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Patents

Submission + - Jonathan Schwartz of Sun weighs in Litgation

Submitted by RichMan
RichMan writes: This is under politics and patents because that is where the real subject is. Sure Microsoft is threatening Linux but the real deal is the approach to customers and business strategy fostered by the consumer environment.

Jonathan Schwartz shares his thoughs on Sun's history with open development and customer relations. Sure it reads a bit like PR but some good history and points and lots of good quotes.

With business down and customers leaving, we had more than a few choices at our disposal. We were invited by one company to sue the beneficiaries of open source. We declined. We could join another and sue our customers. That seemed suicidal. We were offered the choice to scuttle Solaris, and resell someone else's operating system. We declined. And we were encouraged to innovate by developers and customers who wanted Sun around, who saw the value we delivered through true systems engineering.
Patents

Submission + - OIN Comments On Microsoft Article In Fortune

Submitted by nadamsieee
nadamsieee writes: Jerry Rosenthal, chief executive officer of Open Invention Network, issued the following statement today: "A recent article in Fortune Magazine raises — or more precisely, re-raises — tired, old allegations about the Linux operating system for the sole purpose of perpetuating unwarranted fear, uncertainty and doubt among current and potential Linux users and distributors... We stand ready to leverage our IP portfolio to maintain the open patent environment OIN has helped create." Groklaw, as always, provides perspective.
Data Storage

Submission + - Scientists uses electricity to increase HDD speed

Submitted by
vinitM
vinitM writes: "Researchers at University of Hamburg in Germany has announced a new breakthrough in hard drive technology that makes use of electricity to increase the capacity, speed and reliability of hard drive. Guido Meier and his colleagues used nanosecond pulses of electric current to push magnetic regions along a wire at 110 meters per second — a hundred times faster than was previously possible. http://www.pclaunches.com/hard_drive/scientists_us es_electricity_to_increase_hard_drive_speed_and_ca pacity.php"
Power

Submission + - Depletion Levels in Ghawar

Submitted by
Prof. Goose
Prof. Goose writes: "http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2470

Ghawar is the largest conventional oil field in the world. The field is entirely owned and operated by Saudi Aramco, the nationalized Saudi oil company. Relatively little is known about Ghawar because the company and Saudi government closely guard field performance information and per-field production details. Available information is predominantly historical (pre-nationalization), from incidental technical publications, or anecdotal.

The reason to understand Ghawar is simple: If Ghawar is in decline, it is very highly likely that world supply has plateaued.

In this post, Stuart Staniford has put together what may end up being the definitive piece of research on the world's largest field. It is an amazing tome, bringing together his fascinating original research and the extant research on Ghawar. It is not for the faint of heart, but it is written in an accessible style."
Space

Submission + - Hubble Finds Ring Of Dark Matter

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have discovered a ghostly ring of dark matter that was formed long ago during a titanic collision between two massive galaxy clusters, ScienceDaily reports. It is the first time that a dark matter distribution has been found that differs substantially from the distribution of ordinary matter.
Networking

Submission + - OpenSEA vows enterprise-grade Open Source 802.1X

Submitted by
galimore
galimore writes: "A new consortium called OpenSEA (Open Secure Edge Access) aims to bring a high-quality Open Source networking projects to enterprise standards. Their first sponsored project is the Open1X supplicant, Xsupplicant, and efforts are underway to add support for Windows and a cross-platform UI. This is interesting considering the recent acquisitions of Meetinghouse by Cisco and Funk by Juniper. A note on the Open1X homepage also mentions OpenSEA. The consortium boasts a number of well-known industry faces such as Symanetc, Extreme Networks, and Tipping Point. There is also a fair bit of University interst through UKERNA, which is kind of like the Internet2 for Europe."
Announcements

Submission + - WaterField Designs Custom HP Laptop SleeveCases

Submitted by
Heidi
Heidi writes: "WaterField Designs Announces Custom Laptop SleeveCases for HP models Introduced at Last Week's HP Mobility Summit SleeveCases available for eleven new HP laptop models; additional two available in June San Francisco, CA, May 15, 2007 — WaterField Designs announces custom-fitting laptop SleeveCases for 13 new notebook models announced at last week's HP Mobility Summit, including a sleek, ultra-light Tablet PC and the company's first 20-inch diagonal entertainment notebook. Because all design and manufacturing are done in San Francisco, WaterField Designs is able to offer custom-sized sleeves for new models almost immediately. The SleeveCase is a slim, durable covering made of a ballistic nylon shell and a high-grade neoprene interior that is customized for a snug fit. It is available in a vertical or horizontal orientation making it easily accessible from either a briefcase or backpack. Customers can choose to add a front flap for added protection or a strap for carrying the SleeveCase by itself. They can also opt for a "Piggyback," a detachable accessories pouch to carry power adapters and other gear. These sleeves for the new HP models add themselves to the list of over 40 custom laptop cases available from WaterField Designs for the Mac and PC market. Frequent flyers can insert their SleeveCase into a wheelie or larger bag to comply with the carry-on limit. At airport security, the SleeveCase can be quickly retrieved and reinserted into the WaterField Cargo, Cozmo or Vertigo bags to help speed the process. "The first step to protecting your laptop is to have the correct-fitting case to cushion it while in transport," explained Gary Waterfield, company founder. "Our SleeveCases hug your computer and the neoprene inner shell provides shock-absorbing qualities. People eager to purchase HP's new laptops can protect their new investment safely and stylishly with one of our new SleeveCases." Availability & Pricing The basic SleeveCase price is $39.00-$41.00. Optional accessories: adding a front flap ($15.00), a suspension shoulder strap and D-rings ($18.00), the Piggyback ($22.00). Specific sizes for the new HP models are listed on the WaterField Designs custom sizing chart: http://www.sfbags.com/products/sleevecases/sizing/ hp.htm About WaterField Designs WaterField Designs manufactures custom-fitted, high-quality cases and bags for a full-range of laptop computers, iPods, and other digital gear. More information is available at www.sfbags.com."
Digital

Submission + - Digital music bit rates voice your lifestyle

Submitted by applechips
applechips writes: An article running on CNET is generating huge controversy in the UK, by claiming that someone's lifestyle can be determined simply by looking at which bit rate is most common in a their digital music library.

