While most 3D printers are still too expensive for home use, there are a variety of online options for ordering 3D printed objects and for finding the equivalent of 3D blueprints for a variety of objects. One of those objects happens to be a plastic gun called the “Liberator”. That printed gun was recently successfully fired without the plastic body breaking.
The Bitcoin, the digital currency that many either love or hate, has recently surpassed $1 billion in value. That mark, which was past by some combined 10.9 million Bitcoins according to TechCrunch, doesn’t mean the currency’s critics are wrong, but it does suggest that a digital “crypto-currency” can work.
You would think that WebOS would be virtually worthless since a few years back HP essentially torpedoed all the products it developed with WebOS. Last year, HP offered the operating system to developers and other companies. Now LG has bought the OS from HP.
Mozilla, the non-profit software company which made the Firefox web browser and Thunderbird email client, announced its new mobile operating system will be work on 17 different mobile carriers during the Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona, Spain. The system, dubbed Firefox OS, will be loaded onto phones from five different handset manufacturers and is set to launch sometime around June.
The first shipment of Raspberry Pi devices has finally gone out, with open-source advocates and Linux-loving geeks getting their hands on the bare-bones computer. At last. Better late than never.
Open source and Linux have been hugely successful, changing how software is developed and delivered. Naturally, one of the ways that success can be measured is in dollars, though the corporate world’s two-fisted adoption of open source have seen the rewards accrue and spread in ways visionary Linus Torvalds couldn’t have predicted all of those years ago in his Finnish college dorm room.
More 18,000 Likes and 11,000 Tweets for a media product not created by a big media company. The really, really cool thing about this story is the math underpinning it is easily understandable and, moreover, numbers of this size aren’t beyond what an average person can imagine. Is this enough to kill Universal, Warner or Sony? Probably not, but it’s good news nonetheless.
Only 20 months ago HP paid $1.2 billion to buy Palm, with webOS the apparent reason for the otherwise odd-seeming purchase. Now the company is releasing the system on an open source basis.
What do you want in a smartphone? For many people, “is a phone, does that touch thing and can play Angry Birds” pretty much covers it. If the salesperson adds “free” or “buy one, get one free” to the pitch and the customer’s walking out the door with a bag.
One of the most serious problems in the wake of any tragedy is matching those wanting to help with those in need. Whereas it can sometimes take days for government and NGOs to pull those threads together, one enterprising techie made this happen in a matter of minutes.
There was a time when the Web was an interesting place, with lots of information, the possibilities for numerous virtual relationships, and much more, all in a relatively unregulated place. Say good-bye to all that.
When Gartner talks about tablets, people generally listen, and the latest from this most well-known of all analyst groups says that the tablet computer market is going to stay big, especially for Apple’s iPad.
Android 3.0 also known as Honeycomb was the hit of CES this year. This version of Android developed specifically for tablet computers was found on the tablets of a variety of manufacturers including Motorola’s Xoom that took top honors as best gadget at CES.
Russian president Vladimir Putin has signed an order to switch the country’s governmental computer systems to open source inside four years. It appears the move is financially rather than politically motivated.
Google’s lack of control over their Android mobile operating system is causing streaming video giant Netflix to delay support for all Android devices and may keep it from supporting some handsets at all.
Well, this apparently is the season for suing rivals. Apple has recently filed two patent infringement lawsuits against Motorola, and lawsuits against HTC and Nokia. And those are just Apple’s lawsuits.
Mozilla had planned to release Firefox 4 late this year, but a number of delays in a variety of production categories have delayed this schedule and there will be no new Firefox until 2011.
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