Developages - Development and Technology Blog

The FCC has set rules for the upcoming auction of 700-MHz spectrum and they went halfway on the four open access principles that Google and others had called for. The agency said yes to “open devices” and “open applications,” thus requiring the auction winner to permit consumers to use any device or application on the network. But the FCC turned down “open services” and “open networks,” so the winners will not be obligated to let others buy access at wholesale prices in order to offer network services. This vote would seem to mean that Google won’t bid in the spectrum auction. Ars has a more in-depth look at the outcome.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Original post by kdawson

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Last night we sat down for dinner with a company that, with the use of open source hardware, intends to invert the top down consumer electronics market as we know it — a lofty goal, no doubt. But when Bug Labs (based in New York) introduces their modular gadget kits later this year, end users (read: tech enthusiasts) will be able buy interchangeable electronics components with a common interface capable of mixing, matching, and building custom devices (without having to lift a soldering iron). Sounds kind of out there, but here’s the model:

• Users snag a small Linux-based micro-PC with USB, WiFi, Bluetooth, and plenty of special ports for attaching these functionality modules.
• Users can develop Java apps and load custom software onto the base device to take advantage of expansion modules for any usage scenarios they can dream up.
• Users expand each portable’s capabilities by adding modules, such as a small or large screen, QWERTY keyboard, GPS, camera, speaker, etc.; the user can add whatever is necessary to build the gadget that fits their purpose. (Sorry, no cell radio modules at launch.)
• Each component is accessible and web addressable, meaning users can write and load software to / from their own or other users’ components, as well as share their functionality or data (i.e. user A can use an app to remotely share his / her GPS locator or digital camera with user B).
• Of course, all these hardware component schematics, interface protocols, etc. will be made available online if you want to build your own Bug-based gear.
• Bug Labs might also allow users to submit novel and relatively marketable configurations for mass manufacturing, and serve as a storefront for budding gadget designers using the Bug platform.

Will a DIY open source hardware hacker’s kit ever be enough to enable Joe Blow to develop the next RAZR or iPod? Probably not to start; effective portable electronics requires a very vertical design process, but if CE development is ever going to be democratized the way software development was over 30 years ago, then clear and open source components and systems is the kind of approach that could be capable of doing it.

 

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Original post by Ryan Block

Nu Metal is a lot of things to lot of people–however, the words “environmentally conscious,” do often come up, when discussing the genre. Bakersfield outfit, Korn, seems determined to change that. The Grammy award winning group announced plans to fuel all 16 (!) of their vehicles on the upcoming Family Values Tour with domestically produced bio-fuels.

The group is also introducing their own band-branded biofuel, under the name Korntastic. I’d be lying if I said I was a Korn fan, but honestly, any band who has the guts to sell biofuel using their name and the suffix “tastic” tacked onto the end, deserves kudos in my book.

Says lead singer, Jonathan Davis: “We can’t save the planet overnight but this is our way of saying everyone has to start somewhere. As a touring band it’s our responsibility to start making a difference. We encourage all other bands touring this summer to do the
same.”

Now, if only it were possible to harness the power of goatees.

Original post by Brian Heater

Filed under: Features

Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about technology, multimedia, and digital entertainment:

For all the attention on the love-hate relationship between Apple and Microsoft, there’s another software superpower with which Apple is increasingly butting heads. Apple was an early investor in Adobe and an early supporter of PostScript, which drove the first LaserWriters and launched the desktop publishing market. When Steve Jobs left Apple and founded NeXT, that company used Display PostScript as the imaging engine for the company’s black boxes.

Photoshop and other members of Adobe’s Creative Suite remain some of the most popular creative tools on the Mac. For years, Photoshop made cameos at Apple keynotes as the company argued the superiority of the PowerPC architecture.

But the relationship has been strained at times as well. After going on lots of minor quests involving the slaying of forest creatures, Adobe released PostScript Level 2. But Apple surprised nearly everyone when it partnered with Microsoft in 1989 to position TrueType and the now-forgotten TrueImage as a rival to Adobe’s technology. Apple would later try again to surpass Adobe’s font technology with QuickDraw GX before adopting PDF as the graphics lingua franca for Mac OS X.

