U.S. researchers closer to creating new solar cells

LOS ANGELES, Nov. 29 (Xinhua) -- U.S. researchers have taken one step closer to creating high-efficiency solar cells using cheap plastic with a dash of silicon, it was announced on Saturday.

    The solar cells, being developed by researchers at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA), have significantly greater sunlight absorption and conversation than previous polymers, the university said in a press release on its website.

    The researchers want these easy-to-use plastic solar energy cells to be sold at local hardware stores, and then hung like posters on the wall, said the release.

    "We hope that solar cells will one day be as thin as paper and be attached to the surface of your choice," said co-author Hsiang-Yu Chen, a UCLA graduate student in engineering. "We'll also be able to create different colors to match different applications."

    The research team found that substituting a silicon atom for carbon atom in the backbone of the plastic markedly improved the material's photovoltaic properties, said the release.

    The new polymer solar cells use organic compounds to produce electricity from sunlight, are much easier to produce than traditional silicon-based solar cells and are also environmentally friendly, the release said.

    "Previously, the synthesizing process for the polymer was very complicated. We've been able to simplify the process and make it much easier to mass produce," said Jianhui Hou, UCLA postdoctoral researcher and co-author of the study.

    "Though this is a milestone achievement, we will continue to work on improving the materials," he said.

    "Ideally, we'd like to push the performance of the solar cell to higher than 10 percent efficiency. We know the potential is there," he added.

Resource - xinhuanet

China to launch new remote sensing satellite

JIUQUAN, Gansu Province, Nov. 30 (Xinhua) -- China will launch a new remote sensing satellite "Yaogan " on Monday at the northwestern Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the northwestern province of Gansu, an official with the center said on Sunday.

    The satellite was to be aboard a Long March-2D carrier rocket into the space "at an appropriate time", the official said.

    At present, both the rocket and the satellite were in good condition and the preparation went on well.

    The satellite would be used for scientific research, land resources surveying, crop yield estimate and disaster prevention and relief. "It will play a positive role in the country's economic development," he said.

    Its predecessor "Yaogan III" was launched from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center in north China's Shanxi Province on Nov. 12, 2007.

    The "Yaogan I" satellite was launched from Taiyuan on April 27,2006, and the "Yaogan II" was launched on May 25, 2007 from Jiuquan.

Resource - xinhuanet

Vodafone Eying €2.8 Billion Take-Over of German Cable TV Operator

Vodafone is reported to be in talks which could lead to a €2.8 billion take-over of the German cable TV operator, Kabel Deutschland (KDG). The company is currently owned by the private equity group, Providence - which brought the company three years ago.

KDG has around 11 million customers in Germany and would be a good fit with Vodafone's local landline subsidiary, Arcor which controls about 14% of the broadband market.

KDG announced increased second quarter revenues last week, by 15.4% to €339.3 million while EBITDA increased 30% to €142.9 million. The higher numbers are partly attributable to the networks acquired earlier this year from the Orion Cable Group.

The firm recently confirmed that it was taking another look at trying to acquire some smaller regional operators. In 2004 KDG tried to buy two cable operators serving regional areas, which would have given the company nationwide coverage, but the deal was blocked by the cartel office amid fears of the company gaining a dominant market position. Changes in the market place with the emergence of telcos providing TV services should make cartel fears easier to overcome.

“A nationwide cable operator would enhance competition vis-à-vis the large telephone incumbents which would also be in the best consumer interest. We want to play a leading role in any such market consolidation,” KDG's CEO, Adrian v. Hammerstein said when the company announced its financial results last week.

Kabel Deutschland was founded in January 1999 by Deutsche Telekom, after it was ordered to spin off its entire cable TV business as required by regulatory terms.

For historic reasons, Kabel Deutschland cannot offer its products directly to all are connected via Kabel Deutschland's network, since only one third of all viewers are direct customers. In the early 1980s, when the cable network was originally established, Kabel Deutschland's predecessor Deutsche Bundespost had to leave in-house cables to other companies or the house owners. This turned out to be a significant obstacle since Kabel Deutschland now has to make single contracts with hundreds of small cable operators.

Resource - cellular-news

Bangladeshi Confirms 3G Licenses by Next March

Bangladesh's telecoms regulator, the BTRC has confirmed that it plans to award 3G licenses in the country by March 2009 - a delay on earlier promises to offer the licenses by the end of this year. During the launch of a trial 3G network by Ericsson in August, BTRC chairman Maj Gen (retd.) Manzurul Alam put a valuation of US$200 million on the licenses.

"The 3G licences will be issued by March next year ... the licences would be awarded through an open auction," Alam told the Reuters news agency.

A couple of months ago, the regulator sold a tranch of additional radio spectrum for US$204 million. Three incumbent operators brought the spectrum which the regulator said was necessary to cope with their increasing subscriber base.

Grameenphone, Banglalink and Aktel bought 7.5, 5 and 5 megahertz frequency respectively, at the rate of Tk 80 crore per MHz - giving them 21.9MHz, 17.5MHz and 17.8MHz respectively. Three other operators did not bid for the spectrum. Teletalk has 15.2MHz, Warid has 15MHz and Citycell has 10MHz.

A report by the GSMA last year had called on the regulator to issue the licenses by the 3rd quarter of this year. The spectrum should be licensed in a way that reflects its economic value and ensures it is efficiently used, the GSMA report argued.

The launch of 3G services could also assist in closing the "digital divide" which results in Bangladesh being poorly served by broadband internet services. A recent ITU report on telecoms in the Asia-Pacific region found that the minimum advertised broadband speed in countries such as Hong Kong and Japan is faster than the maximum broadband speed available in Bangladesh.

The country currently has six operators - and according to figures from the Mobile World, ended the first half of this year with just under 43.7 million mobile subscribers - which is still a population penetration level of 28.5%. Also worth noting is that while the country has six operators, only four of them are of any significant scale, Grameenphone (20.3m), Banglalink (9.5m) and Aktel (7.8m) and finally, Warid Telecom (3.3m). The two remaining long term incumbents, Citycell and Teletalk add up to 2.7 million customers between them.

Resource - cellular-news

O2 UK Launches Low-Energy Phone Charger

UK mobile operator, Telefónica O2 has announced the launch of an energy efficient universal mobile phone charger, which the company says is amongst the most energy efficient in the UK cutting energy consumption by as much as 70 per cent compared to standard mobile phone chargers.

The O2 Universal Charger, which meets the strict energy efficient guidelines of the US Energy Star rating, contains a power control system. This system considerably reduces charge to the mobile phone once the battery is fully charged even if the charger is left switched on in a plug socket. O2 estimates that phones left on charge costs Brits over £30 million in wasted energy every year. Heat loss from the charger has also been eliminated, another source of significant energy loss from standard mobile chargers.

Recent research conducted by O2 has revealed that a typical mobile phone charger wastes over 2.8 KWh of energy per year. O2 estimates that by cutting off the unneeded charge to mobile phones, the Universal Charger could save the equivalent carbon emissions of over 36,000 cars per annum. In addition to being energy efficient, the base unit of the Universal Charger will be accompanied by an inter-changeable leads making the charger compatible with most leading brands of mobile phones and eliminating the need to use a different charger with each mobile.

