If I don’t write that open-source software stinks and that proprietary software is God, Savio complains. If I don’t write that proprietary software stinks and that open-source software is God, Roy complains.

Guess what? The industry seems to agree with me in that affection. Every day we hear about more software going open source. Who would have thought that Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, etc. had any reason to open source software? And yet they do. Why?

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Because there’s power (and money) in openness. There’s also power (and money) in proprietary. The trick is to balance the two so that you don’t go overboard either way. That’s what I’ve been saying for many moons. It’s not really all that radical.

We’ve always liked the Qosmio line for its attractive designs and excellent build quality, and Toshiba has recently expanded the line to include its gaming laptops (now decked out in a fiery red chassis), which previously were part of the more pedestrian Satellite line. Stay tuned for a full review of this new X305, which we expect in the CNET Labs shortly.

The company is here at the Los Angeles Convention Center to show off some of its latest laptops, including the just-announced gamer-friendly Qosmio X305-Q701–a 17-inch Best Buy exclusive. (Matt Elliott has previously blogged about Toshiba’s direct-sale version of the redesigned X305).

As one of the only PC hardware vendors at this year’s stripped-down E3 video game trade show, Toshiba at least hasn’t had to compete with bigger names such as Alienware and Voodoo for attention.

But democracy is not always a fast process. Dan Reicher, director of climate and energy initiatives for Google.org and former U.S. assistant energy secretary, says that the next president will indeed push for change but any regulations will take time to phase in.

Rachel Barron, in Green Tech Media, writes: 2009 could bring a dramatic increase in support from Congress for R&D and more favorable approaches to clean-energy incentives.

Frank Ling is a postdoctoral fellow at the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory (RAEL) at UC Berkeley. He is also a producer of the Berkeley Groks Science Show.
Content provided by and all rights reserved to CleantechBlog.com, the premier site for commentary on clean technologies, news, and issues relating to next generation energy and the environment.

Fast pyrolysis is a process in which the organic materials are rapidly heated to 450 – 600 ?C at atmospheric pressure in the absence of air. Under these conditions, organic vapours, pyrolysis gases and charcoal are produced. The vapours are condensed to bio-oil. Typically, 70-75 wt.% of the feedstock is converted into oil.

The plant cost a mere $2.2 million to build as it uses all off the shelf parts. It produces 200 kw at a cost of 5 cents per kwh, compared to the former costs of 30 cents per kwh when using diesel. The design is projected to pay for itself within four to five years. Hydrothermal power is very promising, as it is estimated that the water beneath the Earth’s surface holds 50,000 times the amount of energy in the remaining gas and coal resources.

Steamed Alaska

The product can be used not only to replace gasoline and diesel, it can be used as feedstock for the chemical industry.

Jack Moins writes in EcoGeek:

The secret ingredient? Heat. It turns out that raising the temperature breaks the bonds of organic materials (in fact heat pretty much breaks any bond at a high enough temperature) through a process known as pyrolysis.

Think you need special enzymes to convert plant materials into fuel? It looks like science is getting closer to eliminating that step. Pretty soon we might be able to directly convert crop residues, waste paper, and pretty much anything organic into bio-crude, which is essentially oil.

At the Chena Hot Springs Resort in Fairbanks, Alaska engineers have created a breakthrough hydrothermal system that generates power using “low-temperature” reservoir water at 165 F, in contrast to conventional systems that required at least 300 F.

U.S. Climate Legislation

Waste to Oil

All the major US presidential candidates are making global warming a part of the their platform. Whoever wins, policy for energy, environment, and even agriculture are bound to change significantly.

Geothermal power is coming to a resort near you. At least the ones in Alaska.

Among its innovations, the system uses a three-pressure system and ammonia-water cycles, which limits the use of toxic coolants. With this early success, the entire town of Chena is adopting hydrothermal for its buildings and a greenhouse for food production

Turtle Beach Ear Force X4 headset

While previous Xbox-centric Ear Force models–the Ear Force AXT and Ear Force X2–have suffered from excessive wiring requirements and other design flaws, we’re hoping the X4 will be more in line with the Ear Force AK-R8, an excellent surround headset for the PC. The $200 Ear Force X4 is now shipping; look for a full CNET review soon.

