Electronic Waste (Credit : takomabibelot on Flickr CC-BY)

Top mobile telephone suppliers have agreed to back an EU-wide harmonization of phone chargers, the European Commission said on Monday, hailing the pact as good news for consumers and the environment.

“People will not have to throw away their charger whenever they buy a new phone,” said EU Industry Commissioner Guenter Verheugen, estimating that unwanted phone accessories accounted for thousands of tons of waste in Europe each year.

What about the data transfer and headphone? Doesn’t every second mobile buyer buys/gets a headphone?

• Reuter
• Slashdot

Video Bay - Credit: thevideobay.org

The Pirate Bay has launched a public beta of VideoBay.  It runs on HTML 5 video tags (no flash) with ogg videos.

Well, this should make the Pirate Bay’s court appeal interesting. For the last couple of years, the guys have been working on an anything-goes, censor-free haven for online video sharing called VideoBay, and it’s now gone into “Beta Extreme.”

“This will be an experimental playground and as such, subjected to both live and drunk (en)coding, so please don’t bug us too much if the site ain’t working properly,” the site’s front page currently warns.

I can’t wait for <video>/<audio> tags to become more popular and for ogg to become a more recognisable format.HTML 5 standards.

• Gizmodo

Olympics (Credit : cmaccubbin@flickr, CC-BY)

“My primary driver here is to deliver the Olympics and that means using proven applications software and by and large that application software does not run on open standards – there are some exceptions to that we are running a little bit of Linux but by and large it is Windows orientated,” he said.

Pennell added that although he had no plans to use significant amounts of open source software, he didn’t believe that servers running Linux would be more efficient than proprietary platforms. “I doubt it drives any huge difference in terms of the number of servers involved,” he said.

Ouch!! Someone needs to have a proper IT team.

• eweekeurope
• opendotdotdot

Microsoft’s latest service pack for Office 2007, which included native support for OpenDocument, has been shown to have poor interoperability with other ODF-using applications. Rob Weir, Chief ODF Architect at IBM, showed, on his blog, the results of Office 2007 SP2’s attempts to read and write an ODF spreadsheet:

The new entry to the mix is Microsoft Office 2007 SP2, which has added integrated ODF support. Unfortunately this support did not fare well in my tests. The problem appears to be how it treats spreadsheet formulas in ODF documents. When reading an ODF document, Excel SP2 silently strips out formulas. What is left is the last value that cell had, when previously saved.

[...]

In the other direction, when writing out spreadsheets in ODF format, Excel 2007 SP2 does include spreadsheet formulas but places them into an Excel namespace. This namespace is not what OpenOffice and other ODF applications use. It is not the ODF 1.2 namespace. It isn’t even the OOXML namespace. I have no idea what it is or what it means. Not every ODF application checks the namespace of formulas when loading documents, but the ones that do reject the SP2 documents altogether. And the ones that do not check the namespace try and fail to load a formula since it is syntactically different than what they expected. The applications essentially display a corrupted document that is shows neither the formula nor the value correctly.

Mr. Weir did not test any other ODF document types, but not supporting formulae in ODF spreadsheets makes them next to useless, and thus the ODF support useless in a business environment. I have to wonder whether or not Microsoft did this deliberately to hamper adoption of ODF by businesses.

• Rob Weir’s blog post with detailed test results

Pen - Credit: mshades on Flickr (CC BY)

ODF and PDF will be officially apart of Microsoft Office on April 28th.

In a post this afternoon in an unusual location — the Microsoft Update blog rather than the Office blog — the company officially gave its heads-up message that Office 2007 SP2 will be officially released in two weeks, on April 28. In it, users will have the ability to export their open OOXML and “compatibility mode” documents to Open Document Format and to Adobe’s PDF format, in the company’s first implemented stage of its support for alternate and interoperable document formats.

This will not yet be the same as adopting .ODT documents, .ODS spreadsheets, and .ODP presentations as alternate standard formats for Office applications — that feature is coming in the next edition of the suite, now due sometime next year. Up to now, the ability for Office 2007 apps to save to PDF and to XPS — Microsoft’s own try at an interoperable display format — has been available as a downloadable add-in. Now, that functionality will be available to new users without the add-in needing to be installed.

When I used to send people .docs, my free software conscience hurt. When I sent them .odts, my social conscience hurt. Now I can send documents without feeling guilty! Yay!

• BetaNews

Open Video Alliance - Credit: openvideoalliance.org

Kaltura, Yale ISP, and PCF have formally announced the Open Video Conference that will take place in New York City on June 19-20 at the NYU Law School in Manhattan.  Mozilla is also a major sponsor.

