Technorama

It is ironic that ISO standards aren't freely available, you have to actually pay to get a copy. So if I wanted to write an ISO C++ compiler that would be pretty hard without paying ISO in Switzerland 102 CHF (£66).

It's now time for ISO to modernise, move with the internet generation and publish ISO standards online for no-charge. Other standards organisations like the Khronos Group (and the previous ARB group) with their OpenGL standards have been published online for decades! This has furthered the adoption of those standards ;)

Scientific papers suffer the same problem, when scientists want to publish a papers they assign copyright to a publishing Journal. The Journal organises the peer-review of the paper, and then charges for the final version in the form of journal subscriptions and one-off payments.

It's now also time for a new paper publishing model too, as Journals have ramped up prices so much it is now financially economical to look for a fairer model which cuts out those greedy Journals! This means we get all the papers in nice electronic form too ;)

The LHC (Large Hadron Collider) at Cern is taking steps to provide freely all data and papers from its experiments. So we have a great organisation taking the lead, setting the standard to follow!

Labels: Future, ISO, Khronos

One of the common problems installing software on GNU-Linux machines is the variety of different packaging systems. Redhat is still persevering with its own RPM packing system, when others have already adopted the standard DEB package format.. how long till they make the switch to DEB and apt-get online repositories?

RPM is notorious for dependency problems, I've suffered with Mandriva and Fedora in the past when trying to get extra software packages working. It's now time for consolidation Redhat! They're losing out to Ubuntu.. so this might even tempt some users back ;)

Dropping RPM would save Redhat development costs, and make it easier for customers to move to Redhat from all the DEB based distributions of GNU-Linux (Ubuntu etc). SuSE should also migrate their YUM front end to DEB!

Labels: Consolidation, Future, GNU+Linux, Ubuntu