Monthly Archives: February 2009

$25 billion in electric vehicle loans still waiting for perfect beggars

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from Engadget by Darren Murph

While the Big 3 seem to be visiting Washington on an all-too-regular basis trying to secure funding for future success, $25 billion in loans set aside to promote electric car usage in America has been sitting untouched for nearly two years. As the story goes, the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan program was established in 2007, but administrations have been toying with ideas about how to use it until present day. Some 75 applications from hopeful companies have been whittled down to 25, but there’s no telling how long it’ll be before we hear who’s getting the cash (and when). Many are irate that this dough is still sitting idle, but we tend to agree with the “let’s wait until we find truly remarkably beggars” approach before it’s just handed out to those without a viable plan. The takeaway? Electric vehicles may still end up progressing as planned despite the current economy, but only if brilliant plans can cut through miles of red tape.

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This Powerful Robot Can Lift Entire Car Frames, Tear Apart Several Humans at Once [Robots]

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from Gizmodo by Jesus Diaz

Leave it to the Germans to invade Poland or create Titan, the world’s strongest industrial robot. They can go either way: One day they are in Krakow, and the next their robot lifts a ton.

Titan—which has a payload of one ton and can reach 10.5 feet— is made by Kuka Roboter GmbH. What does this mean: Using a total of nine motors, it can lift five times its own weight, and can manipulate almost anything you can throw at it in a factory. This includes tasks that previous to its release in 2007, required two robots, like raising the frame for an entire car completely unaided. All while maintaining full positioning precision in 3D space, according to the company.

To give you another idea of its power: The second axis of the Titan—powered by two motors—can withstand a static torque of 60,000 newton meters. Any powerful car would only develop 600 Nm. [Kuka]

Jacketed hamsters demonstrate movement-powered nanogenerators

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by Darren Murph, posted Feb 27th 2009 at 12:33AM

Imagine this — one day, with enough steroids, your pet hamster actually could power your home by just running on its wheel. Georgia Tech researchers have discovered ways to “convert even irregular biomechanical energy into electricity,” and it’s demonstrating the finding by showing off jacket-wearing rodents that are game to run. According to the institution’s Zhong Lin Wang, the minuscule nanogenerators “can convert any mechanical disturbance into electrical energy,” which theoretically means that power can be driven by simple, irregular mechanical motion such as the vibration of vocal cords, flapping of a flag or the tapping of fingers. As with most of these university discoveries, there’s no telling how soon this stuff will be pushed out to the commercial realm, but at least they’ve found something to keep the rats busy during the off hours.

Like to say to people that I too own a pocket pet (hamster… or actually we can call him walking battery charger :) ) And while he is mightily cute he is quite annoying… Our hamster loves to start running 5 in the morning and all through the day. He stops running around 7pm for some reason… And now I can use the maniac power!! Muhahaha!!

Microsoft talks open-source love amid TomTom Linux ‘war’

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Linux lovers brace for action

By Gavin Clarke in San Francisco

Posted in Applications, 27th February 2009 04:01 GMT

Microsoft has imagined a future where Windows relies on open source, just as community leaders tried to contain the fall out from what some (http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/2009/02/has-microsofts-patent-war-against-linux.html) believe could be the start of Microsoft’s “war against Linux”.

The company’s server and tools president Bob Muglia has apparently told a technology conference he believes most of the company’s products would use open-source “at some point.”

Muglia was speaking at the Stanford Accel Symposium (http://www.accel.com/symposium/venue.html) at Stanford University, California, and his comments were picked up by attendee John Newton, chief technology officer and chairman of Alfreso. “At some point almost all our product will have open source in it,” Newton wrote in a Twitter flagged up (http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10172150-16.html?tag=mncol;txt) by Alfreso fellow Matt Asay.

Microsoft products already contain code licensed under open source. Now it just wants more for Silverlight, Visual Studio 2010, and its Oslo modeling framework. Open source has been seen as a way for Microsoft to enrich and expand the reach of .NET.