Conference Highlights

• Brings together stakeholders in the online video space (video makers, coders, lawyers, academics, entrepreneurs, etc.) for cross-pollination and development of the Open Video movement.
• Raises the public profile of video creators and artists, especially those whose work relies on or contributes to Open Video.
• Raises public interest and awareness around the Principles of an Open Video Ecosystem, a community effort to define best practices in online video.

Conference Details

• two day event; June 19-20 at NYU Law School with live webcast
• main agenda to feature high-profile speakers and presenters in legal and cultural dimensions of online video.
• secondary programming to include workshops on DIY video creation, publication, etc. (like USC’s 24/7 DIY Conference).
• secondary programming to include open source developer workshops, tech demos, and technical community building.
• compilation of video art reel (remix, collage, etc) and related documentaries for continuous screening (like Stay Free’s Illegal Art exhibit).

Hmmm…I wonder if I can catch the China Town Bus and make it up for this.

• Open Video Conference

Open Video Alliance - Credit: openvideoalliance.org

Open Video Conference has announced a call for proposals.

June 19-20, 2009
New York City
NYU Law School
openvideoalliance.org

** Submission deadline: March 19 **

We are requesting proposals and ideas for panels, presentations, workshops, and other sessions that will address how we can shape online video and the public debates around the medium. Proposals may be intended for the main conference track, or for more focused unconference style sessions. Proposals topics may be legal, technical, or cultural, though we encourage proposals in all relevant areas. The more complete and fleshed out a proposal, the more likely it will be accepted—but we welcome the submission of all good ideas.

Here’s my proposal: “Flash is an evil, evil piece of trash.  Address strategies by which it might be destroyed.”

• Open Video Alliance

Open Standards - Credit: developer.mozilla.org

Mozilla has given the Wikimedia Foundation $100,000 to fund the development of the Ogg, Theora, and Vorbis.

Mozilla is integrating support for the Ogg format directly into Firefox 3.1, so the next version of the popular open source web browser will be able to play Ogg media without requiring any plugins or external software. The Ogg format will be supported through Firefox’s implementation of the HTML 5 video element, which allows video to be seamlessly interwoven with conventional HTML content and manipulated through the DOM. Mozilla has recently demonstrated the video element feature being used for streaming video. Opera is also integrating standards-based video support into its browser and has a working implementation of Ogg for HTML 5.

Although the technology is starting to fall into place, it will take time for the standard to be supported broadly enough to encourage adoption by sites that stream rich media. The lack of DRM support inherent in the open implementation will also likely impede adoption by major commercial content creators. Standards-based solutions may never manage to displace Flash, but the first big steps need to be taken for this to even be a possibility.

Yay for free codecs.

• Ars Technica

Old Movie Camera - Credit: thomasclaveirole on Flickr (CC BY-SA)

In an effort to make Internet Archive videos more accessible to XO users, the internet archive will be converting all their videos to OGG Theora.

The other day John Gilmore pointed me towards a very interesting initiative: the Internet Archive is currently working on making all its videos accessible to OLPC XO users by converting them to Ogg Theora. And in this case “all its videos” means 185,000 moving images, including many cartoons and full-length movies that have fallen into the public domain.

Now that’s quite an impressive number I dare say! I’m also pleasantly surprised by the speed – up to a maximum of 1000 videos per hour (!) – with which the Internet Archive is converting its content. To date almost 50% of their videos have been made available as .ogg.

Sweetness!  Go Brewster.

• OLPC News

OASIS ODF Logo. Source: http://odftoolkit.org/

Sun Microsystems announced in a press release that they and IBM have started the ODF Toolkit Union, a project to increase support for the OpenDocument format.

The ODF Toolkit will use an initial software code contribution from Sun to provide developers with an easy-to-use Application Programming Interface (API) for reading, writing and manipulating ODF documents while accelerating additional application development. One part of the initial code contribution is an ODF Validator, a tool that validates OpenDocument files and checks certain conformance criteria. Capitalizing on the open, elegant nature of ODF, the Toolkit targets developers who want to create new applications and solutions ranging from content management, business workflows and activities to Web-based document solutions.

The ODF Toolkit will break down barriers between people and their data by providing support for a wide range of new applications. The ODF Toolkit Union will complement other industry efforts such as the ODF standardization work done at the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS). These initiatives collectively are eliminating the economical and technical barriers to creativity, use and overall utility of documents.

I’m hoping that GNOME Office uses this as an opportunity to add proper OpenDocument support to their products. Currently you have better interoperability with the reverse-engineered Microsoft Office binary formats than with ODF.

• Sun Microsystems
• OpenOffice.org
• The ODF Toolkit Project
• Slashdot