Paul Merrell's Library tagged standards →  View Popular

European Union regulators are looking into whether mobile phone operators who block customers from making inexpensive wireless calls over the Internet are breaking competition rules.

The European Commission, the EU antitrust authority, has sent questionnaires to phone companies asking what "tools" they use to "control, manage, block, slow down or otherwise restrict or filter" Internet-based voice calls.

The EU deadline for responding to the survey was Tuesday. The questionnaire, obtained by Bloomberg News, does not identify any companies.

Some mobile carriers have blocked services that use voice-over-Internet protocol, or VoIP, which allows users to make calls over the Web. Companies may be seeking to stop customers from accessing applications, like eBay's Skype, to defend voice revenue from the less expensive Internet services, Carolina Milanesi, research director for mobile devices at Gartner, the research company, said.

How does this relate to cloud computing? Well, there aren’t few enough standard interfaces… yet. We have at least 5 major operating systems, 4+ database types and 3 or so browsers. We have Flash, and JavaScript, and Silverlight. Incompatibilities between them reduce the working combinations slightly, but what about the different versions, and their incompatibilities? Taking just these simple, core technologies, that’s 5 x 4 x 3 x 3 = 180 different technology combinations! That’s a lot of complexity to mask over if you want to provide the same general kind of service to everyone. Look at the number of variables you have to cater for when all you’re supplying is electrons-per-second!

But it is possible.

State IT organisation representatives from Brazil, South Africa, Venezuela, Ecuador, Cuba and Paraguay have signed a declaration expressing their dissatisfaction with the International Standards Organisation (ISO).

The countries signed the declaration at the CONSEGI conference in Brazil over the weekend in response to news that the ISO/IEC had rejected the appeals from South Africa, Brazil and Venezuela and India to the ISO process to adopt Microsoft’s OOXML format as an international standard.

The need for openness led major players in the virtualization market to jointly create a proposed standard, the Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF). Members of the team were XenSource, which is owned by Citrix, VMware, Microsoft, HP, IBM and Dell.

The OVF was submitted to the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), which develops management standards and promotes interoperability for enterprise and Internet environments. The DMTF accepted the proposed standard in September.

The OVF will package all VMs with an XML wrapper that will let them run on any virtualization platform. It will also incorporate a security check to ensure that the VM has not been tampered with; metadata about what hardware or hypervisor the VM can run on; and a license check. The DMTF said the OVF will be rolled out this year.

This document analyzes how design decisions of a specification's conformance model may affect its implementability and the interoperability of its implementations. To do so, it introduces the concept of variability - how much implementations conforming to a given specification may vary among themselves - and presents a set of well-known dimensions of variability.

Its goal is to raise awareness of the potential cost that some benign-looking decisions may have on interoperability and to provide guidance on how to avoid these pitfalls by better understanding the mechanisms induced by variability.

Members Approve Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) 2.0 as OASIS Standard

IBM, Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, SAP, TIBCO, Vignette and Others Collaborate on Open Standard for Integrating Web Services into Portals

Boston, MA, USA; 30 May 2008 — OASIS, the international open standards consortium, today announced that its members have approved the Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) version 2.0 as an OASIS Standard, a status that signifies the highest level of ratification. Developed through an open process by the OASIS WSRP Technical Committee, the new standard simplifies the effort required for aggregating applications, such as portals, to quickly integrate remote content and applications.

"Vendors of aggregating applications no longer need to write special adapters to accommodate the variety of interfaces and protocols used by content providers," explained Rich Thompson of IBM, chair of the OASIS WSRP Technical Committee. "With WSRP, they can integrate remote content and applications with just a few mouse clicks and virtually no programming effort. WSRP version 2.0 adds those capabilities needed to fully integrate the remote components into the aggregated application."

Abstract

This specification evolves HTML and its related APIs to ease the
authoring of Web-based applications. Additions include the context menus,
a direct-mode graphics canvas, inline popup windows, and server-sent
events. Heavy emphasis is placed on keeping the language backwards
compatible with existing legacy user agents and on keeping user agents
backwards compatible with existing legacy documents.