.mrt memo

Something from the topic of “Things you can’t do in Windows”.

Hypothetical scenario: you have a new machine and new installation of Windows XP, but no hardware is recognized. It barely display’s you a really small resolution picture.
Another scenario: you cant look into your box, but you have to get the specs somehow.

Now on Windows you would probably try something like SiSoftware Sandra, but it seems to recognize only the drivers that are installed in your system. Not the hardware itself. That is almost completely useless. Well I am not aware of any better means to accomplish this task in Windows than to reboot into Linux (whether its a live cd or installed dual boot system, doesn’t really matter) and explore your system with some of the following commands:

• lspci
• cat /proc/cpuinfo
• lsusb
• cat /proc/scsi/scsi
• ls /dev (if using udev)
• dmesg|less

Via Slashdot.

Well. For everybody who loved Starcraft, here’s a whole new mindblowing experience. Actually for whatever RTS game, this would be an amazing experience. The fact that it’s running on Linux, makes it even more cooler. I want that

Here’s the info part of the video:
OS: Gentoo Linux.
PC: p4, 1.8mhz, 256mb, 40gb(hd).
Monitor: waytec 15”.
Video: Nvidia 64mb.
TouchScreen Device: penmount usb 8-wire.
Touchscreen opensource drive for linux: “evtouch”
Graphic system: xorg 7.1 + XGL + compiz

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYY-g6ionzM

Seems that Novell has done some spoofing and goofing around with the infamous Mac’n'PC ads.
Check it out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cldeHjFig_c
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVOnFdMf0RU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pa1RCg-Ccp0

Ingenious comment on OOninja.com:

“OOwriter needs tab browsing like Firefox. Everyday I need several documents open at once.”

Update 20080405

Many thanks go to Andrew Z from OOOninja for directing my attention to OOo Tabs extension. It’s something similar to what I thought, but not quite.

• You cannot navigate through tabs with the usual ctrl+tab/ctrl+shift+tab
• you cannot close tabs with ctrl+w
• well also the right click menu on the tabs bar doesn’t give you the option to close a tab - you simply have to go File->Close
• and the tab titles don’t reflect the titles of the documents, simply “my windowN”
• I hope they learn from Firefox, fix the previously mentioned discomforts, also closing “X” would be nice
• and in the future I hope they also get to implementing Firefox’s FishEyeTabs, as I cannot live without it anymore :P.

I read some tech news and found some great ones.

“Seagate may sue if SSD gets popular” - typical corporate legal BS. So Intel and Samsung have reached to 64GB with their SSD-drives and now they begin to resemble HDDs. They may kill Seagate’s business and what you do about that. You try to get some money from that newcomer as the new technology may kill your old one. Great job, Seagate!

Smaller and faster supercomputers by replacing wires with lasers. That’s the new project Sun is working and DARPA is financing. Fancy idea.

So nowdays probably the most significant gadget new wave seems to be “ultra mobile” little laptops which run Linux. Asus Eee PC and OLPC are just some of the examples. Now another one enters the battle for the consumers wallet. I hope Acer, Asus and all the others do well, because then we can perhaps get super-duper small laptops really cheap. It’s another “cheaper, better, faster..” news.

Oh and while I’m at it, Fujitsu contributes a 7200rpm 320GB 2,5 inch HDD. Thats great, but SSD is only 3 iterations away from there (64GB -> 128GB -> 256 GB -> 512GB). Well, unless Seagate sues their ass and they will have to pay humongous amounts of money and SSD will never get off the ground.

Those news almost make me feel that there is some hope yet and we can have cheap ubiquitous tech somewhere in the near future. Or they are very good at conjuring the illusion of advancement.

Via XKCD.com #399

OpenOffice.org Ninja has a little overview of the upcoming OOo 3.0.

Perhaps the most important new feature would be Office Open XML file support (.docx, .pptx, .xlsx) and the possibility to IMPORT standard PDF files. I think the latter will be a nice addition to OOo’s killer-features.

Here’s a piece of useful information to all who have to use Unix/Linux CLI once in a while.

Via How-To-Geek.

Just a little thought from an article (”How Apple Got Everything Right By Doing Everything Wrong by Leander Kahney“) I read.

I was just reading about the molecular nano-machine that presumably could control 16 others and the future applications it may have. The most intriguing side of the news for me was the medical implementation as a no-cut-no-blood surgery machine. Think about it - you have a braintumor and your medicine would be a little capsule or a hypodermic syringe filled with couple of nanobots who simply go and destroy the hostile tissue.
Well, you could also think forward and perhaps the nanobots would enable some “magical” powers, like in the last year’s dystopian adventure Bioshock. There we had plasmids that you inject into your bloodstream and they enhance your abilities and provide new “magical” powers. Check out Bioshock, the storytelling was awesome.