Workshifting by Citrix Online CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

It seems like forever that people have been arguing that remote working is the future. Why limit yourself to just the people who live near your office when hiring? Why suffer the distractions of an office when you could define your own environment in your very own home? Why waste employee time commuting? Surely by now every employee would want to be working from wherever they choose and employers would be forced to accept it, if not actively encourage it to save on office costs and get the best employees.

They aren’t really new anymore, but I just discovered them.  Apparently the Dutch accessibility laws go beyond just the WCAG standard and require a whole range of best practices for web sites.  Good stuff.

When the Java Content Repository (JCR) standard first came out it was supposed to bring in a new era of compatibility between content repositories and put an end to the content silo. There was, and still is, a lot of talk about it and just about everyone added JCR compliance to their marketing materials. Unfortunately, that’s mostly where things stopped – the implementation work that followed was generally done was buggy or incomplete and the only viable JCR implementations that I’ve seen have come out of Day Software, who lead the JCR spec effort. There are a few CMSs around that do have good JCR support – Alfresco for example – but they’re few and far between and even with that, there isn’t a lot of people taking advantage of that support and the standardization of the repository interface.

Tim Bray’s second, very short notice, prediction for 2008 is that Windows is going to “look bad”. It’s probably a good prediction – Vista simply didn’t do enough to make Windows competitive for the next 3 years or so they’ll take to get the next release out. Obviously Windows isn’t going to disappear but there is already a strong trend towards alternate platforms, mostly OS X, which is very likely to increase over the next 12 months. Even my wife has become an Apple evangelist (more so than me) ever since she got my old powerbook to use in front of the couch. It seems the in-laws will be making the switch in the next year as well.