Ronan Dunne, CEO, Telefónica O2 UK, comments: “People are becoming increasingly concerned about the impact products are having on the environment and with mobile the single biggest impact is the energy used in charging. The O2 Universal Charger offers customers a simple yet effective way of reducing the environmental impact of their phones and reduces the waste associated with charger disposal.”

Resource - cellular-news

Iraq to Fine All Three Mobile Networks Over License Breaches

Iraq's three mobile phone networks all face fines from the government for apparently failing to meet conditions in their network licenses - reports Middle East Economic Digest (MEED). All three networks have failed to meet QoS requirements, while Korek Telecom has been censured for failing to meet coverage requirements.

The smallest operator, Korek Telecom has a national license, but coverage which is limited to mainly the Northern region of the country. An expansion to national coverage would need the financial muscle of an outside partner - which has lead to recent rumours that Etisalat is in talks to take a stake in the firm.

"Asiacell is bad and Zain is very bad," Hayam al-Yasiri, an adviser to the Telecommunications Ministry told MEED. "Korek is breaching the licence because of the coverage and the service. Korek up to this moment does not cover many cities, although according to the licence they should cover them."

The decision on the fines is expected before the end of the year
Resource - cellular-news

Romania Grants WiMAX License

Romania's new telecoms regulator, ANC (which recently replaced ANRCTI) says that it has awarded a WiMAX 3.6Mhz license to Radiocommunications National Society (SNR) for a payment of €2 million.

SNR was granted the right to use the 3657-3685 MHz and 3757-3785 MHz frequency bands under the terms of the Government Emergency Ordinance no.18/2008. By observing the provisions of this Ordinance, SNR released the 3600–3657 MHz and 3700–3757 MHz radio frequency bands it held, thus receiving the right to implement BWA systems in the two remaining sub-bands. As regards the released bands, ANC is currently conducting a comparative selection procedure in view of granting two licences.

The minimum license conditions require the coverage of at least 50 cities and at least 20 towns. The coverage is defined in relation to the number of base stations installed and in operation in a certain locality, within a certain deadline.

The amount of the licence fee to be paid by SNR was calculated proportionally to the validity period of the right to use the radio spectrum. SNR is entitled to use these radio frequencies until 24 July, 2011.

Resource - cellular-news

"Dawning 6000" to use Chinese-made Loongson processor

The high-performance computer "Dawning 6000," which will have a computing speed over 1,000 trillion operations per second, will adopt the Chinese-made general processor Loongson for the first time as its core component. This is according to the Dawning Information Industry Company.

"Dawning 6000" is currently jointly developed by the Institute of Computing Technology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Dawning Information Industry Company.

Li Guojie, chairman of Dawning Information Industry Company and director and academician of the Institute of Computing Technology, said research and development of the Dawning 6000 is expected to be completed in two years. By then, Chinese-made high-performance computers will achieve two major breakthroughs: first, adopting domestic-made central processing units (CPUs) will be technically obstacle-free; second, the existing cluster-based system structure of high-performance computers will be changed once the computing speed reaches 1,000 trillion operations per second.
Resource - People’s Daily Online

In Courtroom Showdown, Bush Demands Amnesty for Spying Telecoms

SAN FRANCISCO — The Bush administration on Tuesday will try to convince a federal judge to let stand a law granting retroactive legal immunity to the nation's telecoms, which are accused of transmitting Americans' private communications to the National Security Agency without warrants.

At issue in the high-stakes showdown — set to begin at 10:00 a.m. PST — are the nearly four dozen lawsuits filed by civil liberties groups and class action attorneys against AT&T, Verizon, MCI, Sprint and other carriers who allegedly cooperated with the Bush administration's domestic surveillance program in the years following the Sept. 11 terror attacks. The lawsuits claim the cooperation violated federal wiretapping laws and the Constitution.

In July, as part of a wider domestic spying bill, Congress voted to kill the lawsuits and grant retroactive amnesty to any phone companies that helped with the surveillance; President-elect Barack Obama was among those who voted for the law in the Senate. On Tuesday, lawyers with the Electronic Frontier Foundation are set to urge the federal judge overseeing those lawsuits to reject immunity as unconstitutional. At stake, they say, is the very principle of the rule of law in America.

"I think it does set a very frightening precedent that it's okay for people to break the law because they can just have Congress bail them out later," says EFF legal director Cindy Cohn. "It's very troubling."

The judge presiding over the case, U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker of San Francisco, announced late Monday he wanted to discuss 11 questions (.pdf) at Tuesday's hearing, one of which goes directly to the heart of the immunity legislation.

"Is there any precedent for this type of enactment that is analogous in all of these respects: retroactivity; immunity for constitutional violations; and delegation of broad discretion to the executive branch to determine whether to invoke the provision?," the judge asked.

Carl Tobias, a professor at the University of Richmond School of Law, says the immunity legislation, if upheld, "makes it possible to extend immunity to other areas of the law."

He agreed, for example, that it would not be far-fetched to imagine Congress immunizing ExxonMobil for the 1989 Valdez oil spill "for national security reasons." A jury awarded about $5 billion in punitive damages in that case, an amount the courts reduced to $500 million.

In the telecom immunity challenge, the government argues that the telecoms should not be punished, or suffer the threat of punishment, for a surveillance program that the Bush administration claims was designed only to fight terrorism. The government also denies the lawsuits' allegations that the surveillance was a broad dragnet that sucked down Americans' communications on a wholesale basis.

The administration also says the immunity is warranted because the lawsuits threaten to expose government secrets.

The EFF brought the original spying lawsuit in 2006 against AT&T, and has since been joined by dozens of others targeting the nation's telecommunications companies.

The EFF's case, which has been consolidated with the others in the U.S. District Court of San Francisco, includes so-called whistle-blower documents from a former AT&T technician. The EFF claims the documents describe a secret room in an AT&T building in San Francisco that is wired to share raw internet traffic with the NSA.

The government sought to dismiss the original EFF case, and others that followed, on the grounds that they threatened to expose state secrets. Judge Walker has ruled against the government, saying the case could proceed.

The government appealed. But before the appeal was decided, Congress on July 9 gave the president the power to grant immunity to the carriers.

The EFF is now challenging the immunity legislation on the grounds that it seeks to circumvent the Constitution's separation of powers clause, as well as Americans' Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures.

"The legislation is an attempt to give the president the authority to terminate claims that the president has violated the people's Fourth Amendment rights," the EFF's Cohn says. "You can't do that."

Two weeks ago, the administration told Walker in a court filing (.pdf) that the immunity legislation "represents the considered judgment of our nation's political branches that, in the unique historical circumstances following the 9/11 attacks, telecommunications companies should not bear the burden of defending against claims that those companies assisted the government in its efforts to detect and prevent further terrorist attacks."

Congress, the government continued, "concluded that those companies should not face further litigation if they provided such assistance pursuant to a court order or a written certification, directive or request from a senior government official, or did not provide the alleged assistance."

The immunity law allows the government to file a classified brief with Judge Walker activating immunity for a particular communication company. Walker then has little power to deny the request, unless the judge finds the immunity legislation is itself unconstitutional.

