No big surprise that Conexant sold off its powerline networking group today. Linking the dots on its future, it's not a big shocker HomePNA specialist CopperGate Communications was the buyer.

One of the most interesting debates at the March CTIA Wireless show was whether WiMax would become a primary path to 4G services, equal to Long-Term Evolution, or whether it would be a niche service offered in rural areas and greenfield installations. Pat Russo of Alcatel-Lucent and Mike Zafirovski of Nortel Networks made a strong case for diversity in broadband access, where some customers would choose a WiMax access device, while others would move to LTE femtocell base stations. Arun Sarin of Vodafone Group echoed many wireless operators in insisting that the world needed to get behind a single LTE standard -- something Sprint CEO Dan Hesse did not agree with.

The controversial H1-B visa program is back in the news following a settlement the U.S. Department of Justice struck with iGate Mastech, a computer consulting company that ran ads that asked only for H1-Bs to apply.

I'm sure your heard the one about sending a probe to the sun at night so that when it gets there it won't melt because the sun's not so hot then.

Jockeying for position in the home network circa 2010 will be a major consumer sport with the HomeGrid Forum jumping into the fray. The players all will want to position themselves as the best solution for everyone from carriers to OEMs to consumers.

The exhibitor list for the recent Interop show in Las Vegas featured as many network equipment manufacturers as it has for the past 20 years. But peruse the workshops and speeches, and the virtual absence of infrastructure technology, including higher-layer protocols divorced from hardware, becomes apparent. Subjects such as cloud computing, virtualization, software-as-a-service, and configuration management databases still have plenty of connections to hardware, but they assume the existence of a well-defined enterprise LAN topology which no longer needs to be discussed because of its familiarity.

Masdar, a city in the largest emirate of the UAE Abu Dhabi on the Persian Gulf, is being created in collaboration with the Massachussetts Institute of Technology to house 50,000 people with the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology at its center.

Cray's deal to work with Intel on a new line of supercomputers trumpets what most savvy observers should already know. AMD has lost the technology edge it had two years ago.

Anyone who lives in the U.S. contributes more than twice as much greenhouse gas to the atmosphere as those living in the rest of the world. "Regardless of income, there is a certain floor below which the individual carbon footprint of a person in the U.S. will not drop," according to Timothy Gutowski, professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, who taught the class that calculated the rates of carbon emissions.

The four founders of MeshNetworks Inc. are collaborating again, bartering spectrum for licensed services under the name of Spectrum Bridge Inc. Rick Rotondo, vice president of marketing at the new company, said that the founders feel confident that this could be their most successful startup out of six that various combinations of the founders have been involved in.