• IBM Gearing Up for New Power8 Servers

  IBM reported its first quarter fiscal 2014 results late Wednesday, once again showing weakness in its server hardware business. Big Blue however has a plan to change its hardware business fortunes.

• IBM Throws Power8 Gauntlet At The Feet Of X86

  IBM is particularly keen on promoting Linux on Power, and Schroeter said that there are now over 800 independent software vendors whose wares are certified to run on the Power-Linux combo. Many of the hyperscale and extreme scale customers that IBM would love to sell Power-based machines to have their own variants of Linux as well as their own applications, so they can relatively easily port their code to Power should it make sense for performance reasons. This is, in fact, the bet that Big Blue is making. It may not be as bold as the bet the company made to create the System/360 mainframe 50 years ago, but the company is not walking away and remains committed to using Power machinery behind its Watson service and continuing to design processors for both Power and System z platforms into the future.

Free software projects need licenses. But choosing a license is such a pain that most github projects don’t even bother (resulting in an initiative by Github to rectify this). And when taking a closed source project and making it free software, the topic of license choice will take a huge amount of time and effort.

Read more ►

It would appear that the Bluefin-21 now searching the Indian Ocean offers a similar, but perhaps more powerful computing system. Bluefin lists a 4GB flash drive, plus additional payload storage. The craft also incorporates GPS, RF, Iridium, and strobe communications, and can connect via Ethernet at short range for downloading data at shipside. Other features include a dead-reckoning drift that is typically less than 0.1 percent of distance traveled.

Linux has figured in a variety of autonomous aquatic craft, including the Liquid Robotics' solar-powered Wave Glider SV3, designed in part by Java creator James Gosling. On the low-end, you can go underwater (with a tether) with the BeagleBone Black based OpenROV UUV.

Read more ►

In the past months we presented the Arduino Yun and Arduino Galileo boards. Today we present you a new board, quite more powerful, but still Arduino compatible and powered with GNU/Linux. It’s an all Italian board called UDOO.
Indeed, now almost every month we see the birth of a new platform that integrates processors capable of hosting GNU/Linux with the Arduino architecture, in emulated form, or with a dedicated microcontroller. Now is the time to UDOO but we already see looming on the horizon the availability of Arduino Three, and who knows what other boards in the meantime.
UDOO project comes from the idea of the founders to provide a tool for digital learning: high computing power combined with the world of microcontrollers with maximum ease of use, will form a new generation of designers, makers and developers with the knowledge necessary to develop projects in the fields of digital / physical computing.

Read more ►