Tech this week (Oct 20 to 24 2008)

Nokia puts QT on Symbian series 60 platform: After Trolltech was acquired by Nokia ,it was widely anticipated that they may port QT libraries to Symbian platform. The first pre-release of QT for Symbian (called the ‘pyramid’) is now available.  As per the developer blog, to start with the Qore(QTCore),internet(QTNet) ,GUI (QTWidgets) and the GUI testing framework would be available.

With this release, QT now has support for the 3 major smartphone platforms today.

WiFi at 1Gbps: Yes, that is what Quantenna, a start up wants to achieve with its new chip!

WiFi standards, has come a long way and the latest standard 802.11.n (still in draft) has added support for multiple-input multiple-output  devices (MIMO) . In layman terms that means 802.11n allows devices with multiple transmitter and receiver antennas.

This inclusion enabled WiFi to achieve speeds upto 600Mbps .This has made the standard quite attractive and many devices already support the standard even though its still a draft.   Quantenna takes the 802.11n draft standard, and has improved it by  using four antennas each for sending and  receiving and 4 radio’s for each band. (a 4×4 array). This MIMO system makes it possible to achieve 1Gbps on WiFi.

Value of open source: The Linux Kernel is worth $1.4 bn!! That is the conclusion from a study done by the Linux Foundation. The figure was derived based on the number of lines of source that is calculated using a tool called SLOCount and then using an estimation model called ‘Intermediate COCOMO’ .

I remember COCOMO from my Software Engineering course at college. Now here ,is a nice example of how it is put to use 🙂  As acquiring small open source software companies by large companies increase, this model may help them in estimating the value of their product.

Microsoft’s new patent – real time censuring of audio :   Microsoft’s PDC2008 is on the way and many are expecting announcements on their next edition of Windows (Windows 7) and their road map on cloud computing. Before that ,here is a new patent from Microsoft that caught my attention.  PN/7,437,290 is about a method to analyze the phonemes in live audio streams and replace a F*** or M****** with a bleeps,other noise or silence.

Earlier , there used to be a 7 second delay during which the content is scanned by an editor who adds the bleep.  MS plans to use it in filtering audio exchanged between players using their XBox 360 along with some voip solutions like Teamspeak.