open-source

NEW YORK--Industry consortia are pervasive. But they often don't amount to much -- a spate of press releases, a series of progressively less energetic meetings making little progress, and the eventual fade to black. And even most successful consortia tend to be about vendors cooperating on specific standards and technologies. Important, but very limited in scope.

The Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) has been an exception. It announced in October of 2010 with a membership including more than 70 global IT leaders, representing $50 billion dollars in annual IT spend. Intel has been the organizing force and is the … Read more

The bottom line: If at first you don't succeed, update and update again. Regular Chrome OS updates over the past year have made it faster, with better offline support and more compatibility with traditional file formats. But it's still only for die-hard Googlers.

Review: Welcome to the Chrome channel. Google's operating system started off last year as being little more than all Chrome, all the time. Updates made over the past year have given Chrome OS users better file format support, faster navigation, revised menus, dramatically improved offline abilities, and a new, traditional-looking desktop.

But if you … Read more

This year at the San Francisco Bay Area Maker Faire, trying to juggle my own interests (talk to cool people) and my 5-year-old son's (build or break stuff), we both hit paydirt at the same time when we stumbled across the Grid Beam exhibit.

My kid spent 45 minutes in the hot sun inventing and screwing together a life-size car-like contraption, and I got to dive into the minutiae of the product with its creators, Phil and Richard Jergenson.

Grid Beam is Erector Set meets IKEA. The hardware is standard 2x2 wood beams with holes drilled through every 1 1/2 inches (which is the actual width of a 2x2 beam), and standard furniture bolts that will be familiar to anyone who's ever assembled a futon frame.… Read more

AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson recently made some public statements about Google that the Web giant says don't really pan out, according to 9to5Google.

During a panel discussion put on by the Milken Institute last week, an audience member asked Stephenson why there's such a delay in updating Google's operating system on devices carried by AT&T. Basically Stephenson blamed Google for delayed updates.

"Google determines what platform gets the newest releases and when," Stephenson replied. "Oftentimes, that's a negotiated arrangement and that's something we work at hard. We know … Read more

Cloud computing seems to often get used as a catch-all term for the big trends happening in IT.

This has the unfortunate effect of adding additional ambiguities to a topic that's already laden with definitional overload. (For example, on a topic like security or compliance, it makes a lot of difference whether you're talking about public clouds like Amazon's, a private cloud within an enterprise, a social network, or some mashup of two or more of the above.)

However, I'm starting to see a certain consensus emerge about how best to think about the broad sense … Read more

Microsoft is moving its Interoperability Strategy team into a new, wholly-owned subsidiary, the company announced on April 12.

The new group, known as Microsoft Open Technologies, will be headed by Jean Paoli, who is currently the general manager of the team. It will be comprised of about 50 to 75 full-time and part-time employees and contractors. A board consisting of Microsoft managers from other business units will oversee the new entity.

Paoli said in a blog post on the Microsoft Port 25 blog that the idea behind the creation of the new subsidiary is to facilitate Microsoft's relationships with … Read more

Twitter has open-sourced some of the numerous tweaks it has made to MySQL, the database technology that the microblogging site uses to store most of the data generated by its users.

"MySQL is the persistent storage technology behind most Twitter data: the interest graph, timelines, user data and the Tweets themselves," wrote Twitter developers Jeremy Cole and Davi Arnaut on the Twitter engineering blog. "Since we believe in sharing knowledge and that open source software facilitates innovation, we have decided to open source our MySQL work on GitHub under the BSD New license."

The code Twitter'… Read more

It looks like Google will fulfill its promise of faster Chromebooks by using Intel's Sandy Bridge and imminent Ivy Bridge processors, a big step up from the current Atom-based products.

Chromebooks run Google's Chrome OS, a browser-based operating system that runs only Web applications. But under the covers, handling the hardware itself, is the Linux operating system. Google's plans can be divined from an even lower-level open-source project called Coreboot that handles the earliest stages of firing up a computer.

To work, Coreboot needs to know how to talk to a computer's hardware, and yesterday, Michael Larabel of Phoronix spotted a big Google contribution to Coreboot. … Read more

Legos are cool. Tinker Toys are cool. Zoob is cool. But you know what's really cool? Building a hybrid gizmo out of all of the above (and other construction toys as well).

That's possible now--without tape, glue, chewing gum, or earwax--using the Free Universal Construction Kit, a set of adapters that let you snap together parts from 10 popular building toys. Brought to you by the F.A.T. (Free Art and Technology) Lab and Sy-Lab, the kit can be downloaded for free as a collection of models in STL format that can be printed with 3D printers such as the Makerbot.… Read more