OpenStack 11/02/2013 (a.m.)

• XML Production Workflows? Start with the Web and XHTML

  I was looking for an answer to a problem Marbux had presented, and found this interesting article.  The issue was that of the upcoming conversion of the Note Case Pro (NCP) layout engine to the WebKit layout engine, and what to do about the NCP document format. My initial reaction was to encode the legacy NCP document format in XML, and run an XSLT to a universal pivot format like TEI-XML.  From there, the TEI-XML community would provide all the XSLT transformation routines for conversion to ODF, OOXML, XHTML, ePUB and HTML/CSS. Researching the problems one might encounter with this approach, I found this article.  Fascinating stuff. My take away is that TEI-XML would not be as effective a "universal pivot point" as XHTML.  Or perhaps, if NCP really wants to get aggressive; IDML - InDesign Markup Language. As an after thought, i was thinking that an alternative title to this article might have been, "Working with Web as the Center of Everything".

  Tags: OpenWeb, XML, XHTML-CSS, HTML5-CSS3-JavaScript, IDML

  • - By Gary Edwards

  • Challenges: Some Ugly Truths

    The challenges of building—and living with—an XML workflow are clear enough. The return on investment is a long-term proposition.

    Regardless of the benefits XML may provide, the starting reality is that it represents a very different way of doing things than the one we are familiar with. The Word Processing and Desktop Publishing paradigm, based on the promise of onscreen, WYSIWYG layout, is so dominant as to be practically inescapable. It has proven really hard to get from here to there, no matter how attractive XML might be on paper.

    A considerable amount of organizational effort and labour must be expended up front in order to realize the benefits. This is why XML is often referred to as an “investment”: you sink a bunch of time and money up front, and realize the benefits—greater flexibility, multiple output options, searching and indexing, and general futureproofing—later, over the long haul. It is not a short-term return proposition.

    And, of course, the returns you are able to realize from your XML investment are commensurate with what you put in up front: fine-grained, semantically rich tagging is going to give you more potential for searchability and recombination than a looser, more general-purpose approach, but it sure costs more. For instance, the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is the grand example of pouring enormous amounts of energy into the up-front tagging, with a very open-ended set of possibilities down the line. TEI helpfully defines a level to which most of us do not have to aspire.[5]

    But understanding this on a theoretical level is only part of the challenge. There are many practical issues that must be addressed. Software and labour are two of the most critical. How do you get the content into XML in the first place? Unfortunately, despite two decades of people doing SGML and XML, this remains an ugly question.

  • Practical Challenges

    In 2009, there is still no truly likeable—let alone standard—editing and authoring software for XML. For many (myself included), the high-water mark here was Adobe’s FrameMaker, substantially developed by the late 1990s. With no substantial market for it, it is relegated today mostly to the tech writing industry, unavailable for the Mac, and just far enough afield from the kinds of tools we use today that its adoption represents a significant hurdle. And FrameMaker was the best of the breed; most of the other software in decent circulation are programmers’ tools—the sort of things that, as Michael Tamblyn pointed out, encourage editors to drink at their desks.

    The labour question represents a stumbling block as well. The skill-sets and mind-sets that effective XML editors need have limited overlap with those needed by literary and more traditional production editors. The need to think of documents as machine-readable databases is not something that comes naturally to folks steeped in literary culture. In combination with the sheer time and effort that rich tagging requires, many publishers simply outsource the tagging to India, drawing a division of labour that spans oceans, to put it mildly.

    Once you have XML content, then what do you do with it? How do you produce books from it? Presumably, you need to be able to produce print output as well as digital formats. But while the latter are new enough to be generally XML-friendly (e-book formats being largely XML based, for instance), there aren’t any straightforward, standard ways of moving XML content into the kind of print production environments we are used to seeing. This isn’t to say that there aren’t ways of getting print—even very high-quality print—output from XML, just that most of them involve replacing your prepress staff with Java programmers.

  • Why does this have to be so hard?

    It’s not that XML is new, or immature, or untested. Remember that the basics have been around, and in production, since the early 1980s at least. But we have to take account of a substantial and long-running cultural disconnect between traditional editorial and production processes (the ones most of us know intimately) and the ways computing people have approached things.

    Interestingly, this cultural divide looked rather different in the 1970s, when publishers were looking at how to move to digital typesetting. Back then, printers and software developers could speak the same language. But that was before the ascendancy of the Desktop Publishing paradigm, which computerized the publishing industry while at the same time isolating it culturally. Those of us who learned how to do things the Quark way or the Adobe way had little in common with people who programmed databases or document-management systems. Desktop publishing technology isolated us in a smooth, self-contained universe of toolbars, grid lines, and laser proofs.

    So, now that the reasons to get with this program, XML, loom large, how can we bridge this long-standing divide?

  • Using the Web as a Production Platform

    The answer, I think, is right in front of you. The bridge is the Web, a technology and platform that is fundamentally based on XML, and which many publishers are by now comfortably familiar with. Perhaps not entirely comfortably, but at least most publishers are already working with the Web; they already either know or have on staff people who understand it and can work with it.

    The foundation of our argument is this: rather than looking at jumping to XML in its full, industrial complexity, which seems to be what the O'Reilly-backed StartWithXML initiative[6] is suggesting, publishers instead leverage existing tools and technologies—starting with the Web—as a means of getting XML workflows in place. This means making small investments and working with known tools rather than spending tens of thousands of dollars on XML software and rarefied consultants. It means re-thinking how the existing pieces of the production toolchain fit together; re-thinking the existing roles of software components already in use. It means, fundamentally, taking the Web seriously as a content platform, rather than thinking of it as something you need to get content out to, somehow. If nothing else, the Web represents an opportunity to think about editorial and production from outside the shrink-wrapped Desktop Publishing paradigm.

  • Is the Web made of Real XML?

    At this point some predictable objections can be heard: wait a moment, the Web isn’t really made out of XML; the HTML that makes up most of the Web is at best the bastard child of SGML, and it is far too flaky/unstructured/underpowered to be taken seriously.

    We counter by arguing that although HTML on the Web exists in a staggering array of different incarnations, and that the majority of it is indeed an unstructured mess, this does not undermine the general principle that basic, ubiquitous Web technologies can make a solid platform for content management, editorial process, and production workflow.

  • With the advent of a published XML standard in the late 1990s came the W3C’s adoption of XHTML: the realization of the Web’s native content markup as a proper XML document type. Today, its acceptance is almost ubiquitous, even while the majority of actual content out there may not be strictly conforming. The more important point is that most contemporary Web software, from browsers to authoring tools to content management systems (from blogs to enterprise systems), are capable of working with clean, valid XHTML. Or, to put the argument the other way around, clean, valid XHTML content plays absolutely seamlessly with everything else on the Web.[7]
  • The objection which follows, then, will be that even if we grant that XHTML is a real XML document type, that it is underpowered for “serious” content because it is almost entirely presentation (formatting) oriented; it lacks any semantic depth. In XHTML, a paragraph is a paragraph is a paragraph, as opposed to a section or an epigraph or a summary.
  • It is worth pausing for a moment to consider the role of XHTML in the ePub standard for ebook content. An ePub file is, anatomically, a simply disguised zip archive. Inside the zip archive are a few standard component parts: there are specialized files that declare metadata about the book, and about the format of the book. And then there is the book’s content, represented in XHTML. An ePub book is a Web page in a wrapper.
  • So there is an argument for recalling the 80:20 rule here. If XHTML can provide 80% of the value with just 20% of the investment, then what exactly is the business case for spending the other 80% to achieve that last 20% of value? We suspect the ratio is actually quite a bit steeper than 80:20 for most publishers.
  • Furthermore, just to get technical for a moment, XHTML is extensible in a fairly straightforward way, through the common “class” attribute on each element. Web developers have long leveraged this kind of extensibility in the elaboration of “microformats” for semantic-web applications.[10] There is no reason why publishers shouldn’t think to use XHTML’s simple extensibility in a similar way for their own ends.
  • XHTML, on the other hand, is supported by a vast array of quotidian software, starting with the ubiquitous Web browser. For this very reason, XHTML is in fact employed as a component part of several more specialized document types (ONIX and ePub among them).
  • Why re-invent a general-purpose prose representation when XHTML already does the job?
  • n contrast, more “serious” XML document types like DocBook[8] or DITA-derived schemas[9] are capable of making semantic distinctions about content chunks at a fine level of granularity and with a high degree of specificity.