Oral arguments in Walker's courtroom are scheduled for 10 a.m. PST on Tuesday. Threat Level will cover the proceedings live.

Resource - Wired

More Rumours of a Nokia Laptop Computer

Rumours that Nokia may start production of its own brand laptop computers have resurfaced after UBS analyst Maynard Um issued a research note saying that it was increasingly likely to happen

Nokia MikroMikko 1 (credit Mika Ojutkangas)

Ericsson Portable PC (credit Datasalen)

"Given the rise of net-books/dongles sales, convergence between high-end mobile phones and laptops, and forays by computer manufacturers (Apple, HP) into smartphones, we think it is only a matter of time before Nokia launches notebook type devices,” Um wrote in the note - warning that they he does not expect a product to hit the shops until Q3 2009 at the earliest.

"Our checks indicate Nokia may be working on a 9”-10” notebook/tablet PC with a second OLED display, touchpad, near field communication (NFC) capability, HDMI out, and Linux OS. Given its seemingly higher end functionality, we do not think it will compete in the traditional netbook (~US$400) market."

There were rumours around April this year that Nokia was looking at launching a range of computers - but this was firmly refuted at the time by Nokia’s global marketing VP, Anssi Vanjoki.

Vanjoki said: "I have heard the rumours and I can categorically say Nokia is not entering the laptop market." Although Apple is known for selling laptop computers, Vanjoki said: "They sell some Notebooks, but the growth is from iPods. I don’t think they’re having commercial success with Notebooks."

It is worth noting though that Nokia sold computers in the past.

In the mid 1980's Nokia had a PC division, and merged it with Ericsson Information Systems, whose origins lay in the purchase by Ericsson of the computer business of Saab. The merged company, Nokia Data was later sold to UK based ICL in 1991 - and later became part of the larger Fujitsu group.

Nokia Data's most notable computer was the MikroMikko 1 - which was sold around the world.

Ericsson for its part sold mainly IBM compatible computers - and even launched a laptop (by the standards of the time) in 1985.

Resource - cellular-news

Amazon's database service enters public testing

SimpleDB, one of Amazon.com's suite of online services that people can use to build Web sites or other computing operations, is out of private beta testing.

The service lets programmers store database records at Amazon and extract specific data from them. Along with the shift to public beta testing, Amazon cut the price for storing data from $1.50 to 25 cents per gigabyte per month.

SimpleDB, introduced nearly a year ago, is a newer arrival into the Amazon Web Services suite. Other services let customers process data, store raw data, distribute content, and store messages sent among different computers.

The company also announced basic level of use is free for at least six months--the first time the company has done so with one of its Web services. After various thresholds are met in data transfer and computer processing, customers must pay according to usage.

"We've made the business decision to go with SimpleDB even simpler than it was before. You can now get started for free. For at least the next six months, you can consume up to 500MB of storage, and you can use up to 25 machine-hours each month. You can transfer 1GB of data in, and another 1GB out," said AWS evangelist Jeff Barr in a blog posting Monday.

Among those using SimpleDB are Pluribo, Issuu, and MyMiniLife.com, Amazon said.

To make SimpleDB easier to use, Amazon said it plans to release a new interface similar to the SQL (Structured Query Language) widely used in databases today. It also plans a mechanism to let people more easily upload multiple items.

Resource - CNET

BenQ Joybook U101 launches, gives almost no joy

M
The BenQ Joybook Lite U101 we spied back when it was announced in September has just launched, and though there's nothing incredibly exciting here, we thought we'd give you a quick rundown, because we're just cool like that. The U101 boasts completely standard netbook fair -- an Atom N270 CPU, Intel 945GSE chipset, 1GB of DDR2 memory, with 80-160GB mechanical drives and 4-16GB SSD options. It's also got a 16:9 display with a 1024 x 576 resolution (rare for a netbook), a 1.3 megapixel webcam, and three USB 2.0 ports. The sassy little number comes in blue, pink, white and black, and it can be yours for €398 ($503) in Taiwan right now, but we've got no word on when it will be available elsewhere. Dip this puppy in gold or something and then maybe, just maybe we'll bite.
Resource - Engadget

Firefox Surpassing 50% Market Share in More Regions

On top of today’s exceptional news about Firefox surpassing 20% worldwide market share during the month of November, we have further good news to share. After Firefox reached the 50% market share milestone in Indonesia back in July, we can now say the same about two more regions: Slovenia and Macedonia. Below you’ll find the November 2008 numbers according to Net Applications.

What’s the key takeaway here?

Our market share in the regions above has been growing like crazy. For example, since our July announcement about Indonesia, we’ve seen Firefox’s share in Indonesia pick up another 7%, Slovenia 4%, Slovakia 5%, and the Philippines an astounding 13%!

A tremendous amount of credit here goes to the Mozilla community. John Lilly summed it up best: “The open web is more vibrant than ever, and the thousands of Mozilla contributors around the world have played a major role in making it that way.”

Resource - Blog of Metrics

Obama-Biden transition site Change.gov now under a Creative Commons license

Change.gov, the website of US president-elect Barack Obama’s transition team, has undergone some important and exciting changes over the past few days. Among them is the site’s new copyright notice, which expresses that the bulk of Change.gov is published under the most permissive of Creative Commons copyright licenses - CC BY.

Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Content includes all materials posted by the Obama-Biden Transition project. Visitors to this website agree to grant a non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free license to the rest of the world for their submissions to Change.gov under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

This is great news and a encouraging sign that the new administration has a clear sense of the importance of openness in government and on the web (there’s a bit more on this over at Lessig’s blog). The embrace of Creative Commons licensing on Change.gov is consistent with earlier support by both Obama and McCain for the idea of “open debates.” (It’s also in line with Obama’s decision to publish the pictures in his Flickr Photostream under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license - pretty cool!)

Tim O’Reilly has written a smart post (which has elicited some very thoughtful reader comments) recommending that Change.gov use revision control as a way to further improve transparency and make it possible for the public to review any changes that occur on the site. Of course, licensing is just one component of openness, but getting licensing right is necessary for enabling people to truly take advantage of technologies that facilitate collaboration.

Update: Several people have pointed out that “works created by an agency of the United States government are public domain at the moment of creation” (see Wikipedia for more on this). Change.gov is not currently the project of a government agency, but a 501(c)(4) that has been set up to manage the Obama-Biden transition. Also, the public is being invited to contribute their own comments and works to the site, and it is important to have a clear marking of the permissions that other people have to this material.

Resource - Creative Commons

SixApart Hires Pownce Founders, Closes Service

The team behind microblogging service Pownce announced on the company blog today that it is joining blog software company SixApart and closing Pownce in two weeks. Pownce left private beta with a big launch just 11 months ago but the service never grew beyond a core group of fans.

The Pownce team says it plans to "come back with something much better in 2009." We're excited to see what Pownce co-founders Leah Culver and Mike Malone do at SixApart; it should be a very good environment for them to innovate in.

This is the second move where well known innovators have taken their technology and brains to a bigger company and shuttered their startup that we've reported on in a week. Last week open source star Rael Dornfest sold his personal assistant startup Sandy to Twitter.

