LifeFitness exercise bike interfaces with Nexus S, makes fitness marginally enjoyable (video)

LifeFitness may have taken one too many creative liberties with its Cyberbike Wii accessory , but it did a laudable job of redeeming itself at Google I/O this week. The outfit brought a USB-equipped exercise bike to the show floor, where an Open Accessory-enabled Nexus S promptly stole the show.

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LifeFitness exercise bike interfaces with Nexus S, makes fitness marginally enjoyable (video)

Google announces Ice Cream Sandwich for Q4 2011, for smartphones and tablets alike

“One OS that runs everywhere.” There you have it, folks! Google intends to meld its Honeycomb tablet wares and Gingerbread smartphone software into one delicious Ice Cream Sandwich. Maybe that’s why the “sandwich” bit is in the name? Either way, it’ll be a universal OS that runs on everything from teeny tiny Android phones to 10-inch tablets and will intelligently adapt to each form factor with things like a resizable status bar

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Google announces Ice Cream Sandwich for Q4 2011, for smartphones and tablets alike

YouTube starts transcoding all new uploads to WebM, already has a third of its library ready

Google’s resolve to bring WebM video streaming to the masses doesn’t seem to have been weakened by a general lack of interest from the rest of the tech world, and the company’s announced that each and every new YouTube upload will now be automatically transcoded into a WebM version. Nearly a third of YouTube’s archives have already made the transition to the open source format, though if you think that’s a small proportion, you should probably know that those 30 percent account for 99 percent of all views on the site.

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YouTube starts transcoding all new uploads to WebM, already has a third of its library ready

ZodTTD makes PSX4Droid 3.0 free, claims Google booted him from Android Market

It’s been one week since Google pulled the PSX4Droid emulator from the Android Market without warning, and today its lead developer has decided to take a stand — ZodTTD’s made a new version of the app free of charge, and is hosting it at his personal website as a downloadable APK. He now claims that not only did Google pull his app, the company has frozen his developer accounts, effectively restricting his ability to publish to (and profit from) the Android Market until this gets sorted out.

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ZodTTD makes PSX4Droid 3.0 free, claims Google booted him from Android Market

Android chief Andy Rubin tackles open source qualms, says Honeycomb isn’t ‘one size fits all’

Google got a lot of flak for withholding the Android 3.0 source code , and plenty more when Businessweek sources claimed the company had set aside its open stance to dictate from a throne , but today the man who would allegedly sit atop the royal seat says it isn’t so. Andy Rubin, the man in charge of Android, says that “there are no lock-downs or restrictions against customizing UIs” nor “any efforts to standardize the platform on any single chipset architecture” as have often been rumored before, and that when Honeycomb is finally ready for phones , Google will indeed release its source code. Overall, he claims that Android’s position when it comes to open source hasn’t changed since day one — which is nice for those who would like to believe that Google’s still sticking to its motto — but that’s not likely to appease companies cut out of the loop simply because they weren’t part of the early adopter club.

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Android chief Andy Rubin tackles open source qualms, says Honeycomb isn’t ‘one size fits all’

IT Poll: Do You Use a Proprietary Database?

Over the weekend we told you about Oracle’s killer quarter . One of the interesting things about how well Oracle is doing is that a large part of the company’s revenue growth is coming from new licenses for its proprietary database software.

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IT Poll: Do You Use a Proprietary Database?

Forget Rivalries, Pay Attention to the Developers

What do we know about developers? What can we deduce about what they don’t do? We can make the educated guess that open source developers are unfamiliar and not really interested in the “one stack fits all” approach that the enterprise giants still battle to control

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Forget Rivalries, Pay Attention to the Developers

Oracle Had a Killer Quarter – What Does That Mean for Open Source in the Cloud?

Oracle’s sales increased 37% to $8.76 billion last quarter, according to Bloomberg . Cloud computing gets some of the credit for the revenue jump, causing a surge of interest in Oracle’s databases and a 29% gain in new license sales. Earlier this year David Linthicum wrote a post titled ” Amazon’s Oracle move shows open source won’t gain in the cloud ” in response to Amazon Web Services offering Oracle Databases on RDS

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Oracle Had a Killer Quarter – What Does That Mean for Open Source in the Cloud?

