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wind

Wind River buy makes Intel a software company

Thousands of Intel employees already work on software, but with Intel's agreement to acquire Wind River Systems, the chipmaker is moving software from an indirect supporting role to a significant and direct revenue stream.

Intel's primary business is developing, manufacturing, and selling microprocessors, but software has gradually been rising in prominence. Starting years ago from only basic ingredients such as programming utilities, Intel has been gradually expanding its software work, for example by pushing the Moblin mobile Linux project and bulking up its Software and Services Group through a spending spree for smaller companies such as videogame physics engine maker Havok. … Read more

Intel to buy Wind River for $884 million

Chip giant Intel is set to acquire Wind River Systems, a maker of software for embedded devices.

Intel has entered a definitive agreement to buy Wind River for $11.50 per share in cash, which works out to a total value of approximately $884 million, Wind River said Thursday. Wind River would become a wholly owned subsidiary of Intel, reporting to the chipmaker's Software and Services Group, headed by Renee James.

The pending acquisition, Wind River said, would fit into "Intel's strategy to grow its processor and software presence outside the traditional PC and server market segments, … Read more

Is community wind power full of hot air?

Call it wind power for the neighborhood.

Some companies are trying to stake out a middle ground in wind power by making mid-size turbines big enough for a school or big-box retailer to use, but not so big that they require a convoy of trucks to be delivered.

Distributed wind generation with medium-size turbines runs counter to the prevailing trends in the industry. In the past several years, turbines have gotten bigger and bigger to lower the cost of generated electricity. At the opposite extreme, there is rapid growth in sales of the small wind machines designed for a single … Read more

Nobel laureate: Wind is not the future

While the Obama administration has expressed increasing hopes that wind power will play a key role in America's future energy system, one of the world's leading scientists is ruling out the technology.

Jack Steinberger, the 1968 Nobel Prize winner in physics and director of CERN's particle-physics laboratory, spoke at a conference of Nobel laureates at the 350-year-old Royal Society in London last week.

His conclusion: "Wind is not the future," according to the London Times.

Steinberger says Europe should cancel its big wind plans and that solar energy is the future.

Historical resources in the … Read more

Small wind turbines blow out big sales

Updated on May 29 at 7:25 a.m. PT with corrected figure of installed turbines last year.

Sales of turbines big enough to serve a single home or office building grew rapidly last year and are poised for even faster growth this year, according to a report from the American Wind Energy Association.

The report, published on Thursday (click for PDF), found that sales of small wind turbines smaller than 100 kilowatts grew 78 percent last year, even though there was a sharp drop-off at the end of last year and beginning of this year.

The actual number of … Read more

New colors + TV = MSI U123

MSI's newest Wind has gone on sale, upgrading to an Atom N280 processor from the previous N270 for some modest performance gains. What else is new as compared with the last-generation Wind? Four colors instead of two--blue, red, gray, and white, so a family of four could have its own MSI Wind party and not mix up their laptops.

Also new and notable is a TV antenna connector, turning the Wind into a portable broadcast-ready set in a pinch. Most of what we watch these days is on the Internet anyway, but this could always come in handy for … Read more

Mac OSX 10.5.7: Better for Hackintoshed Netbooks?

Although Apple doesn't have any clear Netbook plans on the horizon, that hasn't exactly stopped anyone from getting their own Apple Netbook the hacky way. Hackintoshes, i.e. PCs with Mac software loaded on them, hadn't truly started stealing the spotlight until the Netbook phenomenon. For as little as $300 and a copy of Leopard, you too could have the sort of ultraportable that Jobs and Co. would only sneer at.

The downside, besides no official hardware support from Apple, has been battery life, an area where OS X hasn't exactly been Netbook-friendly.

That is, until … Read more

The next big thing in wind: Slow wind, huge turbines

With politicians pushing adoption of renewable energy in the United States and Europe, the last few years have seen a surge in plans for wind farms--both on land and sea. But wind power isn't viable everywhere--and prime coastal spots are often already developed.

So some wind-turbine makers are shifting their focus toward building bigger wind turbines that can harvest the lower-speed winds that are more readily available. This next generation of wind turbines is no small matter: their rotors have a diameter the size of a football field.

In general, wind turbines get more powerful and efficient with taller … Read more

Wind and solar charger 'tribrid' for power blackouts

Kinesis Industries' K3 is a compact "tribrid" wind and solar power generator about the size of a flashlight. The company calls it a tribrid since the built-in rechargeable battery also can be precharged with normal grid electricity using an AC plug. It also charges from any computer via USB, or from a car cigarette lighter with available USB adapter.

According to Kinesis, the fully charged K3 can power a mobile phone more than five times on a single charge--and an iPod/MP3 player more than 10 times.

At a weight of 10.5 ounces (a little over half … Read more