  • To sum up the general argument: the Web as it already exists presents incredible value to publishers, as a platform for doing XML content management with existing (and often free) tools, and without having to go blindly into the unknown. At this point, we can offer a few design guidelines:

    • prefer existing and/or ubiquitous tools over specialized ones wherever possible;
    • prefer free software over proprietary systems where possible;
    • prefer simple tools controlled and coordinated by human beings over fully automated (and therefore complex) systems;
    • play to our strengths: use Web software for storing and managing content, use layout software for layout, and keep editors and production people in charge of their own domains.
  • Putting the Pieces Together: A Prototype
  • At the SFU Master of Publishing Program, we have been chipping away at this general line of thinking for a few years. Over that time, Web content management systems have been getting more and more sophisticated, all the while getting more streamlined and easier to use. (NB: if you have a blog, you have a Web content management system.) The Web is beginning to be recognized as a writing and editing environment used by millions of people. And the ways in which content is represented, stored, and exchanged online have become increasingly robust and standardized.
  • The missing piece of the puzzle has been print production: how can we move content from its malleable, fluid form on line into the kind of high-quality print production environments we’ve come to expect after two decades of Desktop Publishing?
  • Anyone who has tried to print Web content knows that the existing methods leave much to be desired (hyphenation and justification, for starters). In the absence of decent tools for this, most publishers quite naturally think of producing the print content first, and then think about how to get material onto the Web for various purposes. So we tend to export from Word, or from Adobe, as something of an afterthought.
  • While this sort of works, it isn’t elegant, and it completely ignores the considerable advantages of Web-based content management.
  • Content managed online is stored in one central location, accessible simultaneously to everyone in your firm, available anywhere you have an Internet connection, and usually exists in a much more fluid format than Word files. If only we could manage the editorial flow online, and then go to print formats at the end, instead of the other way around. At SFU, we made several attempts to make this work by way of the supposed “XML import” capabilities of various Desktop Publishing tools, without much success.[12]
  • In the winter of 2009, Adobe solved this part of the problem for us with the introduction of its Creative Suite 4. What CS4 offers is the option of a complete XML representation of an InDesign document: what Adobe calls IDML (InDesign Markup Language).
  • The IDML file format is—like ePub—a simply disguised zip archive that, when unpacked, reveals a cluster of XML files that represent all the different facets of an InDesign document: layout spreads, master pages, defined styles, colours, and of course, the content.
  • IDML is a well thought-out XML standard that achieves two very different goals simultaneously: it preserves all of the information that InDesign needs to do what it does; and it is broken up in a way that makes it possible for mere mortals (or at least our Master of Publishing students) to work with it.
  • We would take clean XHTML content, transform it to IDML-marked content, and merge that with nicely designed templates in InDesign.
  • What this represented to us in concrete terms was the ability to take Web-based content and move it into InDesign in a straightforward way, thus bridging Web and print production environments using existing tools and skillsets, with a little added help from free software.
  • The result is an almost push-button publication workflow, which results in a nice, familiar InDesign document that fits straight into the way publishers actually do production.

  • Tracing the steps

    To begin with, we worked backwards, moving the book content back to clean XHTML.

  • The simplest method for this conversion—and if you want to create Web content, this is an excellent route—was to use Adobe’s “Export to Digital Editions” option, which creates an ePub file.
  • Recall that ePub is just XHTML in a wrapper, so within the ePub file was a relatively clean XHTML document. It was somewhat cleaner (that is, the XHTML tagging was simpler and less cluttered) than InDesign’s other Web-oriented exports, possibly because Digital Editions is a well understood target, compared with somebody’s website.
  • In order to achieve our target of clean XHTML, we needed to do some editing; the XHTML produced by InDesign’s “Digital Editions” export was presentation-oriented. For instance, bulleted list items were tagged as paragraphs, with a class attribute identifying them as list items. Using the search-and-replace function, we converted such structures to proper XHTML list and list-item elements. Our guiding principle was to make the XHTML as straightforward as possible, not dependent on any particular software to interpret it.
  • We broke the book’s content into individual chapter files; each chapter could then carry its own basic metadata, and the pages conveniently fit our Web content management system (which is actually just a wiki). We assembled a dynamically generated table of contents for the 12 chapters, and created a cover page. Essentially, the book was entirely Web-based at this point.
  • When the book chapters are viewed online, they are formatted via a CSS2 stylesheet that defines a main column for content as well as dedicating screen real estate for navigational elements. We then created a second template to render the content for exporting; this was essentially a bare-bones version of the book with no navigation and minimal styling. Pages (or even the entire book) can be exported (via the “Save As...” function in a Web browser) for use in either print production or ebook conversion. At this point, we required no skills beyond those of any decent Web designer.

  • Integrating with CS4 for Print

    Adobe’s IDML language defines elements specific to InDesign; there is nothing in the language that looks remotely like XHTML. So a mechanical transformation step is needed to convert the XHTML content into something InDesign can use. This is not as hard as it might seem.

  • Both XHTML and IDML are composed of straightforward, well-documented structures, and so transformation from one to the other is, as they say, “trivial.” We chose to use XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transforms) to do the work. XSLT is part of the overall XML specification, and thus is very well supported in a wide variety of tools. Our prototype used a scripting engine called xsltproc, a nearly ubiquitous piece of software that we found already installed as part of Mac OS X (contemporary Linux distributions also have this as a standard tool), though any XSLT processor would work.
  • In other words, we don’t need to buy InCopy, because we just replaced it with the Web. Our wiki is now plugged directly into our InDesign layout. It even automatically updates the InDesign document when the content changes. Credit is due at this point to Adobe: this integration is possible because of the open file format in the Creative Suite 4.
  • We wrote an XSLT transformation script[18] that converted the XHTML content from the Web into an InCopy ICML file. The script itself is less than 500 lines long, and was written and debugged over a period of about a week by amateurs (again, the people named at the start of this article). The script runs in a couple of seconds, and the resulting .icml file can then be “placed” directly into an InDesign template. The ICML file references an InDesign stylesheet, so the template file can be set up with a house-styled layout, master pages, and stylesheet definitions for paragraphs and character ranges.
  • The result is very simple and easy to use. Our demonstration requires that a production editor run the XSLT transformation script manually, but there is no reason why this couldn’t be built directly into the Web content management system so that exporting the content to print ran the transformation automatically. The resulting file would then be “placed” in InDesign and proofed.

  • It should be noted that the Book Publishing 1 proof-of-concept was artificially complex; we began with a book laid out in InDesign and ended up with a look-alike book laid out in InDesign. But next time—for instance, when we publish Book Publishing 2—we can begin the process with the content on the Web, and keep it there throughout the editorial process. The book’s content could potentially be written and edited entirely online, as Web content, and then automatically poured into an InDesign template at proof time. “Just in time,” as they say.

    This represents an entirely new way of thinking of book production. With a Web-first orientation, it makes little sense to think of the book as “in print” or “out of print”—the book is simply available, in the first place online; in the second place in derivative digital formats; and third, but really not much more difficult, in print-ready format, via the usual InDesign CS print production system publishers are already familiar with.