Though these startups were inspiring, we also think it quite noteworthy that even at a down time economically there are still jobs for super smart people. We covered the Pownce/SixApart deal in greater depth at our hire-tracking site Jobwire. See that coverage for more details about the technology that Pownce will bring to SixApart.

Resource - Pownce Blog

Beta release: 0.4.154.25

Google Chrome version 0.4.154.25 has been released. You will automatically get updated in the next few days. You can open About Google Chrome (from the wrench menu) to get the update at any time.

This is a roll up of fixes that have previously been released to our Dev channel users. See http://dev.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel/release-notes for details on the changes that have been made since 0.3.154.9.

Note: Please use the excellent Google Chrome Help Center or file a bug to report problems. There are a lot of people watching those sites and ready to help.

New Features

• Bookmark manager with import/export.

Use the 'Customize and control Google Chrome' (wrench) menu to open the Bookmark manager. You can search bookmarks, create folders, and drag and drop bookmarks to new locations. The Bookmark Manager's Tools menu lets you export or import bookmarks.

• Privacy section in Options.

We grouped together all of the configuration options for features that might send data to another service. Open the wrench menu, click Options, and select the Under the Hood tab.

• New blocked pop-up notification.

The pop-up blocker formerly just minimized pop-up windows to the lower right corner of the browser window, create one 'constrained' window for each pop-up. Now, Google Chrome displays one small notification in the corner that shows the number of blocked pop-ups. A menu on the notification lets you open a specific pop-up, if needed.

Security Issues

• This release fixes an issue with downloaded HTML files being able to read other files on your computer and send them to sites on the Internet. We now prevent local files from connecting to the network with XMLHttpRequest() and also prompt you to confirm a download if it is an HTML file.

Severity: Moderate. If a user could be enticed to open a downloaded HTML file, this flaw could be exploited to send arbitrary files to an attacker.
[Originally fixed in 154.18]

Other Updates

Bug-fix updates (no new features) to major components:

• Gears is updated to version 0.5.4.0 (from 0.4.24.0).
• V8 (JavaScript engine) is updated to 0.3.9.2 (from 0.3.5.0).
  
  

--Mark Larson, Google Chrome Program Manager

Resource - Google Chrome Beta release: 0.4.154.25

Open source hardware 2008 - The definitive guide to open source hardware projects in 2008

What is open source hardware? Briefly, these are projects that creators have decided to completely publish all the source, schematics, firmware, software, bill of materials, parts list, drawings and "board" files to recreate the hardware - they also allow any use, including commercial. Similar to open source hardware like Linux, but hardware centric.

This is one of the new and emerging trends we've seen really take off over the last few years. Each year we do a guide to all open source hardware and this year there are over 60 projects/kits - it's incredible! Many are familiar with Arduino (now shipping over 60,000 units) but there are many other projects just as exciting and filled with amazing communities - we think we've captured nearly all of them in this list. Some of these projects and kits are available from MAKE others from the makers themselves or other hardware manufacturers - but since it's open source hardware you can make any of these yourself, everything is available.

You can also call this guide... "The Open source hardware gift guide - The one and only, 3rd annual celebration of open source hardware!" - we think these are some of the best things to consider for the holidays and it supports an exciting development in hardware design.

So sit back and get ready to scroll through the list! Here we go!

Arduino Duemilanove - The new classic
Arduino is a tool for making computers that can sense and control more of the physical world than your desktop computer. It's an open-source physical computing platform based on a simple microcontroller board, and a development environment for writing software for the board. "Duemilanove" means 2009 in Italian and is named after the year of its release. The Duemilanove is the latest in a series of USB Arduino boards.

Features:

• Microcontroller ATmega168
• Operating Voltage 5V
• Input Voltage (recommended) 7-12V
• Input Voltage (limits) 6-20V
• Digital I/O Pins 14 (of which 6 provide PWM output)
• Analog Input Pins 6
• DC Current per I/O Pin 40 mA
• DC Current for 3.3V Pin 50 mA
• Flash Memory 16 KB (of which 2 KB used by bootloader)
• SRAM 1 KB
• EEPROM 512 bytes
• Clock Speed 16 MHz

Resource - MAKE

Windows 7 allows DirectX 10 acceleration on the CPU

Windows 7’s new WARP system can run Direct3D 10 and 10.1 on the CPU, doing away with the need for a hardware 3D accelerator in some circumstances

It turns out that Intel isn’t the only company that’s looking at performing Direct3D in software; Microsoft has just announced that it’s also planning to introduce a new feature called WARP in Windows 7 that allows you to run Direct3D 10 and 10.1 on the CPU.

In what could be seen as an easy answer to the Vista-capable debacle, where there was some confusion as to what 3D graphics hardware you specifically needed to run Windows Vista’s Aero interface, Microsoft has introduced what it calls a ‘fully conformant software rasterizer’ called WARP (Windows Advanced Rasterization Platform) 10, which does away with the need for a dedicated hardware 3D accelerator altogether.

Microsoft details the new feature in this document on MSDN, in which the company says that WARP 10 will support all the features and precision requirements of Direct3D 10 and 10.1. The feature also supports up to 8x multi-sampled anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering and all optional texture formats. The minimum CPU spec needed is just a simple 800MHz CPU, and it doesn’t even need MMX or SSE, although Microsoft says that WARP 10 will work much quicker on multi-core CPUs with SSE 4.1.

Of course, software rendering on a single desktop CPU isn’t going to be able to compete with decent dedicated 3D graphics cards when it comes to high-end games, but Microsoft has released some interesting benchmarks that show the system to be quicker than Intel’s current integrated DirectX 10 graphics. Running Crysis at 800 x 600 with the lowest quality settings, an eight-core Core i7 system managed an average frame rate of 7.36fps, compared with 5.17fps from Intel’s DirectX 10 integrated graphics.

Of course, this low level of performance isn’t going to threaten ATI and Nvidia in the world of PC gaming, but it could mean that Windows 7’s 3D desktop interface will now be accessible to everyone, whatever graphics card they own.

Microsoft says that the technology is also targeted at casual games, explaining that ‘the majority of the best selling game titles for Windows are either simulations or casual games, neither of which requires high performance graphics, but both styles of games greatly benefit from modern shader based graphics and the ability to scale on hardware if present.’ Microsoft also points out that the technology could be useful for ‘emulators and virtual environments that are attempting to display advanced 3D graphics.’
Resource - Custom PC

Intel launches new online dev magazine

Visual Adrenaline offers tips on multi-threading and code optimisation for games devs
Leading component and software vendor Intel has launched a brand new digital magazine targeting the games development sector.

Entitled Intel Visual Adrenaline, the mag is free to those who sign up to the Intel Software Dispatch news service. The digital publication covers the use of multi-threading and code optimisation in the rendering of games and apps, as well as information on the latest tools and development products.

The mag will be released once per quarter and takes the form of a downloadable PDF.

Resource - Develop

Three Reasons Why Netbooks Just Aren’t Good Enough

The debate about Netbooks, which are very small and very cheap laptop devices, is beginning to heat up. The category is only about a year old but sales are expected to top 5 million this year.

