Groklaw

My favorite quote of the day so far comes from a comment that was filed on Bob Sutor's post about how the International Organization of Standardization is risking irrelevancy based on the way it ignored objections to the rushing of the Office Open XML (OOXML) specification through the ISO's ratification process...."I'm usually an optimist, but in situation after situation, the response has always been "we are right and -- wait a minute until we find it -- we have a rule which justifies our forcing OOXML through the system."

But the gem of a quote came in one of the comments: "If MS-OOXML can be approved, I'd like to see what will be rejected in the future. Sorta feels like you're watching an NBA game where the officials have already placed their bets!" - David Berlind, InformationWeek

Google's Chrome browser has as Spartan a user interface as possible, but the browser's Omnibox also turns out to be a window into a much more elaborate view of the browser.

That's because Chrome users can type several commands into the browser's address box to uncovers a wealth of nitty-gritty detail and an amusing Easter egg. - Stephen Shankland, CNET

The SCO Group 9:00 am - 5:00 pm SCO is offering full-day training on Porting and Packaging on SCO OpenServer 6 and UnixWare 7.1.4 Workshop. A hands-on workshop walking through porting of open source applications and packaging.

[PJ: So, all day long walking through porting open source applications on their products. I presume this means SCO's karma has overtaken them. Or that they are Irony Wonderland, where their survival as a business depends utterly on the Open Source community. I'd skip the iXorg Meeting, from the looks of it though. They may not mind all-day-and-night-long stuff, but I'm a busy girl.] - SCO's website

Yes sir, Mr. Ballmer. - UserFriendly

The laptops are not just computers but can be viewed as agents of change where the children become familiar with a tool that they will need in the workforce and in life. After initial training, the laptops are easy to use and OLPC training is provided to teachers, parents and children who take part in the programme. Ian found it took 2 weeks to teach the teachers (and parents) but just a few hours to teach the children who were keen to just get on to the laptop (learning by doing)....

So far, the reaction has been 100% enthusiastic from the Ministers, teachers, parents and the children but Education are somewhat ambivalent about the project. - Cook Islands Herald

Welcome! This is Regular Expressions, or, more precisely, its early-September 2008 installment. Regular Expressions is a column we've written around a hundred times already, stretching back to the late '90s. We're excited to bring it now to Linux Developer Network (LDN), which will publish two installments each month.

LDN focuses in September 2008 on different aspects of kernel development and management. We'll be back mid-month with our own slant on kernel work; first, though, we return from the US Labor Day holiday this week wondering why everyone doesn't use Erlang? Regular Expressions' usual domain is high-productivity languages like Perl, Tcl, and Python, and specific news or ideas that help make the most of them. - Linux Developer Network, LF

"I'm seeing a five-fold increase in speed on type-aheads and lists over IE," he reports. "In quick-add portlets [plug-in user interface components] the browser returns to a 'ready' state much faster."

Davidson also has a robust answer as to whether Chrome, still in beta, is faster than Firefox. "Firefox is faster than IE; Chrome is faster than Firefox," he said. "There are different browser features that will attract different users, but I'll be using Chrome." NetSuite said support for Chrome will be across all its applications by mid-October. - Martin Veitch, CIO, PCWorld

As part of its $300 million brand resuscitation advertising campaign, Microsoft this holiday season will send legions of Microsoft 'gurus' into retail stores such as Circuit City and Best Buy.

The gurus' task: To help buyers make informed PC purchasing decisions, and to also explain the nuances of the complex and intricate snowflake that is Windows. - CRN

As part of the Chrome release, Google open sourced a big portion of Android's graphic engine code. This code comes from the Skia Graphics Engine that was developed by Skia Inc., a company Google acquired in 2005. It was based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and was started by Michael Reed.

This vector graphics rendering software makes highend visual effects possible on feature phones. It is tiny in size and is capable of delivering very high quality. Skia's engine is the graphics core of both Google Android and Google Chrome. - Om Malik, GigaOM

Most stakeholders agree that the future of textbooks is electronic, but their motives and methods are different.

