Targeted at professional users, decision makers, developers, beginners and the Linux community in general, the event's panel discussion is said to feature a topical discussion on whether recent mergers threaten innovative small and medium sized Linux businesses.
The workshops are the first in a series of events to develop a network of Arab GNU/Linux trainers throughout the Middle East.
I'm at Southeast LinuxFest right now, listening to Daniel Chen's Linux audio talk. A bit over an hour ago, I finished my presentation on the Linux security myth. It's meant to be accessible to normal users or to geeks needing to explain to normal users. I was asked afterward why I didn't talk about buffer overflows. That's easy: normal users can't do anything about them.
The others may or may not speak directly to the FOSS paradigm and philosophy, with the remote exception of Muhammad Ali’s chiling yet inspiring two sentences: “Speak your mind. Don’t back down.” I’m trying to find where the guitar player, the soccer player, the astronomer and the pilot fit in, but nevertheless, it seems that seven years ago, IBM did the Free/Open Source Software community a huge favor by producing this ad.
I have been in this community long enough I am beginning to get repeat customers. The young lady with the Acer Aspire One now running Debian GNU/Linux dropped by. Her machine had been run by her pre-schooler and was missing a few keys… GNU/Linux was doing well. She had actually installed some packages and asked me to get the wireless working. It turned out that the driver had some problems and everyone was having problems with the wireless switch on that model.
Providing wireless in each classroom and using open standards would get them a lot more IT for less. My thesis for many years has been that more IT is good for education and the lowest cost option does it best, GNU/Linux.
It got me thinking about what kinds of things I would like to see in my Linux desktop in a number of years and now I want to know your thoughts as well. I have created a Poll, which you can see on the right, and the question is:
If you could manage development efforts for the Linux desktop, what would your Linux desktop have in four years time?
If you’ve recently converted to Linux from Windows, or if you’re just giving Linux a shot, there are a few things you need to know right off the bat about how Linux works and where the major differences are when compared to Windows. Some of the fundamental components are different between the two operating systems, and the way things are done can be drastically different; you need to learn these differences to be able to use Linux effectively, and to avoid trying to force Windows metaphors onto a Linux system that doesn’t accept them.
A German CAD (Computer Aided Design) company, CAD Schroer, has come up with a novel way to use no-cost software on GNU/Linux to make money. Their product, Medusa4 Personal, runs on that other OS, too, but they see a large and growing market of use on GNU/Linux (152 countries - a third are on GNU/Linux). The idea is to provide the use of professional-quality software to SMB (Small and Medium sized Business) free of charge. By making it available on GNU/Linux, they make the cost of entry even less.
The IDSbox Mini is a paperback-sized Linux server with a single SFF SATA hard disk, which can be partnered by a second drive attached to one of its USB expansion ports. The unit itself acts as a heatsink and being fanless is completely silent.
It’s not news that Linux powers most of the world’s fastest supercomputers, but have you ever actually seen the list? I was not aware that there was an organization set up to track all those supercomputers and publish the details, but today I found Top500 Supercomputer sites and its latest Top500 list for June 2010. BBC News has a very cool graphical representation of the list.
This week on the show: WebM license conflict resolved, Linaro initiative announced, Google drops Windows company-wide, Apple drops the ball on the new iPhone, Fab tests MeeGo and much more…
Topics for this podcast:
*Linaro reinforces traction for mobile and embedded Linux *Open source strategy spotlights: Novell, HP *Riptano makes commercial play with Apache Cassandra *Linux still tops in Top500 Supercomputers
In this episode: Fedora 13 is out. Google drops the Windows option for new staff and yet Windows is still doing well as a server. Discover how we fared with a minority distribution and we tout our ideas on how Linux devices can beat Apple's iPad.
Google has fixed a number of serious bugs in its Chrome browser, and has released new versions of the Chrome developer version and Chrome Frame, a plug-in that allows Microsoft's Internet Explorer to access websites using the Chrome rendering engine.
Google says that several major websites, including WordPress and Meebo, have already adopted the technology and use the markup that enables Chrome Frame. This allows them to provide a better experience for users who have the plugin installed.
Another interesting option may come from some where like Codeweavers who run Windows applications in a Linux (ChromeOS is a Linux variant) environment. That wouldn't necessarily be "inside the browser" but there is always wiggle room in defining the browser when it is the whole OS.