Responses to the article such as, "Scarily accurate...", "some of the stuff said in these is spookily accurate" and "Very accurate indeed. I'm up at 320, and 90% of the paragraph applies to me", have highlighted how bizarrely predictable most digital music users actually are.
Upgrades

Submission + - Apple Upgrades Line of MacBooks

Submitted by
martinelli
martinelli writes: "The Apple rumors that surfaced in the last week turned out to be true. Apple pumped up the specs in all of their MacBooks — larger hard drives, more memory, and faster processors."
Software

Submission + - MIT Media Lab Releases New Programming Language

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Efforts to make computer programming accessible to young people began in the late 1970s with the advent of the personal PC, when another programming language with roots at MIT — Logo — allowed young people to draw shapes by steering a turtle around a screen by typing out commands. But the path to mastering most programming languages has been strewn with obstacles, since students needed to figure out not only the underlying logic but also master a brand new syntax, observe strict rules about semicolons and bracket use, and figure out what was causing error messages even as they learned the program. By contrast, Scratch — a free download at scratch.mit.edu — is easy enough for kindergarten-age children to use.
United States

Submission + - Indian software firms abusing H1B visas?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: It's not a big surprise and is in fact a known fact that a bunch of Indian IT companies, that have opened offices in the US , engage in outright abuse of H1B visas by bringing "highly-skilled" workers from India. From this Times-of-India article, "As the US Senate gets ready to take up the comprehensive immigration reform legislation, the two top law makers — Republican Senator Charles Grassley and Democratic Senator Richard Durbin — said "more and more it appears that companies are using H-1B visas to displace qualified, American workers." The companies the senators sent letters to were Infosys Technologies, Wipro Ltd., Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., Patni Computer Systems, I-Flex Solutions Inc., Satyam Computer Services Ltd., Larsen & Toubro Infotech Ltd., Tech Mahindra Americas Inc. and Mphasis Corp. As if outsourcing of jobs to India wasn't enough, these companies are setting up shops right here in the US to bring in cheap labour resulting in lower wages and displaced American workers.
Spam

Submission + - A decentralized myspace to filter spam?

Submitted by
JonathanBrickman0000
JonathanBrickman0000 writes: "Just recently got onto myspace, am enjoying, but just now read about the growing spam problem. The most significant downside, it seems to me, is the centralization of it all on one server farm, one platform, one database. Mightn't it be better to do this using a more distributed technology? Perhaps a way to squirt enough webapp code (could be multilingual, Perl and PHP and server-side Java and Ruby and anything else that can support the APIs) onto three or four different major web-server architectures, to allow us to weld our own $10/month web spaces on tens of thousands of different servers, into one coherent whole which we all independently control most carefully for our own benefit and the benefit of all. And then when we have such a distributed setup, all of us participating make money exactly the way MySpace does, to the limit of the capacity of the web space we are either renting or owning.

Not entirely unlike IRC in distributed nature, but MySpace-like instead, and using unspecialized hardware and software, both rented space and owned servers, with real income-production potential.

Anyone care to try?"
Operating Systems

Performance Evaluation of Xen Vs. OpenVZ 116

Posted by kdawson from the price-to-pay dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Compared to an operating-system-level virtualization technology like OpenVZ, Xen — a hypervisor-level virtualization technology that allows multiple operating systems to be run with and without para-virtualization — trades off performance for much better isolation and security. OpenVZ's performance advantage due to running virtual containers in a single operating system kernel can be significant. A performance evaluation study (PDF) done by researchers at the University of Michigan and HP labs provides insight into how big a performance penalty Zen pays and what causes the overheads (primarily L2 cache misses)." From the report: "We compare both technologies with a base system in terms of application performance, resource consumption, scalability, low-level system metrics like cache misses and virtualization-specific metrics like Domain-0 consumption in Xen. Our experiments indicate that the average response time can increase by over 400% in Xen and only a modest 100% in OpenVZ as the number of application instances grows from one to four... A similar trend is observed in CPU consumptions of virtual containers."
Enlightenment

Submission + - Toyota going 100% hybrid by 2020

Submitted by
autofan1
autofan1 writes: "http://www.motorauthority.com/cars/toyota/toyota-c utting-hybrid-costs/ Toyota's vice president in charge of powertrain development, Masatami Takimoto, has said cost cutting on the electric motor, battery and inverter were all showing positive results in reducing the costs of hybrid technology and by the time Toyota's sales goal of one million hybrids annually is reached, it "expect margins to be equal to gasoline cars". Takimoto also made the bold claim that by 2020, hybrids will be the standard drivetrain and account for "100 percent" of Toyota's cars as they would be no more expensive to produce than a conventional vehicle."

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