ODF meet your new enemy: OOXML

Microsoft’s Office Open XML (OOXML) document format has been adopted as an international document standard and joins the likes of ODF and PDF (yes, there’s a lot of acronyms).

I will echo what Knowledge Economy International, which campaigns for fairer access to knowledge, says: “We are disappointed,” (the director, James Love).

I don’t see why we need two document formats (PDF excluded) as an ISO-standard, especially when OOXML has 6,000 pages of code whereas ODF has a mere 860 pages. This, apparently, makes the two formats incompatible, “…many experts argue that translation between the two is too incomplete to allow true interoperability – a concept that Microsoft has recently publicly embraced,” Reuters says.

Who can we blame for the adopting of OOXML? Well, the United States, Britain, Germany and Japan, according to the OpenDoc Society, to name a few. I’m just glad that I can say that opponents not only included China and India but also New Zealand.

Internet addiction = mental illness

A psychologist has come out and said that having an addiction to the Internet, and technology in general, is the equivalent to having a mental illness.

You may have this illness if you cannot bear to be away from a computer, always wanting the newest and latest equipment, wanting to spend more time on your computer, and experiencing the negative repercussions of their addiction.

And it’s not just the Internet, it’s any form of instant communication such as text messaging with a mobile phone.

I’ve attached my Google Web History statistics for the month of February, 2008, so you can make up your mind whether or not I am addicted to the Internet using its colour coding for the number of webpages visited (total Google searches is not just for February). I can also tell you that since the start of March I have sent 314 text messages – not a lot compared to some of my friends.

Flickr to do video too

I use Flickr quite a bit to post what I perceive as some of my best photographs to the site, so it is with bewilderment that I hear that Flickr is to launch a beta version of a video sharing service next month.

Yahoo! owns Flickr and I can understand that they would like to take away some of the market share Google currently experiences with its video-sharing service, YouTube.

Frankly I would like Flickr to remain a pure photography site, adding video just ruins that experience, doesn’t it?  I have various websites I use before going elsewhere: YouTube for videos, Flickr for photographs, Smaps for mapping in New Zealand, The New Zealand Herald for news, etc, etc.

Change comes when a service you use can no longer fulfill a need and the other website can and then some. I’m not about to change anytime soon.

Hulu launches officially

I blogged earlier about how I like Hulu and how I am able to use it, well tomorrow, New Zealand-time, is the official launch of the online television show hub. Warner Bros., Lionsgate, NBA and NHL have jumped on board to offer more content.

And not only is Hulu offering full-length TV shows with little advertisements, but is also offering full-length movies such as Knight Rider.

The launch doesn’t mean it is available elsewhere though, it is still currently limited to U.S. users.

The Pirate Bay to be The Criminal Bay?

Popular file-sharing site, The Pirate Bay, is facing court action in its host country, Sweden.  The four men who run the site face charges of conspiracy to break Swedish copyright law.

BBC has the article in full.

I done broke the Wikipedia

Well, in an exclusive Wikinews report, it looks like Wikipedia user Scientizzle has “done broke the Wikipedia”.

A couple of Wikipedia users added virus code to a couple of Wikipedia pages to make anti-virus think there was a potential security risk, when in fact everything was fine.

So Scientizzle, an admin, decided to go through and delete the revision history. The only bad thing was one of the affected pages was the sandbox. This basically crashed the server and locked the database and prevented any editing of the encyclopaedia for around half an hour.

Wikinews has the frankly amusing article in its entire exclusive state online.

10 gigabit Internet please?

Australia and the United States were connected together at a whopping 1 gigbit per second Internet speed. The University of Melbourne, Australia and the University of California San Deigo, America were able to communicate together in real time, as if they were standing together in the same room.

The speed they were able to attain was around 250 times greater than the average broadband speed in Melbourne.

If this technology is actually available, then why aren’t Governments queuing to deliver this to every household in their country? Sure, it will cost a lot, but super fast Internet can increase a country’s economy. Companies will be able to operate straight out of, say New Zealand, and trade with other countries like America. BRING IT ON!

The greatest New Zealander of all has died

I take a break from my regular topic of stories to inform the world that the greatest New Zealander of all time has died aged 88.

Sir Edmund Hillary is mostly remembered for his amazing feat along with Sherpa Tenzing Norgay of being the first people in the world to be atop the tallest peak in the world, Mount Everest.

Not only did he do this, but his other work is what he should be remembered for. He often visited Nepal to help build schools, hospitals, and plenty, plenty more. He was even named as an honorary citizen of Nepal in 2003 for the amount of humanitarian work he did for the people.

Sir Hillary will surely be missed and mourned by many New Zealanders, young or old.

Rest in peace Ed.

File sharing could be legal in Canada

A plan introduced to end the illegal use of file sharing programs in Canada by the Songwriters Association of Canada has been welcomed by some, shot down by others. The plan will set an annual fee of around C$60 for unlimited and legal access to file sharing portals.

The C$5 monthly fee would be automatically added to the bill of all Canadian Internet users.

Basically you are getting all the songs you want for a very small fee, an idea I think is great. Avril Lavigne, among other artists, agrees.

However, the idea has been slammed by Internet service providers (ISP) because they do not want to be the ones who have to harvest a “tax”.

Wikipedia to fail in 2008?

New Scientist has come out and listed the five technology companies that are going to fail this year (‘08). Number two has been listed as Wikipedia.

Wikipedia was listed as number two because of a ‘fight between Google and Wikimedia’.

Quote:

Wikipedia. The gloves are off in a pointless battle between two of the most successful internet organisations of the last decade: Wikimedia, the parent organisation behind Wikipedia and Google. Last year, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales announced that the organisation was starting work on an open source search engine to which anyone could contribute. The goals, he said, were to make the search algorithm transparent (a clear dig at Google’s notorious secrecy) and to make the results more relevant.

Google responded in December by announcing of Google Knol, [see my Google Knol post here] a barely disguised rip-off of Wikipedia, in which knowledgeable people are encouraged to write articles about their areas of expertise.

Neither organisation really needs to take on the other, so it’s hard to fathom what this is all about. The outcome is easier to call, however.

When it comes to launching online endeavours, we all know that Google gives good web and has numerous successful progeny to prove it. Wikimedia, on other hand, is a one-hit wonder. Its other websites such as Wikinews and Wikibooks are poor cousins to Wikipedia.

So there’s only going to be one winner in this contest, and it ain’t Wikipedia.

See the blog post at New Scientist for the other companies that are supposedly set to fail, which ironically includes Google despite the above reasoning for Wikipedia.