Google Chrome OS will be with us before the end of 2010. You will be able to buy a new netbook running it instead of Windows. But what if you are worried about being able to use some apps that currently run on Windows after the switch? Apparently Google has you covered with something being referred to as Chromoting.
Google has bold plans for Chrome OS: it wants to build an operating system that relies solely on web applications. This strict requirement means that the only native app in Chrome OS is the Chrome browser itself. Even things like printing will be handled in the cloud. Still, there are plenty of desktop apps today that don’t have an equivalent in the cloud. It now looks like Google has an answer to that issue as well through a technology dubbed tentatively “chromoting.”
An XDA-Developers forum member known as Charnsingh_Online has coded a CyanogenMod patch that enables 720p recording on Google’s flagship Nexus One smartphone.
Owners of older HTC Android smart phones will be happy to know that an update to version 2.1 of to open source mobile platform will be available later this June. The announcement comes right after the update was released in Taiwan.
This week sees the launch of 2.6.35-rc2, plus other goodies, so let’s dive into it!
So I've been hardnosed now for a week - perhaps overly so - and hopefully that means that 2.6.35-rc3 will be better than -rc2 was. Not only do we have a number of regressions handled, we don't have that silly memory corruptor that bit so many people with -rc2 and confused people with its many varied forms of bugs it seemed to take, depending on just what random memory it happened to corrupt.
NILFS2 is a different type of file system which is termed a log-structured file system. You can read a summary of it here. Rather than write to a tree structure such as a b-tree or an h-tree, either with or without a journal, a log-structured file system writes all data and metadata sequentially in a continuous stream that is called a log (actually it is a circular log). Because of this design it is very easy for NILFS2 to create snapshots and mount them along side the file system itself. But one of the more desirable features of NILFS2 is performance.
Snapshots are stored in special, filesystem-sized sparse files and are created by moving deleted or overwritten data blocks into the sparse file. When accessing the sparse file, all files are available in the version they were in when the snapshot was created – any holes in the snapshot file will automatically be filled in with the unchanged data in the original filesystem. Find more details about Next3 in an article at LWN and a paper released by the developersPDF. Next3 is available under the GPL 2.
Today we're announcing Next3, a file system developed here at CTERA to provide efficient snapshot capabilities on our Cloud Attached Storage appliances. I wanted to elaborate a little on how and why this came to be, and what our considerations were in developing this.
CTERA Networks is giving the Linux Ext3 file system additional data protection in the form of new snapshot capabilities.
There's been a few revisions to the R500 3D documentation since the original February 2008 release and the most recent one has just come over the night.
I’m very happy to announce the release 1.0 of the Emacs identica-mode microblogging client. Its been a while since the last release, and its been for a good reason!
Tor 0.2.1.26 addresses the recent connection and memory overload problems we've been seeing on relays, especially relays with their DirPort open. If your relay has been crashing, or you turned it off because it used too many resources, give this release a try.
In the roughly five years that the Git distributed version control system has been around, it has gained quite a following. But at its core, Git is command-line oriented, which doesn't necessarily suit all of its users. Along the way, various GUI interfaces to Git have been created, including two Tcl/Tk-based tools that come with Git. Giggle is a GUI front-end for Git that is based on GTK+, which released a 0.5 version in late April.
Have you ever thought about how you really spend your time at work? If you're wondering where the time goes, the GNOME Time Tracker is a great tool to help you keep an eye on which activities eat up your days.
Close on the heels of releasing Flash Player 10.1, Adobe announced the closure of the Labs program of Flash Player 64-bit for Linux. Adobe also set the Flash 64-bit for Linux forums on read-only mode, effectively quelling any and all means of discussion.
Adobe has quietly closed its first and only 64-bit Flash beta for any operating system, and left the 64-bit future of Flash in limbo.
The GNU find utility is one of the most useful commands you'll ever get to know. At first glance the options and syntax can seem arcane. But, with a little practice, you'll be able to locate any file on your system with almost no trouble at all. To help you get started, we've got 10 ways you can use find to get what you're looking for.
The game has been in public alpha for the best part of eight years now, and is available on Windows, Mac and Linux. According to developers Guild Software the Android version is a 100 per cent port of the game.
Those who decide to test the Kontact suite can find details about how to integrate the repository and install the software on the project page.
