Arstechnica - Open Source

Raspberry Pi has received the lion's share of attention devoted to cheap, single-board computers in the past year. But long before the Pi was a gleam in its creators' eyes, there was the Arduino.

Unveiled in 2005, Arduino boards don't have the CPU horsepower of a Raspberry Pi. They don't run a full PC operating system either. Arduino isn't obsolete, though—in fact, its plethora of connectivity options makes it the better choice for many electronics projects.

While the Pi has 26 GPIO (general purpose input/output) pins that can be programmed to do various tasks, the Arduino DUE (the latest Arduino released in October 2012) has 54 digital I/O pins, 12 analog input pins, and two analog output pins. Among those 54 digital I/O pins, 12 provide pulse-width modulation (PWM) output.

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Describing it as "the future," Mozilla has been showing off ORBX.js, a video codec roughly comparable to the industry-standard H.264 that can be decoded entirely in JavaScript.

ORBX.js was developed by a company called OTOY. OTOY's major product is Octane Render, a 3D renderer that works exclusively on NVIDIA cards using CUDA. Working with customers including Autodesk, OTOY has developed technology to allow applications such as Autodesk's 3ds Max modelling software to be accessed over the Web without using plugins.

Central to this is the ORBX codec. The codec allows efficient, real-time encoding on GPUs, and can be decoded in JavaScript. The JavaScript decoder works in all modern browsers, both desktop and mobile, though with differences depending on the browser features available.

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Google's Project Glass team has released the Linux-specific source code that ships with the Android-based augmented reality device. The source is available now at code.google.com, and Google said "it should be pushed into git next to all other Android kernel source releases relatively soon."

This doesn't mean all of the source code related to Google Glass has been released. Android code is released in two parts—changes to the Linux kernel are released under the GPLv2 free software license, just as Linux itself is, while most of the code that makes Android recognizable to users is released under the Apache License. With Glass, just the Linux code has been released.

While the public nature of Android source code has allowed forks such as Amazon's Kindle Fire platform, a brand-new glasses platform based on Glass code wouldn't be possible just from the kernel source release. For example, any modifications made to the Android user interface to optimize it for Google Glass wouldn't be part of the kernel code.

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Linux creator Linus Torvalds last night announced the release of version 3.9 of the kernel. Available for download at kernel.org, Linux 3.9 brings a long list of improvements to storage, networking, file systems, drivers, virtualization, and power management.

H-Online editor Thorsten Leemhuis has an excellent rundown of what's new in Linux 3.9. One new feature, listed as "experimental," allows SSDs to act as caches for other storage devices. "This feature is able to speed up data writes, as it allows the faster SSD to first cache data and then, in a quiet moment, transfer it to the slower hard drive," Leemhuis wrote.

Linux maintainers have also done some driver work that might improve the sometimes questionable support for desktops and laptops. New drivers include support for Intel 802.11ac Wi-Fi components, as well as trackpads used in Samsung's ARM-based Chromebook and the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition Ultrabook. The Kernel's driver for AMD Radeon graphics chips was updated to support Oland chips in the 8500 and 8600 Series Radeon video cards, in addition to AMD's forthcoming Richland chips. The driver code for HD audio codecs is also now "leaner and more robust."

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Opera has been busy repositioning itself as a middleware player for the mobile Web recently, but that isn't stopping the company from defending its investment in browser technology. The company has filed a 20 million Kronor ($3.4 million) lawsuit against a former employee and consultant, claiming that he stole company secrets and incorporated them into a mobile browser for Mozilla.

According to a report by Norwegian IT site Digi.no, Opera has filed suit against Trond Werner Hansen, a Norwegian musician and designer who worked for Opera from 1999 to 2006 as a user interface designer and developer before leaving to pursue his music career. Hansen also worked for Opera as an outside consultant from 2009 to 2010. Last year, Hansen was involved with the development of the Mozilla prototype "Junior" browser for Apple iOS. Hansen and Alex Limi—former Firefox UI head and now manager of Mozilla's product design strategy—demonstrated the browser prototype in a video on Air Mozilla last June. Hansen said in the video, "I spent almost seven years trying to simplify Opera and didn't really succeed. Simplification of something that already exists is really hard. That's way beyond product design issues—it's company issues. I feel like we failed in making something really easy."

Limi credited Hansen with the invention of a number of Mozilla UI features, including the browser search—"the source of all our revenue," Limi said—and the "speed dial" feature that allows users to pick frequently visited pages from a new browser tab. "Pretty much everything he's invented, they're now in all browsers," Limi continued.

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