Turtle Beach has just unveiled its latest surround sound headset for the
Xbox 360. The Ear Force X4 offers a wireless connection to the 360 (thanks to a separate base station) and it doubles as an Xbox Live communicator for chatting during multiplayer games (the microphone and headphone-to-controller tether can be removed during solo gameplay). The Ear Force X4 delivers full Dolby Digital and Dolby Pro Logic II surround decoding, and the standard optical digital and analog stereo inputs mean that it can be connected to virtually any other audiovisual source beyond the Xbox 360.

Coming soon to the Blackberry: iTunes music syncrhonization.

Still, for music fans in desperate need of a new phone–like me–the iPhone is still the most obvious choice, especially now that a 3G model is almost certainly on the way. But if you’re already a Blackberry fan, or are primarily concerned with having access to e-mail at all times, the 9000 seems like the clearest alternative to the iPhone.

So while the iPhone grew out of the
iPod, and thus counts music playback as one of its primary features, the Blackberry Bold focuses more on its core communications features–e-mail, messaging, and telephony–as well as new physical improvements, like a bright color screen. You can see this focus in the first detailed hands-on review of the product at Crackberry.com, where media playback isn’t even mentioned until part III (of IV) and gets no more than a paragraph. And 1GB of onboard memory isn’t really enough for serious music listeners anyway, although it’s expandable to 16GB.

Smartphone fans are excited about yesterday’s announcement of the Blackberry 9000, aka Blackberry Bold, aka Research In Motion’s
iPhone killer. But Blackberry users are a different breed than iPhone users–the Blackberry’s reason for existence is always-connected e-mail, and Blackberry users tend to be all business, afraid of being out of touch for even a moment. (An old friend in Washington D.C.–where Blackberry users are legion–had to make a vow after her third child was born not to check her e-mail after 6 p.m.)

But the clearest indication of all: while the 9000 might echo past Blackberries and ship with a Roxio application for organizing music on your PC and transferring it to your phone, RIM is also preparing a new application called Blackberry Media Sync that will let you use Apple’s iTunes to transfer files to the phone. Of course, once you do get music onto the device, a relatively powerful internal stereo speaker system might actually make listening without headphones a reasonable option–sort of like the boombox of tomorrow. The iPhone’s speakers are apparently not quite up to the task.

Plat'Home OpenBlockS

Part of the first ecology-friendly line of Linux servers ever shipped in the United States, Plat’Home’s OpenBlockS server has been built and tested to provide enterprise-grade reliability in its RISC-based hardware, and has eliminated moving parts including a hard disk drive and cooling fan. It is also RoHS-certified, a European Union directive meaning that it’s free of lead, mercury, cadmium, hexavalent chromium, and other damaging materials.

Plat’Home has a whole series of microservers, but this week’s announcement is about its OpenBlockS device, now available to U.S. customers. At 4.5 x 3.2 x 1.5 inches, they can fit practically anywhere. They have no moving parts and can handle pretty extreme temperatures. If you’re into hardware specs, here are all the gory details for you.

Plat’Home introduced Linux in Japan in 1993 (yes, 1993!), did a successful IPO in Japan in 2000, and currently ships microservers based on their own mix of Linux and BSD that fit in the palm of your hand.

(Credit: Plat'Home)

One of the security bulletins is a cumulative patch for IE, and the other is designed to resolve vulnerabilities in ActiveX Kill Bits. Both flaws affect users who visit malicious Web sites with IE, which, in turn, allows malicious attackers to execute remote code from their systems.

One of the five critical patches is designed to resolve a flaw in Microsoft Office Project, which could allow attackers to take complete control of users’ systems if they open a malicious Office Project file.

Microsoft on Tuesday issued five “critical” security patches designed to address vulnerabilities in Windows,
Microsoft Office, and Internet Explorer.

The five critical patches were included among eight bulletins that Microsoft released as part of its Patch Tuesday. The bulletins covered a total of 10 vulnerabilities.

