Tech Center Current

Microsoft is attempting to get the International Standards Organization to fast-track the approval of its Office Open XML (OOXML) document format which it developed to compete with the already-established OpenDocument Format (ODF) ISO standard. The Linux Foundation has recently made an official statement urging ISO members to vote “no” on fast-track approval, citing numerous implementation problems and allegations that Microsoft is attempting to use its wealth and business connections to hijack the standardization process.

At the 2007 SIGGRAPH conference, an annual convention for computer graphics specialists to discuss new computer graphics techniques and applications, Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir of Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories demonstrated an innovative new method for resizing the dimensions of images. The new method, called content-aware image resizing, preserves the size and visual quality of the more important regions of the image by sacrificing accuracy in the less important areas. It’s difficult to describe in words alone, so here is a video from the creators illustrating the impressive results:

Dave Gutteridge from the Tokyo Linux User Group speculates on why Linux, a free alternative to Windows, isn’t getting the attention from home users that a free MP3 player or a free car would receive, and he traces it to a general perception that Windows is also free.

Read the article: Windows Is Free

Several technology news sites have written about a recent survey from Netcraft which, at first glace, appears to show that Apache has suddenly lost a lot of market share in the webserver market. However, the change in numbers actually has more to do with how Google is reporting their server usage than people switching webservers.