  • Creating Ebook Files

    Creating electronic versions from XHTML source is vastly simpler than trying to generate these out of the existing print process. The ePub version is extremely easy to generate; so is online marketing copy or excerpts for the Web, since the content begins life Web-native.

  • Since an ePub file is essentially XHTML content in a special wrapper, all that is required is that we properly “wrap” our XHTML content. Ideally, the content in an ePub file is broken into chapters (as ours was) and a table of contents file is generated in order to allow easy navigation within an ebook reader. We used Julian Smart’s free tool eCub[19] to simply and automatically generate the ePub wrapper and the table of contents. The only custom development we did was to create a CSS stylesheet for the ebook so that headings and paragraph indents looked the way we wanted. Starting with XHTML content, creating ePub is almost too easy.
  • today, we are able to put the process together using nothing but standard, relatively ubiquitous Web tools: the Web itself as an editing and content management environment, standard Web scripting tools for the conversion process, and the well-documented IDML file format to integrate the layout tool.
  • Our project demonstrates that Web technologies are indeed good enough to use in an XML-oriented workflow; more specialized and expensive options are not necessarily required. For massive-scale enterprise publishing, this approach may not offer enough flexibility, and the challenge of adding and extracting extra semantic richness may prove more trouble than it's worth.
  • But for smaller firms who are looking at the straightforward benefits of XML-based processes—single source publishing, online content and workflow management, open and accessible archive formats, greater online discoverability—here is a way forward.
  • Rather than a public-facing website, our system relies on the Web as a content management platform—of course a public face could easily be added.
  • The final piece of our puzzle, the ability to integrate print production, was made possible by Adobe's release of InDesign with an open XML file format. Since the Web's XHTML is also XML, is can be easily and confidently transformed to the InDesign format.
  • Such a workflow—beginning with the Web and exporting to print—is surely more in line with the way we will do business in the 21st century, where the Web is the default platform for reaching audiences, developing content, and putting the pieces together. It is time, we suggest, for publishers to re-orient their operations and start with the Web.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

OpenStack 10/24/2013 (p.m.)

• Researchers tout electricity storage technology that could recharge devices in minutes

  Tags: mobile devices, power-source, batteries, capacitors, supercapacitors

  • Vanderbilt University researchers say they have come up with a way to store electricity on a silicon-based supercapacitor that would let mobile phones recharge in seconds and let them continue to operate for weeks without recharging.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

OpenStack 10/24/2013 (a.m.)

• Google's uProxy could help fight Internet censorship

  "At its Ideas Summit in New York, Google has announced that it is working on developing a browser extension that will act as an easy-to-use way to bypass country-specific Internet censorship and make connections safer and more private. Safer connections The tool, which was developed by the University of Washington and seeded by Google, is at its core a peer-to-peer personalized virtual private network (VPN) that redirects Internet traffic coming from an initial, less secure connection through a second, trusted connection, and then encrypts the pathway between the two terminals. Whenever you access the Internet, the connection is routed through a number of terminals. At each step of the way the connection may be blocked, surveilled, or even tampered with (especially if the data is not encrypted). On the whole, the safety and privacy of your data is only as good as the weakest link in the chain. Google's solution with uProxy was to develop a tool that makes it much easier to make an unsafe connection more secure, with the help of a trusted friend. The software, which will be available as a Chrome and Firefox extension to begin with, can use existing social networks like Facebook or Google Hangouts to help find users who already have uProxy installed on their system. If two users agree to use the service in tandem, the software can begin to make data connections safer. How it works Let's assume that Alice, who lives in a country with an Internet censorship problem such as China or Iran, contacts Bob, who has much safer, or uncensored, or unmonitored access to the Internet. Bob agrees to act as a proxy for Alice, and as long as his browser is open, Alice's outgoing web traffic will now be routed through Bob's connection, and so she'll now be able to access websites that she wouldn't otherwise be able to reach on her own. The connection between Alice and Bob is also encrypted. To an external observer looking at Bob's connection, it would appear that he is simply surfing the net, while it is really Alice who's doing the browsing. Likewise, an observer looking at Alice's connection would only see a stream of encrypted data being sent from and to Bob, but would not be able to understand it, or determine whether it's "allowed" web traffic or not. One more possible use for the software could be to proxy your own web traffic whenever you are traveling and worried about the safety of your connection (when you're connecting to an open Wi-Fi hotspot or public network, for example). In cases like these, you can use uProxy to route your web traffic back to your home computer and access the Web as if you were in your own home. What uProxy is (and isn't) Internet proxies already provide a similar service, but the advantage with uProxy is that it's a true P2P service, so there is no centralized server that governments can block. The data packets in the encrypted connection between Alice and Bob aren't marked in any way, and so they can't be easily flagged by a malicious user (or government). Google cautions that users should only make use of uProxy with those they trust. If you provide someone access to your safer connection, you have to trust that they will be using the connection legally: since the traffic is routed through you, you will be responsible for their online activity. Likewise, if you're using the service to get access from someone else, you have to trust that their connection is secure. If it isn't, you may be thinking that you're not being monitored, while really you are. In fact, if your friend's connection turns out to be less safe than your own, you'll just be making things worse for yourself. The service doesn't anonymize traffic like Tor, and it isn't a file sharing tool as it only proxies traffic from web browsers. What's next? Google says it is developing uProxy for the desktop versions of Chrome and Firefox to start with, and that the tool may be expanded to other browsers and mobile platforms in the future. The software has been launched as a private beta only, and the code hasn't been made available to the public yet because Google wants to make sure that the software is indeed tamper-proof. For that, it is allowing technically-savvy beta testers to take a look at the code to iron out any bugs. Once the software reaches the desired stability, it will be audited by Internet freedom organizations such as OpenITP, and then made freely available under an open source license. The video below is a short introduction to the software."

  Tags: uProxy, P2P, Security, Google

  • - By Gary Edwards

Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

OpenStack 10/20/2013 (a.m.)

• Office Productivity Software Is No Closer To Becoming A Commodity | Forrester Blogs

  "We (Forrester) just published a report on the state of adoption of Office 2013 And Productivity Suite Alternatives based on a survey of 155 Forrester clients with responsibility for those investments. The sample does not fully represent the market, but lets us draw comparisons to the results of our previous survey in 2011. Some key takeaways from the data:   One in five firms uses email in the cloud. Another quarter plans to move at some point. More are using Office 365 (14%) than Google Apps (9%).  Just 22% of respondents are on Office 2013. Another 36% have plans to be on it. Office 2013's uptake will be slower than Office 2010 because fewer firms plan to combine the rollout of Office 2013 with Windows 8 as they combined Office 2010 with Windows 7. Alternatives to Microsoft Office show little traction. In 2011, 13% of respondents supported open source alternatives to Office. This year the number is just 5%. Google Docs has slightly higher adoption and is in use at 13% of companies. "

  Tags: Office-Productivity, Cloud-Computing, Cloud-Productivity-Platform, Cloud-Compound-Document, HTML5

  • - By Gary Edwards
  • We just published a report on the state of adoption of Office 2013 And Productivity Suite Alternatives based on a survey of 155 Forrester clients with responsibility for those investments. The sample does not fully represent the market, but lets us draw comparisons to the results of our previous survey in 2011. Some key takeaways from the data:
     
    • One in five firms uses email in the cloud. Another quarter plans to move at some point. More are using Office 365 (14%) than Google Apps (9%). 
    • Just 22% of respondents are on Office 2013. Another 36% have plans to be on it. Office 2013's uptake will be slower than Office 2010 because fewer firms plan to combine the rollout of Office 2013 with Windows 8 as they combined Office 2010 with Windows 7.
    • Alternatives to Microsoft Office show little traction. In 2011, 13% of respondents supported open source alternatives to Office. This year the number is just 5%. Google Docs has slightly higher adoption and is in use at 13% of companies. 
  • Microsoft continues to have a stranglehold on office productivity in the enterprise: Just 6% of companies in our survey give all or some employees an alternative instead of the installed version of Microsoft Office. Most surprising of all, multi-platform support is NOT a priority. Apps on iOS and Android devices were important to 16% of respondents, and support for non-Windows PCs was important to only 11%. For now, most technology decision-makers seem satisfied with leaving employees to self-provision office productivity apps on their smartphones and tablets if they really want them. 
  • Do you think we're getting closer to replacing Microsoft Office in the workplace?

