bits

By incorporating this support within the kernel, it makes it easier for Linux distributors to support Centrino-based Wi-Fi. However, vendors must still <http://ipw2100.sourceforge.net/firmware.php?fid=4>obtain the Intel driver firmware itself separately from the kernel due to Intel's licensing restrictions.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1881470,00.asp?kc=ewnws110405dtx1k0000599

The Intel firmware license (http://ipw2100.sourceforge.net/firmware.php?fid=4) basically says you are licensed to use it ONLY on Intel Components -- does that include a system with an AMD CPU??:)

The Great Northern: A Cluster?

Or are Chicago+Detroit in the cluster too (along with Lacrosse!:)

>==============================================================================
>www.TheGreatNorth.com
>======================
>
>the four stages(sic?) of the innovation economy -
> - Current Performance
> - Resource Flow
> - Innovation Capacity
> - Development Capacity
>
>======================
>Innovation Indicators
> ...
> Indicators of regional inspiration compare research and development
> (R&D) expenditures by academic institutions, small businesses,
> corporations, and medical institutions. The successful competition
> for federal research grants assesses the quality of the regional
> research infrastructure.
> ...
> Of the 21 indicators used to assess inspiration??? <-- what are they?
>
>Invention Indicators
> (I think the Invention==patents metric is limited:)
> Invention Indicators focus on patents and the commercial possibility
> that regional patents represent....the perceived commercial
> potential of new knowledge in the region and a common benchmark for
> innovation.
>
>Momentum Indicators
> (...hmmm...sounds good - smells like apple pie - what is it?? just me?)
> Success breeds more success, ...branded 'hot spots'... Economic
> momentum provides a solid foundation for future growth, creates
> civic pride and aspiration, and contributes to regional wealth.
>
>Means Indicators
> (this one sounds more real to me?)
> Means Indicators assess the presence, cost, and willingness to
> support critical regional infrastructure in the areas of education,
> communications, transportation, business costs, and
> government supplied services.
>
>================
>
>Great Northern - A Partner in Innovation?
> (other than they may not get it??:)
>
> The Great North acts as the regional catalyst and conscience to
> sustain the core community values, work ethic, and spirit of
> innovation that distinguish our region. Founded on the premise that
> our region's greatest challenges are best met by the collaborative
> efforts of business, academic, government, labor, and media
> organizations, The Great North unites civic-minded, CEO-level
> leadership, who are purposefully invited onto The Great North Board
> of Directors for their multiple regional perspectives.

Beyond catalyzing changes in what we do, technology profoundly affects how we think. The Internet is a new context for self-exploration and social encounter. Psychopharmacology, robotics, nanotechnology, genetic engineering, biotechnology, and artificial intelligence are among the technologies that raise fundamental questions about selfhood, identity, community, and what it means to be human.

Once It Was Direct to Video, Now It's Direct to the Web - New York Times

Once It Was Direct to Video, Now It's Direct to the Web - New York Times: "As cheaper technology and a seemingly inexhaustible hipness quotient have led to more filmmakers and films being produced, theatrical distribution has become more expensive, the outlets more cautious, and the returns on investments more dubious. The Internet has absorbed some of the spillover, although the bigger success stories - notably, the political films of Robert Greenwald ('Uncovered: The War on Iraq,' 'Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism'), or 'Faster,' a highly lucrative motorcycle documentary narrated by Ewan McGregor - have been niche movies with a core audience."

Parents Fret That Dialing Up Interferes With Growing Up - New York Times

A report on teenagers and technology released this summer by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that teenagers' use of computers has increased significantly. More than half of teenage Internet users go online daily, up from 42 percent in 2000, the report said; 81 percent of those users play video games, up from 52 percent.

Instant messaging has become "the digital communication backbone of teens' daily lives," used by 75 percent of online teenagers, according to the Pew report. "Parents are really struggling with this," said David Walsh, the president of the National Institute on Media and the Family, a nonprofit educational organization in Minneapolis that began a program this year to help families reduce screen time and increase physical activity. "As the gadgets keep evolving, they keep consuming more and more of our kids' time. Our kids need a balanced diet of activity, and the problem is that it's getting out of balance. I don't think as a society we're dealing with it yet."">Parents Fret That Dialing Up Interferes With Growing Up - New York Times: "A report on teenagers and technology released this summer by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that teenagers' use of computers has increased significantly. More than half of teenage Internet users go online daily, up from 42 percent in 2000, the report said; 81 percent of those users play video games, up from 52 percent.

Instant messaging has become 'the digital communication backbone of teens' daily lives,' used by 75 percent of online teenagers, according to the Pew report. 'Parents are really struggling with this,' said David Walsh, the president of the National Institute on Media and the Family, a nonprofit educational organization in Minneapolis that began a program this year to help families reduce screen time and increase physical activity. 'As the gadgets keep evolving, they keep consuming more and more of our kids' time. Our kids need a balanced diet of activity, and the problem is that it's getting out of balance. I don't think as a society we're dealing with it yet.'"

