Fashion robot runs real-time Linux

http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS5878102799.html

Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) has demonstrated a Linux-based humanoid robot that will perform in a fashion show next week. The HRP-4C runs the robotics-focused hard real-time ART-Linux distro, which was released this week for Linux 2.6xx under GPL.

The HRP-4C robot and the open-source ART-Linux distro were developed by AIST's Human Robotics Group (HRG). ART (Advanced Real-Time) Linux has been used in a variety of humanoid robot prototypes from the Japanese government-backed HRG/AIST, says the group. The newest HRP-4C model announced earlier this week has been a hit on YouTube. Designed to look like a young Japanese woman, the robot stands (and walks) about five feet, two inches (158 centimeters), and weighs about 95 pounds (43 kilograms).

IT Organizations Turn to Linux in Economic Downturn

http://www.novell.com/ru-ru/news/press/it-organizations-turn-to-linux-in-economic-downturn/

New global survey reveals more than half of participants plan to accelerate their adoption of Linux in 2009

Novell today announced that a recent market survey, conducted by IDC and sponsored by Novell, reveals a surge in the acquisition of Linux driven by the worldwide recession. As more and more businesses seek to cut costs and find value, they are drawn to the tremendous economies that Linux offers, with more than half of the IT executives surveyed planning to accelerate Linux adoption in 2009. In addition, more than 72 percent of respondents say they are either actively evaluating or have already decided to increase their adoption of Linux on the server in 2009, with more than 68 percent making the same claim for the desktop. The study surveyed more than 300 senior IT executives spanning manufacturing, financial services, and retail industries across the globe, as well as government agencies.

IBM is in talks to buy Sun Microsystems

http://www.infoworld.com/archives/emailPrint.jsp?R=printThis&A=/article/09/03/18/Report_IBM_is_in_talks_to_buy_Sun_Microsystems-IDGNS_1.html

Global technology giant IBM is in talks to buy Sun Microsystems in a deal that would expand its server market share, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.

IBM may pay as much as $6.5 billion in cash for Sun, the newspaper reported on its Web site, without naming its sources. That amount of money would be nearly double Sun's closing share price on Tuesday of $4.97 per share.

This purchase may influence the following open source projects: OpenSolaris, OpenOffice.org, OpenJDK, MySQL & VirtualBox.

Open Source Symbian: Introducing the Release Plan

http://blog.symbian.org/2009/03/12/introducing-the-release-plan/

David Wood, one of the Symbian platform founders, published release plan for Symbian open source platform.
"Symbian^2, which is based on S60 5.1, reaches a functionally complete state at the middle of this year, and should be hardened by the end of the year. This means that the first devices based on Symbian^2 could be reaching the market any time around the end of this year - depending on the integration plans, the level of customisation, and the design choices made by manufacturers."

ROFL RAZZI

http://roflrazzi.com/

Here comes Google Voice

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/here-comes-google-voice.html

FR: Gendarmerie saves millions with open desktop and web applications

http://www.osor.eu/news/fr-gendarmerie-saves-millions-with-open-desktop-and-web-applications

The French Gendarmerie's gradual migration to a complete open source desktop and web applications has saved millions of euro, says Lieutenant-Colonel Xavier Guimard. "This year the IT budget will be reduced by 70 percent. This will not affect our IT systems."

Guimard this Thursday in the city of Utrecht in the Netherlands gave a presentation on the move from a Microsoft-based to an Ubuntu GNU/Linux-based desktop. The Lieutenant-Colonel was one of the keynote speakers at an annual conference organised by NOiV, the Dutch national resource centre on open source and open standards.

Guimard estimates Gendarmerie since 2004 has saved 50 million euro on licences for standard office applications, hardware and maintenance.

The decision in 2004 to move to open source, was raised by one of the Gendarmerie's accountants. "Microsoft was forcing us to buy new software licences. This annoyed our accountant, who tried OpenOffice." According to Guimard the proprietary software maker then started lobbying the Gendarmerie, which is how the general manager found out about the experiments. "When he saw OpenOffice worked just as well and was available for free, it was he that decided it should be installed on all 90.000 desktops."

Google creates Android team in Taiwan

http://www.h-online.com/open/Google-creates-Android-team-in-Taiwan--/news/112837

According to Chien Lee-feng, president of Google Taiwan, Google has established an Android team in Taiwan to provide support for smartphones. The only Android based device currently in commercial release is the T-mobile G1 smartphone built by HTC, which is also based in Taiwan.

It's likely that the open source mobile phone operating system group will not only support smartphones, but also netbooks. As Android is based on Linux, there is no reason why it could not grow into a full Linux distribution for use on netbooks and tablet devices.

At the beginning of the year, writers at VentureBeat got Android running on their Asus EEE PC. Recently Asus announced that they would release an EEE PC netbook running Google's Android operating system by the end of the year. However, Asus has not yet provided a release date or officially announced the hardware specifications.

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