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The incredible folding chopsticks

In Singapore, a lot of us eat with chopsticks. Most of those you get these days are the low-quality disposable kind that leave strands of wood in your food and are way too thin for a good grip. If you feel strongly against using these horrible tree-killing utensils, the Brunton FlipSticks folding chopsticks could just be your thing.

The ends of the FlipSticks which pick up food are made of bamboo, just like regular chopsticks, but the rotating ends are stainless steel. They fold to half the normal length for storage and fit into a handy case for transport, as … Read more

Solar mat charger goes on a roll

It may be getting easier and cheaper to harness the sun's energy, but all too often the equipment needed to do so isn't the most portable. At least one manufacturer has figured this out, however, and is apparently responding to that inconvenience.

Brunton started shrinking its solar chargers a year ago with its "SolarPort" and is continuing its weight-loss program now with the "SolarRoll," according to Newlaunches. As its name indicates, the latter is basically a mat of solar panels that can be rolled up and carried around in a bag or even a … Read more

Open source @ SAIC: Wayne Waddoups speaks

Last week The Open Road caught up with Justin Steinman @ Novell and Mike Olson @ Oracle to discover how open source factors into these companies' businesses. This time, we're switching gears a bit to talk with a company that sells services around software - both open source and proprietary - rather than a software company.

Being familiar with the interesting open source work happening at SAIC, I decided to talk with two members of its Open Source Community of Practice: Ryan Brunton, a developer within SAIC's Open Source Community of Practice, and Wayne Waddoups, vice president of Strategy, SAIC Office of Technology. SAIC has long worked with projects like Linux and MySQL, but it's the cutting edge work it's doing with open source applications and infrastructure that caught my eye. More to the point, and more to Wayne's and Ryan's response, I wanted to know how open source helps SAIC build its business.

Just as enterprise software vendors have their P&Ls tied to proprietary software (making adoption of open source more difficult than it otherwise would be), so, too, do tier-one systems integrators like SAIC, Accenture, etc. How does SAIC view open source, given revenues of $8.2 billion that might well point it back to proprietary software?

Wayne and Ryan write:… Read more