But the timing of Muglia’s words couldn’t have come at a worse moment in Microsoft’s long and troubled relationship with the open-source community.

He spoke just as Microsoft filed court papers in the US that accused TomTom of violating its intellectual property with that company’s widely used voice-activated car navigation devices. Those devices run TomTom’s own brand of GPL and LGPL’d Linux.

Unsurprisingly, Microsoft’s attempts to talk-down the broad threat to Linux have been dismissed, and it has fallen to representatives of the open-source community itself to call for calm, while also talking tough in the face of a potential Microsoft threat to Linux.

Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin and Software Freedom Law Center policy analyst Bradley Kuhn both separately moderated their concerns about the case by pointing out that this is a private dispute between Microsoft and TomTom on GPS mapping software.

Kuhn told The Reg people should press on with open-source projects, rather than obsess about what patents might or might not exist in Linux or stop their work on open-source projects through some concern over potential violations or that Microsoft might come knocking.

“Until…they are accused of infringing, there is no reason they should be worried,” he said.

“I don’t believe what Microsoft says on this case that it’s not about free and open source software, but at this moment, I don’t see any evidence this patent reads on free and open source software. Patents get narrowed and invalidated during the patent litigation process all the time.”

Zemlin blogged (http://www.linux-foundation.org/weblogs/jzemlin/2009/02/26/note-on-microsoft-tomtom-suit-calm-down-hope-for-the-best-plan-for-the-worst/) that people should calm down, hope for the best, and plan for the worst. To that end, the Linux Foundation said it’s watching the situation and is ready to mount a defense of Linux should the need arise.

“The Linux ecosystem has enormously sophisticated resources available to assist in the defense of any claim that is made against Linux,” Zemlin wrote.

“We do not feel assumptions should be made about the scope or facts of this case and its inclusion, if any, of Linux-related technology.”

The claim that has people concerned involves TomTom’s Linux using an implementation of FAT to add file system support for long and short file names, memory management for flash, and for connecting devices. The question is whether TomTom misused Microsoft’s patented version of FAT32 and VFAT – which it’s been licensing to third parties – or whether it employed a different implementation of FAT instead. FAT is commonly used in consumer devices, such as digital cameras, when connecting to PCs.

The TomTom picture is complicated by the fact it runs a mix of Linux and proprietary software. You can get Microsoft’s filings here (http://regmedia.co.uk/2009/02/27/tomtom1.pdf) and here (http://regmedia.co.uk/2009/02/27/tomtom2.pdf) (both PDFs).

The case is ironic, given TomTom was actually found to be in violation of the GPL in October 2004 by the GPL Violations Project. TomTom subsequently agreed to make the modifications it made to Linux available online as part of the Linux Kernel.

TomTom US refused to comment on the case, but a spokesperson at its head-quarters on the Netherlands told (http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/djf500/200902260425DOWJONESDJONLINE000552_FORTUNE5.htm) Dow Jones TomTom would “vigorously defend” itself. ®

Toshiba shows off 32nm NAND flash chips, promises to go smaller

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from Engadget by Donald Melanson

32nm NAND flash memory may not seem like a huge leap over some of the current 34nm chips out there, but Toshiba seems to be able to appreciate the little things in life, and it’s certainly found plenty to boast about with its latest chips here. Perhaps most notably, the company apparently didn’t make any major changes from its previous 43nm chips in terms of device structure, with the exception of one “major improvement” to the circuit that was made to overcome the “extremely small” write margin. The new 32nm chips also pack the same 32-gigabit (or 4GB) capacity as those aforementioned 34nm chips, which should let folks cram a bit more storage into the same small space. Better still, Toshiba says volume production of the chips should begin as soon as September of this year, and it’s apparently already aiming to mass produce some chips in the 20 to 30nm range by late 2010 or 2011.