Blender’s 10-munite demo video, a follow-up for Elephant’s Dream, has finally been released.  It demonstrates all the wonderful things that can be done with Blender (especially with fur).  It is released under CC by.

We’ve collected several mirrors worldwide for a stable and – hopefully fast – hosting of the BBB movies. You can download the files in four different flavours, which will nicely work for all common video players and OSes.
The download section also has Vimeo and Youtube links for streaming video.
Lastly, mirrors with the DVD ROM studio files are also being added now!

Have fun watching! And, thanks again for the great feedback and ongoing support. It has been a great ride for everyone here, and I definitely look forward to the next open movie… which – as promised – will not start before the Blender 2.5 project is in usable state. Most likely that’s end of 2008, early 2009.

Yay!  I’ve been waiting since they announced this project back in November.

• Big Buck Bunny

Via announces the OpenBook, releasing all CAD specs under CC BY-SA.  This lets other entities buy the chips from VIA, and customize the rest of the hardware themselves.

Taipei, Taiwan, 27 May 2008 – VIA Technologies, Inc, a leading innovator of power efficient x86 processor platforms, today introduced the new VIA OpenBook™ mini-note reference design targeted at the rapidly growing global market for ultra-portable notebooks

The VIA OpenBook mini-note reference design introduces a host of new innovations, including the next generation of VIA Ultra Mobile Platform, based on the VIA C7®-M ULV processor and the new all-in-one VIA VX800 digital media IGP chipset. Together, this ultra compact, power efficient platform delivers richer computing and multimedia features, including a stunning 8.9” screen and greater video playback support, in a compact and stylish clamshell form factor that weighs just 1kg.

The VIA OpenBook features a flexible internal interface for high-speed broadband wireless connectivity that provides customers with the ability to select from a choice of WiMAX™, HSDPA and EV-DO/W-CDMA modules appropriate to their market. In addition, under a unique collaborative approach, the CAD files of the external panels of the reference design are offered for download under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 license to give customers such as OEMs, system integrators, and broadband service providers greater freedom in tailoring the look and feel of their device to meet the diverse needs of their target markets.

Very cool.  When can I buy one?

• VIA Press Release
• CC Blog
• OpenBook Movie
• Engadget
• Gizmodo

Barry Gitarts has been found guilty of copyright infringement in the first federal trial for online music piracy.

A 25-year-old Brooklyn man has been found guilty of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement in what the Recording Industry Association of America describes as the first-ever federal trial for online criminal copyright infringement primarily featuring music.

Barry Gitarts was convicted Thursday by a federal jury in Virginia, according to the U.S Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia. He now faces up to five years in prison, a fine of up to $250,000 and three years of supervised release. In addition, he must “make full restitution” to record labels.

Honestly, this is isn’t as bad as I would expect.

• Wired
• Slashdot

The EFF successfully has kept Lockheed-Martin from posting take-down notices concerning B-24 images.

Last month we told you about Lockheed Martin’s effort to use trademark infringement claims to cause the removal of digital images of classic military aircraft from TurboSquid, a stock images site. The central mark at issue was the term “B-24,” which Lockheed managed to register as a trademark for use in connection with scale models of airplanes. We sent an open letter to Lockheed’s licensing agency, demanding that they withdraw their improper objections. We’re pleased to report that Lockheed has decided to withdraw its claim, and TurboSquid is putting the images back up forthwith.

It’s a shame we need the EFF for things like this, but we do.

• EFF

The Open Graphics Project’s first hardware release, OGD1, is available for preorder.

The Open Graphics Project has started accepting preorders for their OGD1, a graphics card with a completely open source design. This initial release is billed as a high-end FPGA prototyping kit specifically designed to test computer graphics architectures. The card has two DVI connectors, S-Video, 256MB RAM, and a 64bit PCI-X connector. The core of the system is a Xilinx Spartan-3 XC3S4000 FPGA. A nonvolatile Lattice XP10 FPGA is used to bootstrap the Xilinx at power up. Here’s the layout of the specific components.

An open design like this could prove very beneficial to the free software community. The open hardware makes driver development much easier; binary drivers from traditional graphics manufacturers have been very hard to work with in the past. The OGD1 could also be used with CPU architectures that wouldn’t be unsupported by normal graphics cards. An FPGA based design means that CPU intensive processes like video decoding could be offloaded to the video card without needing a dedicated chip. There is still a lot of work to be done and at $1500 we’re pretty sure most of you won’t be buying the first generation. It’s still exciting to see traditional PC hardware getting reinvented and opened up. Check out the OGD1’s FAQ for more info.