Adding folder sharing in Bodhi Linux

If you are a fan of modern Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu, that offer incredibly simple ways to share folders with workgroup computers, you will be happy to know the same feature can be added to Bodhi Linux (my new favorite Linux distribution.) Although adding this feature isn’t exactly automatic (or, some would argue, user-friendly), it’s all just a matter of knowing what to look for. So here I am to explain to you how to add this feature and then how to share out those folders.

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Adding folder sharing in Bodhi Linux

Develop Cross-Platform Apps for both iOS and OSX with Chameleon

Chameleon is a development framework for OSX that acts a drop-in replacement for the iOS framework UIKit. According to the project’s site, some application can be ported to OSX from iOS without changing any code. However, Chameleon is still able to provide a desktop OS experience instead of a multitouch experience.

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Develop Cross-Platform Apps for both iOS and OSX with Chameleon

Iconfactory working on open-source iOS frameworks for Mac OS X

The Iconfactory is one of the premiere Mac development houses, and as Iconfactory developer Craig Hockenberry posts on his blog , they’ve just contributed to the developer community “in a big way.” The team has introduced an open source framework called Chameleon , which provides apps designed for iOS an easier porting path to run on Mac OS X as well. Most of the work came from tools built to handle Iconfactory’s own apps, but they’ve released the code to other developers interested in reusing iOS code for Mac OS apps.

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Iconfactory working on open-source iOS frameworks for Mac OS X

Feature: Back to the front of the pack: Ars reviews Firefox 4

Mozilla has officially released Firefox 4, a major update of the popular open source Web browser.

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Feature: Back to the front of the pack: Ars reviews Firefox 4

Rubyvis: A Ruby Port of the Protovis Library

Protovis is a data visualization tool from the Stanford Visualization Group . We mentioned it last month when we covered the group’s Data Wrangler project. Rubyvis is a port of Protovis, which uses JavaScript, to Ruby

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Rubyvis: A Ruby Port of the Protovis Library

Crowdsourcing the Preservation of U.S. War Papers

The Center for History and New Media at George Mason University has joined forces with crowdsourcing document outfit Scripto , open source document transcription tool, to transcribe and share a piece of U.S. history thought to be lost. The project ” Papers of the War Department, 1784-1800 ” seeks to transcribe and digitize copies of papers from a formative part of American history, previously thought to be lost to fire

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Crowdsourcing the Preservation of U.S. War Papers

Manager your podcasts in Linux with gpodder

Podcasts have been around for a long time, and with good reason. Podcasts are a great way for users to retrieve and save various forms of educational and entertainment audio broadcasts.

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Manager your podcasts in Linux with gpodder

Adding visual effects on Bohdi Linux

Today I finally dropped standard Ubuntu as my operating system of choice on my laptop and opted for Bohdi Linux . I say “standard” Ubuntu, because Bohdi Linux is built on top of Ubuntu 10.04, so it is effectively Ubuntu, but without the weight of either GNOME or KDE on top

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Adding visual effects on Bohdi Linux

Chrome 10 brings Flash sandboxing and new settings UI

Google has issued a new stable release of the Chrome Web browser and is rolling it out to users. The new version introduces some noteworthy JavaScript performance enhancements, new plug-in security features, improved support for synchronization, and a new user interface for managing the browser’s settings

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Chrome 10 brings Flash sandboxing and new settings UI

Most Organizations Now Use Open Source Software According to Gartner

More than half of the 517 organizations surveyed by Gartner use open source software (OSS). When the firm first started tracking open source in the enterprise five years ago, only 10% of organizations were using OSS. Gartner published the results in a report titled Survey Analysis: Overview of Preferences and Practices in the Adoption and Usage of Open-Source Software .

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Most Organizations Now Use Open Source Software According to Gartner

Nokia sells Qt commercial licensing and services business to Digia

Now that Nokia has shifted to a Windows Phone-centric smartphone strategy , it’s only natural for the company to divest itself of responsibility with regard to the Qt framework at the heart of Symbian and MeeGo development — a platform Nokia acquired from Trolltech back in January of 2008. We just got word that Digia will acquire the Qt commercial licensing and services business from Nokia, including the transfer of some 3,500 desktop and embedded customers actively using Qt today. Sebastian Nystr

Feature: Ars reviews the Motorola Xoom

Motorola’s Xoom tablet is the first device to ship with Android 3.0, codenamed Honeycomb, a highly anticipated new version of Google’s mobile operating system.

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Feature: Ars reviews the Motorola Xoom