• Microsoft Office fends off open source OpenOffice and LibreOffice but cloud tools gain ground | ZDNet

  Interesting stats coming out from the recent Forrester study on Office Productivity.  The study was conducted by Philipp Karcher, and it shows a fcoming collision of two interesting phenomenon that cannot continue to "coexist".  Something has to give. The two phenom are the continuing dominance and use of client/server desktop productivity application anchor, MSOffice, and, the continuing push of all business productivity application to highly mobile cloud-computing platforms.   It seems we are stuck in this truly odd dichotomy where the desktop MSOffice compound document model continues to dominate business productivity processes, yet those same users are spending ever more time mobile and in the cloud.  Something has got to give. And yes, I am very concerned about the fact that neither of the native XML document formats {used by MSOffice (OXML), OpenOffice and LibreOffice (ODF)} are designed for highly mobile cloud-computing.   It's been said before, the Web is the future of computing.  And HTML5 is the language of the Web.  HTML is also the most prolific compound-document format ever.  One of the key problems for cloud-computing is the lack of HTML5 ready Office Productivity Suites that can also manage the complexities of integrating cloud-ready data streams. Sadly, when Office Productivity formats went down the rat hole of a 1995 client/server compound document model, the productivity suites went right with them.  Very sad.  But the gaping hole in cloud-computing is going to be filled.  One way or the other.

  Tags: Office-Productivity, Cloud-Computing, Cloud-Productivity-Platform, Cloud-Compound-Document, HTML5

  • - By Gary Edwards

Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

OpenStack 10/18/2013 (p.m.)

• Testosterone Pit - Home - The Other Reason Why IBM Throws A Billion At Linux (With NSA- Designed Backdoor)

  Tags: surveillance state, NSA, Linux, Linux-backdoor, Solaris, FreeBSD, Darwin

  • IBM announced today that it would throw another billion at Linux, the open-source operating system, to run its Power System servers.

    The first time it had thrown a billion at Linux was in 2001, when Linux was a crazy, untested, even ludicrous proposition for the corporate world. So the moolah back then didn’t go to Linux itself, which was free, but to related technologies across hardware, software, and service, including things like sales and advertising – and into IBM’s partnership with Red Hat which was developing its enterprise operating system, Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

    “It helped start a flurry of innovation that has never slowed,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation. IBM claims that the investment would “help clients capitalize on big data and cloud computing with modern systems built to handle the new wave of applications coming to the data center in the post-PC era.” Some of the moolah will be plowed into the Power Systems Linux Center in Montpellier, France, which opened today. IBM’s first Power Systems Linux Center opened in Beijing in May.

    IBM may be trying to make hay of the ongoing revelations that have shown that the NSA and other intelligence organizations in the US and elsewhere have roped in American tech companies of all stripes with huge contracts to perfect a seamless spy network. They even include physical aspects of surveillance, such as license plate scanners and cameras, which are everywhere [read.... Surveillance Society: If You Drive, You Get Tracked].

  • Then another boon for IBM. Experts at the German Federal Office for Security in Information Technology (BIS) determined that Windows 8 is dangerous for data security. It allows Microsoft to control the computer remotely through a “special surveillance chip,” the wonderfully named Trusted Platform Module (TPM), and a backdoor in the software – with keys likely accessible to the NSA and possibly other third parties, such as the Chinese. Risks: “Loss of control over the operating system and the hardware” [read.... LEAKED: German Government Warns Key Entities Not To Use Windows 8 – Links The NSA.

  • It would be an enormous competitive advantage for an IBM salesperson to walk into a government or corporate IT department and sell Big Data servers that don’t run on Windows, but on Linux. With the Windows 8 debacle now in public view, IBM salespeople don’t even have to mention it. In the hope of stemming the pernicious revenue decline their employer has been suffering from, they can politely and professionally hype the security benefits of IBM’s systems and mention in passing the comforting fact that some of it would be developed in the Power Systems Linux Centers in Montpellier and Beijing.

    Alas, Linux too is tarnished. The backdoors are there, though the code can be inspected, unlike Windows code. And then there is Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux), which was integrated into the Linux kernel in 2003. It provides a mechanism for supporting “access control” (a backdoor) and “security policies.” Who developed SELinux? Um, the NSA – which helpfully discloses some details on its own website (emphasis mine):

    The results of several previous research projects in this area have yielded a strong, flexible mandatory access control architecture called Flask. A reference implementation of this architecture was first integrated into a security-enhanced Linux® prototype system in order to demonstrate the value of flexible mandatory access controls and how such controls could be added to an operating system. The architecture has been subsequently mainstreamed into Linux and ported to several other systems, including the Solaris™ operating system, the FreeBSD® operating system, and the Darwin kernel, spawning a wide range of related work.

  • Among a slew of American companies who contributed to the NSA’s “mainstreaming” efforts: Red Hat.

    And IBM? Like just about all of our American tech heroes, it looks at the NSA and other agencies in the Intelligence Community as “the Customer” with deep pockets, ever increasing budgets, and a thirst for technology and data. Which brings us back to Windows 8 and TPM. A decade ago, a group was established to develop and promote Trusted Computing that governs how operating systems and the “special surveillance chip” TPM work together. And it too has been cooperating with the NSA. The founding members of this Trusted Computing Group, as it’s called facetiously: AMD, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Microsoft, and Wave Systems. Oh, I almost forgot ... and IBM.

    And so IBM might not escape, despite its protestations and slick sales presentations, the suspicion by foreign companies and governments alike that its Linux servers too have been compromised – like the cloud products of other American tech companies. And now, they’re going to pay a steep price for their cooperation with the NSA. Read...  NSA Pricked The “Cloud” Bubble For US Tech Companies

Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

OpenStack 10/14/2013 (a.m.)

• The US is Losing Control of the Internet…Oh, Really? | Global Research

  Tags: surveillance state, internet-freedom, U.S., NSA-blowback, ICANN, IETF, IAB, W3C, Internet-Society

  • All of the major internet organisations have pledged, at a summit in Uruguay, to free themselves of the influence of the US government.

    The directors of ICANN, the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Internet Architecture Board, the World Wide Web Consortium, the Internet Society and all five of the regional Internet address registries have vowed to break their associations with the US government.

    In a statement, the group called for “accelerating the globalization of ICANN and IANA functions, towards an environment in which all stakeholders, including all governments, participate on an equal footing”.

    That’s a distinct change from the current situation, where the US department of commerce has oversight of ICANN.

    In another part of the statement, the group “expressed strong concern over the undermining of the trust and confidence of Internet users globally due to recent revelations of pervasive monitoring and surveillance”.

    Meanwhile, it was announced that the next Internet Governance Summit would be held in Brazil, whose president has been extremely critical of the US over web surveillance.

    In a statement announcing the location of the summit, Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff said: “The United States and its allies must urgently end their spying activities once and for all.”

Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

OpenStack 10/08/2013 (a.m.)

• Review: Samsung Galaxy Gear smartwatch

  Good review of a break through product.

  Tags: Samsung-Galaxy-Smartwatch

  • - By Gary Edwards

Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

OpenStack 10/06/2013 (a.m.)

• Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Approve Work On DRM For HTML 5.1 - Slashdot

  From the Dept. of YouGottaBeKiddingMe. 

