Popular Science is following their tradition and have published a Top 100 of everything new and escpecially innovative in 2006.

• PopSci’s Best of What’s New 2006

Smart Homes, when will they arrive!!? Well they have been around since the remote control! But let’s take a look at what’s going on right now in the field of Smart Homes in South Korea… From my point of view (the consumer!) we need to get the industry focusing on interoperability, since we don’t want to get our own homes stuck in vendor lockdowns.

Excerpt from the Article: … It is a concept that is now a reality, but the next house we saw was a mock up of what things could be like.

In South Korea’s vision of the home of the future we will all wear mini-PCs on our wrists, which turns things on or off, opens doors, and tracks the wearer’s position in the house at all times.

Smart wardrobe
Style advice is offered by a mirror on the wardrobe

Here, everything is voice activated, and the fridge can provide you with recipes which use the ingredients inside, and let you know if your food is out of date.

It relies on the food packaging containing radio tags, or RFID labels, which can be read by the fridge each time it passes through the door.

But will the food industry or consumers be prepared to pay more for this? And what about food that does not come in lots of packaging? …

• BBC NEWS | Click | Smart homes a reality in South Korea

So it finally happened, Sun relicensed Java to the GNU Public License (GPL), the most widely used Open Source license.
I welcome this move and look forward to seeing where it will take the Java and open software in general.

According to the theserverside.com: ” The rumors have been confirmed by Sun: Java is going to be released in full under the GPL v2. The initial plan is to release Hotspot and the javac compiler under the GPL v2, with the rest of Java to follow in the first half of 2007. Java EE will also be opened under the GPL, as well as J2ME. The Java specification will remain under the control of the JCP.

The GPLed components will be hosted in the JDK communities on dev.java.net. Initial components (javac and Hotspot, as well as Javahelp) are from the Java 7 codebase, as Java 6 is almost entirely finished; Java 6 will eventually be put under the GPL as time permits.

The key behind moving to the GPL is to drive more volume and more adoption for the platform. The GPL helps get Java into some markets that it hasn’t served as fully as it should – such as educational markets, governments in the developing world, and some commercial customers – as well as, obviously, some distributions of Linux which insist not on Linux-friendly licenses but on actual GPL licensing.

GPLv2 was chosen over GPLv3 for fairly obvious reasons: GPLv3 isn’t finished yet! Sun is, they said, working with the FSF on defining GPLv3.”

• The Serverside: Sun relicenses Java under GPL
• Slashdot: Sun Open Sources Java Under GPL
• CW.dk: Sun slipper Java fri som open source

Good news for Mozilla products, soon we could gain as much as 10x performance boost on our JavaScripts / ECMAScripts.

SAN FRANCISCO — November 7, 2006 — Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) and the Mozilla Foundation, a public-benefit organization dedicated to promoting choice and innovation on the Internet, today announced that Adobe has contributed source code for the ActionScript™ Virtual Machine, the powerful standards-based scripting language engine in Adobe® Flash® Player, to the Mozilla Foundation. Mozilla will host a new open source project, called Tamarin, to accelerate the development of this standards-based approach for creating rich and engaging Web applications.

The Tamarin project will implement the final version of the ECMAScript Edition 4 standard language, which Mozilla will use within the next generation of SpiderMonkey, the core JavaScript engine embedded in Firefox®, Mozilla’s free Web browser. As of today, developers working on SpiderMonkey will have access to the Tamarin code in the Mozilla CVS repository via the project page located at www.mozilla.org/projects/tamarin/. Contributions to the code will be managed by a governing body of developers from both Adobe and Mozilla.

“Adobe’s work on the new virtual machine is the largest contribution to the Mozilla Foundation since its inception,” said Brendan Eich, chief technology officer, Mozilla Corporation, and creator of JavaScript. “Now web developers have a high-performance, open source virtual machine for building and deploying interactive applications across both Adobe Flash Player and the Firefox web browser. We’re excited about joining the Adobe and Mozilla communities to advance ECMAScript.”

Roadmap
The Tamarin project is just getting started so the roadmap is not yet fully developed, but some of the technical goals include:

1. Integrating the Tamarin VM and garbage collector within SpiderMonkey
2. Using the SpiderMonkey compiler to generate code for Tamarin
3. Porting the just-in-time compiler to new hardware platforms
4. Completing the self-hosting ECMAScript 4 compiler

• Adobe and Mozilla Foundation to Open Source Flash Player Scripting Engine
• Mozilla Tamarin Project