Continue reading Switched On: Apple’s brash Flash clash rehash

 

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Original post by Ross Rubin

Patrick writes -

A few issues back Make did a feature on making changes to one’s vehicle. I′d like to share something similar that’s in the spirit of Make–making vehicles accessible for the disabled. A whole lotta creative engineering is involved, and every job is a custom one, fit specifically for that person’s needs.

Recently, I got my truck finished up after a nine month process of bureaucracy, paperwork, fittings, brainstorming, training, debugging and more brainstorming. Since each job is custom, I had a door panel modified, the factory console ripped out and a fab’ed new one put in place, a longer sliding lock for where I need to lock down. That’s the short of it, really.

Accessible vehicles - Link.

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Original post by Popgadget: Personal Tech for Women

It looks like the New York Time’s David Pogue isn’t the only Dave who wasn’t exactly thrilled with his first iPhone bill. It seems that designer and illustrator David Stolte took his newest gadget with him on a recent trip to England and Ireland. When he got back, and got his bill, he probably wished he had tracked down a leprechaun on his travels, because he sure could have used a pot of gold.

His bill, with international roaming charges, was $3,000. According to him, the rep said he′d be charged $.005 per KB, and he didn’t do the math. Sounds like he probably also showed off his fancy new phone’s features to a lot of friends.

Stolte claims to have attempted to check his data usage twice during his trip, only to get a “usage is unavailable message,” but apparently kept downloading anyway.After doing a little post-shock research, Stolte found out that AT&T offers a $70 per month international data plan to its Blackberry customers, and hoped that the company would give him a deal like that, and make it retroactive to his last bill. Customer service reps countered by offering him $400 “courtesy credit” on toward his $3K bill, so long as he signed up for a $300 annual international data plan, with a 20MB a month limit.

That wasn′t good enough for Stolte, so he took his story of wireless woe to the Internet, and BoingBoing in particular today. Lo and behold, within hours, AT&ampT called Stolte out of the blue, claiming it was all a “miscommunication,” and that they would, of course, waive all charges.

Bottom line folks, leave your iPhone at home when you travel abroad, unless you have the aforementioned international data plan, or a Scrooge McDuck-sized vault full of coinage. Because while this fairy tale may have a happy ending, AT&ampT probably expects us all to learn our lesson along with David Stolte.

Post by Matt Safford

Original post by Gearlog

onehitwonder writes “Well-known CIO John Halamka has rigorously tested six different operating systems over the course of a year in an effort to find a viable alternative to Microsoft Windows on his laptop and his company’s computers. Here is CIO.com’s initial writeup on Halamka’s experiences; we discussed their followup article on SUSE. Now CIO is running a writeup on Halamka’s take on Ubuntu and how it stacks up against Novell SUSE 10, RHEL, Fedora, XP, and Mac OS X, in a life-and-death business environment.” For the impatient, here’s Halamka’s conclusion: “A balanced approach of Windows for the niche business application user, Macs for the graphic artists/researchers, SUSE for enterprise kiosks/thin clients, and Ubuntu for power users seems like the sweet spot for 2008.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Original post by kdawson

Belkin’s snazzy new Sport Armband for iPhone just arrived, so I figured I’d take it for a run along with the Nike + iPod adapter. Unfortunately, no dice. When the Nike adapter is plugged into the iPhone, the “This accessory is not supported by iPhone” message pops up. However, I think one day it might work via firmware update and/or launch of a new adapter. Here’s why…

Background: Nike + iPod Sport Kit only works with iPod Nanos, not full size iPods. Why? Because, unlike the Nano, the iPod has moving parts. Apple probably doesn′t want to recommend running around with your iPod, because the shock might offset the needle on the hard drive and/or some of the other sensitive pieces inside.

However, the iPhone is like the Nano in that it uses a flash memory for storage, hence no moving parts. So, why not allow the Nike + iPod adapter to work on the iPhone? Perhaps a firmware update will soon to address this. Or, here’s some wishful thinking: The iPhone has Bluetooth and WiFi radios. Maybe Apple and Nike will launch a new Sport Kit that works over one of these radios, which would eliminate the need for the current Sport adapter that plugs into the bottom of the Nano. The product would be just the unit that fits in your shoe and talks to your iPhone via Bluetooth or Wifi. Hence the “Nike + iPhone Sport Kit.”