There's a lot of community energy at a show like LinuxTag, which is why KDE e.V, the foundation dedicated to supporting the KDE interface, probably chose LinuxTag as the platform from which to launch their latest community membership drive.
Under the name "Join the Game," KDE e.V. is inviting new individual supporting members to join the organization for 100 Euro/year, to help support their ongoing and expanding programs.
Dear Friends, Child advocates, and Free / Open Source Software enthusiasts,
Four years ago I founded Kiddix Computing, a company dedicated to building safe and friendly computing environments for children. This mission has been embodied in our core product Kiddix, a family-friendly operating system and software stack for children. Since our 1.0 release of Kiddix three years ago we have gained users from all over the world, but have been developing inside a closed environment. This will now be changing...
Red Hat, a leading distributor of the free Linux operating system, is now pushing virtualization to another level.
With Benchmark's backing, Red Hat actually did have about a $5 billion market capitalization upon its IPO, and then that valuation settled down along with the rest of the market for technology companies. There will be open source-focused companies with multi-billion dollar market caps. There will be better times for technology companies. There will be inflated perceptions of technology stocks again. These things go in cycles, and my bet is that Whitehurst knows that his company stands a great chance of becoming a multi-billion dollar, public open source-focused leader.
Ubuntu 10.4 LTS, Lucid Lynx, builds on the major improvements introduced in last year's breakthrough 9.10 Karmic Koala release (improved boot time, optimized kernel for better desktop performance, Grub2 bootloader and ext4 filesystem). New features therefore center mainly on two areas - a long overdue facelift and an assortment of new cloud-facing applications and features.
Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, and the Ubuntu UK Community are jointly hosting an event aimed at introducing Ubuntu direct to UK businesses.
Canonical has a comparatively good track record with herding the user interface to suck less than most other Linux distributions. They take existing technology, and tweak it to make it less painful than Linux has traditionally been. I’m curious to see how well this Ubuntu Light will work, and exactly what hardware it will support.
"As Ubuntu is increasingly becoming an option for many OEMs on many devices, we have been very pleased to extend the programme to better suit their growing requirements" said Chris Kenyon, VP OEM Services & Alliances, at Canonical. "The programme is simplified and will be more easily understood by the industry as they look to embrace and profit from Ubuntu as part of their product range".
Zorin OS is an Ubuntu-based Linux OS aimed at novice users who may be taking their first steps into the Linux world after having employed Windows all their lives. The latest release, Zorin OS 3, is the most polished version yet and comes with some interesting, new features. Top among these is the Zorin Look Changer, a tool that enables one to customize the way their desktop looks and acts depending on their preferences or what they’re used to.
Summary: Lubuntu 10.04 provides a functional, fast desktop environment. It eschews glitz and eye-candy bloat in favor of speed and low use of system resources. Rating: 4/5
Tilera's chips have the attributes of a general-purpose CPU, as they run the Linux OS and other applications commonly used to serve Web data. The chips are designed to run applications scalable across a large number of cores. Certain common Linux applications, such as the Apache Web server, MySQL database and Memcached caching software have been ported for use on Tilera's chips.
YOU MIGHT VERY well have used one of Linpus' Linux distributions without even knowing about it, as the company specializes in custom Linux installations for a wide range of solutions, least not netbooks. The company has also made some customized versions of Moblin, but its latest project is something that looks extremely interesting, a version of Linux for ARM based PCTVs.
As reported by FreeOS.com, the Linux watch was conceived at IBM's T. J. Watson research center where different groups of researchers are continually exploring the numerous challenges that emerge in the field of user interface design, power management, input devices, wireless communication, sensors and models for co-existences for pervasive devices and wearables. A team of researchers with skills in hardware design, Operating Systems, displays, electronic and mechanical packaging, industrial design and user interface design, which was spread across multiple research IBM sites worked together to develop the wrist watch that would eventually run Linux and X11. They were led by Chandra Narayanaswami and worked persistently for about 18 months to achieve this feat.
The Linux-ready testing framework combines a scalable test execution engine, an embedded device virtual lab manager, and dynamic software instrumentation technology, says Wind River. The software can be deployed as a stand-alone system or can be integrated via open interfaces with commercial tools, such as Wind River Linux, or with internally developed test environments, says the Intel subsidiary.
