I’m going to share to you some of my favorite set of icons. These are specifically made for Ubuntu, as well as any other Linux distro with a GNOME desktop. So here they are:

Hackers are claiming they have kidnapped children in a bid to infect PCs with a Trojan Horse virus, says Sophos.

The Linux Foundation on Wednesday plans to announce an event enabling Linux users to interact with the Linux community, including high-level maintainers and developers.

China has stepped up investment in its homegrown Godson microprocessor and hopes to build its first petaflop-class supercomputer using the chip in 2010, one of the country's senior engineers said on Tuesday.

Kristin Armstrong, who won an Olympic cycling gold medal on August 13, this week said that Google Earth played a critical role in her training for the event.

An open-source technology has been launched to help developers using Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 find duplicated code in their software projects.

Xen.org, the developer of the open source Xen project, on Wednesday announced the release of the Xen 3.3 hypervisor engine. The product is the result of a distributed development effort by senior engineers from more than 50 leading hardware, software and security vendors. Xen 3.3 includes enhancements that further advance its position as a fast, scalable and secure virtualization engine for a broad range of server and PC chipsets from supercomputers to PDAs.

Mozilla Labs launched a new prototype Tuesday aimed at giving Internet users new ways to create mashups of online content. Dubbed "Ubiquity," the technology is Mozilla's solution what it sees as a common and time-consuming problem Web surfers face when they try to compile information from the Web. "Most people do not have an easy way to manage the vast resources of the Web to simplify their task at hand. For the most part they are left trundling between Web sites, performing common tasks resulting in frustration and wasted time," Aza Raskin, head of user experience at Mozilla, wrote on his blog.

Dish Network and DirecTV are battling amongst themselves to promote the most HDTV channels, as well as outflank cable competitors like Comcast and Time Warner Cable.

Dish Network is beating DirecTV and cable competitors to the punch, reports Light Reading. They have begun to roll out standard-def and high-def service in the eastern half of the United States using MPEG-4 (see table for a list of the first 21 markets). Dish is supporting the service with MPEG-4 receivers, including one with an on-board digital video recorder (DVR).

Dish is pushing its recently launched TurboHD service and some 1080p resolution content. Dish expects to offer as many as 150 national HD channels by year’s end, with hopes that it can reverse a second quarter that saw the satellite company lose subscribers for the first time.

Meanwhile, DirecTV began delivering all HD programming in MPEG-4 last month, a spokesman said. But, because it would require massive set-top switch-outs, DirecTV doesn’t have any announced plans to offer Standard Definition in MPEG-4. DirecTV says it has 130 “national” HD channels up, and will have the capacity for 200 when the DirecTV 12 satellite is available next year. DirecTV also expects to offer some movies in 1080p, later this year.

There’s an excellent chance you can get HDTV signals through your current cable provider, with more than 100 million U.S. households “passed” by a cable operator that offers HDTV, reports C/Net. All of the top 100 cable markets have been “passed” by a cable company with HDTV programming. That’s the good news. The bad news is that most providers carry only a handful of the 50-odd HDTV networks. Time Warner Cable has agreed to carry the Big Ten Network in standard-def and High-Def in all Big Ten states while Charter says a deal to carry the Big Ten Network is “imminent.”

DirecTV and Dish Network plan to broadcast the existing MPEG-2 HD lineup, but subscribers with older HD equipment will have to upgrade to newer MPEG-4 boxes to watch the new local and national HD channels.

Business Week summarizes a variety of mobile VoIP services that allow you to make phone calls from your cellphone over Wi-Fi networks.

VoIP calling is already raising a ruckus in telecommunications, putting pressure on the price of land-line calling and luring subscribers toward upstarts like Vonage and Comcast away from incumbents such as AT&T, and Verizon. Now, the technology threatens to erode sales for mobile-phone service providers too.

These apps are popular amongst people who use iPhones, notes GigaOM, thanks to services such as Truphone, Gorilla Mobile and iCall.

ON World estimates that in 2011, mobile VoIP voice services may generate $33.7 billion, up from $516 million in 2006, the most recent year for which the figure is available. Jajah, for example, experienced a fivefold increase in just a year and now has more than 10 million users — and growing.

Carriers are not happy VoIP newcomers snapping up almost one-quarter of all wireless minutes now devoted to long-distance and international calls.

