http://gizmodo.com/…

A video surveillance program, similar to the one that has proven to be so “effective” in London, is coming to Chicago with the help of Big Brother Blue, IBM. The cameras, which will reportedly cost less than current city-wide surveillance methods, will also be linked to intelligent software.

For instance, the system will be able to send out an alert if it locates a stolen car or even a missing child. It’s too bad this seems just a little too smart, if you ask us. Like, who gets to determine what the network tracks? Sure, right now it’s just Amber Alerts and stolen cars, but what happens when it starts following people who don’t particularly like the current administration or have ideas that are deemed “too” radical? While we love our technology and the feeling of being safe and protected, we also like doing as we please without being watched.

But does it run Linux? Was Apple on to something back in 1984?

http://blogs.zdnet.com/…

I affirm, I really was going to drop this Ron Paul rant I pursued in my earlier post.

But some facts in this morning’s post by my highly respected Washington, D.C.-centric colleague Declan McCullagh entitled Ron Paul: The Internet’s Favorite Candidate” made me realize there are some lessons that still need to be taught to all you Libertarian-leaning fans of the Republican Presidential candidate.

Read More…

 http://kerneltrap.org/node/11756

Offering a potential alternative to the existing suspend and restore implementations in the Linux Kernel, Ying Huang posted a patch utilizing kexec, “kexec based hibernation has some potential advantages over uswsusp and suspend2. ” He listed two such potential advantages, “the hibernation image size can exceed half of memory size easily,” and, “the hibernation image can be written to and read from almost anywhere, such as a USB disk [or] NFS.” He described the feature implemented by his patch as “jumping from a kexeced kernel to the original kernel“, allowing someone to first boot from one kernel, then to kexec another crashdump kernel in reserved memory and run from it for a while, and finally to “jump back” to the original kernel.

Sounds like an interesting way to do hibernation. I’ve not used any of the suspend technologies as I’ve little need for them but I’m hoping to pick up a subnotebook (maybe the Foleo) and in that case I’d want some suspend feature.

https://direct.openmoko.com

The Neo 1973 boasts the following hardware specifications

• 2.8″ VGA TFT color display
• Touchscreen, usable with stylus or fingers
• 266MHz Samsung System on a Chip (SOC)
• USB 1.1, switchable between Client and Host (unpowered)
• Integrated AGPS
• 2.5G GSM – quad band, voice, CSD, GPRS
• Bluetooth 2.0
• Micro SD slot
• High Quality audio codec

The base unit costs $300 and advanced kit is $450. It looks like a good start but I’m more interested in a cell with an actual qwerty keyboard. Something like the Sidekick but with a touchscreen plus an open Linux platform would be a killer device.

http://gizmodo.com/…

Bj will be the new robot mutt in town when it arrives worldwide this fall. It may not have Sony’s pedigree, but it’s smarter than any other pup-bot ever. Designed for research and hacking, the fully programmable Bj uses Linux and is loaded with an i.MX 533MHz processor based on an ARM core with 64MB of RAM.

It also uses Kondo’s servo-motors, wireless LAN and a 350,000-pixel CMOS sensor capable of getting 30 frames per second video.

At $4900 it’s a bit expensive but it sounds pretty spiffy. I’d love to see a Bj vs. Roomba match.

http://www.linuxdevices.com/…

At least two large online retailers are selling Nokia’s 770 Internet Tablet for $140. Originally priced at $400, the 770 was Nokia’s first Linux-based consumer device — and arguably the first product in an emergent new generation of pocketable WiFi-connected Web tablets.

My college roommate has one of these 770s and loves it (except that the community firmware he installed didn’t support suppend). And for him the metal cover is a requirement as he lugs it around in his pocket all the time. I’ve considered picking the N800 up but I’m holding out for something with a physical keyboard that’s more subnotebook like. Hopefully the Palm Foleo will fill that desire.