If you are looking for a dual screen ebook reader/netbook which is available now, the enTourage eDge may be exactly what you need.
Microsoft has fallen by the wayside in the mobile market, leaving Linux the main challenger to Apple, according to one open-source leader.
Lovely home except for those pesky leaks. This Nokia house built (circa 2010) upon on a foundation of Symbian with a MeeGo roof is also sporting an interesting looking S-series smokestack. Most of the building blocks we've already seen including the flagship N8. The N9 is almost certainly Nokia's followup to the N900 and Espoo's first handset to feature its new MeeGo OS.
Nokia has issued a release candidate for version 1.0 of the Qt SDK and has published some details about the release roadmap. The SDK will be released with Qt Creator 2.0 and Qt 4.6.3.
Qt is an open source development toolkit that simplifies cross-platform application development. After obtaining Qt in a 2008 acquisition of Trolltech, Nokia relicensed the toolkit under the LPGL so that it could be used to develop proprietary applications at no cost. Nokia has largely focused on improving the toolkit's suitability for rapid mobile development. It can be used to build applications that will run across all three major desktop operating systems and several mobile platforms, including Symbian and MeeGo.
Now I am all for trying new distros and netbooks are a place where I feel Linux truly outshines all other operating systems, so when a new netbook focused distro comes to maturity I always like to take it for a test drive. MeeGo, the joint operating system between Nokia's Maemo and Intel's Moblin, has been getting alot of hype recently in the Linux community and the world at large. I can understand why, personally I was very excited when MeeGo was first announced. Nokia and Intel are both very large names that bring substantial financial backing to the table, beyond this they are also allowing the Linux Foundation to manage the MeeGo project.
Nokia known to make phones with the very popular symbian operating system tried to take another road with the new phone n900. The phone is the successor of the of the not so popolar nokia internet tablet n810. The phone runs the same OS as the nokia n810 i.e. the linux based OS maemo.
The latest Android 2.2 update, codenamed Froyo, brings a number of new features, but a couple of them stand head and shoulders above the rest. While the latest version of Google's open-source mobile operating system isn't widely available on handsets at present, we've been testing it on a Nexus One, Google's own brand smartphone.
There are applications available that turn your android (or your Iphone) into a spying device, these apps upload phone data to a central server without the user noticing it.
Sony did a press release about 3D tv's and blue ray players and they anncounced a android BD remote app.I know not everybody is to happy with Sony but this is a nice movement. I would like many more manufacturers to release remote control apps for my favorite device.
How many times is this damn device going to change names? The guys over at Phandroid just got a hold of some shots from what appears to be a Verizon marketing system. The shots all clearly state that our pal the Droid Xtreme, is actually the Droid X by Motorola.
It seems that Sony Ericsson is really showing some Android love these days. According to various rumors, three new handsets from the famous manufacturer will be using Google’s open source operating system.
Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha revealed to Reuters today that the company’s Android-powered mobile devices are selling faster than they can be manufactured. Verizon has had similar experiences with the Droid Incredible from HTC, an Android phone whose biggest problem has been that demand outstrips current supply.
The firm which specialises in making "socially aware" mobile phones told Gigaom that it was moving away from Qualcomm's operating system and going to join the ranks of HTC, Motorola, Samsung, LG and SonyEricsson and load Google's open source Android operating system on its devices.
Arduino boards don't run embedded Linux or any other operating system directly, but are available with Arduino libraries for desktop Linux. The libraries enable developers to control the devices and integrate other applications and devices. (See farther below for more on Arduino.)
Acer is readying the Acer Aspire One D260, a dual-boot netbook running Windows 7 and Android on an Intel Atom N450 or new DDR3-ready N455, with a claimed eight hours of battery life. Acer also formally introduced its high-end Acer Liquid E Ferrari Special Edition, a smartphone that runs Android 2.1 on a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, offers a 3.5-inch screen, and -- of course -- is colored Ferrari F1 red.
Motorola co-CEO Sanjay Jha announced that his company will release an Android smartphone equipped with a 2GHz processor by the end of the year, say industry reports. Also this week, Apple announced the iPhone 4, Sprint amended its sales estimate for the launch of the HTC Evo 4G, and the Samsung Galaxy S debuted in Asia, says eWEEK.
Following my recent post about Six Linux Distributions on an HP 2133, I saw a comment saying that I had not tried Jolicloud.
