O'Reilly News & Commentary

What VMware's Cloud Foundry announcement is about

By Andy Oram
April 13, 2011

By now, the popular APIs for IaaS have been satisfactorily emulated so that you can move your application fairly easily from one vendor to another. But until now, the PaaS situation was much more closed.

4G is a moving target - The official definition of 4G is different from the marketing term.

By Bruce Stewart
March 16, 2011

The "4G" mobile companies are touting isn't necessarily in line with the formal specification. The big question is: Do consumers really care?

Four short links: 1 March 2011 - Controlling Standards, Async Persistence, Javascript Patterns, Social Mechanics

By Nat Torkington
March 1, 2011

Implementing Open Standards in Open Source (Larry Rosen) -- Companies try to control specifications because they want to control software that implements those specifications. This is often incompatible with the freedom promised by open source principles that allow anyone to create and distribute copies and derivative works without restriction. This article explores ways that are available to compromise that...

Four short links: 24 February 2011 - Network Snooping, Traffic Growth, Data Munging, and Open Interop

By Nat Torkington
February 24, 2011

Charles -- a debugging proxy that lets a developer view all HTTP and SSL traffic between their machine and the Internet. (via Andy Baio's excellent "How I Indexed The Daily) The Rise and Rise of Mobile Broadband -- the Blackberry is now the standard measure of traffic, apparently. The outcome is simple - Cisco estimates that global mobile data...

An era in which to curate skills: report from Tools of Change conference

By Andy Oram
February 18, 2011

Three days of intensive discussion about the current state of publishing wrapped up last night in New York City. Research and sales, authoring and curation, are all still important skills.

An era in which to curate skills: report from Tools of Change conference

By Andy Oram
February 18, 2011

Three days of intensive discussion about the current state of publishing wrapped up last night in New York City. Research and sales, authoring and curation, are all still important skills.

ePayments Week: Does Apple deserve a bigger bite? - Google offers publishers a sweeter deal, telcos rally around a payment standard, and Bling Nation embraces Facebook

By David Sims
February 17, 2011

Apple's plan to charge publishers 30% of in-app subscriptions was undercut by Google's 10% One Pass program the next day. But is Apple's service worth a premium? Plus: Giant companies mull a mobile payment standard and Bling Nation shifts its website to Facebook.

An era in which to curate skills: report from Tools of Change conference

By Andy Oram
February 17, 2011

Three days of intensive discussion about the current state of publishing wrapped up last night in New York City. Research and sales, authoring and curation, are all still important skills.

Australian Whole-of-Government Common Operating Environment Policy and OOXML - AGIMO boots OpenOffice but Libre Office reboots OpenOffice?

By Rick Jelliffe
January 28, 2011

Two big stories this week: AGIMO's COE and LibreOffice. AGIMO is the Australian Government Information Management Office. They are the ones who set policies such as requiring govt web page meet the W3C's WCAG 2.0 guidelines for accessibility, or that...

Developer Week in Review - Ozzie architects a departure, Apple earnings and rumors, the BSA meddles, and C++ is 15.

By James Turner
October 20, 2010

This week, Microsoft loses their chief architect, Apple continues to own the news cycle, the BSA tries to put the kibosh on open standards, and a well-known language reaches a milestone.

A Non-Technical Field Guide to the HTML 5 Family

By Jon Reid
September 29, 2010

Part Two: The Newest Family Members In my last entry, I wrote about the HTML 5 family and its history. This entry will be about the latest incarnation of the standards, some of the new features, and why they're important....

A Non-Technical Field Guide to the HTML 5 Family

By Jon Reid
September 14, 2010

HTML 5 is on everyone's mind these days, most notably is the Flash vs. HTML 5 debate which has garnered industry-wide attention. There's a lot of information about HTML 5 out on the web, but much of that information is technical and geared towards developers and their questions...

Deliberate non-conformances in XML Schema implementations - Really, how could it be any other way?

By Rick Jelliffe
August 6, 2010

From SAXON's Michael Kay, on the XML-DEV mail list today: On interoperability, there are at least three reasons why you might get different results from different processors. One is because the specification leaves the behaviour of certain things implementation-defined (for...

OpenStack offered as Rackspace's answer to calls for an open cloud

By Andy Oram
July 20, 2010

When Rackspace and NASA announced OpenStack, I thought of it as either a PR or yet another attempt to impose some pet project on the world as a standard. But it may actually a newsworthy intervention into the furiously evolving cloud industry.

Land of long white cloud sees through the fog - An end to embedded software patents

By Rick Jelliffe
July 16, 2010

Dawn comes first in New Zealand! From the New Zealand governments Beehive.govt.nz website: Commerce Minister Simon Power has instructed the Intellectual Property Office of New Zealand (IPONZ) to develop guidelines to allow inventions that contain embedded software to be patented....

Three 'Internets'

By Rick Jelliffe
July 16, 2010

I am used to the idea that there is an 'internet' of people (email, blogs, twitter, social media, phones, mail) and an 'internet' of data (WWW, W3C Linked Data/RDF, wikipedia, Atom feeds, HTML, ATM machines, etc), but an EU discussion...

Europe to force all 'significant market players' to provide information necessary for interoperability?

By Rick Jelliffe
June 12, 2010

Three news items caught my interest this week. all slightly related: Dr. Neelie Kroes has made a significant speech How to get more interoperability in Europe on practical steps on interoperability and standards. She presents this as building on the...

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