Add a Computer to a Cable

Here's a GNU/Linux-based computer the size of an RJ-45 jack:

Specs listed for the Digi Connect ME 9210 are said to include:

* Processor -- 32-bit Digi NS9210 75MHz (ARM926EJ-S)
* Security -- On-chip 256-bit AES accelerator
* Memory -- 8MB SDRAM
* Flash -- 4MB or 8MB of NOR flash
* Networking -- 1 x 10/100 Ethernet
* Expansion -- Flexible Interface Modules (FIM) with 300MHz DRPIC165X CPU
* Interfaces:
o High-speed TTL serial
o Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI)
o I(2)C v1.0 bus with 7- and 10-bit address modes
o 10 x shared GPIO ports with up to 3 external IRQ options
* Power management -- modes for on-the-fly clock scaling, low power sleep, and configurable scaling/wake-up events (EIRQ, UART, Ethernet, etc.)
* Other features -- software watchdog
* Operating temperature -- -40 to 176 deg. F (-40 to 80 deg. C)
* Power -- 3.3VDC @ 346 mA; 1.14 W typical consumption
* Operating systems -- Digi Embedded Linux; NET+OS (ThreadX-based

Don't miss the pix - they are almost literally incredible. (Via Wind River blog network.)

Recognising Google's True Character

It's easy to become apprehensive about the massive and growing power of Google. After all, its operating plan is essentially to know everything about everything that happens online - and, as a consequence, offline. I certainly share those concerns, but it's also important to note the company continues to make moves that contribute to the free software commons.

The latest one is pretty cool:

We're happy to announce the OCRopus OCR Project, a Google-sponsored project to develop advanced OCR technologies in the IUPR research group, headed by Prof. Thomas Breuel at the DFKI (German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, Kaiserslautern, Germany).

The goal of the project is to advance the state of the art in optical character recognition and related technologies, and to deliver a high quality OCR system suitable for document conversions, electronic libraries, vision impaired users, historical document analysis, and general desktop use. In addition, we are structuring the system in such a way that it will be easy to reuse by other researchers in the field.

Just as important is the choice of base platform:

We are initially targeting Linux x86 and x86/64 and are developing under Ubuntu 6.10. The code should be easily portable to other Linux distributions and other platforms. If you're interested in taking responsibility for another platform, please let us know.

OCR is an area where free software is still lagging somewhat compared to proprietary code: Google's latest gift to the community is therefore highly welcome - even if ultimately it will help it know even more about documents and hence us. (Via Matt Asay).

In the (Marketing) Belly of the Beast

It's always a good idea to try to understand how Microsoft regards the world of free software, and there's no better way of doing that than reading its own materials aimed at beating open source. Here's a good example, called Linux Personas, which presents various kinds of GNU/Linux users and how to win them back to Windows.

Perhaps the most interesting category is the Linux Aficionado - hard-core open source geek, in other words. The two key approaches are the usual tired TCO studies - a pretty forlorn hope given the extent to which they have been debunked - and an argument based on the strength of Windows' integrated platform.

The latter has always truck me as one of the better points, since it is (currently) a key differentiator for Microsoft. I still don't see geeks going for it (their senior managers might, though). What's more important in this context, perhaps, is the rise of the open source stack, which effectively is building a counter-argument to this. (Via Slashdot.)