  Tags: HTML5, DRM, W3C

  • - By Paul Merrell
  • "Danny O'Brien from the EFF has a weblog post about how the Encrypted Media Extension (EME) proposal will continue to be part of HTML Work Group's bailiwick and may make it into a future HTML revision." From O'Brien's post: "A Web where you cannot cut and paste text; where your browser can't 'Save As...' an image; where the 'allowed' uses of saved files are monitored beyond the browser; where JavaScript is sealed away in opaque tombs; and maybe even where we can no longer effectively 'View Source' on some sites, is a very different Web from the one we have today. It's a Web where user agents—browsers—must navigate a nest of enforced duties every time they visit a page. It's a place where the next Tim Berners-Lee or Mozilla, if they were building a new browser from scratch, couldn't just look up the details of all the 'Web' technologies. They'd have to negotiate and sign compliance agreements with a raft of DRM providers just to be fully standards-compliant and interoperable."

Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

OpenStack 10/02/2013 (a.m.)

• http://www.sdtimes.com/lgp/images/wp/What's%20next%20for%20HTML5.pdf

  White paper from Intel discusses HTML5 and the future of computing. Intro: Computer programmers have been grappling with cross-platform issues since there was a second platform. Since then, the number of issues has rapidly increased. Today’s developers can target at least four operating systems (plus their fragments), running on devices with all shapes, sizes, resolutions, persistence levels, input methods, carrier networks, connection speeds and states, UI conventions, app stores, deployment and update mechanisms, and on and on. Many of the world’s developers once looked to Java* as the shining knight of cross-platform development. Indeed, the structured language of Sun* (and now Oracle) continues to solve many cross-platform issues. But it also introduces obstacles, not the least of which is a class structure that heavily burdens even the tiniest of program functions. Java’s heft grew still more burdensome as developers turned to the browser for app delivery; Java applets are black boxes that are as opaque to the browser as the language is closed to the developer (with all due deference to the JCP). Around the same time Java was fuelling the browser wars, a like-named interpreted language was beginning to emerge. First called Mocha, later LiveScript, and finally JavaScript*, the language proved more useful than Java in some ways because it could interact with the browser and control content display using HTML’s cascading style sheets (CSS). JavaScript support soon became standard in every browser. It is now the programming language of HTML5, which is currently being considered by the World Wide Web Consortium as the next markup-language standard. To better understand HTML5—why it is where it is and where it’s going— Intel® Software Adrenaline turned to Moh Haghighat, a senior principal engineer in the Developer Products Division of Intel’s Software and Services Group. Moh was the technical lead from Intel’s side on the first JavaScript just-in-time compiler (JIT) in Firefox* browser. He also led the development of the first parallel JavaScript JIT and parallel browser layout-engine prototypes, both in the context of Firefox. He is currently leading Intel’s HTML5 technical strategy.

  Tags: HTML5, Visual-Productivity, Visual-Documents, Cloud-Computing

  • - By Gary Edwards

Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

OpenStack 09/29/2013 (p.m.)

• EU Committee Votes to Make All Smartphone Vendors Utilize a Standard Charger - HotHardware

  This seems like a reasonable role for government. 

  Tags: smartphone, charger, E.U. law, E.U., standardized interfaces

  • - By Paul Merrell
  • The EU has been known to make a lot of odd decisions when it comes to tech, such as forcing Microsoft's hand at including a "browser wheel" with its Windows OS, but this latest decision is one I think most people will agree with. One thing that's frustrating about different smartphones is the occasional requirement to use a different charger. More frustrating is actually losing one of these chargers, and being unable to charge your phone even though you might have 8 of another charger readily available.

  • While this decision would cut down on this happening, the focus is to cut down on waste. On Thursday, the EU's internal market and consumer protection committee voted on forcing smartphone vendors to adopt a standard charger, which common sense would imply means micro USB, given it's already featured on the majority of smartphones out there. The major exception is Apple, which deploys a Lightning connector with its latest iPhones.

    Apple already offers Lightning to micro USB cables, but again, those are only useful if you happen to own one, making a sudden loss of a charger all-the-more frustrating. While Lightning might offer some slight benefits, Apple implementing a micro USB connector instead would make situations like those a lot easier to deal with (I am sure a lot of us have multiple micro USB cables lying around).

    Even though this law was a success in the initial voting, the government group must still bring the proposal to the Council which will then lead to another vote being made in the Parliament. If it does end up passing, I have a gut feeling that Apple will modify only its European models to adhere to the law, while its worldwide models will remain with the Lightning connector. Or, Apple might be able to circumvent the law if it offers to include the micro USB cable in the box, essentially shipping the phone with that connector.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

OpenStack 09/28/2013 (a.m.)

• iPhone 5 Review - CNET Reviews

  "The good: ......... The iPhone 5 adds everything we wanted in the iPhone 4S: 4G LTE, a longer, larger screen, free turn-by-turn navigation, and a faster A6 processor. Plus, its top-to-bottom redesign is sharp, slim, and feather-light. The bad: ............ Apple Maps feels unfinished and buggy; Sprint and Verizon models can't use voice and data simultaneously. The smaller connector renders current accessories unusable without an adapter. There's no NFC, and the screen size pales in comparison to jumbo Android models. The bottom line: .............. The iPhone 5 completely rebuilds the iPhone on a framework of new features and design, addressing its major previous shortcomings. It's absolutely the best iPhone to date, and it easily secures its place in the top tier of the smartphone universe."

  Tags: iPhone-5, Tech-Reviews, reviews, mobile-computing

  • - By Gary Edwards

• Google News

  "The new iPhone is here – but is Apple in danger of delivering too little with its latest upgrade? This is an excellent in depth review of the iPhone 5, By Gareth Beavis  September 27th 2012 ..... 8 COMMENTS Moatly the iPhone 5 is compared to the Smasung Galaxy 3, and the HTC One X. HTC wins the form factor and feel award. Samsung beats the iPhone in near everything else. Both the HTC and Samasung use Quad Core Processors. The iPhone 5, although greatly improved over the i4, uses a dual core processor. Some highlightes for the iPhone 5: ...... Photo stitching ....... Siri In most things the iPhone is "average". Where it really shines is an improvement to the iPhone 4 !!!!! Some serious drawbacks: ......... No Google Maps !!!! AAnd the new Apple Maps are a JOKE ......... The core Contact-Calling-Email system is native and quite outside of the Google Apps. No sync PAGE 1 OF 14 : Introduction and design The excitement of the rumor mill, the titillation of every leaked photo led to higher than ever levels of expectation for the iPhone 5, and while the announcement was greeted with some derision at the lack of perceived headline improvements, the record sales tell an entirely different story. Given the underwhelming changes to the iPhone 4S, the iPhone 5 really needs to re-energize customers to prove Apple can repeat the game-changing trick it managed with the iPhone 4. So is the Apple iPhone 5 the greatest smartphone ever, one that will finally see Apple ascend to the top spot in our 20 best mobile phones chart? Or is it a case of too little, too late?"

  Tags: iPhone-5, Tech-Reviews, reviews, mobile-computing

  • - By Gary Edwards

Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

OpenStack 09/27/2013 (p.m.)

• US websites should inform EU citizens about NSA surveillance, says report

  Yee-haw! E.U. sanctuary and rewards for NSA whistle-blowers. Mandatory warnings for customers of U.S. cloud services that their data may be turned over to the NSA. Pouring more gasoline on the NSA diplomatic fire. 

  Tags: surveillance state, NSA, NSA-blowback, EU, cloud computing, whistle-blowers

  • - By Paul Merrell

  • All existing data sharing agreements between Europe and the US should be revoked, and US web site providers should prominently inform European citizens that their data may be subject to government surveillance, according to the recommendations of a briefing report for the European Parliament.

    The report was produced in response to revelations about the US National Security Agency (NSA) snooping on internet traffic, and aims to highlight the subsequent effect on European Union (EU) citizens' rights.

