's Magazine includes a very interesting essay by the novelist Jonathan Lethem titled, "The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism", in which he discusses the public commons of ideas and the absurdity of restricting other people the right of second use. "Artists and their surrogates who fall into the trap of seeking recompense for every possible second use end up attacking their own best audience members for the crime of exalting and enshrining their work." Taking issue with the idea that any work is "untainted" by other people's ideas he states, "Any text is woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony." Later on he states that, "Contemporary copyright, trademark, and patent law is presently corrupted. The case for perpetual copyright is a denial of the essential gift-aspect of the creative act." He finishes up with simple request, "Don't pirate my editions; do plunder my visions." The best part of the essay is at the end when he provides a key to all of the sources he stole his ideas from.
The Internet

Submission + - Walmart downloads reject Firefox, Apple browsers

babooo404 writes: Last week, Walmart launched their online video download service. Immediately there were posts that the service did not work with the Firefox or Safari browsers. There was a collective, "WTF" when this happened as this is 2007, not 1997. Now it appears that reports are out that Walmart has COMPLETELY turned off the ability to get into the application at all by Firefox, Safari or any other browser it does not like.

http://www.centernetworks.com/walmart-in-bed-with- microsoft-no-to-firefox
Privacy

China Creates Massive Online ID Database 142

schwaang writes that while the US continues to hash out concerns over the Real ID Act, which aims to create a national ID by standardizing state driver's licenses, China has already implemented a massive online ID database, which they say will help prevent fraud. From the Xinhua English-language site: "Anyone can now send a text message or visit the country's population information center's website, to check if the name and the ID number of a person's identity card match. If they do match the ID card-holder's picture also appears, said the Ministry, adding that no other information is available to ensure a citizen's privacy is protected. Completed at the end of 2006, China's population information database, the world's largest, contains personal information on 1.3 billion citizens. Giving public accessing to the database is also designed to correct mistakes if an individual discovers that their name, number and picture don't match."
Power

Storing Wind Power In Cold Stores 242

Roland Piquepaille writes "According to Nature, a European-funded project has been launched to store electricity created from wind in refrigerated warehouses used to store food. As the production of wind energy is variable every day, it cannot easily be accommodated on the electrical grid. So the 'Night Wind' project wants to store wind energy produced at night in refrigerated warehouses and to release this energy during daytime peak hours. The first tests will be done in the Netherlands this year. And as the cold stores exist already, practically no extra cost should be incurred to store as much as 50,000 megawatt-hours of energy. Here are additional details and a picture illustrating this brilliant idea."
Censorship

Teens Prosecuted For Racy Photos 740

An anonymous reader writes with a story on CNet about two teens who were prosecuted under anti-child-porn laws in Florida for having made and emailed racy photos of each other. Both were under 18 years old, so the resulting pictures are clearly illegal; but the teens' intent was not to share the pictures with anyone else. An appeals court majority opinion found that emailing the photos from one of the kids to the other was a careless act that should, it seems, bring down the full weight of the law. A minority opinion argued that the laws were intended to protect children from exploitative adults, not from other children.
Encryption

Father of MPEG Replies To Jobs On DRM 234

marco_marcelli writes with a link to the founder and chairman of MPEG, Leonardo Chiariglione, replying to Steve Jobs on DRM and TPM. After laying the groundwork by distinguishing DRM from digital rights protection, Chiariglione suggests we look to GSM as a model of how a fully open and standardized DRM stack enabled rapid worldwide adoption. He gently reminds Jobs (and us) that there exists a reference implementation of such a DRM stack — Chillout — that would be suitable for use in the music business.

Comment Re:One significant thing about the iMac (Score 1) 790

Bzzt.

If Apple designs throw-away computers, then explain why I have three PCs in storage and use my G3 tower at home? If you believe that not being able to use the latest features somehow changes the utility of the system you're using, you might think again. Usually, it's only your perception that's changed, and usually it's in response to marketing hype. For most users, yesterday's machines are just fine. If you really need to have a bleeding-edge machine, you might be surprised at how much value a used Mac retains.

CousinDave

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