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A Silicon Valley start-up backed by an early Google employee is taking a novel approach to building a business for domestic robots and driverless vehicles: it will take it's sweet time.

The senior director of entertainment products at Motorola questions whether Apple will truly "open up" the iPhone. "We've yet to see Apple's SDK [software developers' kit], and I'm sure there will be some level of [Apple] control that goes along with it. I guarantee you that you will not see a Napster music service on the iPhone," said David Ulmer, as he and three other wireless industry big-wigs pondered the impact of Apple's latest status symbol at this week's CTIA Wireless I.T. and Entertainment trade show in San Francisco.

Desktop Linux needs drivers. Right? Of course. So why is Novell's Greg Kroah-Hartman, a Linux kernel developer and head of the Linux Driver Project, having to ask people to tell him about devices that need drivers? It's a good question, and Kroah-Hartman doesn't have the complete answer. What he does know, as he explained in his blog, is that while the Linux Driver Project now has "over 300 different developers signed up to help create and maintain Linux drivers," at the same time he doesn't have "enough work to keep them busy."

How many times have you been stuck at work when the latest episode of a podcast such as LugRadio has become available for download, or the latest version of your favourite Linux distribution has been released? Wouldn’t it be really useful if you could access a server at home through your web browser and order it to download that file, so that it’s waiting for you when you get there? Or, if you like to sleep in peace with your desktop off, wouldn’t it be great if you could remotely access a BitTorrent client on the home server in your attic and tell it to run the downloads while you sleep? -- Here's how.

In Section 2 we saw that, on some machines, the cost of access to specific regions of physical memory differs depending on where the access originated. This type of hardware requires special care from the OS and the applications. We will start with a few details of NUMA hardware, then we will cover some of the support the Linux kernel provides for NUMA.

Ballmer's statement that Linux "uses our intellectual property." -- along with follow-up claims by Microsoft executives that they had found violations of 235 patents in Linux and other open-source software -- caused a sudden refrosting of what had been a slowly thawing relationship between the company and the open-source community. By dangling the threat of patent-infringement lawsuits over the heads of users and vendors alike, "Microsoft opened up a can of worms with the open-source community that they have been attempting to close since then," said Charles King, an analyst at Pund-IT Inc. in Hayward, Calif. So the two sides remain wary "frenemies." And their friend-or-foe relationship has continued to evolve in both directions this month.

Pepper Computer, manufacturer of the original Pepper Pads and developer of the Pepper Linux OS, has admittedly seen better days. After months of silence from the firm's executives led forum members to write the company off as dead, CEO Len Kawell has finally responded to users' pleas and posted a summary of Pepper's current state of affairs -- but not before we left a message at headquarters stating our intentions to write up a deathwatch piece this week.

Rupert's just said again what I've been hearing in various places: Vista's awkwardness is going to drive people to Linux. That's something I heard when Specavers moved to Linux. They'd been thinking about moving before, but there was always a barrier - the cost of retraining. That's the theory at least - but let's not forget that home users now effectively cannot get Windows XP. They're pushed towards Vista Home Premium, and that means here's a generation who will go through the Vistification process at home on their own time, at their own expense.

From Tectonic, the South African government accepts ODF as the document standard. The adoption of ODF (Open Document Format) in our government is indeed great news, and hopefully it will have an effect on other developing countries when decisions like these are made. What disturbs me though, is the criteria for what qualifies as an open standard, according to the MIOS document.

The SCO Group, which earlier this month filed for bankrupcy protection, says it has received an offer for its Unix business. A group of New York investors, backed by York Capital Management, are willing to pay $36m. This includes a $10m credit for lawyers' bills.

Virtual Bridges, a provider of desktop and enterprise virtualization solutions for business, announced today the release of a major upgrade to its Virtual Desktop Server product. Virtual Desktop Server, Virtual Bridges’ Educational/SMB and enterprise product, allows an organization to deploy multiple Windows desktop sessions to PCs, Workstations and thin clients from a non-Windows server such as Linux and Solaris.

What’s the lowest price you can find for a desktop PC? Next time you run out of baked beans, beer or …. big bunches of bananas (Alliteration too!) and nip to that shopping behemoth known as Tesco, you’ll be pleased to hear you can fill your basket with a PC for £139 as well! However this isn’t just a PC like any other … it’s running Ubuntu (V6.06).

Seems that ATI/AMD has made some serious progress on their drivers since the announcement of their new-found Linux enthusiasm. With driver version 8.42.3, you can find these awesome new additions..

Novell today appointed Tim Wolfe as president, Novell Americas, responsible for the execution of Novell's strategy across the Americas. Wolfe, who brings nearly three decades of software, technology and consulting leadership experience to the role, most recently held the position of vice president and general manager of Novell's East region in the United States. He will play a key role in Novell's transition to a greater focus on customers and partners in implementing the company's go-to-market strategy.

Today’s big news: Alice will bring Fiber to the building (see Wikipedia’s “Fiber to the premises” entry) to Hamburg, as does Netcologne in, well, Cologne, and M-Net in Munich. Now if they would only understand that it’s not all about triple play (read: TV over Ethernet) for end-customers, but a really distributed and symmetric internet. That would be innovation indeed then. Give us Gigabit to the homes, and we will give back Gigabytes of useful information for the rest of the world.

Interop The virtualization hypervisor belongs in server hardware - not in the operating system. So says Xensource, friend and partner of the operating system giants Microsoft, Red Hat and Novell. "Hypervisor will be delivered in hardware. In my view, it's a separate layer [from the operating system] because it's part of the box," Crosby told several hundred people gathered for his Interop keynote at the Jacob Javits Center in New York. "Platform virtualization is here to stay."

About a month ago, Network Appliance sued Sun to try to stop the competitive impact of ZFS on their business. Their objectives were clear - number one, they'd like us to unfree ZFS, to retract it from the free software community. Second, they want us to limit ZFS's allowable field of use to computers - and to forbid its use in storage devices. So later this week, we're going to use our defensive patent portfolio to respond to Network Appliance, filing a comprehensive reciprocal suit. As a part of this suit, we are requesting a permanent injunction to remove all of their filer products from the marketplace, and are examining the original NFS license - on which Network Appliance was started. By opting to litigate vs. innovate, they are disrupting their customers and employees across the world.

This article describes a compact little JSP tag library that uses some external JavaScript to bring easy-to-use Ajax support to your JSP pages, and how AjaxTags makes an excellent choice for quick, easy, and sophisticated Ajax applications.

Sabayon Linux is an up and coming Linux OS. The artwork of this Gentoo based Linux distribution is wonderful. Packed with software I think this distribution is one that everyone would enjoy.

R2integrated (R2i) is a Microsoft shop that has discovered how well open source software and communities can build a solid business. Principal Chris Chodnicki says it was a customer request that turned the technology consultancy toward DotNetNuke (DNN), an open source Web application framework. R2i began using and contributing to DNN about a year ago after Snyder's of Hanover asked the company to consider using DNN to build Snyder's corporate intranet. Since then, "We went from this little five-man company to 50 employees, all due to the alignment with this open source product."