Standards

Sony plans to acquire the portion of its optical disc joint venture with NEC that it doesn't already own and make the company a subsidiary, it said Thursday.  read more »

Solid-state drives are fast becoming popular replacements for hard drives, especially in laptops, but experts caution that SSDs aren't as secure as commonly thought.  read more »

Players in the solid-state drive industry need to unite and establish an umbrella organization that establishes standards that define the technology, like its performance, a Sun Microsystems executive said on Monday.  read more »

Lenovo will start including SSDs (solid-state drives) as a storage option in more laptops to meet increasing user demand, a company official said.  read more »

South Africa has appealed the adoption of the Microsoft-sponsored Office Open XML (OOXML) document format as a standard by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), the ISO said Friday. It did not rule out the possibility that other countries may appeal.  read more »

Toshiba plans to begin mass production of Direct Methanol Fuel Cells by March next year and to have a television based on the powerful Cell microprocessor on sale before the end of the same year, it said Thursday.  read more »

The Free Software and Open Source Foundation for Africa (FOSSFA) has called on African governments and standards bodies to abstain in the balloting, due to close Saturday, on whether a file format based on Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) should be an international standard.  read more »

After days of heated debate, Kenya has decided to abstain from the International Organization for Standardization's (ISO) vote on OOXML.  read more »

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has adopted an international standard based on Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) document format.  read more »