Publishers are pushing digital versions of their products - which maintain profits lost to the used book market and show sympathy to student concerns - while activists and increasingly more professors are advocating open-source textbooks, which are available for free online and can be printed for low costs. - Jessica Riegel, The Daily Pennsylvanian

The attorney, who asked not to be named, told The Mac Observer that, in his opinion, Psystar doesn't have a sound case. Apple has the legal right to restrict Mac OS X to its hardware the same way an author and book publisher have a monopoly right to publish a copyrighted work. In other words, copyrights create a legal monopoly to protect the author and his investment. "That idea, that the author has the right to create a monopoly and enjoy monopoly rents, is an idea that is as old as copyright and is how Congress has chosen to reward authors and inventors for their inventions so as to foster, promote, and facilitate the creative arts," he told TMO

In addition, the "tying" aspect of the case is on tenuous grounds, he said, because Mac OS X doesn't stand alone as a useful product. - The Mac Observer

Google launched its web browser in part to stop its rival, Microsoft, from "Balkanising" the internet by carving it up in ways that favoured its own services, the internet company's chief executive officer said on Wednesday. - FT.com

Maybe Google really does have something here - in just two days, they have leapfrogged Opera in market share, and have their eyes set on bigger fish. I would have thought that Google's foray into the browser market would have taken a bit more time to develop, but it seems that adoption has been extremely rapid. According to TechCrunch, most users are coming from Internet Explorer, not Firefox. - Garett Rogers, ZDNet

Red Hat gave notice in their press conference this morning that it is taking over the virtualization applications KVM (Kernel Virtual Machine) and SolidICE from Qumranet, Inc. KVM has already been a component of the Linux kernel for two years. Via this acquisition, Red Hat predicts short development times and ensures comprehensive hardware support, thereby providing a strategic advantage over other solutions. SolidICE is a desktop virtualization system that can coexist with Linux or Windows. According to Red Hat CEO and President Jim Whitehurst in response to the acquisition, Red Hat thus becomes one of only two enterprises worldwide that offers complete virtualization solutions, emphasizing its equal rank with Microsoft as technology leader. Red Hat clarifies its target customers on its website in that it will offer Windows desktop users a secure and scalable virtualization platform. According to Red Hat's concept, the product will manage Windows as well as Linux server and desktop virtualization. - Britta Wülfing, Linux Magazine Online

Media Sentry's days of unlicensed investigations of Michigan residents may soon be over.

On May 28, 2008, the Michigan governor signed into legislation an expanded revision of the state's professional investigator licensing act. The new definitions make it absolutely clear that the activities of Media Sentry fall under the definition of a private investigator and that, as such, it needs to secure a license to investigate residents of Michigan.

Specifically, the act specifically covers any business that contracts to make an investigation for the purpose of obtaining computer forensics to be used as evidence before a court. - Recording Industry v. The People

Comcast on Thursday appealed the Federal Communication Commission's order that it stop its controversial practice of throttling file sharing traffic....

David Cohen, a Comcast vice president, said Comcast would comply with the order, even though Comcast maintains it never throttled traffic. Still, Cohen said the Philadelphia-based internet service provider was appealing (.pdf) to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit because the commission went too far. - David Kravets, Wired

Attempting a turnaround, Avistar Communications Corp. (DEMO 08) is trying to carve out an identity in the video conferencing world for a new marketing concept it calls "unified communications," while fending off hostile actions by Microsoft Corp., which is challenging Avistar's lifeblood - its patents. To bring in much-needed revenues and boost its stock price, the small San Mateo, CA public company needs to license technology that's covered by its 83 patents worldwide. Its new management team was in conversations in February with Microsoft when the giant without warning changed course and challenged all 29 of Avistar's U.S. patents. - Mary A. C. Fallon, DEMO.com

Sun xVM VirtualBox 2.0.0 was released today, and is available for download from virtualbox.org. New features include 64-bit guest support, host interface networking on Solaris and OS X hosts, support for nested paging on modern AMD CPUs, and a native front end for the OS X client (and a move to Qt 4 for the others). - Calum's Sunny Wee-blog

The new facility is being announced today as a collaborative project of Linux vendor Red Hat Inc., the City University of New York and Intel Corp. where government IT staffers will be able to test code and applications on a variety of next-generation Intel multicore hardware. The new lab is located in Manhattan at CUNY's Institute for Software Design and Development. - Todd Weiss, ComputerWorld

This year, OLPC opted to team up with a Web e-tailer instead of running the program itself, said Matt Keller, director of Europe, Middle East and Africa at OLPC, in an interview Wednesday.

Amazon.com will start selling XO laptops under the Give One, Get One program in late November, around the time of Thanksgiving in the U.S. Sales will likely extend through to around the end of December. - Dan Nystedt, IDG, PCWorld