Lots of people think Netbooks are the next big volume market because they allow people who previously couldn’t afford computers to own one. People got so bullish on the devices that sales projections reached 50 million units by 2012.

I’ve had a chance to test many of the units, though, and I can say that the promise is much bigger than the payoff. Perhaps that’s why Intel is rethinking whether the devices are as great as everyone’s expectations.

A typical Netbook has a 7 inch screen, an Intel Atom or Via Nano processor, a solid state (flash) hard drive and a keyboard that’s 80-85% standard size. Most have Wifi. Some have other bells and whistles like bluetooth, a camera, etc.

I find Netbooks unusable for three reasons: they’re underpowered as PCs, the screen is too small for web surfing, and the keyboard is so small that effective typing is impossible.

The basic problem as I see it: Netbooks are designed to appeal to two very different markets - the price sensitive and the size sensitive. The two are really mutually exclusive.

Too Little Horsepower

Netbooks use Intel Celeron, Intel Atom, or Via Nano CPUs. All are x86 compatible, and they have great power usage. At best the devices have 1 GB of memory, and some make do with as little as 256 MB.

Most of these machines are running Windows XP or Vista. A few have some flavor of Linux. Combining that UI, even the lower end XP and Linux, with normal computing is a heavy chore for these machines. If you have an email application open and a couple of tabs in a browser, there’s a lot of slow down. One Vista machine I’ve been testing tends to crash after a few minutes of use.

This is not the computing experience that most people are familiar with. The Atom just can’t compare to a dual-core laptop when it comes to performance Anyone with an alternative will quickly be unhappy at how sluggish these machines are.

Then There’s The Screen

These machines have screens ranging from 7 inches on up. The worst thing about the screens is vertical resolution, which is generally 600 pixels. Even if you aren’t using a lot of toolbars and plugins on the browser that take up vertical space, they annoyance factor is high. This is, at best, how much of a web page you’ll see on the screen:

You are constantly scrolling down on these devices. You have to scroll down just to see the title of the first article on the NYTimes, for example. And unlike the iPhone, you can’t just swipe your finger. You have to use the keyboard or trackpad to scroll down, and it means taking your eyes off the screen. It’s annoying and, again, if you have a different device, you are going to stop using your Netbook.

Remember that the iPhone has 480 vertical resolution, and you can resize text to fit a lot of it on the screen. The image above shows 8 lines of text in the post (net of title, etc.). The iPhone shows 22 lines of text.

In other words, the iPhone or iPod Touch, with a tiny 3.5 inch screen, has a vastly better browsing experience than any Netbook (it’s faster too).

The Keyboard

Then there’s the keyboard. It’s tiny - most of them are just 80% of regular size. Any normal adult can’t type fast on it without constantly hitting the wrong keys because there is no space between them. It isn’t much better than a Blackberry-type mobile keyboard when it comes to speed and accuracy of input.

Convergence Of Mobile And Laptop

There is a big fat hole in the market between mobile devices like the iPhone and regular laptops. But smaller, underpowered laptops aren’t the answer for the mass market. Most of the Netbooks aren’t much cheaper than very low end laptops (and those laptops have normal keyboard and much bigger screens).

The problem with Netbooks is they are trying to address two markets at once: emerging markets where price is very important, and developed markets where people want a second computer. The emerging markets don’t care about size, they just want it at a low cost - so offer them something that’s bigger and works better at the same price (remember, bigger = cheaper for most computer parts except the screen). Developed markets don’t care about price as much as performance, and Netbooks cut too many corners. Perhaps that’s why Netbook screens are starting to inch up to 10 and 11 inches. Which doesn’t really make them much different from normal laptops (and the prices are about the same).

So what’s the answer? Well, we have our own ideas. When you ditch the operating system and all it’s weight and focus on a device that runs a browser only (a true netbook), you can make do with mobile phone level hardware. Give people a big screen to really experience the Internet. Make it a touch screen or add a normal keyboard. And keep it really inexpensive. That’s a device people will want.

The sub notebooks can get bigger and more useful without sacrificing cost, which is great for emerging markets and students. Tiny notebooks that perform well will be higher cost, and there’s a market for those, too.

Resource - TechCrunch

FreeBSD 6.4 Released

Even though FreeBSD 7.x is already out and updated, the FreeBSD team keeps working on the FreeBSD 6.x branch, now designated the legacy branch. They released FreeBSD 6.4 today, with lots of new features, fixes, and updates. They are expecting FreeBSD 6.4 to be the last release in the 6.x branch.

The highlights of the release are listed as follows:

• New and much-improved NFS Lock Manager (NLM) client
• Support for the Camellia cipher
• boot loader changes allow, among other things, booting from USB devices and booting from GPT-labeled devices with GPT-enabled BIOSes
• DVD install ISO images for amd64/i386
• KDE updated to 3.5.10, GNOME updated to 2.22.3
• Updates for BIND, sendmail, OpenPAM, and others

The complete release notes are of course also available, as is the errata list. This release is supposed to be supported by the security team until November 30th, 2010. Using torrents for downloading this release is usually preferred, but you can of course also check your local mirror.

Resource - OSNews

Aonuma can't quit Zelda until he beats Ocarina of Time

As co-director of a game that many consider the greatest of all time, you'd think Eiji Aonuma would be content to put his feet up and soak up the praise. It's what we would do, but that's probably why we'll never create anything as awe-inspiring as The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.

Speaking to Nintendo Power about his past work on most of the Zeldas since Ocarina of Time, Aonuma insists that he can't stop making the games, because he's yet to beat what he achieved with Ocarina. "I'm happy that a title I worked on some time ago remains highly praised to this day," he says, "but that also shows how none of the subsequent games in the series have surpassed it."

He adds that this alone may be what motivates him to make more Zelda and keep putting more happy in our heads. A revealing insight into the perfectionist mindset of a top game designer!
Resource - Wii Fanboy

Pixel Qi conjuring up black magic technology for 40-hour laptops

Sure, you can go out and get yourself a laptop right now that'll go 12.5-hours strong, but what if your portable computer could nearly outlast your Aigo A215? While L's mythical quad core lappie came close in theory, Mary Lou Jepsen's (the former CTO at OLPC) startup is hoping to eventually create a machine that can last between 20 and 40-hours between charges. Pixel Qi is being pretty closelipped right now (and understandably so) about what exactly it has going on, but we get the idea the secret sauce is in a highly efficient display that will require far less power than traditional LCDs. The best part? We could see one of these longevous notebooks in the pipeline as early as 2H 2009, so we'd probably start stocking up on Red Bull right about now.
Resource - Engadget

Linux hits the iPhone

We knew this day would eventually come, but somehow we're still misting up a little -- Linux has been ported to the iPhone and iPod touch. Dev Team member planetbeing is the mastermind in charge of bringing everyone's favorite open-source OS to Apple's handhelds, and while it's a little rough around the edges (read: no touchscreen drivers, sound, or WiFi / cell radio support), it's definitely the first step on the road to hacking nirvana. The team is hard at work, and it even sounds like they're thinking about porting Android in the near future (!), so hit the read link to try it out and lend a hand if you can -- or just head on past the break for a quick vid of the port in all its text-scrolling glory.