  • The report warns that EU data protection authorities have failed to understand the “structural shift of data sovereignty implied by cloud computing”, and the associated risks to the rights of EU citizens.

    It suggests “a full industrial policy for development of an autonomous European cloud computing capacity” should be set up to reduce exposure of EU data to NSA surveillance that is undertaken by the use of US legislation that forces US-based cloud providers to provide access to data they hold.

  • To put pressure on the US government, the report recommends that US websites should ask EU citizens for their consent before gathering data that could be used by the NSA.

    “Prominent notices should be displayed by every US web site offering services in the EU to inform consent to collect data from EU citizens. The users should be made aware that the data may be subject to surveillance by the US government for any purpose which furthers US foreign policy,” it said.

    “A consent requirement will raise EU citizen awareness and favour growth of services solely within EU jurisdiction. This will thus have economic impact on US business and increase pressure on the US government to reach a settlement.”

  • Other recommendations include the EU offering protection and rewards for whistleblowers, including “strong guarantees of immunity and asylum”. Such a move would be seen as a direct response to the plight of Edward Snowden, the former NSA analyst who leaked documents that revealed the extent of the NSA’s global internet surveillance programmes.

    The report also says that, “Encryption is futile to defend against NSA accessing data processed by US clouds,” and that there is “no technical solution to the problem”. It calls for the EU to press for changes to US law.

  • “It seems that the only solution which can be trusted to resolve the Prism affair must involve changes to the law of the US, and this should be the strategic objective of the EU,” it said.

    The report was produced for the European Parliament committee on civil liberties, justice and home affairs, and comes before the latest hearing of an inquiry into electronic mass surveillance of EU citizens, due to take place in Brussels on 24 September.

• Exclusive: John McAfee vows to make Internet 'impossible to hack' in Silicon Valley return | McClatchy

  Tags: surveillance state, NSA-blowback, John-McAfee

  • Anti-virus software pioneer John McAfee, who buried himself in the sand to hide from police in Belize, faked a heart attack in a Guatemalan detention center and admits playing the "crazy card," says he's now ready for his next adventure: a return to Silicon Valley.

    At age 67, McAfee is promising to launch a new cybersecurity company that will make the Internet safer for everyone.

    "My new technology is going to provide a new type of Internet, a decentralized, floating and moving Internet that is impossible to hack, impossible to penetrate and vastly superior in terms of its facility and neutrality. It solves all of our security concerns," McAfee said in an interview with the San Jose Mercury News.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

OpenStack 09/26/2013 (a.m.)

• YouTube gets the yuck out in comments cleanup | Internet & Media - CNET News

  Tags: youtube, google+

  • Laugh all you want, fuzzball, but Google is changing how YouTube uploaders manage comments on their videos. The new system, which began rolling out to a limited number of uploaders on Tuesday, favors relevancy over recency and introduces enhanced moderation tools.

    The new commenting system, which is powered by Google+ and was developed in collaboration between the YouTube and Google+ teams, provides several new tools for moderation, said Nundu Janakiram, product manager at YouTube. It will default to showing YouTube viewers the most relevant comments first, such as those by the video uploader or channel owner.

    "Currently, you see comments from the last random person to stop by," Janakiram said. "The new system tries to surface the most meaningful conversation to you. We're trying to shift from comments to meaningful conversations," he said.

  • He explained that three main factors determine which comments are more relevant: community engagement by the commenter, up-votes for a particular comment, and commenter reputation. If you've been flagged for spam or abuse, don't be surprised to find your comments buried, but that also means that celebrities who have strong Google+ reputations will be boosted above others.

    There's more to the system than just relevancy, though. Because the system is powered by Google+, comments made on posts with YouTube links in the social network will show up on YouTube itself. So, you'll see comments from people in your Google+ Circles higher up, too.

    Just because it's powered by Google+ doesn't mean that you'll lose your YouTube identity, though. "You are still allowed to use pseudonyms," said Janakiram, whether you're "a Syrian dissident or SoulPancake".

    Another feature, and one that speaks directly to YouTube's goal of fostering conversations, is that you'll be able to comment publicly or privately to people in your Circles. Replies will be threaded like Gmail.

    The hope is that new moderation tools will make it easier for video owners to guide the conversation, Janakiram explained. "There have been challenges in the past with certain comments and what's been shown there."

Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

OpenStack 09/22/2013 (p.m.)

• Cisco Visual Networking Index: Forecast and Methodology, 2012–2017  [Visual Networking Index (VNI)] - Cisco Systems

  Tags: internet, internet-traffic, Visual-Networking-Index

  • This forecast is part of the Cisco® Visual Networking Index (VNI), an ongoing initiative to track and forecast the impact of visual networking applications. This document presents the details of the Cisco VNI global IP traffic forecast and the methodology behind it.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

OpenStack 09/20/2013 (p.m.)

• On the NSA, PRISM, and what it means for your 1Password data | Agile Blog

  Might be right. Might be wrong. Oh, the joy of having people around who feel entitled to read other people's data, whether it's shared or not. 

  Tags: surveillance state, NSA, encryption, security

  • - By Paul Merrell
  • In judging NSA capabilities, we need to keep in mind that they have a history of discouraging the US government from using systems that the NSA could break. If the NSA could break AES-CBC-128, then they would not be advising US government agencies to use it. Interestingly there is a history of the US and UK governments advising foreign governments to use cryptographic systems derived from Enigma, which the US and UK could break at the time.  But the NSA has (correctly) operated under the assumption that if they have found a way to break something, others will too.

  • It’s also reasonable to assume that the gap between the kinds of cryptanalytic techniques that the NSA has, and what the academic community has, is not as large as it was in the past. We did see evidence of the NSA (presumably) using a novel technique in Flame. We know that they are ahead, but as the number of people who publicly study cryptanalysis increases, the gap should narrow significantly. It certainly appears that their skills in designing presentation slides are more than a decade behind readily available and documented public techniques.

    From these I comfortably operate on the assumption that the actual building blocks (AES, etc) and the constructions (CBC) we use are not broken.

    Of course, one area where the NSA has clear, unmatched power is with computing resources. Our estimations of how long it would take a password cracker to guess a Master Password have been based on the kinds of tools that the public password cracking community has available.

  • There may be non-cryptographic flaws in cryptographic software, including 1Password, that the NSA is able to exploit, and that nobody else knows of. That is, they may know a way to break 1Password’s security without having to break the crypto. Naturally, we work  hard to keep 1Password free of such vulnerabilities, but that is no guarantee that there aren’t some which the NSA is aware of and that we are not.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

OpenStack 09/19/2013 (p.m.)

• The BRICS “Independent Internet” Cable. In Defiance of the “US-Centric Internet” | Global Research

  Undoubtedly, construction was under way well before the Edward Snowden leaked documents began to be published. But that did give the new BRICS Cable an excellent hook for the announcement. With 12.8 Tbps throughput, it looks like this may divert considerable traffic now routed through the UK. But it still connects with the U.S., in Miami. 

  Tags: security state, NSA, Internet-Balkanization, BRICS-net

  • - By Paul Merrell

  • The President of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff announces publicly the creation of a world internet system INDEPENDENT from US and Britain ( the “US-centric internet”).

    Not many understand that, while the immediate trigger for the decision (coupled with the cancellation of a summit with the US president) was the revelations on NSA spying, the reason why Rousseff can take such a historic step is that the alternative infrastructure: The BRICS cable from Vladivostock, Russia  to Shantou, China to Chennai, India  to Cape Town, South Africa  to Fortaleza, Brazil,  is being built and it’s, actually, in its final phase of implementation.

    No amount of provocation and attempted “Springs” destabilizations and Color Revolution in the Middle East, Russia or Brazil can stop this process.  The huge submerged part of the BRICS plan is not yet known by the broader public.

