Kaspersky warns of enterprise cloud scenarios

Cloud won’t become standard, says Kaspersky

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VMWORLD Cannes

VMworld : A Virtualization conference in Cannes 24-26 February

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ODF in the European Parliament

In the European Parliament many languages are in use, this is French, Pascal Paridans from the IT services explains that the Parliament is working to make its procedures ODF conformant, to accept documents encoded in this ISO standard format for document exchange.

Concernant la soumission de document ODF par nos députés. Le Parlement européen a toujours choisi une approche pragmatique qui consiste à toujours privilégier la satisfaction des besoins métiers. Il y a peu nous avons été contacté par M. Cappato [an Italian ALDE member of Parliament], pour permettre la soumission de document au format ODF. Nous devons reconnaître que lorsque M. Cappato nous a contacté, la configuration standard sous tendant les applications de la plénière, ne permettait pas d’accepter des formats du type ODF.
Cette difficulté est à présent levée et tout député qui souhaite soumettre un document en format ODF peut le faire.

Pour être complet sur ce domaine. Il est vrai que des améliorations sont encore à prévoir notamment afin de permettre aux députés de communiquer en format ODF aussi bien à la réception qu’à l’expédition vers les citoyens européens.

Nous avons conscience de ce besoin. Nous allons donc inscrire la validation et la mise en production d’une solution permettant le traitement des fichiers ODF au niveau du poste de travail standard des députés. Ceci leur permettra de communiquer plus librement avec les citoyens européens et sur base de standards ouverts.

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Adobe opens Flash streaming protocol

Adobe opens its Flash streaming protocol RTMP as part of its open screen initiative. The move to open RTMP comes as competition with the Microsoft alternative Silverlight heatens up. Adobe currently dominates the field of streaming with its Flash technology, used by video portals such as Youtube. But competitor Microsoft recently won showcases as the Olympics and the Obama inauguration for its Silverlight technology with strong .NET integration. Other beneficiaries of the competition include the users on other operating systems. Microsoft sponsors via Novell the Moonlight project for an implementation of Silverlight for Novell’s SuSe Linux operating system. Flash is reimplemented via the ambitious Gnash free software project and Adobe updated its own binary plugins for Linux. Enthusiasts of world wide web technology advocate the future was html5 instead of both offerings. Streaming technology is a patent minefield, so little can be told about the openness of the specifications.

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Update of the EUPL

The European Commission has updated the European Union Public License (EUPL): Seven clarifications were made that did not attempt to change the original meaning. The EUPL 1.1 is made available in all official languages of the European Union and the originators ensure that is is compatible with national copyright laws in all member states. The EUPL thus reaches a maturity other licences cannot provide and – unlike the GNU General Public License – it stays politically neutral and does not dillute the ownership attribution for your work.

For software developers, in particular from the public sector, the EUPL should be considered when you start new openly licensed software projects.

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Microsoft Azure lifts you up to the clouds

Recently Microsoft has released an update to the Azure SDK. Windows Azure is a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, run-time, and control environment for the Azure Services Platform.

A sponsored paper of David Chappell explains the Azure plattform: Azure is depicted as a bundle of .Net, Live and SQL services.

In other words Azure uses an existing software stack bottom-up and packages it for a cloud strategy. My open question is how that Azure strategy would actually translate into downstream innovation and repositioning.

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lxshortcut – back to simplicity

LXDE has a added new component, lxshortcut. It’s a small utility used to edit application shortcuts. I really missed it. In other words, it is for those little buttons you click on and that start the application for you. The tool demonstrates the LXDE philosophy to make the desktop not only lightweight and fast but modular. This is so important because we want life to be simple. We want a desktop environment to be stable. We want code to be manageable.

Think back to the Unix konsole world where you always have one tool for one purpose and that tool is stable and known to work. The stability of modern complex desktop environments, in particular those available for Linux but also Vista, is a problem for users, and it affects further scalability of these systems as well. When you add complexity but have no means to make it stable you get software where users are able to discover a bunch of bugs and defects within 3 minutes of use.

lxshortcut is a simple tool that meets real user needs. A few days ago I manually fiddled with my configuration files.

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Barcamp Taipei and LXDE

Sustainability expert Chris Watkins points at the upcoming CarCampTaipei where members of the LXDE team will present their light Desktop environment software.

Chris also has some suggestions for Linux distributions (via Twitter):

#Linux desktops need a keyboard shortcut for the applications/system menu. Shouldn’t the Windows key be mapped by default?

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