Resource - Engadget

Nokia Quake III gains on-phone server, Bluetooth keyboard and mouse support

Remember when playing Quake III at a decent resolution required a $5,000 Alienware? Man, those were the days. Now, we can't help but be thankful for a few special Nokia handsets (the N95 8GB, E90 and N82 in particular) that can all handle the game by their lonesome. In fact, the latest version of the software adds a few remarkably awesome extras. For starters, users can now take advantage of on-phone server support, meaning that your handset can actually host a Quake III multiplayer battle (and may we recommend the server name "trashaccident?"). Also of note, the devs have tossed in support for Bluetooth mice and keyboards. We know, right? Tap the read link for all the juicy installation instructions.
Resource - Engadget

Intel evaluating new netbook concepts, form factors

Netbooks have been one of the major success stories of 2008, but recent comments from Intel indicate that the company isn't satisfied with current device form factors. Speaking at a Raymond James IT Supply Chain conference last week, Stu Pann, an Intel VP of sales and marketing, admitted that Intel initially miscalculated the market segments that netbooks would appeal to.

"We originally thought Netbooks would be for emerging markets and younger kids... It turns out the bulk of the Netbooks sold today are Western Europe, North America, and for people who just want to grab and go with a notebook," Pann said. "We view the Netbook as mostly incremental to our total available market."

Pann also noted (his comments can be streamed here) that netbook screen sizes don't lend themselves to long-term use, saying, "if you've ever used a Netbook and used a 10-inch screen size, it's fine for an hour. It's not something you're going to use day in and day out."

Consumer interest in netbooks definitely caught Intel off-guard, and it took the company months to ramp Atom production in order to satisfy demand. I agree with Pann, when he portrays netbooks as providing an "incremental" increase to Intel's total market, but I'm not sure he's right when he states that consumers won't use a netbook on a daily basis. It's true that the majority of us would have a massive headache after trying to work on a 10" LCD all day, but why assume that a netbook user is perpetually limited to the device's display?

A typical Western netbook user will have access to a much larger secondary display, as well as a keyboard and mouse at both work and home. Combined, these three simple devices negate the unfortunate physical aspects of netbook use. Mobile users, meanwhile, are more likely to use a netbook for short spans of time, which would fit within Pann's "fine for an hour" distinction.

Given how popular they've become, it's easy to forget that netbooks are only a year old, while the Atom itself has only been on the market for approximately six months. The device manufacturers themselves are still experimenting with features, sizes, and price points; it would be downright short-sighted for Intel to bring down the gates on experimentation and categorically lock the definition of the netbook form factor. What Pann failed to address—and it's a significant point—is that the sudden jump in netbook sales might be indicative of a long-term purchasing shift.

It's been posited that one reason netbook sales spiked in 2008 is because consumers were concerned about the economy and opted to purchase a cheaper, more portable system, which would fit Pann's "grab and go with a notebook," theory. But the continuing popularity of these smaller systems indicates that consumers like them, and have generally found that they provide an adequate amount of horsepower. Ultimately, yes, a netbook is just a smaller notebook, but a significant number of shoppers appear to want a smaller, cheaper, notebook.

Full-size notebooks aren't going to go away, anymore than full-size desktops are; there will always be a group of buyers who want more computing power and will trade portability for it. Nevertheless, I think the rise of netbook sales in 2008 is the beginning of a buying pattern rather than a trendy spike.

Second-generation netbooks, including hypothetical models with larger screens, will cast a wider net and capture groups of buyers that weren't interested in earlier models. Meanwhile, existing netbook owners already seem to be using these devices "day in and day out." If you're a current netbook owner, or are interested in buying one, what's your take on this? Are you buying it as a device you intend to use on a daily basis (even if it isn't your only system) or will it be confined to occasional portable use?

Resource - Ars Technica

Renesas to Announce Full HD Video Processor for Mobile Phones

Renesas Technology Corp will announce an application processor that enables mobile phones to process 1920 x 1080 (1080p) resolution 30fps full HDTV video at ISSCC 2009, which will take place in San Francisco, California, from Feb 8 to 12, 2009 (session code 8.7).

Renesas announced in May 2008 that it was developing a full HDTV video processor (See related article).

The session is titled "A 342mW Mobile Application Processor with Full HDTV Multi-Standard Video Codec." The processor's CPU core has the maximum operating frequency of 500MHz. It supports MPEG-4AVC/H.264, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 video formats.

The 6.4 x 6.5mm chip was manufactured using 65nm CMOS technology. Its power consumption is 342mW when it is processing full HDTV video in real time via 166MHz 64-bit DDR-SDRAM.

Some overseas semiconductor manufacturers have already started sample shipments of their HDTV-compatible application processors. Broadcom Corp announced its HDTV-compatible processor in October 2007, while Nvidia Corp and Texas Instruments Inc announced theirs in February 2008. All these processors can encode and decode 1280 x 720 resolution 30fps HDTV video but are not compliant with full HD video.

Resource - Tech-On

Ubuntu launches Free Culture Showcase

The Ubuntu project has announced the launch of its second Free Culture Showcase initiative. The developers behind the popular Linux distribution are giving artists in the free culture community a unique opportunity to have their creative works included in the next major version of Ubuntu.

Participants can submit music, video clips, or images, which will be evaluated by a panel of judges. The winning items will be included on the Ubuntu 9.04 Live CD and in the default installation. In order to qualify, all creative works submitted to the contest must be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license, which permits modification and redistribution of content.

"The Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase is an opportunity to bring the best of two great worlds together by showing off high quality Free Culture content in Ubuntu," wrote Ubuntu community manager Jono Bacon in a blog entry. "The winning submissions will be made available on the shipped CDs and download images of the Ubuntu 9.04 release. Every user will be able to find the content in the Examples/ folder in a home directory."

The showcase will be accepting submissions until February 6. A panel of judges will choose an assortment of the best submissions and then the Ubuntu Community Council will select the actual winners from among those finalists. There is a limited amount of space on the installation CD for including free culture art, so submissions must stay within the size constraints dictated by the contest rules. For more details, see the Free Culture Showcase page at the Ubuntu wiki and the announcement at the official Creative Commons blog.

Resource - Ars Technica

Mobile Browser Battlemodo: Which Phones Deliver The Real Web

Before 2007, using the internet on your phone would make you want to kill yourself, if you were dumb enough to believe the crap splattered across that tiny screen even was the "internet." But the combination of increased bandwidth and better mobile software means that more phones really are promising to deliver the real internet, in living color. We tested eight different browsers, and while some put smiles on our faces, others proved that rendering HTML correctly is a far cry from actually giving you an awesome web experience. And what about 3G vs. Wi-Fi? Everything the carriers have told you is a lie. This is the true state of mobile web.

Before we give you the rundown of each of the most prevalent mobile browsers, here's how they all stacked up in a timed test of how fast (and how well) they could render websites, chosen for their diversity and particular challenges:

CHART KEY: Number value is time for complete page load in seconds; page rendering is rated from "Fail" to "Excellent" for each; and the color (red, yellow, green) indicates overall performance taking into account both speed and rendering accuracy: Green = good overall, Red = fail overall.