  • Nonetheless it is very real and extremely effective. So real that international investors are now jumping with both feet on this unprecedented real economy opportunity. The change… has already happened.

    Brazil plans to divorce itself from the U.S.-centric Internet over Washington’s widespread online spying, a move that many experts fear will be a potentially dangerous first step toward politically fracturing a global network built with minimal interference by governments.

    President Dilma Rousseff has ordered a series of measures aimed at greater Brazilian online independence and security following revelations that the U.S. National Security Agency intercepted her communications, hacked into the state-owned Petrobras oil company’s network and spied on Brazilians who entrusted their personal data to U.S. tech companies such as Facebook and Google.

  • BRICS Cable… a 34 000 km, 2 fibre pair, 12.8 Tbit/s capacity, fibre optic cable system

    • For any global investor, there is no crisis – there is plenty of growth. It’s just not in the old world
    • BRICS is ~45% of the world’s population and ~25% of the world’s GDP
    • BRICS together create an economy the size of Italy every year… that’s the 8th largest economy in the world
    • The BRICS presents profound opportunities in global geopolitics and commerce
    • Links Russia, China, India, South Africa, Brazil – the BRICS economies – and the United States.
    • Interconnect with regional and other continental cable systems in Asia, Africa and South America for improved global coverage
    • Immediate access to 21 African countries and give those African countries access to the BRICS economies.
    • Projected ready for service date is mid to second half of 2015.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

OpenStack 09/19/2013 (a.m.)

• 55 Free Templates to Make Visual Content Creation Quick & Painless

  Excellent stuff from HubSpot "Visual content is in high demand. Just about every type of content we marketers create can be enhanced by some kind of visual element. And in social media? Visuals pretty much make or break your presence. In fact, photos on Facebook generate 53% more Likes, 104% more comments, and 84% more clickthroughs than the average post. And if you need more evidence to convince you visual content is essential to your marketing, just consider all these stats! But honestly ... who's got time for all that? And I don't know about you, but I don't exactly have a degree in graphic design. Or the budget to hire someone who does. So, what's a design-impaired marketer to do? Luckily, over the past several months, we've been on a mission to make visual content creation much less of an obstacle for the average marketer. How, you ask? Templates, my friends ... templates. And what's great about these templates is they're all for software you probably have loaded onto your computer already: PowerPoint. And PowerPoint is such an accessible piece of software for non-designer folks like you and me. In fact, we use it all the time at HubSpot when we don't have a designer handy.  I'm going to walk you through the visual content templates we have available for free download, and show you how we've used them ourselves to create awesome visuals right in PowerPoint."

  Tags: marketing, visual-marketing, Visual-Productivity, presentations

  • - By Gary Edwards

• 10 Free Design Tools for Creating Stunning Visual Content

  More good stuff from HubSpot! excerpt: "I'll admit it -- I'm a cheap-o when it comes to most things in my life. When going to the airport, I'll volunteer to schlep an extra hour on the MBTA with my suitcase over taking a cab. I will buy the generic over the name brand any day. And if I can find some free online tool to do something I'd otherwise have to pay for in my marketing ... you guessed it -- I do it.   In my quest to find alternatives to fancy computer programs, I've come across a lot of free tools that help take my marketing up a notch while also save my team's budget -- and I wanted to share them with you. Although there will be some occasions where you won't be able to avoid paying for the tools you need to rock your job, lots of times you can increase the quality of your visual content with just a free resource. But you have to know the free tool is out there in the first place.  So without any further ado, let's get to the meat of the post: the most important free tools you can use to create visual content. "

  Tags: HubSpot, marketing, visual-marketing, Visual-Productivity

  • - By Gary Edwards

Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

The Fifth Wave

My response to an interesting post by Jeremy Chone, "The Five Software Architecture Generations: From Mainframe to Mobile Apps to HTML5".  Clear thinking and his conclusions track near exactly with the Fourth and Fifth Wave of computing concepts.

......................................................................

Well done Jeremy.  This is a very thought provoking article that left me wondering about how your software characteristics analysis impact platform wars? And more specifically; productivity systems?  

BEA founder Bill Coleman once famously said that Silicon Valley is always all about "owning the platform".  So i'm wondering what the current world view is when expressed in terms of a rapidly converging communications-content-collaborative computing and connectivity platform?  Who are the platform contenders?  Are their platforms open or proprietary; HTML5 or Hybrid?  Which Cloud Computing contenders are on track to own or dominate the productivity systems platform of the future?

You have laid out four platform waves (?) as distinct software development eras.  Interestingly they match up closely to the traditional platform waves of mainframe, workstation, personal computing, networking, and internet; as identified in an infamous 1998 Economist magazine article, "The Fourth Wave".  (I think the concept of "epoch marking era changes" called "waves", dates back to an Alvin Toffler "Future Shock" where he introduced a concept called the The Third Wave, circa 1980).  IIRC, the Economist Fourth Wave article combined the pc / networking era into one wave, projecting the Internet era as the Fourth Wave.  Perhaps giving the early days of sneakernet unprecedented recognition :)

My thinking is that Bill Coleman would say that platform and software development models roll forward together, riding the same wave.  The Fourth Wave Internet ushers in a new era of universal access, exchange and connectivity.  I for one thought the pc - networking era of great computing, crap communications and connectivity would be rapidly replaced.  As management expert and business guru extraordinaire, Peter Drucker, observed,  the era of personal computing and client / server networking did not improve productivity.  At best it was a wash; with factors like connectivity brittleness, high cost of systems build and maintenance, high cost of change and zero chance of improvement or adaptation, and time consuming data entry often far outweighing the benefits of computational output and information management.  Yet here we are.  Still waiting for the productivity explosion of the fourth Wave to kick in.

Drucker did note that the 1995 advent of near universal access to the Internet did improve productivity.  Dramatically so.  But for unexplained reasons that continue to defy logic.  The platform convergence of communications and computation had an incredible impact on productivity, but we really need to understand this phenomenon before software development can truly leverage it.  Unfortunately the leading thinker on business productivity systems and historical trends, Peter Drucker, has passed away.

Still, i can't help but wonder why productivity has yet to go hockey stick vertical.  Like so many, i'm hoping that an Open Web based on HTML5+ (HTML5, CSS3, JSON, SVG/Canvas, and JavaScript) holds the key to that long awaited leap in productivity.  A replay of 1995 but on a tsunami scale deserving of what the Internet is today.

I actually thought we hit the breakthrough point with the perfect storm of 2008.  A number of push factors hit that year, some technological, and some economic, starting with the release of the iPhone in late 2007 and the start of the mobile Web revolution.  This coincided with the ISO standardization of "Tagged PDF", also in late 2007.   Tagged PDF made it possible to convert volumes of static, (legacy ad current) business documents and forms to Web ready "interactive" business documents.  Throw in the 2008 leap in functionality of the then nascent Amazon EC2 Cloud Computing platform, and for technology it was clearly game on.   

Rarely is technology enough to compel massive and sudden change though.  The next level of Fourth Wave computing needed a push.  And that came in September of 2008, when we had a financial crisis and near world wide economic meltdown.  To survive, corporations had to conserve cash and cut costs without compromising competitiveness.  The easiest and fastest way of doing this is to cut labor cost and consolidate operations. And that means systems automation.  Do more with less.  I thought for sure we we're entering an era of unprecedented transition to software productivity systems based on highly efficient - low investment cost mobile ready, Cloud Computing platforms.

When it comes to the transition to high productivity Cloud Computing systems, an inevitable movement seemed especially compelling since it was easy to see that the cost of labor was about to go hockey stick vertical as new government regulations, requirements, and taxes tore into the cost of operations (ex: unemployment and healthcare costs).  As the risk of traditional business improvements rises, the more secure the ROI of Cloud platform based productivity software systems.  Or so i thought.  It's been four years since the perfect storm hit, and no one seems to have hit "it".