$1,500?  I’ll add this to my list of cool things to buy in the future when they are cheaper/I am not as poor, right there with the OpenMoko Neo.

• Hack a Day
• Announcement
• FAQ
• Slashdot

Microsoft Office 2007 will support ODF in full, but not fully implement OOXML. Office 2007 will also support PDF 1.1, PDF/A, and Microsoft’s competing fixed-text format, called XML Paper Specification.

In a surprise move, the company also announced that it intends to participate in the OASIS ODF working group and the corresponding ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 Subcommittee 34 working groups for ODF, as well as the ISO Technical Committee 171 working group for PDF, said Doug Mahugh, senior product manager for Microsoft Office.

…

However, the company is not quick to embrace its own creation. Mahugh stated that Microsoft would not implement the final ISO version of OOXML until Office 14 ships at an unstated date in the future. This variant of OOXML was designated ISO/IEC 29500 at the time it was certified as an ISO International standard in April.

I wonder how long it will take them to implement the enormous spec.

• SDTimes
• Consortium Info
• Slashdot

Update: Check out this analysis from Groklaw.

Also known as the XOXO, the second generation OLPC hardware has been unveiled.  It is about half the size of the original, and has dual touchscreens.

At OLPC’s Global Country workshop today, founder Nick Negroponte unveiled the next-gen XO Laptop, and it totally blows the original away. About half XO 1.0’s size and more like a foldable book, it does away with the keyboard and trackpad to go totally touchscreen—that’s right, dual touchscreens, straight out of the future, like a kid’s book in Minority Report. Folded all the way out, the displays work like a single continuous one, for say, a sweet game of pong. Like XO 1.0, the display by Pixel-Qi will look fine indoors or in bright sunlight. Unfortunately, it really is from the future: Due in 2010, they’re aiming for $75 and one-watt power consumption.

Hopefully the new hardware doesn’t cause things to get worse for the Windows Vs. GNU/Linux situation of the project.

• Gizmodo
• OLPC News

As of Tuesday, IBM has patented putting a hand imprint on a laptop for better balancing.

A portable data processing system having a chassis base unit and a chassis cover unit pivotably attached with the chassis base unit is provided. A hand impression is disposed on a bottom surface of the chassis base unit. A portable data processing system having a chassis base unit and a chassis cover unit each having a partial hand impression disposed on respective surface is provided.

I wonder if my patent on multiple-friction-level toilet paper has gone through yet.

• USPTO
• Slashdot

Adobe’s Flash Player 10 adds built-in peer-to-peer support and is able to save files to local drives.

The first key Flash Player feature is a peer-to-peer (p2p) technology from a company they acquired called Amicima in 2006.

The second key feature is that Flash can now save files directly to your local hard disk.

These two new capabilities together make any type of p2p application trivial. Whether you are trying to roll your own LimeWire, or you have more honorable intentions such as implementing a server-less voice over IP (VOIP) application such as Skype, the new Flash Player will make these kinds of applications trivial.

I still hope Flash dies.  And being able to write to disk?  Can you just imagine the security problems that could exist with this?

• Why Does Everything Suck?
• Public Knowledge
• Gigaom

Napster drops its DRMed all-you-can eat model for DRM-free 99 cent MP3s.

Look out, Amazon. Napster just launched the largest digital rights management-free music store in the world, with six million songs that can be loaded onto just about any digital audio player — a healthy advantage over the Amazon’s five-million-track MP3 store.

Apple also has cause for concern. Two of its most widely-known competitors now offer DRM-free music the majors won’t let Apple sell without DRM. Apple’s latest figures on the topic (released in October) indicated that it only had two million DRM-free tracks.

Napster will continue selling songs for 99 cents a piece and albums for $10, except that now every song in its six-million-track catalog will be available in the unprotected MP3 format instead of the Microsoft’s Playsforsure-protected format it had previously used to placate the record labels, before they became more afraid of Apple than they were of DRM-free music.

In other news, Jamendo still has DRM-free OGGs and MP3s for $0.00 each.

• Wired
• NME
• CBS
• PC Mag
• Accociated Press
• Boing Boing