It’s not going to get any better. Skype, the eBay-owned service used by more than 338 million people to make free PC-to-PC calls, later this year plans to release a new product called “Skype for your mobile” that will let customers use local wireless minutes to make international calls. It works on almost 50 handsets, but uses cellular data services rather than Wi-Fi.

Wireless carriers are expected to generate $700 billion in sales of voice services this year, according to consulting firm Ovum. Together, international and long distance will make up 24% of the 1.2 billion wireless minutes used this year, estimates Insight Research.

In other news, text messaging in the United States continues to explode, according to new figures from VeriSign. The company said it delivered more than 52 billion messages during the second quarter of 2008, up more than 20% from the previous quarter and saw a daily average of 572 million messages, more than doubling the 230 million per day during the second quarter of 2007.

VeriSign offers Short Message Service delivery engines to more than 600 carriers, reaching more than 2.4 billion wireless subscribers across carrier, enterprise, and media/entertainment networks. SMS text messaging is the most widely used data application on the planet, according to Wikipedia, with 2.4 billion active users, or 74% of all mobile phone subscribers sending and receiving text messages on their phones.

Meet the Space Cube — the world's smallest fully functional PC. Primarily designed for use in space, it somehow manages to cram a working PC with USB ports, card readers, audio outputs and proprietary interfaces into a tiny cube chassis measuring just two inches square. It runs a basic Linux front-end.

If you search the web you can find a number of references to programs/scripts that convert diff output to HTML. This is a bash version.

read more

Dell is going after emerging markets with a new line of low-cost computers. The Vostro notebooks and desktops are the company's first models targeted specifically at China, India and a handful of other Asian, African and Latin American nations. The systems will sell for about the equivalent of $440 to $475. The move marks a distinct shift in strategy for Dell, which has previously focused on building standard products that stay constant from country to country. The change follows similar steps by competitors such as HP and IBM, which are pushing low-cost models of their own.

Carol Wilson of Telephony Magazine has an in-depth review of municipal broadband in the United States. She says that despite some high-profile failures, the deep-seated need for broadband is keeping municipalities on the fiber-to-the-home-track.

These projects are being fueled by the falling cost of Fiber To The Home (FTTH) technology and the growing experience in deploying systems, due in no small part to the massive effort Verizon has launched.

It is supremely ironic that one of the nation’s more visible and contentious muni fiber projects, involving the city-owned Lafayette Utilities System in Lafayette, La., is now reaping the benefits of delays to its FTTH construction caused by lawsuits and legal actions launched by incumbent cable and telco operators.

Among the examples she mentions:

• Networks such as iProvo and Utopia found it hard to attract service providers, and without services, customers just weren’t interested. A Utah state law now prohibits municipally owned networks from selling retail services.

  “What happened in Utah is something we have been talking about for years — the state law that effectively prohibits retail service is, in my view, a very substantial part of what is wrong with the environment in Utah and particularly iProvo,” said Jim Baller, attorney with Baller & Herbst, which represents municipalities and has done research for e-NC Alliance, among others. “If applications are slow to evolve — and they have been — service providers are left competing with incumbents on traditional services, where they have no advantages.”

• North Carolina’s e-NC Authority is seeking ways to stimulate broadband initiatives in rural areas of that state, while Massachusetts just passed a bill to create a Broadband Institute, using $40 million in state funding to bring broadband to western areas of the state still served only by dial-up.
• In Washington state, the Grant County Public Utilities Department, another FTTH pioneer, still is operating a wholesale-only network in accordance with state law there, although it came under criticism and went through a management change over the $400 million price tag of that network.

  Partially in response to that criticism, the Grant County PUD halted its network expansion in 2004, after four years of construction had connected about 11,000 homes — or one-third of the anticipated homes — said Sarah Morford, spokeswoman for PUD. After extensive review and exploration of other technology options, the Grant County PUD commissioners voted in March to press forward, citing public support for its fiber network. Over the next five years, Grant County plans to expand the network to reach 80% of residents and 95% of businesses, or about 3000 homes and business per year.

