The Barrel

Marvell Offers Mini Plug Computer for Consumer, Network, Appliance Designs

 
Marvell has created a new Plug Computing initiative to help developers build high-performance, always-on, always-connected and environmentally friendly little computer devices that plug into electrical wall sockets and act like embedded or appliance computers in the home. The little plug-in computers start with a gigahertz-class processor and are capable of acting like home media [...]

Posted in Linux, Networking

IT offshoring is exaggerated and the IT labor shortage is real

The fastest way to raise the hackles of most U.S. IT professionals is to mention offshore outsourcing. Among them, there is a common perception that U.S. corporations are cutting IT budgets by laying off lots of IT professionals and shipping their IT jobs overseas, and generally wrecking a lot of IT departments in the process.
This [...]

Posted in Networking, News

Bandwidth Caps

Okay as you all know, or I hope that you do Comcast has started to enforce a bandwidth on it’s users. While a 250 gig a month cap sounds like a lot, but if you have more than one computer and more than one user, what with movie,iso’s, podcasts, chattting, IM, and streaming music the [...]

Posted in Networking, News, Personal

Easy file uploads with Droopy

 
Suppose someone wants to send you a large file. They could try to send it via email, but many email servers impose limits on file size. They could try sending it over during an instant messenger or Internet Relay Chat session, but that’s slow, as the file actually gets transferred twice: once to the chat [...]

Posted in Networking, Software

WiFi software arrives on Linux desktops

 
A vendor of Linux-based WiFi arrays is finally releasing a version of its WiFi Monitor utility for Linux desktops. The open source, widget-like Xirrus WiFi Monitor for Linux enables users to monitor, secure, and troubleshoot WiFi networks, says Xirrus. The company refers to the software as a "desklet," a widget-like applet that provides quick access [...]

Posted in Networking

Top 7 Wireless Apps for Linux

Assuming you have managed to find a wireless card that is working well with your Linux distribution, or perhaps you just settled for a hack-n’-hope solution with NDISWrapper, you need to settle on an application that you can use to connect to your wireless network.
For vanilla GNOME and KDE-based installations, you are provided solutions out-of-the-box. [...]

Posted in Networking, Wireless

Are download limits anti-competitive?

Legitimate online video services have already been slow in coming to Canada, but because of download limits being imposed by the country’s major internet service providers, they may never really get here.
Many of the country’s largest ISPs recently did away with unlimited download offerings in favour of consumption-based models, where users are billed extra if [...]

Posted in Networking, News

Google, Yahoo Join in The Tangled (Open)Social Web

In a day of openness among the giants of the Web, Microsoft’s announcement is dwarfed by the joint venture between ardent rivals.
Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) has joined forces with Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) and MySpace to announce the OpenSocial Foundation, a nonprofit venture to support the development of portable, interoperable applications under the OpenSocial standard.
This comes the [...]

Posted in Networking, News

Intel Wi-Fi Provides 6 Mbps Over 100 km

MIT Technology Review describes a new Wi-Fi router from Intel capable of sending a Wi-Fi signal tens of miles with 6-Mbps performance. This is perfect for rural areas without Internet service, and for less developed countries interested in building out their Internet infrastructure but no means to lay expensive cable or fiber optics. The routers [...]

Posted in Networking, News

Firefox 3 Beta 4 is 5x faster than IE7 and 3x faster than Firefox2

The almost-but-not-quite-final beta of Firefox 3 (FF3 beta 4) is now available for download. The most noticeable improvement is speed. In some tests, it’s three times faster than Firefox 2 (meaning the test completes in 1/3 the time), and a whopping five times faster than IE 7:

Source: ZDNet Blogs

Posted in Linux, Networking, Software