Igniting Social Change

Well in what people call “news”, IBM has agreed to support Solaris on its x86 platform. But for me this is’nt a great deal.Why would somebody run solaris on IBM x86, IBM must have asked SUN to port solaris on to IBM mainframes. IBM is for sure a better deal maker than Sun.

Windows running on Sun boxes, V40Z, V20Z e.t.c. Sun’s x86 series…was also a shock. The first time I heard somebody was installing windows on a Sun box, I ran into the data center to find this thin 1 U (v20z) server, and later saw Windows 2003 on the T6400 e.t.c. So is hotmail still on solaris?? or is it on windows installed on sun.

Sun is upbeat this week, google has started packaging its StarOffice into google pack. I dont know how this helps SUN, unless google has paid Sun a royalty.

Also big news for open source followers, xensource is in the process of being aquired by Citrix. However Xensource CEO has said that his company will abide by the commitment to all vendors.

The market these days seems to love to shock people..!

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Imagine your software contribution helping in the smooth operation of a space shuttle. It’s not a dream…….it’s a reality.

NASA has plenty of open source softwares where the open source community can contribute and make a difference.

Few excerpts from NASA open source project website.

” NASA conducts research and development in software and software technology as an essential response to the needs of NASA missions. Under the NASA Software Release policy, NASA has several options for the release of NASA developed software technologies. These options now include Open Source software release. This option is under the NASA Open Source Agreement “NOSA”.  “

The motivations for NASA to distribute software codes Open Source are:

1. To increase NASA software quality via community peer review
2. To accelerate software development via community contributions to maximize the awareness and impact of NASA research
3. To increase dissemination of NASA software in support of NASA’s education  

I found the World Wind project to be of lot of interest to the end user. It allows any user to zoom from satellite altitude into any place on Earth, leveraging high resolution LandSat imagery and SRTM elevation data to experience Earth in visually rich 3D, just as if they were really there.  Quite similar to Google earth.

Links::

http://opensource.arc.nasa.gov/
http://www.opensource.org/licenses/nasa1.3.php
http://opensource.arc.nasa.gov/agreement.jsp?id=22
http://opensource.arc.nasa.gov/project.jsp?id=9
https://lists.nasa.gov/

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Openbeacon has unveiled an open source tracking system at the Chaos Communication Congress (Berlin), which is an annual meeting of the international hacker scene.  This event attracts technology enthusiasts who examine the implications of technology on society.

This tracking system can be used for following people around buildings. The creators of the OpenBeacon system sold 900 tags at ?10 (US$13) each to attendees who volunteered to be tracked during the four-day event. Some attendees bought multiple tags to experiment with later.
 
OpenBeacon uses chips from Nordic Semiconductor ASA that transmit and receive over the 2.4GHz frequency, which is available for unlicensed use in many countries. At the conference, the chips communicated with nearby base stations which sent data back to a central server. There were 23 base stations positioned around the conference center.

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Xbox Linux is a project that ported the GNU/Linux project to the Microsoft Xbox gaming console. Due to the fact that the Xbox uses a digital signature system to prevent the public from running unsigned code, one must either use a modchip, or find an alternative system for running unsigned code. Originally, modchips were the only option. However, it was later demonstrated that the TSOP chip on which the Xbox’s BIOS is held may be reflashed. This way, one may flash on the “cromwell” BIOS developed by the Xbox Linux project (the name comes from a corruption of “clean room”, alluding to the fact that it was developed entirely legally).

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