Via Technologies released the hardware design for a low-cost laptop with WiMax support under an open-source license in an effort to make customisation easier and shorten design cycles for system makers. The CAD (computer-assisted design) files for the OpenBook reference design can be downloaded for free and made available to anyone under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 license.

Remodeling? Like free software? If you answer "yes" to both questions, try taking Sweet Home 3D for a spin. The open source, cross-platform 3-D interior design application is simple to use and simple to learn. You don't create individual objects in Sweet Home 3D like you do in a modeling app like Blender; instead you focus on the layout and design of the rooms themselves.

Once again the Defective by Design have sprung into action to denounce another product from Apple, and once again nobody really cares. Defective by Design is a marketing campaign sponsored by the Free Software Foundation. While the FSF does plenty of good work, DBD is increasingly out of touch with the majority of users.

"...The current design of postgresql.org needs a refresh! We're looking for talented designers interested in re-developing our look [...] To help find a great designer, we've decided to put $2000 on the table..."

Technology FLOSS: "GNU/Linux is far more secure than Windows among other things because it's designed to be so (a real muti-user OS by design, real Networked OS by design, etc) plus other customs that we *NIX users have like not using the root account to play Frozen Bubble and so on."

Lantronix will award prizes of $6,000 and $3,000 to the two top entries for Best Linux Design, and a separate prize of $3,000 for the Best Student Linux Design.

Lantronix announced a design contest based on its recently introduced XPort Pro, touted as the "world's smallest Linux networking server. Lantronix will award prizes of $6,000 and $3,000 to the two top entries for Best Linux Design.

Access China and NEC Electronics are developing a "price sensitive" smartphone reference design incorporating the "new" Mini version of the Access Linux Platform (ALP) mobile stack. The touch- and 3G-enabled design will use NEC's ARM9-based MP201 system-on-chip (SoC), and a future design may use NEC's new ARM11-based Emma Mobile 1.

"Design Patterns in Ruby by Russ Olsen is an introduction to Design Patterns. It covers 14 out of the 23 patterns of the GoF Design Patters: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software book and adds three Ruby-related patterns. The book examines each pattern in general, shows how it applies to a dynamic language like Ruby and explains when to use or not use the pattern..."