This second chart runs through the same procedure with all of the phones that had Wi-Fi options:

It's a pretty daunting pile of numbers, so let's break it down into standard prose, rating each browser as we go:
Android
A fast, smart mobile browser based on WebKit. It tackles most sites with (almost) unrivaled grace and speed. Panning and zooming could be smoother and more responsive, but with a ton of options for getting around a page—various touch methods and the trackball—few sites will be challenging to zip around. The only thing we really miss is multitouch for zoom. Buttons just aren't a very elegant or precise solution, and while the whole-page magnifying glass technique is nice, we'd love something a bit more refined. Overall though, we're happy campers on Android's browser. Grade: B+

BlackBerry Bold
Leaps and bounds ahead of the browser BlackBerry users have put up with for years, it renders most pages correctly, even if scripts give it a conniption fit (hence its long load times for Wikipedia and the WSJ). It uses the standard "click to zoom" metaphor, which works well enough, though getting around a page with the trackball can be kind of a work out for you thumb. The Column View, which squeezes a whole page into a single column, is fairly convenient and makes it easier to get around wider pages, even if it doesn't work equally as well on every site (nice on Wikipedia, ugly on Giz). Hopefully they fix the script performance in the Storm, which is using an updated version of the Bold's browser. We humbly suggest they ditch their home-baked browser for one based on WebKit, which would help out there. Grade: B-/C+

iPhone
What can we say? It's still got the best mobile browser around. It crushes basically everything but Android's browser—which is also based on WebKit—in speed and outclasses its still classy brother-from-another-mother (and everyone else) with the ease and elegance of its multitouch zooming. Some pages still give it fits, and it's missing Flash support, but it really does deliver an unrivaled mobile web experience. We love it, but make no mistake we're eagerly waiting for something better. (Mobile Firefox? Is it you?) Grade: A-

Nokia E71 Symbian S60
Hey look, another web browser with WebKit guts! It doesn't perform quite as well as Android's or iPhone's iteration where speed or render accuracy are concerned (can any Symbian nuts explain why?), but it does a serviceable job. The big thing it has going for it is Flash Lite 3 support, though performance there is kinda assy and memory intensive. Navigation is tougher with the E71's d-pad than with a trackball, but the whole page magnifying approach makes it easy enough to get around (too bad you have to dig through a menu or two to get to it). Not bad, but short of excellent. Grade: B-

Internet Explorer on Windows Mobile
Jesus Christ. This is a joke, right Microsoft? Hahaha. No really, this is the worst smartphone browser on the planet. It couldn't render its way out of an ASCII-art paper bag. It totally screwed up every single test page, except for Wikipedia, which it only mostly screwed up. Good luck navigating a page if you're granted the miraculous occurrence of it being rendered in a state that's usable. Grade: F-

Opera Mobile on Windows Mobile
Microsoft's own intentions notwithstanding, you can use the internet on a Windows Mobile phone. You just need Opera Mobile. It's kind of hobbled by Windows Mobile's assy performance, but it usually gets the job done. Not as quickly or always as accurately as its WebKit rivals, but it's definitely usable. Interestingly, it benefits more from the extra bandwidth offered by Wi-Fi than the WebKit browsers do. Menu-based zoom is annoying and imprecise. Touch-based panning worked okay, though a little laggy. We mostly navigated with the Samsung Epix's optical cursor, which worked pretty well, somewhere in between a d-pad and a trackball. Grade: C

Sprint Instinct
Holy CRAP. This is not the painfully lousy browser the Instinct shipped with not by a long shot. The original was slow and fairly feeble, even if it was the head of its (dumbphone) class. The new 1.1 browser really is a life-changing upgrade. It suffers in the chart because it's much slower than most other browsers, and zooming is still clumsy, but once the page loads, it's much smoother to pan and actually move around. I got a bit annoyed that it lied about pageload time, hanging at the last 2 percent of the status bar for half the load, but it usually gets things right. This is the best non-smartphone browser you can get. Grade: C+

LG Dare
Like the Instinct, the Dare proves you can actually get a usable browsing experience on a feature phone. It's a little nimbler at loading pages than its Korean blood rival, but the reason it ultimately posts lower marks than the Instinct is that it buckles way more easily under a moderate to heavy pageload, turning it into an unresponsive picture of the website you were trying to look at. Still, it renders most pages fairly accurately, and we like the sliding zoom scroll bar, at least in theory, since it seems like an intuitive way to deal with the zoom issue. Unfortunately, it works more like a glorified pair of buttons. (Note: I don't think the speed was actually a piddly 300 Kbps—I think it just had a problem dealing with DSL Reports' mobile speedtest, even though it's text-based for the dumbest of phones.) Grade: C

Methodology
We tested every browser only using the full—not mobile—versions of selected sites, over 3G and, whenever possible, Wi-Fi. All scripts were turned on, and the cache was cleared before each round of testing. We took the average of a series of five sequential speedtests to give us an idea of the bandwidth we're dealing with, and timed how long it took to completely load a site according to each browser's progress bar. We assessed whether or not it rendered the page correctly, on a scale ranging from "excellent" to "good" (a couple things out of place) to "utter fail" (I've seen prettier train wrecks).

A few additional issues to note: Internet Explorer would not work on Wi-Fi. Opera yes, our Skyfire install, yes, Internet Exploder, no. (Samsung suggested it might be because of Opera.) We didn't pursue the matter because of how IE did in the 3G tests: A page that looks like a pile of blended dog poo is going to look like that no matter how much faster it loads. Sprint's updated Instinct and Verizon's Dare, which we included as best-of-class examples of feature phones, don't have Wi-Fi capabilities. We left out Opera Mini and Skyfire, since they both leave most of the hard work to servers which essentially spit out a kind of image file—besides, we don't think this kind of internet-by-proxy browser will be around for much longer.

The Big Gulp
Remember our mantra it's code that counts? It's true for mobile internet too. An awesome browser can make up for a mediocre network, but a terrible browser delivers a crappy experience no matter how great the network is. It's all about the browser. As it stands, WebKit is clearly the best thing going, but even then, software implementation matters, or Nokia would deliver as good a performance as Android and iPhone. Proving the point, it's striking how little Wi-Fi actually boosted speed beyond 3G—hell, WebKit browsers on 3G slid past some of the others that were running on Wi-Fi.

Another thing to note is that the zoom metaphor is a tricky thing to nail. Buttons are too brutish, the magnifying glass is imprecise. Multitouch seems to be the best way to handle zooming in and out in a way that's intuitive and precise. Hopefully we'll see other developers start to use multitouch interfaces in touchscreen phones (*cough*ANDROID!*cough*).

As much as this blow-by-blow battlemodo shows you all the problems we encountered, the big picture is that really, mobile web is pretty dandy right now, and getting dandier. It could be more reliable, faster, maybe a little more versatile, but for the most part, yes, you can access the internet on your phone. Compared to just two years ago, that's really saying something. We can't wait to see what it'll look like in two years. Maybe Internet Exploder will actually work. Nah, that's a little too sci-fi.

