February 2008

Legacy Inflation

February 21, 2008

When I was a child I stumbled upon the dark secret that all the adults were hiding. A simple mathematical calculation revealed their conspiracy. I was 10 years old, and my mother was 30. So she was 3x my age. I observed that in 10-years time I would be 20, and my mother would be [...]

8 comments Read the full article →

Interoperability the ELIZA way

February 18, 2008

Back in the days before the Web, before GUI’s, before PC’s, before many of you were even born there was ELIZA. The brainchild of Joseph Weizenbaum, ELIZA was a 1966 computer program that seemed to understand. I’m sure we’ve all played with ELIZA or variants over the years. I remember playing it during lunch in [...]

3 comments Read the full article →

Fast Track versus PAS

February 16, 2008

Years ago I read an interesting article about the encyclopedia entry for the keyword “Longitude”. According to the article, the entry merely said “See Latitude”. With that short, two-word sentence the encyclopedia author conflated these two concepts as mere orthogonal dimensions, lumped together, each as boring as the other. This ignored the fact that latitude [...]

14 comments Read the full article →

A Pre-BRM Miscellany

February 16, 2008

I’ll be attending the BRM as part of the US delegation, leaving for Geneva a week from today. I am awed by the security apparatus which is being rolled out to ensure the integrity of the open standards process. Photo ID requirements, badged access to the meeting room, prohibitions against cameras and recording devices, no [...]

8 comments Read the full article →

Punct Contrapunct

February 12, 2008

The recent Burton Group report, What’s Up, .DOC? by Guy Creese and Peter O’Kelly was made available free to the public for a stated purpose: We’ve made the overview available for free (I must admit I’m not sure for how long), as we believe this topic warrants expanded industry debate before a February, 2008 ISO [...]

4 comments Read the full article →

By Metes and Bounds

February 6, 2008

A few years ago I bought my first house. The process was overwhelming at first, but due to the assistance of an attorney, a mortgage lender, an appraiser, an assessor, a surveyor, two insurance agents (one for the house and one for the title), a house inspector, a real estate agent, etc., the purchase occurred [...]

16 comments Read the full article →