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Archive for the 'Open Source' Category

Android and Symbian Merger?

Posted by Sam Churchill on July 25th, 2008

They don’t advertise for killers in the newspaper. That was my profession. Ex-cop. Ex-blade runner. — Blade Runner

Nokia’s Symbian OS for cell phones and Google’s Android are destined to be combined to provide a single open source operating system for smartphones, opines analyst firm J. Gold Associates in a research note.
The merger of the [...]

Shuttleworth: On the Launchpad

Posted by Sam Churchill on July 23rd, 2008

After the technical sessions concluded on the first day of OSCON, some attendees headed across town to see Mark Shuttleworth, founder of the Ubuntu Linux distribution, give a presentation to local Portland group Legion of Tech.
Shuttleworth, who traveled to space in a Russian Soyuz craft in 2001 after selling his company Thawte to Verisign, is [...]

Open Warfare at OsCon

Posted by Sam Churchill on July 22nd, 2008

You’re nothing but a deck of cards!
- Alice in Wonderland

Whether you call it a cellphone, a “Palmtop”, smartphone, or a converged device — pocket-sized computing devices took center stage at the first-ever O’Reilly Open Mobile Exchange held this week at Oscon 2008, in Portland, Oregon.

With more than 3 billion cellular users world-wide, “open” handheld [...]

CherryPal: 2 Watt PC

Posted by Sam Churchill on July 22nd, 2008

The $250 CherryPal C-100, new “green” PC, consumes only 2 watts of power, compared with the 100 watts of some desktops. It is designed for “cloud computing“.
For software, the device ships with the OpenOffice.org productivity suite, Apple iTunes, a CherryPal-branded media player and instant messaging client. The computer’s OS, open source Debian Linux, is inaccessible [...]

Open Source Convention in Portland

Posted by Sam Churchill on July 20th, 2008

The O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) is an annual convention for the discussion of open source software, such as Linux, MySQL, Perl and Python. It is organized (sitemap) by the publisher O’Reilly Media and is held each summer in Portland, Oregon.

Now in its tenth year, OSCON runs July 21-25 at the Oregon Convention Center, [...]

Tracking Soldiers, Mapping Relief

Posted by Sam Churchill on July 18th, 2008

DARPA wants to electronically RFID tag US combat soldiers so they can then be swiftly found and rescued if they get into trouble.

The “Individual Force Protection System“, is being pursued by contractor Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC).
According to this presentation (pdf), given last year by DARPA officials, IFPS would consist of a small, three-inch [...]

Open the Box

Posted by Sam Churchill on July 17th, 2008

What’s the mobile killer app? That was the question at Silicon South-West’s recent conference ‘Wireless 2.0‘ in Bristol, England.
To which Dr. Tony Milbourn, CEO of Camitri, replied: “What is the iconic application that makes things happen?” Do people want the Swiss Army Knife or discrete functionality?”
David Wood, founder and executive vice president of Symbian, in 77 million [...]

OpenMoko Arrives

Posted by Sam Churchill on July 15th, 2008

Last Friday, OpenMoko launched its highly anticipated FreeRunner smartphone, a Linux-based handset that’s completely open in both hardware and software last week. This week, developers are getting their first hands-on (Google News).
Half the requests for the OpenMoko are from universities, who use the device in embedded-design and open source programming courses, says Information Week.
[...]

Meraki Nets in SF and Portland

Posted by Sam Churchill on July 4th, 2008

Venture Beat’s Anthony Ha says the San Francisco free WiFi network, using Meraki access points, is quietly moving forward with its plans to blanket the entire city in free WiFi.

In fact, the company just crossed a big threshold — Meraki says more than 100,000 people have used its Free the Net service. That number [...]

Nokia + Symbian: Open, Open, Open

Posted by Sam Churchill on June 24th, 2008

Symbian (wikipedia), the market leading operating system for mobile phones, celebrated its ten year anniversary today — with a bang. Nokia, the world’s largest cellphone company, plans to acquire the 52 per cent of Symbian it doesn’t already own and make the platform open source.
“Our vision is to become the most widely used software [...]