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After the installation completes and you reboot, everything works. Everything. The big difference here from Ubuntu and Linux Mint is that rather than tell you that proprietary Broadcom WiFi drivers are available and prompt you to install them, Jolicloud installs them automatically, and then just notifies you after boot that new proprietary drivers are in use. The display resolution is correct for both the WSVGA (1024x600) and WXGA (1280x768) models. Sound, wired networking, and CPU speed stepping all work.
Powered by Fedora 13, this latest version (codename Mirabelle) of Sugar Labs' sweet and compact OS features improved stability and simplified customization, comes in 32-bit and 64-bit versions, and is available both as a standalone download or within the Sugar Creation Kit, a DVD containing documentation and a library of Sugar Activities, fun and engaging programs for children taken from the Sugar Activity Library .
Sugar Labs(R), nonprofit provider of the Sugar Learning Platform to over one and a half million children worldwide, has released Mirabelle, the third version of Sugar on a Stick, a collaborative learning environment that can be loaded onto any ordinary USB thumbdrive and used with a PC, netbook or Mac without touching the hard disk. It is available free for download at http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick. Sugar runs natively on major GNU/Linux distributions and can also run in virtualization under Microsoft Windows and Apple OS X.
There is not much information about this unit as far as specs go, we know from watching the video that it is running Android 1.5, but according to the rep it is going to be updated soon. The unit is the same size as the dell streak, so if you are looking for an idea of the size of that unit, make sure to check the video out.
The last time that Canonical developed an edition of Ubuntu for mobile devices was in 2008 for mobile Internet devices, but it failed to take off. The version that's being looked at for tablets is Ubuntu 10.04 for servers, PCs and netbooks.
Ubuntu developer Canonical is currently working on a tablet-specific Ubuntu OS for future devices. The tablet operating system will feature a touch-friendly UI and will be built from a lightweight version of Linux, possible Ubuntu’s upcoming 10.10 version, which the company calls “Maverick Meerkat.”
The outfit has had The Open Innovation Platform (OIP) in to look after its open source projects for a while. Now it says it wants the OIP to focus on electronic-system level design, virtual platforms and high-level synthesis.
Academic research software is still unavailable in many African universities. Now, universities in Senegal, Mozambique, Cameroon, Madagascar and Equatorial Guinea work with partners in Catalonia to fill this gap.
A large number of African universities, plagued by small and sporadic budgets, have only basic IT networks that focus on applications such as email or financial management. However, information relating to academic research is mostly still processed inefficiently and by hand.
The Symbian Foundation, together with Monotype Imaging Holdings Inc., a member of the foundation and one of the most renowned text imaging-solution providers, has recently announced the official launch of the first open source font available for the Symbian platform. Monotype Yuppy, also known as the MYuppy Chinese font, will prove to be a very helpful tool, especially for manufacturers and developers aiming for the Chinese mobile-phone market, one of the largest in the world. MYuppy is now available, fully customizable, and can be downloaded from the developer's site.
One of the limitings factors in Amateur Radio experimen-tation with Digital Voice has been the lack of suitable Open Source Codecs.
David Rowe VK5DGR hopes to change that.
A GIS visualisation and editing tool will allow you to read one or more spatial file formats and let you query and manipulate the data. You can even generate maps with custom colour schemes and labels.
Windows usage is declining, MySQL usage is gaining, and Enterprise JavaBeans and Spring usage are tied
Sands is part of the quintet that's organized the SouthEast LinuxFest 2010, the group's second annual event that is expected to draw about 750 people to the Spartanburg Marriott at Renaissance Park this weekend.
Mozilla published a second release candidate for the next build of Thunderbird on Wednesday. Judging from the public bug list, only one critical bug kept Thunderbird 3.1 Release Candidate 2 from becoming the final build of the current branch, code-named Lanikai.
Thunderbird 3.1's latest RC is now available for Windows, Mac and Linux machines.
Open-source middleware maker WSO2 has launched an open source cloud platform that should be of interest to enterprise Java developers. Called Stratos, it's a fully hosted application platform-as-a-service (PaaS) for building and deploying apps and services "with instant provisioning of enterprise servers, including the portal, enterprise service bus (ESB) and application server."
The documentation and code of Google Cloud Print is open source and HP is building upon that to Net-enable a new line of printers.