A Journey to a Thousand Maps Begins With an Open Code

By DAMON DARLIN
Published: October 20, 2005

A Google map is no longer just a Google map.

You can still search Google Maps to figure out how to get from here to there, but why would you, when you can use it to pinpoint kosher restaurants in Cincinnati, traffic cameras in Dublin, or hot spring spas anywhere in the United States? How about finding coffee shops in Seattle that provide free wireless Internet access? Or would you prefer to locate the McMansion your boss just bought and find how out exactly how much he paid for it?

An army of programmers, most of them doing it just for fun, has grabbed the software code that generates the distinctive maps with their drop-shadowed virtual pushpins, and combined it with other data like the locations of potholes, taco trucks and U.F.O. sightings, and even the sites of murders and muggings.

The result is Google map mash-ups, the latest form of Internet information repackaged for entertainment and, perhaps, profit. For instance, type the official airline flight abbreviation and flight number into the Google search engine and FBOweb.com should come up at the top of the results page. Click on that and you will see a pushpin marking the spot where the plane is. The service also provides a data box listing the speed, altitude and estimated time of arrival of the flight.

US deploys global IP strategy

USPTO launches three-pronged attack
By Faultline
29 September 2005

The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is rapidly becoming the cornerstone of US global hegemony, and this week a new initiative, supposedly from US President George Bush, and talked up by US Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez, was intended to push the intellectual property agenda overseas.

There are three new initiatives, one to put intellectual property rights experts on watch in key overseas countries including Brazil, China, India and Russia, and a new Small Business Outreach program to educate US small businesses on how to protect their intellectual property rights and a global intellectual property academy which is expected to provide training for foreign government officials on IP issues."

Information Commons: A bright star for the future of information

September 27, 2005
-Posted by Chris Jablonski

In the eyes of its creators, the World Wide Web was never designed to take on the role as the be-all end-all architecture for a truly distributed global information system. But while large vendors, standards groups and technologists have grown dependent on the Web and treat it that way, some researchers are taking a revolutionary approach to the problem and addressing it at the very core of information design. A newly published white paper from Harbor Research (a firm specializing in pervasive computing), entitled Designing the Future of Information, The Internet beyond the Web looks at two initiatives—the 'Information Commons” of Maya Design, and 'Internet Zero' from MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms.

The Information Commons is a universal database to which anyone can contribute, and which liberates information by abandoning relational databasing and the client-server computing model, according to the white paper. It has been under development at Maya Design for over 15 years as the result of a $50 million research contract from several federal agencies, including DARPA, to pursue 'information liquidity,' or the flow of information in distributed computing environments. Their goal is to build a scalable information space that can support trillions of devices.

I spoke today with Josh Knauer, director of advanced development at MAYA Design about the Information Commons and how it is progressing. According to Knauer, Maya (which stands for Most Advanced Yet Acceptable) is using P2P technology—in the sense of information sharing and not file sharing—to link together repositories of public and private datasets in the public information space created by Maya. These data and data relationships are stored in universal data containers called 'u-forms,' which are then coded with a UUID, or universally unique identifiers. These are the basic building blocks of the company's Visage Information Architecture (VIA), which allows data repositories to effortlessly link or fuse together to achieve 'liquidity' (the paper has more details)."

The $100 laptop moves closer to reality

By Mike Ricciuti, CNET News.com
September 28, 2005, 8:55 AM PT


CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--A low-cost computer for the masses moved one step closer to reality on Wednesday.

Nicholas Negroponte, the co-founder of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, detailed specifications for a $100 windup-powered laptop targeted at children in developing nations.

Negroponte, who laid out his original proposal at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January, said MIT and his nonprofit group, called One Laptop Per Child, is in discussions with five countries--Brazil, China, Thailand, Egypt and South Africa--to distribute up to 15 million test systems to children."

Coming Next Year: The First 'Trusted' Linux Operating System

Sept. 27, 2005
By Larry Greenemeier
InformationWeek

Red Hat, with help from IBM and Trusted Computing Solutions, plans to put its operating system through the paces of the National Information Assurance Partnership's Common Criteria evaluation program to create the first 'trusted' Linux operating system.

Mitigating Risk by Hiring Open Source Developers

Hiring a new employee is almost always a risk, and hiring the wrong employee is one of the most costly mistakes that a manager can make. As a result, tech companies spend ....

If, however, you are choosing a candidate from the ever-growing pool of programmers who contribute to open source projects, you can get an inside look at a programmer's work on actual projects with actual team members by examining the open source projects he participates in.

[More ...]

Broadband Investment and Consumer Choice Act.

