Intel has announced a mini-motherboard aimed at a new category of mini-PCs dubbed “nettops.” Interestingly, the “Desktop Board D945GCLF2,” powered by a 1.6 GHz dual-core Atom Processor 330, is built in the Mini-ITX format pioneered by Intel competitor Via Technologies.
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“Technology is a tool to address some of the world’s most pressing challenges,” proclaimed Intel Chairman Craig Barrett at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco today. And with those words, Barrett launched a contest that will award $400,000 to the “most innovative ideas for applying technology” to global health care, education, economic development, and the environment.
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Lenny (aka “testing”) appears poised to displace Etch as the popular Linux distribution’s “stable” branch next month. To see how Lenny was coming along, I loaded the latest preview (beta 2) of its KDE system image onto an available Thinkpad, and took it for a spin.
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Embedded designer Paul Thomas is showcasing a tiny, open-sourced computer at LinuxWorld in San Francisco this week. Would-be “Linuxstamp” enthusiasts can obtain pre-built boards for the hefty sum of $120 directly from Thomas, or they can download the design for free and build it themselves.
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The 1394 Trade Association has adopted a new standard for in-home networking of high definition (HD) multimedia content over coax. “1394 Over Coax” combines Ultra Wideband (UWB) communications technology with 1394 protocols, and supports data rates up to 800 megabits/second.
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The Linux OS, in the form of Moblin, LiMo, and Maemo, looks ready to take the lion’s share of the Mobile Internet Devices (MID) market and is set to capture unit volumes of 50 millions units per annum in 2013, reports market analyst ABI Research.
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The LiMo Foundation, an organization formed in 2007 by Motorola, NEC, NTT DoCoMo, Panasonic Mobile Communications, Samsung, and Vodafone to develop a Linux-based mobile phone software platform, announced this week that its membership has swelled to over 50 companies.
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Learning that KDE 4.1.0 had been released by the KDE Community, I hastened to download and install this latest, greatest Linux desktop on the Ubuntu-powered Black Tower. Put generously, the results were highly disappointing!
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Outdoor GPS devices and solutions are quickly gaining momentum, driven by user-friendly devices and converged solutions, reports market analyst firm ABI Research.
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Caltech claims its researchers have “turned science fiction into reality” with their development of a single-chip “microscopic microscope.” Although it doesn’t have any lenses, the device is said to provide magnification comparable to that of sophisticated optical microscopes.
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A tiny embedded motherboard standard inspired by Intel’s recently introduced Menlow silicon platform has gained a high-profile advocate. Advantech, Taiwan’s top industrial computer maker, claims to be the 11th company to “actively” support the 70 x 70-mm Qseven computer-on-module (COM) standard.
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A panel of embedded Linux specialists will discuss the pros and cons of commercial vs. do-it-yourself (DIY) embedded Linux implementations, at next week’s LinuxWorld conference. The session is part of the conference’s Mobile and Embedded Linux track.
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Long-time PC BIOS leader Phoenix Technologies is acquiring embedded BIOS specialist General Software. The companies expect the acquisition to help Phoenix tap into a market consisting of billions of mobile and embedded devices.
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An effort to rapidly reverse global warming is leveraging the collaborative methods of Linux and other open source software. Cquestrate aims to develop a cost-effective, “open” way to produce and introduce lime into the sea, where it will efficiently sequester dissolved CO2.
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A Silicon Valley homebrew robotics club has added vacuuming capabilities — via a small vacuum-bot stowaway — to its prototype house-cleaning robot. In a newly released video the Readybot picks up clutter from a family room floor, and then releases its pet Roomba to perform the finishing touches.
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The mobile phone operating system world was rocked recently by the announcement that Nokia had acquired all of the shares of Symbian that it didn’t already own, and that it planned to transition the OS to an open-source licensing model. How significant is this move?
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Two highly vocal — though not particularly successful — U.S.-based desktop Linux vendors have become one. The formal announcement that Xandros has acquired Linspire came today, following several days of static on the blogosphere.
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Today was Bill Gates’s last full-time day at Microsoft. To commemorate the event, Microsoft released a pair of photos showing 11 of the company’s first dozen employees — the so-called “Albuquerque Group” — back in 1978, and now.
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Since its launch last December, DeviceGuru.com’s stories have made it onto Slashdot about once a month. Unfortunately, the site’s “budget” web-hosting service balks at delivering the resulting traffic spikes. What to do?
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Having recently been bit by the Netflix STB bug, I couldn’t resist checking out Roku’s latest SoundBridge “network music player.” In less than 10 minutes of fooling around with the device after its arrival, I was ensnared!
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Via Technologies has launched gen 2 of its signature mini-motherboard standard. Mini-ITX 2.0, an evolutionary update to the seven-year-old 170×170mm form-factor, introduces new and emerging buses and interfaces such as PCI Express, SATA, Gig-E, and HD A/V, while preserving backwards-compatibility with the original standard.
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Scientists at the University of Pittsburgh have demonstrated a robotic arm being operated by a monkey’s brain activity. Signals transmitted by a microcontroller implanted in the monkey’s brain enable the animal to robotically feed itself pieces of fruit in an effortless and natural manner.
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Motorola-backed startup Camero has introduced a handheld radar device that can “see” through walls. Weighing about six pounds, the laptop computer-sized gadget is intended for use by military, law enforcement, fire, and rescue personnel.
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Market researcher Gartner Inc. has come out with its prognostication of the top ten disruptive technologies for the next five years. Included on the list are multicore processors, social networking, web mashups, cloud computing, augmented reality, and more.
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R&D think tank SRI International claims to have created the first robots to use electrically-controllable adhesion (”electroadhesion”) to reliably climb walls.
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