Slashback: StarOffice, Antennae, Handiness

Slashback with more on paying royalties for Web standards, Sun's newest office suite, securing your 802.11 network starting with the antenna(e), and another glove.

Fewer excuses for the "memos and shopping lists" crowd. Sean Lamb writes: "Now that everyone's done slashdotting Sun's servers, I've posted an Out-Of-Box-Experience review of StarOffice 6.0 beta over at Linux Orbit."

Some things just want to be Free. Bruce Perens writes: "HP has made a public statement supporting royalty-free web standards and urging the community to write W3C with their opinion. "

A document on Perens' web site outlines Hewlett-Packard's response to the ongoing discussion of allowing technologies into W3C standards which could require patents on the so-called Reasonable and Non-Discrimatory (RAND) basis. That document reads in part:

"Agreement on royalty-free standards does not end this discussion. The licensing of patents embedded in standards must be compatible with the GPL license that is applied to the Linux operating system kernel, the MIT-derived license that is applied to the Apache web server, and a number of other software licenses. Because of the many thousands of copyright holders who have already contributed to existing products under those licenses, those software licenses can not be changed - the patent licensing mandated by W3C standards must accommodate them."

I hope other companies benefiting from software like Apache, Linux, and any other software which could be hurt by royalty-based standards make similar statements.

Wardrivers, begone. Moshe Barr may have laid out how to share a network connection with the neighborhood, but what about when you don't want to or can't afford to? trevmar writes: "BYTE.com has just published an article I wrote about WLAN antennas -- how they work and how to choose them. Hopefully I have put in all the stuff you will need to know whether you are setting up a community freenet, or just want to make your own home network harder to hack. If you are hardware inclined, I also describe some low cost hardware, and an access point that can be pulled apart very easily and resoldered at will ..."

Need an integrated keyboard here ... Adrian writes "Forget the guys with the glove from Berkeley, check out these guys -- they have a great product that interfaces with 3D Max for realtime animation generation that is on the market and won best of SIGGRAPH a couple of years back -http://www.didjiglove.com.au" While that's nice, I'd rather not forget the Berkeley guys just yet, since their seems like a more generalized concept.

Comments

Proposals to threaten to fork the standards base

[Simon Brooke]

Responding to the RAND proposal I drew up this analysis and proposal in which I suggest we prepare to launch an alternative standards body; since I circulated it I've learned that Bernhard Rosenkraenzer (Bero) was working on a similar proposal. Linux Weekly News has a front page editorial making the same suggestion.

This is possible and practical and we should prepare to do it. However, to have three Internet standards bodies would be a bad thing. What we should really seek to achieve is a situation where:

• Either
  • W3C commits to not incorporating any proprietary technologies into standards, and
  • W3C opens up its membership to ordinary peoplr, with a subscription for individual members of not more than US $50 per annum
• or
  • W3C winds up and IETF resumes the role of setting Web standards, and
  • IETF commits to not incorporating any proprietary technologies into standards.

So long as W3C remains a rich corporations club this sort of proposal will come bach again and again. It is, after all, in the rich corporations' interest.

Re:Does Star Office No Longer Suck?

[Anonymous Coward]

As of the 6.0 beta, StarOffice no longer sucks. Officially. There *is* one nitpick I have with StarOffice: e-mail support (as in Outlook). There is no *StarMail* application for e-mail (or, better yet, Usenet newsgroup support, which Outlook sorely lacks). If StarOffice can add e-mail and newsgroup support without breaking the rest of the suite, even die-hard Office users like me could switch with little pain.