Joel Cohen is an Emmy award-winning writer and associate producer of The Simpsons. He’s also a keynote speaker at the Red Hat Summit this June. Enjoy this sneak preview of Joel, and then join us in Boston to hear more from him about The Simpsons and keeping innovation alive for 420 episodes over two decades.
The Simpsons has been on for 20 years now. What does the team do to keep creativity alive for that long?
I look forward to talking about this more at the Summit, but basically it is a lot of brainstorming, building on ideas, constantly pushing ourselves to find new, previously un-mined veins for stories and jokes, and shamelessly ripping off other people’s ideas (somehow this last one is the easiest).
How did you wander from a career in sales to writing for The Simpsons and other shows and movies?
A question my parents have asked me repeatedly, although when they ask, they are more sneering and judgmental.
Contributing writer: Thomas Fitzsimmons
At the 2006 JavaOne conference, Sun announced plans to open source Java. This wasn’t exactly a surprise to those of us working on Java at Red Hat, given that there had been rumblings before. But this was a real announcement. We were immediately interested in learning exactly which license Sun would choose. Even if it was a legitimate open source license, it still might not allow us to combine our code with Sun’s.
We have been working on free Java for many years–most particularly through gcj, a project started at Cygnus in 1998 by a developer named Per Bothner. Gcj has been steadily improving over the years, but still wasn’t fully Java-compatible, partly because we couldn’t get permission to run the official Java compatibility test suite. We had also been working on GNU Classpath, which is GNU’s free replacement for the core Java class libraries from Sun. We were very curious to see the “official version.” » Read more
Find out about the new features in Fedora 9 straight from the source–Paul Frields, the new Fedora project leader. He talks with us about the massive changes in KDE4, the new (and improved) LiveUSB features, and the many, many people that helped get Sulphur off to a running start. And what’s in store for Fedora 10? Watch and learn…
This is another article in our series co-publishing with Fedora Interviews.
AbiWord just had a great 2.6 release and the developers took several hours of their spare time over a few weeks period answering questions and providing information. Thanks to the team and especially MarcMaurer for his time and patience. We present you a detailed interview with the AbiWord team on a broad range of topics. » Read more
This week Red Hat Magazine is in San Francisco to bring you to JavaOne. (Or to join you if you’re here too!) I call it day -1 because JavaOne itself hasn’t officially started yet. Today things kicked off with CommunityOne, the “free and open developer conference,” featuring a good variety of sessions and representations from across the open source spectrum. It also included beanbags in front of Star Wars on continuous loop and human hamster balls–never let it be said that developers don’t like to have fun. » Read more
Shadowman on your shoulder?
Fedora on your forearm?
Tux on your tush?
We’re looking for people with Red Hat, Fedora, Creative Commons, and other awesome open source and related tattoos to feature in the magazine.
Even better, have you been thinking about getting some new geek ink but haven’t yet? Have a friend videotape it and send us the footage.
If you’re interested in showing off your ink, drop us a line.
Thanks!
Contributing author: Melanie Chernoff
Over the past year, the OOXML debate launched a worldwide discussion about what an open standard should be, how it impacts the technology industry, and why open standards are important.
Last week, OOXML–an XML format designed for Microsoft’s office suite–was approved as a standard by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). In past articles1 2, we have discussed problems with voting irregularities, the use of a fast-track process without adequate industry review, proprietary Microsoft technologies used without specification, and other problems. Now that OOXML has been approved despite these objections, let’s take a look at the standardization process and the impact that OOXML’s approval will have in the office suite space. » Read more
Contributing author: Jonathan Robie
You may have read our background article about ODF and OOXML and why Red Hat believes OOXML should not be approved as an ISO standard. This time, we focus on how the standardization process has been compromised at ISO.
ISO’s JTC-1 directives were designed to provide a fair, consensus-based way to design standards that are portable, interoperable, and adaptable to all languages and cultures. The OOXML proposal has suffered from two basic problems: (1) voting irregularities, and (2) the use of a fast-track process for a complex, new, large specification that has not received adequate industry review. The resulting specification was driven almost exclusively by one vendor, has not achieved industry consensus, and has had thousands of issues logged against it, largely due to issues involving implementability, portability, and interoperability. Although resolutions have been proposed for many of the issues that have been raised, there is virtually no time to review these resolutions to determine whether they fix the problems. And the voting irregularities have raised serious issues with the fairness of the process. » Read more
As we’re off for a much-deserved long weekend here in the US, we’re bringing you the Friday round-up… a day early. Not much going on this week, but a couple of things we thought we’d leave you with:
Ever see something you think we should include in our weekly round-up? Let us know. We’re always looking for the most interesting bits.
Miss out on JBoss World in Orlando? Or are you still wondering how JBoss and middleware fit into the bigger picture? These and more curiousities are answered in our summary video. And if you’re wondering what the new CEO’s like, you can catch him here as well.
