Category Archives: Emerging

emerging technologies & trends related thereto

Emerging, New Paradigms, Open Source

Open Source moves towards the masses

The Portable Consultant would like to build his home media network: a media pc network with heavy lifting back-end and slim, quiet front-ends next to TVs and stereos.

There are countless ways to do this, and countless web sites to show you how, but what’s striking is the vast array of open source options. Not only Linux OS spin-offs like MythTV and Mythbuntu, but what appear to be very smooth products like Elisa and Neuros LINK from Fluendo and Neuros respectively.

These companies are not only using Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS), but many of them are actively inciting FLOSS developers to join their open source development communities to contribute to and hack their products. Neuros, for example, sends interested developers to its developer wiki directly from the same web page that directs customers to online support forums.

After years of denial from commercial software vendors, the FLOSS paradigm of development and support is proving increasingly useful for commercial consumer products.

These media related software & hardware products, and not the home Linux PC, appear to be the arena where the consumer is meeting open source systems for the first time… whether they know it or not.

Cheers,
-pmh

Emerging, Multimedia, Open Source, Reviews

ThePortableConsultant’s increasing portablility

The Portable Consultant has noticed that the few posts he once did about the Lexar Lightning and its portable USB applications are the most popular hits on his blog site, almost all of which come via Google.

So it is with great shame that I must confess to being remiss in not informing both my regular readers (Hi, Mom!) of the recent increase in my ‘PQ’, my portability quotient.

Over the past few months I have acquired:

1. a new Lenovo X61 ThinkPad… smaller, more powerful, and with far better battery life than my old refurbished T30 (!) ThinkPad.

Lenovo X61 Notebook

2. a new Nokia N800 Internet Tablet… pocket sized, blazingly fast at connecting to WiFi networks and bluetooth devices, a fine podcatcher and Internet Radio – with a linux terminal interface where I can enter most of the same shell commands I once used to manage big UNIX boxes.

Nokia's Linux powered N800 Internet Tablet

3. a new unlocked Nokia 6300 GSM cell phone… a phone not only capable of going “native” in most countries of the world with local SIM cards, but also the miniature camera I’ve always needed to get those unexpected photos at unexpected times in unexpected places.

Nokia\'s 6300 GSM cell Phone

The whole, however, is greater than the sum of the parts. Together these devices enhance the capabilities of each other in ways I’m only beginning to appreciate.

I’ll be writing more about how these devices play together in the near future.

Cheers,
-pmh