Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on February 21, 2008 by CyberNet.

Microsoft is taking a big step today by opening their arms to the open source world. According to their press release their goal is to “promote greater interoperability, opportunity and choice for customers and developers.“

This is an interesting step for Microsoft since they have always done everything they can to fend off open source development, or so it seemed. Starting today they are publishing over 30,000 pages of trade secret documentation, and they have also decided that they won’t sue open source developers who create non-commercial products:

• As an immediate next step, starting today Microsoft will openly publish on MSDN over 30,000 pages of documentation for Windows client and server protocols that were previously available only under a trade secret license. Protocol documentation for additional products, such as Office 2007 and all of the other high-volume products covered by these principles, will be published in the upcoming months.
• Microsoft will indicate on its Web site which protocols are covered by Microsoft patents and will license all of these patents on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms, at low royalty rates.
• Microsoft is providing a covenant not to sue open source developers for development or non-commercial distribution of implementations of these protocols. These developers will be able to use the documentation for free to develop products.
• To promote user choice among document formats, Microsoft will design new APIs for the Word, Excel and PowerPoint applications in Office 2007 to enable developers to plug in additional document formats and to enable users to set these formats as their default for saving documents.

I think Microsoft expects this to make up for all of the things they’ve done wrong in the past against the open source community, but people don’t easily forget those things. From what I gather Microsoft is trying to regain control that they have already lost, such as governments moving to open formats. Give it some time and Microsoft will probably go even more “open” to counteract any open source movements that might be going on.

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If Apple’s no-fee licensing wasn’t enough to entice manufacturers, the Mini DisplayPort connector is now being added to VESA’s DisplayPort 1.2 specifications. The update will also double the available bandwidth to 5.4Gbps, which can be used for 1920 x 1080 stereoscopic 3D imagery, four 1920 x 1200 screens, or one massive 3840 x 2160 display. According to Register Hardware, the 1.2 standard will be published by the middle of this year.

[Via Mac Rumors]

Filed under: Desktops, Displays, Laptops

DisplayPort 1.2 adds Apple’s mini connector, stereoscopic 3D originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 14 Jan 2009 11:52:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Tesla founder and chairman Elon Musk announced at the Detroit Auto Show that Tesla will provide components for the Smart Electric, AutoWeek reports. He said that Daimler and Tesla have been working on the project in secret for the past 18 months.

Initially, Tesla will supply the charging systems and battery packs to build 1,000 Smart Electrics. “This will allow us to accelerate the advent of an affordable electric car,” said Musk at the show, adding that the company is seeking to sign similar production agreements with other major automakers.

Tesla also took the opportunity at the show to showcase the Roadster Sport, a more powerful version of the Tesla Roadster that will cost $127,000, hit 0-60 in 3.7 seconds; it will be available in June.

Auto-stop systems, which cut the engine while idling at a traffic light in order to save fuel, are beginning to hit mainstream vehicles across the globe. A Ford executive said at the Detroit auto show last week that over the next several years, all Ford vehicles will get auto-stop capability, according to AutoblogGreen. Today, only Ford hybrids, including the Escape and Fusion (along with their Mercury counterparts, the Mariner and Milan), can do it.

The report said that automakers are adding the systems to manual transmission cars first, since the driver always sends a clear signal—shifting back into first—before he or she wants to begin moving again. But in the U.S., automatic transmission cars represent 95 percent of the market. In the case of an automatic, “an electro hydraulic pump must be added to shift the transmission back to first gear before restarting.” Look for auto-stop systems to appear on dual-clutch and other “auto-manual” style combination transmissions first, before they eventually appear on regular automatics.

Sure, the Atom N270 has done great things for humanity during its brief tenure powering pretty much every netbook that comes down the pipes, but it’s time for a change, and it looks like the N280 from Intel — already slated for a couple Eee PCs — could provide just the sort of marginal boost we’re looking for. The single core chip bests the N270’s 1.6GHz clock with blazing 1.66GHz speeds, and a 667MHz bus over the original’s 533MHz. What could perhaps be much more interesting is the promised Intel GN40 chipset that accompanies the N280, which there’s currently very little info on, but hopefully does a little bit towards competing with NVIDIA’s ION — or at least pepping up that game of solitaire we’ve been working on.

[Thanks, Jagslive]

Read – N280 shows up on some new Eee PC models
Read – N280 netbooks to hit the market between 2Q09 and 3Q09

Filed under: Laptops

Details on Intel Atom N280 begin to surface, are short on excitement originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 14 Jan 2009 10:26:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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