SSSCA, CBDTPA, and BICCA: Acrimonious Acronyms
by Susan at 09:17PM (EDT) on July 29, 2005 | Permanent Link

All three of these acronyms stand for federal legislative attempts to design digital devices and applications. The first two failed. The third has just been proposed.

So what are these things? The first, the 2001 Security Systems Standards and Certification Act, suggested that any "interactive digital device" (defined as "any machine, device, product, software, or technology, whether or not included with or as part of some other machine, device, product, software, or technology, that is designed, marketed or used for the primary purpose of, and that is capable of, storing, retrieving, processing, performing, transmitting, receiving, or copying information in digital form") needed to respect digital content restrictions and "certified security" technologies. Because standards for indicating digital content restrictions (and implementing them) didn't exist, industry was supposed to come up with them.

[More ...]

Open-Source Software Ratings System

A university, a startup, and chip giant Intel are pushing a proposal for
a standard model to rate open-source software to provide customers with
a better sense of the maturity of the more than 100,000 open-source
projects available today.

The Business Readiness Ratings (BRR) model unveiled Monday (http://www.openbrr.org/) is the brainchild of Carnegie Mellon University (Profile, Products, Articles) West's Center for Open Source Investigation (COSI) and is being cosponsored by open-source testing and certification startup SpikeSource and Intel.

[More ...]

OGRE3D: 3D Rendering Package

OGRE v1.0 [Azathoth] represents the culmination of 4 years of continuous development, resulting in what is now regarded by many as the leading open source real time 3D rendering engine. OGRE is packed with features to make your development life easier, whether you're making games, architectural visualisation, simulations, or anything else which requires a top-notch 3D rendering solution.

Eclipse.Org

Eclipse is a kind of universal tool platform - an open extensible IDE for anything and nothing in particular. Find out what eclipse is all about - check out the Eclipse Roadmap, white paper, read some technical articles, visit the newsgroups, take a look at the projects, and pick up the latest downloads. Don't forget to check out the Eclipse Project FAQ and online documentation. You can find out about eclipse-related events, projects, plug-ins and websites on the Community page.

For software licensing, website terms of use, and legal FAQs, please see our legal stuff page. Eclipse logos and graphics are found on our logos page. And, our thanks to HP, IBM, Intel, Magma and Novell for generous donations to our website infrastructure!

voip-info.org: Open Source VoIP Wiki

Welcome to the VOIP Wiki - a reference guide to all things VOIP
This Wiki covers everything related to VOIP, software, hardware, service providers, reviews, configurations, standards, tips & tricks and everything else related to voice over IP networks, IP telephony and Internet Telephony.

Comprehensive list of Open Source Telephony work at:

http://www.voip-info.org/wiki-Open+Source+VOIP+Software

SourceLabs: Installation/Support/Certification

SourceLabs lets corporate IT buyers realize the strategic flexibility of using open source software without trading off the dependability, convenience and mission critical support that production systems require.

SourceLabs sells support and maintenance subscriptions for tested, certified "stacks" of open source infrastructure software, which we provide free of charge. Rather than simply repackaging the unit tests produced by open source communities, the company's rigorous CERT7 testing framework produces a documented, reproducible certification for functionality, scalability, stress response, failover and security.

Groundworks: Open IT Infrastructure Management

GroundWork's open source IT infrastructure monitoring solution delivers enterprise-class availability and performance for a fraction of the cost of commercial alternatives.

Based on powerful open source software such as Nagios, RRDTool and MySQL, GroundWork Monitor is a complete and practical solution for today's mission-critical IT infrastructures.

Open Source Availability and Performance Monitoring

GroundWork Monitor provides a low-cost, open source-based solution for accurately monitoring your network availability and performance. Using active and passive agents, GroundWork Monitor queries applications, network equipment, servers and other components to identify availability and performance, and communicates these system metrics via a browser-based interface. If service levels or availability dip, GroundWork Monitor proactively alerts your IT staff via pagers, email, and phone calls.

Black Duck: Open Source License Compliance

Black Duck offers software compliance management solutions that help companies govern how software assets are created, managed, and licensed. The company was formed in late 2002 to apply advanced technology to this challenge — a challenge addressed today by manual, expensive, and error-prone approaches.

Software development has changed radically over the past ten years. One aspect of this change is the routine use of third party and open source components to boost productivity. But building on code from third parties injects business and licensing issues into the software development process — issues that can put software assets at risk.

Plone: Content Management with Python

Plone is powerful and flexible. It is ideal as an intranet and extranet server, as a document publishing system, a portal server and as a groupware tool for collaboration between separately located entities.

The Plone Foundation was formed in May 2004 to serve as a supporting organization for Plone. We are modeled after similar ventures, such as the Apache Software Foundation, and will be providing support for the development and marketing of Plone. In addition, the Foundation will be the legal owner of the Plone code, trademarks, and domain names. Our goal is to ensure that Plone remains the premier open source content management system and that we broaden its acceptance and visibility.