HP on Monday unveiled its new ePrint platform that adds Google cloud capability to a new line of Web-enabled printers and allows on-demand printing from anywhere to anywhere without the need for specific printer drivers.
Former Sun/Oracle exec Paul Hinz is now at Liferay and is helping the commercial company push forward both the open source project as well as its enterprise offshoots. This week Liferay announced a series of new initiatives including a collaboration platform called Liferay Live and a new enterprise social collaboration offering called Social Office Enterprise Edition.
We all know that Drupal can work with Varnish, a HTTP accelerator that caches pages in virtual memory. Well, now Varnish uses Drupal too! Varnish Software, the company behind Varnish, just relaunched its site using Pressflow, a Drupal distribution with performance and scalability improvements. The site was built by Kodamera.
VMware, the company that took the hypervisor mainstream and still controls the virtualization of some 80 percent of servers worldwide, is indulging in some retail therapy as it seeks to change its image to one of concierge of the cloud through its higher-end software and services. Indeed, nowhere is its evolution and ambition more clear than in its recent acquisitions. Let’s take a look.
To better support its growth and the services it offers customers, BowlingShirt.com is trying to strike a sweet spot on Magento Inc.’s open-source e-commerce platform. But the merchant’s launch on the Magento platform was interrupted, and it’s back for now on the in-house platform it built in the PHP framework.
The platform also offers many of the other benefits associated with the SaaS model, including scalability, predictability of costs and flexibility.
Big storage is still a big problem. But Gluster is hoping its open-source, commodity hardware-based NAS solution will entice developers to get more involved in their storage systems.
Gluster has been in development for three years.
The opportunity for change exists wherever there is storage that allows alteration. When a device’s program is software, the issues of software freedom are raised. The question becomes who has permission to make changes to that software? This is a question of permission not technical know-how, time, interest, or budget to change the software. If the software is free, the user can get a copy of the program’s source code and make their device behave as they wish. They can even help other users by sharing their improved code. If the developer is the only person who may modify the software, the developer subjugates the user. Developers who want to maintain this power over the user will not distribute free software for the device or complete documentation on how the device works.
Limited to 80 highly-experienced participants, the exclusive beta program offering includes imminent new features of Lightworks Open Source, including: project sharing, advanced 3D stereoscopic editing, Universal Media File support, native RED support, native 2K support, and integration with Avid and FCP.
At the Open Forum European Summit, Neelie Kroes, the European Commission vice-president for the Digital Agenda, said that with improved interoperability comes improved competition, and, she added, competition is good for the European economy. However, she admitted that open source still has some way to go until it will be fully accepted.
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"I am still a big fan of open standards. I believe in openness, and I believe in practising what one preaches," she said. "Some observers think 'open standards' is a tainted term that should not to be used in the absence of a generally recognised definition. Whatever the labels, what matters is the substance. I would urge all stakeholders to focus on the content of the package rather than the wrapping."
Earlier this week I talked to writer and open source advocate Marco Fioretti, who has just announced the start of a study on open data for the European Union. Fioretti is a long-time supporter of open source software, which he wrote about in a chapter of the O'Reilly book Open Government. Fioretti also held a seminar about open and prorietary formats at Pisa's Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies, a major European college in the field of economics.
India's Open Source Drug Discovery (OSDD) project has drawn criticism from geneticists for not publishing its first results in a peer-reviewed journal. Researchers have also dismissed as hype some of the claims made by the project's chief coordinator, Samir Brahmachari.
New plans to open up library, archive and museum collections will make it easier for researchers and students to access resources, according to a taskforce announcing its vision today.
At the moment it can be difficult for researchers to access books and information held in different places because the data is incompatible with the web services they use to search the collections.
Oxford University Press Journals has issued a highly misleading press release -- "Open Access Uptake: Five Years On," not making it clear that it is not Open Access (OA) uptake that is declining, but merely the uptake of OUP's pricey "Oxford Open (OO)" paid hybrid-Gold OA option.
Texts for visually impaired college students are hard to come by. But a new agreement between Cambridge University Press and Bookshare, a nonprofit organization that converts books and journals into formats that blind people can read, may enlarge this library.
Open source hardware hobbyists now have a chipset to play with that’s comparable to the powerful processors found in smartphones such as the Nexus One or HTC Incredible.
