LinuxDevices year-end review: BR Top technology stories of 2006
Dec 20, 2000 — by LinuxDevices Staff — from the LinuxDevices Archive — viewsTHE UNINTENDED SIDE EFFECTS OF BUILT-IN DRM
Building DRM into chips, hard drives, and OSes is dumb, because of unintended consequences to normal computer operation, says Victor Yodaiken in this guest editorial. Yodaiken uses accepted engineering best practices, along with clever real-world examples such as the recent Sony rootkit debacle, to explain why. Details
IMS, UMA CLASH IN UNFOLDING FMC BATTLE
A struggle has emerged in the mobile phone industry, between competing approaches to “fixed mobile convergence,” or FMC. One approach provides consumers with a single number for calls routed over both “fixed” WiFi access points and “mobile” cellular radio networks. The other works with access points that are not controlled by mobile operators. Details
UMPC NEXT LINUX HACKER TARGET?
After three weeks of leaked videos and breathless website stripteasing, Microsoft has revealed its “Ultra Mobile PC” (UMPC) project. In conjunction with an event at the massive CeBIT trade show in Hannover, Germany last week, the software giant unleashed corporate and community Websites devoted to the concept, formerly codenamed “Origami.” Now, the big question is: will these wireless mini-tablet PCs run Linux? Details
OSU CREATES WORLD'S FIRST TOTALLY TRANSPARENT IC
Researchers at Oregon State University (OSU) have used conventional photolithography techniques to produce completely transparent integrated circuits from inorganic compounds, an advance called a “quantum step” toward extremely inexpensive electronics that can be embedded in automobile windshields, cell phones, TVs, games, solar panels, and toys, among other applications. Details
LINUX 2.6.16 — THE “HIGH-END ENTERPRISE” RELEASE
The newest Linux kernel offers dozens of features aimed at improved performance in highly available, highly scalable clustered architectures for enterprise, telecom, and database applications. It also includes power management improvements for devices. This guest column by Linux-Watch editor Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols runs down the salient upgrades. Details
NAND FLASH GAINING ON NOR
The flash memory market grew substantially in 2005, driven by demand from consumer and communications applications, according to IC Insights. Interestingly, the NOR and NAND segments headed in opposite directions, with NOR sales declining 13 percent to $8.0 billion, while the NAND segment grew 64 percent to $10.6 billion. Details
AWESOME MULTIMEDIA TECHNOLOGY HEADS FOR KDE
Phonon, an advanced multimedia architecture due in KDE 4.0, is being demonstrated this week at LinuxTag in Wiesbaden, Germany. The Phonon architecture supports NMM (network-integrated multimedia middleware), enabling such capabilities as delivering synchronized audio and video presentations across networked systems, controlled by a single, central application. Details
NOKIA TURNS CELLPHONES INTO WEBSERVERS
Nokia has ported the Apache webserver to Symbian, in order to enable mobile phones to serve content on the World Wide Web. Many mobile phones today have more processing power than early Internet servers, suggesting that “there really is no reason anymore why webservers could not reside on mobile phones,” according to the company. The technique could also be used on Linux mobile phones. Details
LINUX PHONES TOO CLOSED TO APPEAL TO LINUX USERS?
“Greed and close-mindedness” prevent handset makers from understanding what users want from Linux phones, writes Eugenia Loli-Queru in an impassioned editorial at OSNews. Loli-Queru laments the mutual incompatibility of current Linux phone implementations, the incompleteness of standardization efforts, and the inability of current phones to support user-installed native Linux applications. Details
AN INTERVIEW WITH ARM'S LINUX PRODUCT MANAGER
In this interesting, in-depth interview, ARM Ltd.'s Linux product manager discusses how Linux helps ARM test its processors, the growing adoption of embedded Linux and ARM, and new technologies of possible interest to embedded Linux developers targeting ARM processors. Details
BUTTON-CELL DEVICES TO GAIN BLUETOOTH-LIKE NETWORKING
Nokia and several partners are developing an ultra-low-power, short-range wireless technology aimed at extending personal-area networking (PANs) to really low-power devices, including watches, heart-rate monitors, and other “button cell battery” devices. The companies expect to release the first commercial “Wibree” interoperability specification by Q2, 2007. Details
NOKIA'S OPEN SOURCE DIRECTOR ON COMMUNITY LINUX DEVELOPMENT
At the inaugural “Open Source in Mobile” conference this week in Amsterdam, Nokia's director of open source, Dr. Ari Jaaksi, compared community- versus corporate-controlled distribution and middleware development for mobile phones. Jaaksi generously agreed to share his presentation with LinuxDevices.com readers. Details
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