“We live in a Web 2.0 world,” Marcus said. “It’s getting more and more popular to send people e-mails with link spam…It’s becoming an effective way to compromise people’s machines.”

This security flaw, along with two Internet Explorer-related vulnerabilities are at the top of the list as a must fix, Marcus said.

A second critical patch is designed to tackle GDI (Graphics Device Interface) vulnerabilities in Windows that could allow attackers to remotely execute malicious code if users open malicious EMF or WMF image files. Two years ago, Microsoft faced similar vulnerabilities, forcing the software giant to rush out a fix outside of its monthly patch cycle, noted Dave Marcus, security research and communications manager at McAfee Avert Labs.

EMC has traditionally played in enterprise-level storage and software arenas. Iomega is best-known for hard drives and storage for consumers and small-business customers. EMC hinted that this is just its first move into consumer hardware business.

Iomega earned $336 million in sales in 2007, while EMC did more than $13 billion in sales worldwide last year.

“Iomega will play a key role in EMC’s strategy to expand our information storage and management capabilities deeper into the high-growth consumer and small business markets,” EMC Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Joe Tucci said in a statement.

Once the acquisition is complete, Huberman will lead the newly minted consumer/small-business products division in EMC’s storage platforms group. The division will be built completely around Iomega people and brands. Huberman said no decisions have been made on possible staff cuts at Iomega. “But the expectation is that this is about growth,” he said. “The vast majority will be coming into the new organization.”

EMC has been on anacquisition tear during the last few years, most recently snapping up Pi, a cloud-computing start-up.

Updated at 2:30 p.m. PDT with comments from Iomega Chief Executive Jonathan Huberman.

Software and storage company EMC announced Tuesday that it will purchase Iomega for $213 million, or $3.85 per share. EMC expects the deal to close sometime during the second quarter of this year.

Iomega says the acquisition by the larger EMC will enable the company to grow in a way that it currently cannot. “Our markets are adjacent, but not overlapping,” Iomega Chief Executive Jonathan Huberman said in an interview with CNET News.com Tuesday. “We have strong brand and channel presence in business and consumer (markets), but what we do lack is scale.”

And now for something completely different.

For another, Yahoo opted to use XMPP in its Yahoo Live experimental video service, according to Process One, a Parisian company that sells XMPP-based IM server software using the open-source ejabberd software.

Zimbra, like Google and some other non-incumbent powers in the world of instant messaging, has used the open XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) standard for instant messaging. It’s this standard that Dietzen apparently sees playing a broader role at Yahoo.

No doubt one of those partners would be Google. Generally, it’s one of Yahoo’s biggest rivals, but Google became a major partner in a search-ad deal with Yahoo announced in June. A sidelight to the deal was one line saying the companies would make their IM services interoperable. It’s hard to say at this stage, though, how far Yahoo or others might go.

“I believe XMPP is the right platform through which to deliver interoperability with at least some of our partners,” Dietzen said in an interview.

So perhaps there’s an end in sight for this particular Tower of Babel. Adopting a standard means the IM networks will have to let go of some control, but if done right, it also could mean instant messaging could become a more popular, active, and useful part of the Internet.

For more than a decade, the Internet has suffered from multiple incompatible communication standards for instant messaging. Now it looks like Yahoo, one of the major IM players, is open to breaking the logjam.

E-mail previously had assorted closed communities including America Online, CompuServe, Prodigy, and the Internet itself. The standard prevalent on the latter network, SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) won out in the long run. It’s got shortcomings–for example identity authentication issues that contribute to the spam and security problems–but those problems arguably are easier to fix with one standard than many.

XMPP or SIP?
So if the IM powers want to move to IM standards, the next question is which standard to use.

SIP, or Session Initiation Protocol, grew out of the world of telephony and is more oriented toward multimedia than straight text.

Here, too, Dietzen has an opinion. When I asked him what’s been holding back IM interoperability, he had this to offer: “There are two competing potential standards, XMPP and…SIP. If I were betting, I’d bet on XMPP emerging as the likely framework for adoption.”