Unlike most people i know, i put the bulk of the productivity problem on Microsoft.  They own and control the client and workgroup side of the legacy productivity environment for upwards of 98% of business systems. The core issue is that most businesses would prefer a gentle "transition" of their current business systems and processes to the Cloud, as compared to costly and highly disruptive "rip-out-and-replace" Cloud Computing services.  They expect Microsoft to deliver a cost effective and non disruptive transition path for their legacy productivity systems.  But we're all waiting for Microsoft to figure this out.

Sadly i'm old enough to remember the early days of the Windows platform.  I witnessed first hand the explosive growth and expansion of the Windows productivity environment from the perspective of the contact management software sector.  Interestingly, even though the Windows OS owned the end-users at bootup, the contact managers owned the center of everything that happened after bootup.  Integrating with Office Productivity Suites and connecting to workgroup and corporate servers was just as essential a role for contact and project management systems as managing time, people and contact resources.  These early software productivity systems were quickly strapped into business automation processes; all built on the underlying Windows platform of application and network protocols such as shared DLL's, DDE, OLE, ODBC, MAPI, COM etc.  These connectivity components evolved into ActiveX and eventually .NET instantiations.

Of course, Microsoft soon enough eliminated thousands of contact management software companies with the mere announcement of Outlook.  And as the saying goes, the iron fisted grip on their monopoly platform was complete :)

So what's the hold up?  Where's the transition from the Windows productivity platform to a Microsoft Cloud Computing platform?  And why are the masters of Redmond stuck on the same rip-out-and-replace methodology competitors like Google and SalesForce.com are forced to offer?

IMHO, if you can answer this question with HTML5, you will own the Fifth Wave.  Anything short of that and sadly Microsoft is your daddy for years to come.

Compound Documents and the Lessons of Massachusetts:

I mention this to you Jeremy because i know you understand the bitter soup and slog surrounding the issue of business productivity systems and the importance of compound documents to those systems.  When it comes to automated business productivity systems and processes, compound documents are the fuel.  

It also seems to me that even though the convergence of communications and content rich collaborative computing systems are the magic behind both the Fourth and Fifth Wave of computing, building that functionality into a new, HTML5 ready compound document model becomes the essence of a Formula One, productivity fuel.

One of the "Lessons of Massachusetts" is that the compound documents fueling the Commonwealth's business processes were incredibly platform dependent and extremely brittle.  So brittle that we came to call the unfortunate effects of accessing and exchanging these documents "Reuters Rule"; which simply states that the conversion will break a document.  Specifically, conversion will break both the visual layout and, more importantly, the underlying business process embedded in that document.

The background for these observation is the massive "SOA" study the Commonwealth of Massachusetts conducted in 2005 - 2006.  The study resulted in the now infamous "Request for Information" regarding the possibility of an Open Document XML format plugin for the Microsoft Office Suite.  The study, which involved hundreds of government workers testing Web ready - SOA sub systems and open source/ open standards based productivity applications, was summarized in a 300 page report written by Sam Hiser.   The conclusion was clear.  Break the compound documents and you break the business process they are a part of.  Break the business process and work stops.

Some other things were are clear.  Interestingly, end-users tended to focus on the "visual" aspects of a compound document, and not the underlying, incredibly brittle, embedded software components that were the real gears driving the content, data and continuity - workflow mash that make for an interactive and automated business process.  

Another point of near total breakage was the fact that Massachusetts IT fully expected the XML Documents to not only replace the mess of binary compound document formats, but to ALSO be WEB READY!!  Yes, and scare quotes hardly does justice to these expectations.  

The simple truth is that XML formats were not made for the Web.  They were made to replace the proprietary binary formats of legacy office productivity suites with standardized and transparent markup designed to separate a documents content, presentation and behaviors - without having to rewrite the legacy application suite or re-engineer the all important layout engine.  Since XML is often touted as "a language for creating languages", it was perfect for the task of writing application specific formats.  HTML and HTML5 are near universal Web languages, with every browser expected to correctly read and properly "layout" the format as served.  Web specific yes.  But not application specific.  Just the opposite of the XML document formats.

We ended up  coining the terms "Visual Documents" and "Visual Productivity" as a means of discussing how to get legacy compound business documents to the Web - without breaking them.  And, more importantly perhaps, keeping them "interactive".  Anyone can take a business document static via a PDF print conversion.  The real value of a "visual" (Web ready) compound document though is in keeping it interactive and fully connected even as it transitions across a Web of interconnected Cloud Computing platforms and services.  

The key to the visual document / visual productivity methodology was to avoid conversion of the "native" application and platform specific version of the document, and instead rely on temporary representations designed to meet the purpose of the moment.  For instance, the "local" document is authored in a local productivity application and must remain in it's native format to properly service the legacy business process.  However, in the background the native document can be uploaded to a Web server where access is managed, and viewing is enabled by purpose and device specific "viewers".  We called this process "Fixed, Flow and Flock".  

Want a perfect "Fixed" layout view of the native document?  The Web Server provides a PDF or SVG conversion view.  Want a "Flow" representation of the native?  That's an HTML5 - responsive view.  

"Flock" is a far more interesting view of the native.  This is an HTML5 view with a collaboration panel connecting participants and their comments to specific sections of the document.  These comments are then fed back into the native documents "comment/collaboration" feature set. 

The corollary of Reuters Rule is to keep visual documents in the "native" format while providing fixed-flow-flock purpose oriented representations.  But there remains a few other challenges before the leap from visual document to visual productivity can begin.  The application and platform specific embedded components - the gears that drive a business process- must be replaced in the native document with Open Web ready alternatives.

Here's an example of the problem, coming out of the 2005 Massachusetts study.  On a widespread daily level, information workers were exchanging spreadsheets and forms as email attachments.  Theses documents were rife with automated data feeds connecting to both local and wan database and data transaction processing systems.  The moment they became "attachments" the information went dead; er went from interactive and dynamic to "static".  Recipients were constantly having to verify the original date and time stamp of the attachments.  Knowing the break point was essential to understanding the value of the documents information.  Verification was so costly, time consuming, and error prone as to render the access and exchange process next to worthless.  

Early on in our analysis of Sam's report, and the volumes of feed back at the studies web site that he analyzed, we realized that a Jabber router could go a long way towards solving the brittle connectivity problem.  Florian Reuter came up with an incredibly innovative solution, but we would have to re jigger the Microsoft Office interface, enabling a special, data connectivity instance of an XML panel to facilitate a Web ready binding.  The MSOffice XML panel wasn't complicated, and we were not sure how long Microsoft would leave this window open once they saw the full range of functionality possible.  But a more basic problem remained; how to connect local and wan data servers to a Jabber or JSON Web Server without upsetting the high priests of the database empires.  It wasn't a technical problem as much as a political one.

The thing is, Massachusetts had expectations that Open Web / SOA technology existed or could be created so that the great transition from the legacy Windows productivity platform to the We could begin.  They expected Web ready and fully standardized open formats for Office Suite compound documents.  They expected Web ready productivity systems they could transition to.  They expected to avoid costly rip-out-and-replace.  They expected Web ready open source / open standards based software systems on both client and the server.  They got zip.  

But here we are, near seven years later, discussing whether the language of the Web is going to be the language of the future.  For sure Massachusetts, along with anyone else who had half a brain, assumed this issue had been settled as far back as 1995, when the Web burst onto the scene, promising to obliterate every other platform with it's magic of converged communications, collaborative computation and universal access.  Yet here we are.

Thanks for the interesting post Jeremy - and sorry for the rant.  Getting caught in the grind and stomp of behemoth corporations fighting for the future of computing platform is not pretty.  There are a thousand stories to be told.  I wanted to tell mine, and tell it in this particular HTML5 context, before finally be ground to dust as what "could have been" becomes our collective loss.

Hope all is well,

~ge~