In the meantime, the Belkin armband is great, it feels secure, has a little pouch for your key(s) and the touch interface is surprisingly functional even through the plastic casing.

Post by PJ Jacobowitz

Original post by Brian Heater

Filed under: Portable Audio

It looks like Apple has more than just 3 billion songs sold to celebrate, as it’s now managed to bring longtime hold-outs Led Zepplin into the iTunes fold. The band isn’t quite going all out, however, with it instead simply offering greatest hits of sorts called “Mothership,” which will include ‘Stairway to Heaven’, ‘Whole Lotta Love,’ ‘Dazed and Confused’ and other songs personally selected Jimmy Page, Robert Plant and John Paul Jones. Look for it to be available on November 12th. In other iTunes news, Apple appears to have found itself on Eminem’s bad side (again), with the rapper and his music publisher now suing the company over, you guessed it, alleged copyright violations. As The Detroit News reports, Eminem′s music publisher and copyright manager are claiming that they never actually authorized Universal to offer Eminem′s music on iTunes in the first place, and they’re now asking Apple to cease and desist its reproduction and distribution. Not surprisingly Apple doesn’t appear to be quite ready to comply with that, although it’s so far staying mum on the matter.

Read - Reuters, “Apple says iTunes sales top 3 billion songs”
Read - The Observer, “Led Zeppelin join the net generation”
Read - The Detroit News, “Eminem suit targets Apple” [Via AppleInsider]

 

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Original post by Donald Melanson

Filed under: Gaming

And so we’ve come full circle. After accurately predicting that $100 PS3 price drop a few weeks back, Circuit City is back in the rumor game with a flyer that seems to confirm the $50 price cut for the Xbox 360, and even tosses in some info on price breaks for the Elite and Core systems. According to the flyer, on August 12th the 360 Premium will dip to $350, and include a copy of Rockstar’s “Table Tennis,” while the Elite will raid your wallet for $450 — a $30 reduction — and include zero free games. Finally, the Xbox 360 Core will get $20 lopped off, and sell for $280, which might be the end of the road for the stripped down console once stock runs out.

[Thanks, Sam]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Original post by Paul Miller

Mike took an old desk lamp and recycled into an ambient device, fetching weather information from Internet via an ATmega168 micro controller and Ethernet chip - Link.

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Original post by Popgadget: Personal Tech for Women

An anonymous reader writes “The Software Freedom Law Center has given legal clearance to OpenHAL, a wireless component for Linux, based on their pro-bono review of the code. This announcement dispels allegations of infringement on Atheros’ proprietary HAL software. ‘We believe that this outcome will clear the way for eventual acceptance of a new wireless driver into the Linux kernel,’ said John Linville, the Linux kernel maintainer for wireless networking.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Original post by kdawson

Filed under: Robots

While these days robotics are no stranger to the battlefield, the UK Ministry of Defence is hoping to take things a step further with its “Grand Challenge” competition, which aims to bring autonomous, information-gathering robots to urban warfare situations. Fourteen teams have been picked as finalists, and the true test will come next summer when the robots roll into Copehill Down, an urban warfare training center built during the Cold War, and duke it out with mock targets. The MoD’s hope is for a robot to be able to identify potential snipers, enemy vehicles and other human threats, with a minimum of human guidance, and then report that information back to ground troops gearing up for an assault. Approaches to the challenge include miniature unmanned planes and copters equipped with high-def cameras, and combination setups that include ground units with radar and thermal detection along with aerial units. Points will be awarded for accuracy of recon and autonomy, and the winning team will receive a fancy trophy and military funding. The robots are in it for the glory and the hefty retirement benefits.

[Via BBC News]

 

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Original post by Paul Miller

Heading on your summer vacation soon? If you′re like us—and you probably are since you′re reading this—you can’t go far without your gadgets. In honor of that, we’ve pulled together our reviews of the most rugged and portable devices–perfect for hiking, camping or a day at the beach. Check out Rugged Devices for the Road on PCMag.com.

Original post by Blogging Molly

Filed under: Announcements

We know you’ve been waiting patiently to find out who won the super rare E Ink watch — congratulations to Chris Garman, who’s now the luckiest watch-wearer on his block! To everyone else who gave it a shot, thanks for entering. Oh, and stick close, we’ll have another super rare giveaway shortly.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Original post by Ryan Block