And there are signs others might be interested, too. Earlier this year, AOL began experimenting with an XMPP interface to its AIM and ICQ networks for instant messaging.

So I was encouraged by words from Scott Dietzen, Yahoo’s new head of communications products including Yahoo Messenger and Yahoo Mail. That promotion expanded his turf from his previous position at the helm of the Zimbra online e-mail software start-up that Yahoo acquired last year.

Interoperability problems are denying us a broader, richer world of real-time online communication.

One-time deals or standards?
As I see it, there are two basic paths to IM interoperability. The first, which we’ve been on for some time, consists of one-off technology partnerships between various networks. For example, Microsoft and Yahoo’s IM services now can link together, and the Google Web-based IM service built into Gmail works with AIM.

I’m a power user of IM who struggles to find software that supports chatting with people on the four main IM networks: AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google. Today’s situation, for me at least, is like having to own four e-mail programs for different networks or four telephones for incompatible phone systems.

But that approach only truly works as long as all networks set up partnerships with all other networks–a combinatorics nightmare given the arrival of new IM services from companies such as MySpace, Facebook, and eBay’s Skype. That’s where the second approach–using a standard–comes in handy.

But XMPP looks to have an inside track among the incumbent IM powers. For one thing, Yahoo’s Zimbra software framework supports it, Dietzen said.

A sign at Good Life Grocery in San Francisco's Bernal Heights neighborhood apologizes for being out of the Passover staple.

At home, my partner and I have been figuring out how to make do with a box and a half of year-old matzah. The shortage was the prime topic at a large seder (Passover meal and service) this weekend. Several of us were still talking about how we were still short on the needed Matzah, when one friend announced that he had a few extra boxes and gave those less well off some of his spares.

As someone who’s never had to struggle to have enough to eat, there is something fitting about having to scrounge around to get sufficient matzah to last for the week-long festival.

Students in the rural town of Corinto, Colombia, work in their school’s computer lab using decade-old computers as part of a project aimed at improving local agriculture practices.

For modern Jews, the culinary challenges of Passover are relatively minor. Despite some kvetching over things like how to trying to bring matzah to work in fewer than a million pieces, the Passover ritual is not that difficult. In big cities, Americans have access not just to plain matzah, but also to all kinds of baked goods made from the wafer-like bread.

(Credit:
Ina Fried/CNET News.com)

I found the exercise fitting for the holiday. Passover is about remembering the exodus from slavery in Egypt in biblical times, but also about paying mind to the inequities in our own lives.

But around the globe and even in places close to home it means more people are going hungry. Food is perhaps the most pressing scarcity, but there are so many areas where our global abundance of resources is not reaching many in the community.

Matzah isn’t the only food in short supply these days. Staples like rice and corn are also in short supply. For many of us in techland that means an extra few pennies when we go out to lunch.

The personal computer, for example, has reached approximately the first 1 billion people, but that leaves several billion that have yet to experience its possibilities. I saw some of this first hand earlier this month as I traveled to Brazil and Colombia to look at efforts to broaden computer access.

SAN FRANCISCO–Every year around this time, many Jews spend a week eating just one bread product: a bland flatbread called matzah.

The yearly ritual is designed to recall the unleavened bread eaten by our ancestors as they fled Egypt without time to prepare proper food provisions.

Neither Passover nor this blog is about coming up with all of the answers immediately, but it is a reflection on the work that remains unfinished. I am reminded of the Jewish teaching, popular at Passover, that “It is not upon us to finish the task, nor are we free not to begin.”

Update 4:30 p.m.: This YouTube video, clearly made in anticipation of a more plentiful matzah environment, shows some fun other uses for the stuff. My mom sent me the link, so I had to add it.

This year, though, just getting matzah has been a challenge. There’s something of a shortage in a number of places, including here in the San Francisco Bay Area. I went to at least eight grocery stores without procuring a single box.

In Colombia, I saw how access to computers meant employment possibilities for people that had been maimed by land mines. In a country without many laws promoting jobs for the disabled and where unemployment is high even for those without physical challenges, those who have such injuries face little opportunities for work.