Off you go… into the purple yonder!

WBUR, one of the two NPR stations in Boston now streams in unencumbered and patent-free Ogg Vorbis!
Check out the WBUR listen page. Here’s the direct link to the m3u. Also see the FSF press release about this.

Thanks to the WP-OpenID plugin, this blog now supports OpenID. Woohoo!

Jeff Atwood has a great analysis of javascript performance in the four main browsers. He used the new Sunspider benchmark that the webkit.org folks released recently.
I’m curious how Firefox 3 compares - Firefox 2’s numbers are only so-so.

After the T1, Sun has now also pledged to release the core design files and test suites for the UltraSPARC T2 chip under the GPL. Way to go Sun! The T2 specs are quite impressive - 8 cores with 8 threads each; dual 10Gb embedded NICs; PCI-E embedded; etc - and a power consumption of [...]

Google is putting it’s money where it’s mouth is: it has pledged to bid $4.6 billion for the upcoming 700MHz spectrum auction if the FCC sets rules that require this spectrum to be used in a non-proprietary way: open applications, open devices, open services, and open networks.
Let’s hope the FCC will listen. We desperately need [...]

The Council of the European Union streams some of its meetings and press conferences online. Unfortunately, that streaming is done in Windows Media format. They barely support browsers other than IE, and then only on Windows and Mac OS X. If you don’t use IE on Windows, you get degraded functionality, and GNU/Linux is not [...]

I was pretty excited that Deval Patrick won the elections here in MA. It was high time to get rid of our current narrow-minded governor.
However, Mr. Patrick has made his first bad decision. He’s basically put a wolf in charge of guarding the sheep. The sheep, in this case, is MA’s progression towards the Open [...]

The Belgian federal government is switching to the ODF format for its office documents by September 2008. Here’s the press release (in Dutch and French only). Here’s an article in English describing the move, and here’s the Belgian government interoperability framework website with some related information.
I think we’re going to see an ODF plugin for [...]

A lot has been written about Sony’s delayed PS3. This article gives a good overview of one of the main reasons that I don’t buy Sony: they refuse to follow standards regarding storage media.

I’ve had it. I’m sick of region encoding on DVDs and video games. I’m sick of crippled (’copy-protected’) audio CDs. I’m sick of DRM’d music. I’m sick of the fact that I can’t legally use the DVDs I purchased on the computer I purchased because it runs GNU/Linux. I’m sick of the fact that I [...]