The market for open source hardware is hotting up, with the top 13 companies in the space turning over nearly $50million last year – according to Phil Torrone, designer at Adafruit industries. Speaking with Adafruit’s founder Limor Fried at the O’Reilly Foo Camp East in the beginning of May, Torrone also claimed that there are now nearly 300 significant open source hardware projects in development and predicted that the market will grow to over $1billion by 2015.
Top boffins in the States believe that they may be on the track of a way to place living human beings into suspended animation, allowing them to survive long periods effectively frozen before being "reanimated" with no ill effects.
Dr Mark Roth, based at a Seattle cancer laboratory, got interested in suspended animation after looking at several cases where this has occurred spontaneously in humans.
One well-known case is that of Canadian toddler Erica Nordby, who wandered outside in the winter of 2001 wearing only her nappy. In the bitter cold her heart stopped beating for two hours and her body temperature plunged to just 16€°C* before she was rescued, warmed - and came miraculously back to life, despite having literally frozen to death.
Spence loves to ham it up as Eyeborg, installing a red, laser-like LED light in one version of the prototype and pulling on a 1970s track suit to become Steve Austin (see the video below). But he's serious about using his camera eye to get Internet users to view the world through his eye, and is developing an Eyeborg app that may feature augmented reality functions.
Your Youtube videos could soon be scanned and evaluated for terror threats, thanks to a new project funded by the U.S. intelligence community that’ll create a searchable warehouse of open-source clips.
A legal campaign by a pair of 13-year-old twins has forced police chiefs to admit carrying out unlawful stop and searches on thousands of climate change protesters.
The twins won a high court battle against the police after one of them was left "crying and shaking" and fearing that he would go to prison for having a sticker in his bag.
The smell of the oil on the beach is so strong it burns your nostrils, and leaves you feeling dizzy and headachey even after a few minutes away from it.
In a posting two weeks ago, US coast guards harass journalists covering BP's oil spill, I detailed claims that reporters were being prevented freely from the beaches and in the air in the Gulf of Mexico.
In the wake of every failed attempt to stem the gush of oil spewing from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, the one option that is almost unanimously recommended is the use of relief wells. But such a procedure has its own safety risks and has the potential to actually increase the impact of the spill, say scientists and researchers.
While Barack Obama is lambasting BP for spreading muck in the Gulf of Mexico, he should perhaps pencil in a date with the people of Bhopal when he visits India later this year. While 11 men lost their lives on BP's watch and the shrimps get coated with black stuff, the chemicals that killed thousands of people in Bhopal in 1984 are still leaching into the ground water a quarter of a century after a poisonous, milky-white cloud settled over the city.
Since BP began oil exploration and production in Casanare Colombia in the early 1990s, six thousand people have been assassinated and three thousand people disappeared. Every time there have been complaints or protests in opposition to BP's interests, the community leaders concerned have been killed. This indicates an elimination strategy of violent social control. The agents have been the military and paramilitary groups, but BP as a corporation hás itself been complicit in the human rights violations.
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments this morning in Monsanto vs. Geertson Seed Farms, the first case involving GE crops to reach the high court. The case is not so much about the safety of the crop as it is about the legal merits of the injunction in place — which is keeping GE alfalfa seed on shelves and out of soil — while USDA completes its final Environmental Impact Statement (EIS).
Although the case doesn't dispute the previous ruling that USDA violated environmental laws, the decision could have far-reaching effects for future cases involving environmental protection since the justices are analyzing a lower court's authority to issue an injunction under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The case has therefore attracted a lot of interest from environmental and consumer groups with no history of working on GE crop issues. If the ban on planting GE alfalfa is overturned, the precedent is almost certain to weaken NEPA. Farmers, food businesses, legal scholars, scientists,farm associations, environmental organizations, and three state attorneys general are represented in seven briefs filed in opposition to Monsanto's case.
The Asian Brown Cloud also contributes to localised climate changes by reducing photosynthesis, drastically effecting food production for Asia's expanding populations. Recent studies indicate that stormwater run off from roads carries toxic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons from truck and car exhausts, as well as heavy metals such as lead and zinc into waterways. Up to 4kg of zinc can be found in large truck tyres – and released when friction hits the road. Runoff finds it way into water courses and contaminates fish. In Asia, the poor are dependent on fish as the primary source of dietary protein. The implications should be apparent.