Category Archives: Second Life

Doubts & Hopes

Posted on by
Reply

This post is a follow-up of yesterday’s piece, Predictions & Resolutions. Today I will list many things that do not relate to I.T. , some others that do. But in general, I’ll share what I’m mostly uncertain with for the year 2009.Doubts

  •  Israël has the right to exist, live in peace. Palestinians do as well. That’s why a terrorist movement like the Hamas has no right to send missiles on Israeli cities. But Israel’s counter-attack will be ineffective against the Hamas, I’m afraid. The reason for this is the very structure of the Hamas. It’s a distributed group, and so is Al-Quaeda and in general, terrorist movements. You cannot fight against those structures with the usual means of warfare. Another thing I was at pain understanding for years was the seemingly anti-Israeli bias public opinions have all around the world. Some are outrightly manipulated for religious reasons. But some are not, and have nothing in the way of antisemitic views. In short the whole perception is the one of a reverse David vs. Goliath fight. There are several reasons for this. But something need to be done to come back to a more balanced view and more balanced ambitions from both sides. I hope, in this doubt section, that the Obama presidency could help.
  • I don’t think governments in general are taking the whole measure of the crisis (perhaps except the upcoming Obama administration). This is why 2009 will be painful. In several European countries, the political and generational gap, not to speak of the social inequalities that have been growing in a way this continent was accustomed to will sparkle riots, and lots of instability. It has already started in Greece.
  • European governments all buy into the too worn-off free market ideology. As we have come to understand, this is an ideology (and thus is a factor of danger) that has proven to be a failure, in the same way communism was a failure, allowing some happy few to benefit the system and generating lots of noise. Now don’t get me wrong: free market is a beautiful idea, (perhaps, some might argue, just like communism in the book was) but it is merely just this, an idea, and an economist’s traditional cornucopia of sorts. Now these governments seem to be too busy with exerting pressure on their own citizens by trying to control medias and the Internet than actually addressing people’s problems. They might actually be powerless in front of such a crisis, but they’re also unwilling to bring change to our societies, change that would make their own mental horizon change itself. The power of habits and customs….
  • On a different level, OOXML will continue to be pushed by Microsoft and marketed to everyone, governments included. That’s a trap many will fall into, but as you know there’s a way out: ODF. Meanwhile, the deception OOXML is should be fully advertised so that all can be warned.
  • Will Apple ever include ODF support in iWork? iWork 09 doesn’t seem to support it, but I might be wrong. TextEdit is not enough. 
  • Software Patents will be pushed again and again in Europe. Contrary to my friend Trond Arne Undheim, I don’t think that ex-ante disclosure is that of a good thing: it is merely a much welcome, yet minimal, hygienic measure to an insane situation affecting the I.T. market and innovation.

Hopes

  • OpenOffice.org will go out of traditional desktop application.  Perhaps not in 2009, but very likely later. I’ll go back on this in another future post, but you can check this out…
  • I have been a strong critic of Novell’s agreement of Microsoft, but there is one thing I have never denied and that would be how great OpenSuse is for a distribution. Now what’s both interesting and unfortunate with OpenSuse is that the Novell’s agreement with Microsoft does explicitely not apply to OpenSuse, and that the distribution really opened itself, as a project and as a platform on which to build on. So my legal question here is to check how much legally chaotic OpenSuse got. By welcoming everyone to contribute code, it might have created a situation where neither Novell, nor Microsoft could  exert any kind of pressure or FUD, as their own intellectual property (whatever that means) is now strongly diluted in packaged mess. 
  • I love SecondLife, I really do. But sim crossing and avatar limits? Come on, get real, Linden Labs. Despite those shortcomings, I’m spending more and more times there. 
  • ODF has already been adopted by 16 governments. My hope is to see that number double by the end of 2009.
  • All in all, I expect 2009 to be a year of crisis, but to be a year of positive change in the world. Or perhaps it will be a year of full-blown crisis. But even then, let’s all remember that the hour before dawn is the darkest time of the night…

Happy new year to everyone!

Predictions & Resolutions

Posted on by
2

The time of the year for predictions started in December, the time of resolutions started a few days ago. Let’s tie those together in this post…Predictions:

  •  It will be a great year for Free & Open Source Software. I know it’s been written several times that because of dwindling I.T. budgets resulting from the global crisis money would be less spent on expensive licensing, but I do buy into this theory. However it’s certainly not the only explanation: Free Software gets better, Microsoft is losing its grip on the desktop (yet tries hard to come back with Silverlight and other initiatives), and applications go in the cloud.
  • Talking about the cloud, we will see this trend going. But there’s a paradox in this pattern: do not believe that people only need a browser and do not pay attention to their actual desktop. They do, and they want a nice user experience, bells and whistles that do not actually annoy them, and fewer glitches.
  • It’s been a reality in 2008, and will get even more obvious by 2009: consumers dictate what they want as an user experience, corporate (office) computing follows, just the opposite as what was going on in the eighties. But perhaps a better way of putting it is that those lines defined by mom and pop marketing concepts are blurring. 
  • Office computing, the good old days: Microsoft seems to have some trouble implementing ODF. But they claim to have no difficulty with OOXML. That alone should remind all of us of an all too well known pattern: the format wars. It’s made a come-back ever since 2007, it will get sneaker, although less flamboyant in 2009.
  • Microsoft is changing. Yes you read that well, on this blog. I sincerely think that there is an old guard and a new guard in Microsoft. I also think that this company is becoming more and more like any other big business: people will be fired by the thousands, and that does not make me happy. But while some of the teams there want to play a normal game, most of the people who call the shots don’t want to do that; hence friction will be in the air. I don’t really expect to see a visible schism inside Microsoft happening before 2011-2012, but it will be interesting to watch what will be going on in 2009 on this issue.

Resolutions

  • This year, I promess: I will make money. I swear. Tons of money. Yeah, right. 
  •  I’ll get greener. I don’t have a car, happen to eat organic food very frequently, recycle my trash, but there are many other ways I can contribute to save the planet.
  • That’s it, you caught me right there: I will come back on GNU/Linux. What this means is that in my craziest deams, I will have a real workstation with Linux, and a nice MacBook(Pro?) running OS X. Aside DRM on iTunes which seems to stand on an EOL support ever since yesterday, Macs are pretty cool, both on hardware and software. But I miss Linux. I really do.
  • Using Linux, I will mostly use KDE 4. I tried it, configured it on several desktops and although it’s not fully completed, it rocks and it’s really impressive. You should give it a try.
  • Last but not least? Think hard about how not to annoy my readers.

ISO approves the rejection of the vote on the relevance validity of some appeals…

Posted on by
Reply

So I am just back from vacation during which I unfortunately learnt about the war between Georgia and Russia. That is a complete madness and should be settled down as fast as possible otherwise I fear we will have a regional contagion. And remember, the war in Tchechenia is not over either. Caucasus is getting hot again, and that’s not because of global warming. Let’s hope for better things ahead.

Meanwhile, and while I was on vacation as well, the ISO did not lose its time fiddling with gentrifying concepts such a transparence and fairness. Nay, the ISO did what it had to do when they are harassed by hordes of undeads, communists, alien slime and malignant hogs of all kinds: They shut off the doors, closed the gates… and obeyed the Mighty. Remember, die Partei hat immer Recht. And that’s why the ISO refused to validate the appeals of four national standards organisations any further. Notice that the ISO did not actually answer to these appeals. It made up a list of existing P-countries (but not all of them were listed and besides, results would have been more clearcut with the P- “shooting stars”countries, the ones who got their P status and withdrew from it just after the OOXML ballot) asked them to vote on the relevance of the appeals, thereby refusing to decide on the appeals themselves and -watch this- for fear that these appeals might actually get through, they came up with that rule of the two-thirds. The rule states that you need two thirds of the concerned countries that actually vote yes to two oddly-phrased questions (more details here) . I don’t know where this rule comes from, and there is not even any rationale in favour of such a rule. But who are we to question the holy sanctions of the ISO?

Citizens, companies of various sizes, NGOs, and when put together, a lot of people. But I guess that does not matter at this stage. It is after all not that bad when you think about the war in Caucasus. What could be worse, of course, is that ISO could actually be in charge of solving the crisis between Russia and Georgia. Imagine how they would present their activity:

“ The ISO has successfully decided in favour of the transfer of the sovereignty of Siberia to Microsoft while allowing not two, but ten regions of Georgia to gain their full independence, regardless of their intent to become independent. Religious matters will be transferred to the Vatican except for the enclave of Zugdidi in Western Georgia and Iekaterineburg in Russia who will officially adopt the Church of Satan as their sole religion. After having conferred with Australia and the Imaginary Sultanate of Yareembada on Second Life, ISO declares that no conflict of interest thereby exists, has existed or shall exist between the Russian Federation, Georgia, Australia and any existing, past or future micronation on SecondLife in the matters pertaining to peace-keeping, fruit-groping, large-dog-petting, cookie-eating and computing.”

So what shall be done? Has OOXML finally won its way through the ISO? It obviously did buy its way through the ISO leadership, but there are still other ways to show the world how outrageous this process has become. Now OOXML is still left where it is: noone has seen it, or rather, many (including me) have reported to have seen it, but few, if no one, can actually say for sure where it is, as it simply has never been implemented. Conflicting reports exist about file formats called OOXML that do not seem to conform to the ISO/IEC 29500 spec. But the spec itself is rarely seen, and even more rarely witnessed as an implemented standard. Of course, it does not carry any obligation to be implemented. It’s just an ISO standard…