Opera Injects Itself into Adobe/Apple Flash Debate

Opera product analyst Phillip Grønvold inserted his company into the Apple/Flash kerfuffle in an interview this week.

   Asked about the relevance of Adobe's Web publishing platform, Grønvold stressed the importance of Flash, stating, "Today's internet content is dependent on Flash. If you remove Flash you do not have today's Internet."

      In order to offer the best experience for users, Grønvold added, Opera has to embrace Flash, "but Flash as a video container makes very little sense for CPU, WiFi battery usage etcetera - you can cook an egg on [devices] once you start running Flash on them and there's a reason for that."

   If Flash is going to survive, Grønvold explained, Adobe has to make some fundamental changes to the application:

     "For some reason it's not part of the fabric of the Web currently and Flash either needs to include itself in the future of the Web and open web standards or its technology is going to be consistently under attack from all sides as the open web standard movement grows further and further," he said. more.......

Mozilla, HTML5 editor differ with Microsoft

Microsoft has re-engaged with others in the computing industry in the area of Web standards--but its return is not without friction.

A number of allies--notably Mozilla, Opera, Apple, and Google--have been working for years to refashion Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and a host of associated technologies to make the Web a more powerful foundation for applications and more sophisticated sites. Microsoft now has joined in the effort, but it doesn't always see eye to eye when hashing out details of the upcoming HTML5 with Mozilla and a central individual in the standards process.

One point of debate is the fact that two organizations are involved: the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group. Another is the process by which new Web technologies move from concept to standardization and support in browsers.

Fundamentally, Microsoft prefers a more formal, buttoned-down process that's somewhat at odds with today's free-wheeling Web standards practice. Existing players and Microsoft are still getting used to each other.

Standardization views
Organizations often jockey for influence through standards groups, and HTML is no exception. Dean Hachamovitch, Microsoft's general manager of Internet Explorer, didn't call for an end to the WHATWG, but he did make it clear Microsoft believes the W3C's working group is the center of activity.

"The W3C is the HTML5 standards body," Hachamovitch said, pointing to WHATWG's absence from Wikipedia's entry for standards groups as evidence that it's not one.  more........

Microsoft-funded open-source foundation aiming to diversify

Open-source software veteran Paula Hunter has one of the more interesting jobs in the industry, as the executive director of the CodePlex Foundation, a non-profit, open-source organization that was established with Microsoft as its founding sponsor.

On a visit the Seattle region this week, she sat down with us to discuss the CodePlex Foundation and its future, including its efforts to expand beyond that Microsoft investment and diversify the open-source software projects that it supports as part of its portfolio.

Continue reading for excerpts from the conversation.

Q: What's the purpose of the CodePlex Foundation?

We want to make it easier for commercial entities to participate in open-source development. That could be software companies, that could be corporate IT. What we find is that open-source is being used pervasively in both the commercial software sector and corporate IT sector. Being used, being consumed, more.....

Fedora 13 Expands Linux Virtualization

Virtualization technology has long found a home in Red Hat's Fedora community Linux distribution. Ever since Fedora 4 emerged in 2005, virtualization technologies have continued to advance in the distro and that remains the case with the upcoming Fedora 13 release set for later this month.

Unlike Fedora's early virtualization features, which all leveraged the Xen open source technology, more recent Fedora releases have relied on KVM. New KVM performance and scalability features for virtualization will debut in Fedora 13 that will help to push the envelope for large-scale virtualization deployments.

"If you look at Linux virtualization features, Fedora has always been the vanguard for virtualization," Fedora Project Leader Paul Frields told InternetNews. "We were putting out KVM before anyone else and we were interested in KVM as it seemed like a much more upstream-friendly feature. Although Xen was definitely a virtualization focus for a few years, Xen had some drawbacks."

Frields noted that from Fedora's perspective, Xen had become a drain on resources for developers since it took a lot of work to get Xen to work together with the Linux kernel for a Fedora distribution release. He added that, in his view, the code base for Xen didn't track exactly with the upstream Linux kernel and as a result, there was a mismatch. more.............

New dating site coming up for Apple fan boys and girls

Apple fans are somewhat notorious for being... big fans of Apple products. But does that mean Apple fan girls and boys have a better chance of hitting it off than....

Apple's Website Circa 1993 - apple.com - Gizmodo If you transported Apple's website back to 1993, I have no doubt it would end up looking exactly like this. Especially that beige menubar. HyperCard, anyone?	Chinese Wi-Fi Key-Cracking Kits Provide Free, But Illegal Internet Wi-Fi USB adapters bundled with a Linux operating system, key-breaking software and a detailed instruction book are being sold online and in bustling ...