Resource - Gizmodo

Nokia's 5800 XpressMusic goes on sale somewhere in the world

If you've been gritting your teeth and letting the PR onslaught of the iPhone 3G, Storm, and G1 knock you around as you waited for Nokia's entry into the widescreen, touchscreen superphone market -- that wait appears to be nearing it's end. Nokia has gone and gotten all official and release-y with it's anticipated (if somewhat disappointing) 5800 XpressMusic... or as we know it, the Tube. According to the company's PR, the device "is now, or will be soon" available in Russia, Spain, India, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Finland, "among others." If you'll recall, the phone boasts a 3.2-inch, 16:9 resistive touchscreen (hey, they throw in a guitar pick stylus), a 3.2-megapixel camera, 8GB of on-board storage, and the constant assurance that you're using a phone once called the Tube. No word on price or plans, but we expect cheap, and lots.
Resource - Engadget

350 Open-Source-Lösungen für Unternehmen Meldung vorlesen und MP3-Download

Das Schweizer System- und Baratungshaus Optaros hat seinen Open Source Katalog 2009 vorgestellt. Das 64-seitige Verzeichnis liefert zu über 350 Open-Source-Anwendungen vom Betriebssystem über Entwicklerlösungen bis zu Geschäftsanwendungen eine kurze Beschreibung und bewertet die Unternehmenstauglichkeit. Daneben finden sich Informationen zum Reifegrad, den Funktionen, der Aktivität der hinter dem Projekt stehenden Community, dem verfügbaren Support und der Lizenz.
Die Inhalte des Open Source Katalog 2009 basieren auf Optaros' Enterprise Open Source Directory, einem Online-Verzeichnis von Open-Source-Lösungen für Unternehmen. Der Katalog ist als PDF-Datei zum freien Download oder in gedruckter Version für 8 Euro erhältlich. (odi/c't)
Resource - heise-online

Free Software We're Most Thankful For

Dear free software developers: Before we American nerds sit down to our turkey and mashed potatoes today, know that your creations are at the top of the list of things we're most thankful for. Whether you're an indie hacker putting out the occasional script or an employee at a giant internet company building out a webapp with millions of users or a voluntary coder contributing to an open source project, we salute you this Thanksgiving in gratitude for all the things your work enables us to do every day. Short of covering you in candied yam kisses and cranberry sauce hugs, please accept our hearty thanks for your work. We like you. We really, really like you.

While our thanks goes out to ALL developers of ALL the free software we've featured on these pages, a few projects deserve special mention. On Monday we asked exactly what free software you're most thankful for, and thousands of votes later, we've boiled down the list to the top 40 or so. While we're offline for the day, feast your eyes and mouse on this prodigious list of some of the best free software we're most grateful for. Happy Thanksgiving! (Back to a more regular posting schedule tomorrow.)

The 46 Free Desktop Software Applications, Webapps, and Projects We're Most Thankful For

1. Firefox (see also: The Power User's Guide to Firefox 3)
2. VLC Media Player (see also: Master Your Digital Media with VLC)
3. Ubuntu (see also: Hardy Heron Makes Linux Worth Another Look)
4. Open Office (see also: A First Look at OpenOffice.org 3.0)
5. Pidgin (see also: Ten Must-Have Plug-ins to Power Up Pidgin)
6. Launchy (see also: Take Launchy beyond application launching)
7. Digsby (see also: Digsby Improves Performance, Supports LinkedIn)
8. Gmail (see also: Our full Gmail coverage)
9. Adium (see also: Adium Chat Improves Menu Bar Item, Corrects Your IM Grammar )
10. CCleaner (see also: CCleaner 2.0 Decrapifies Your PC)
11. Picasa (see also: Organize your digital photos with Picasa)
12. AutoHotKey (see also: Turn Any Action into a Keyboard Shortcut)
13. Google
14. Quicksilver (see also: A beginner's guide to Quicksilver)
15. GIMP
16. Foobar 2000 (see also: Roll your own killer audio player with foobar2000)
17. Thunderbird (see also: Eight killer Thunderbird extensions)
18. 7-Zip (see also: Top 10 Windows Downloads, #10: 7-Zip (file archive manager) )
19. DropBox (see also: Dropbox Syncs and Backs Up Files Between Computers Instantaneously)
20. uTorrent (see also: Our complete uTorrent coverage )
21. Winamp (see also: Our complete Winamp coverage)
22. Google Apps
23. AVG Antivirus (see also: AVG Free Anti-Virus 2008 Released, Much Improved)
24. Evernote (see also: Expand Your Brain with Evernote)
25. IrfanView (see also: Download of the Day: IrfanView (Windows) )
26. Opera (see also: Opera Updates to Version 9.6, Gets Faster, Adds Features)
27. Chrome (see also: The Power User's Guide to Google Chrome)
28. Google Calendar (see also: Black-belt scheduling with Google Calendar)
29. HandBrake (see also: HandBrake Media Converter Gets Even Better)
30. Skype (see also: Our complete Skype coverage)
31. Linux (see also: Our complete Linux coverage)
32. Paint.NET (see also: Top 10 Windows Downloads, #3: Paint.NET )
33. Ad-Aware (see also: Cleanse thy PC with Ad-Aware)
34. Avast Antivirus (see also: Download of the Day: Avast anti-virus)
35. Google Docs (see also: Our complete Google Docs coverage)
36. LogMeIn (see also: Use LogMeIn for remote tech support)
37. Transmission (see also: Manage Your BitTorrent Downloads with Transmission)
38. TrueCrypt (see also: Secure your data with TrueCrypt)
39. Amarok (see also: An Early Look at Amarok 2)
40. FileZilla (see also: FTP File Transfer Across Platforms with Filezilla 3.0)
41. Notepad++ (see also: Top 10 Windows Downloads, #6: Notepad++)
42. PortableApps.com (see also: Download of the Day: PortableApps Suite 1.0 (Windows))
43. Rocket Dock (see also: Download of the Day: RocketDock (Windows))
44. Spybot Search & Destroy (see also: Spybot Search and Destroy crushes evil)
45. UltraVNC (see also: Tech support with UltraVNC SingleClick)
46. VirtualBox (see also: VirtualBox 2.0 Adds 64-bit Support, Updated Interface)

A note on the numbers: Mozilla Firefox took first place in this exercise in gratitude with an insanely commanding lead; in fact, Firefox got more than three times the amount of votes the second-place mention (VLC) did. Here's a chart of the top eight on the list so you can see how the votes were spread out relative to one another.

About our vote count: We (ok, I) grossly underestimated how many votes we would get on this particular post. Almost 800 comments in total—many of which contained more than half a dozen free software projects—made finishing the total count (36 pages of comments) before Thanksgiving 2011 impossible. So, this represents just over 1,100 votes, only one third of the total comments we received. This list of 40 contains all the apps that received 10 or more votes. As almost 200 mentions got only a single vote, we think that even though it's incomplete, it's closely representative of the general consensus. (You can check out our complete vote count spreadsheet here.) Our apologies for the incomplete count—lesson learned. Next time, we'll use a proper survey tool.

Resource - Lifehacker