• In Chattanooga, Tenn., for instance, the municipally owned utility EPB, is economically justifying its fiber build on the basis of creating a “smart grid” that will enable the company to reduce energy consumption and lower the cost of power it buys from the Tennessee Valley Authority. The plan is to reach 80% of the 167,000 homes in the 600-square-mile service area in the first three years and then reach more rural homes in the last two years of the five-year buildout.
• Glasgow Electric of Glasgow, Ky., which built the nation’s first municipally owned broadband network, is now publicly arguing that instead of spending $18 billion to build nuclear power generators to meet future electric demand, the TVA should build FTTH networks to 9 million homes at $2000 each and use those connections to manage in-home electrical use.
• According to Joe Savage, president of the Fiber to the Home Council, there are 14 states where laws either prohibit or limit muni networks. A national Community Broadband Act failed in 2007 at the federal level, but U.S. Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) introduced similar provisions as part of a 2008 bill that also seeks to unlock cell phones from specific mobile networks.

As more cities get more experience and that experience is shared, municipal networks will become more common in the U.S., as they already are in Europe, reports Telephony Magazine.

Tim Wu compared U.S. broadband providers to OPEC in a recent New York Times op-ed piece, a charge the CTIA thinks is ridiculous.

Private providers, like Integra Telecom, provide voice, data and Internet communications to thousands of business and carrier customers in 11 Western states. The company owns and operates fiber-optic networks comprising metropolitan access networks, a nationally acclaimed tier one Internet and data network, and a 4,700-mile high-speed long haul network (right).

Related Dailywireless Fiber articles include; FiOS: Too Risky?, Municipal Fiber: Fits and Starts and Be Your Own Fiber Net.

Eye-Fi’s SD memory cards come with built-in WiFi, allowing ordinary cameras to transmit photos over nearby WiFi hotspots. But WiFi drains the battery, so the ability to turn the wireless feature on and off is a much desired feature.

Today Eye-Fi announced they have collaborated Nikon to deliver enhanced integration of the Eye-Fi wireless memory card with the new Nikon D90 DSLR. The Nikon D90 detects when an Eye-Fi card is inserted and manages its power settings to ensure that photos upload for sharing and storing.

In addition, the Nikon D90 includes an Eye-Fi menu that allows users to turn the wireless function on or off. “This is a great example of how a non-wireless camera can be optimized for the Eye-Fi card to create the best experience possible,” said Yuval Koren, chief product officer and co-founder of Eye-Fi.

Through the end of this year, existing SmugMug members can automatically upgrade their Eye-Fi Share or Eye-Fi Card to include one year of free geotagging and hotspot access at more than 10,000 Wayport hotspots.

Eye-Fi products include the Eye-Fi Home ($79), Eye-Fi Share ($99), and Eye-Fi Explore cards ($129).

C/Net’s Crave compares the specs:

  Nikon D80 Nikon D90 Canon 40D Sensor 10.2-megapixel CMOS 12.3-megapixel CMOS 10.1-megapixel CMOS A/D conversion 12-bit 12-bit 14-bit Sensitivity range ISO 100 - ISO 3200 (Hi1) ISO 100 - ISO 6400 (Hi1) ISO 100 - ISO 3200 (expanded) Focal-length multiplier 1.5x 1.5x 1.6x Continuous shooting 3 fps

23 JPEG/6 raw 4.5 fps

n/a 6.5fps
75 JPEG/17 raw Viewfinder 95% coverage

0.94x magnification
fixed focusing screen 96% coverage
0.94x magnification
fixed focusing screen 95% coverage
0.95x magnification
interchangeable focusing screens Autofocus 11-pt AF

Single center cross-type 11-pt AF

n/a 9-pt AF
all cross-type to f/5.6 Live View No Yes Yes LCD size 2.5 inches 3 inches 3 inches Shutter durability < 100,000 cycles 100,000 cycles 100,000 cycles Price (body only) $799.95 $995 $1,099

Below is a promotional viral video, produced by a professional photographer out of Seattle.

But without auto-focus enabled in the video mode and with a 5 minute max video record time, the camera has limitations. Sony and Canon will, no doubt, have their own competition. Sony’s on-chip VR, for example, might be handy for reducing vibration on prime f1.4 lenses like a 50 or 85mm.

DP Review has a detailed preview of the new Nikon D-90 which features 12 Megapixels, HD video recording and GPS input. It costs $999 (body only) or $1299 (with 18-105MM F/3.5-5.6 VR lens)

As a computer professional I take my sight for granted. Think about it, how much you rely on your eyes. How much of what we do is based on what is on the screen and where it is on the screen.

read more