.mrt memo

Nagu Selver ees, nii Prisma järel. Huvitav, mille baasil Selver oma kilekotte teeb, sest mais on ju põllukultuuridest üks maad kurnavamaid.

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.

A really innovative game on a tablet pc. The name’s Crayon Physics Deluxe. It’s a puzzle game in development. Looks cool, but I don’t think I’m going out to buy a tablet just for that. Fortunately, there are plenty of puzzle games for us non-stylus people. So I think it goes under the category “cool but otherwise useless stuff”.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsTqspnvAaI

Cool article about the Matrix Trilogy, some speculation, some hypothesis, some explanation. The basic point I guess is that the writers can always write around little problems such as the death of main character (or in plural “characters”, as I discovered reading the article from the recap of Matrix Online). One way to go is to “deny everything” - never happened, why would you think of something like that?
http://www.the-trukstop.com/articles/2008/matrix.html

Little glitch in the Belgium’s Tax Office
http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The_%E2%82%AC883_Million_Overestimate.aspx

CeBIT started and one of the news from Endgadget is the Asus Eee PC 900. It has 8.9 inch screen (larger compared to current 7 inch screen) and of course all the “usual” Eee PC goodies - Solid State Drive and Xandros Linux preinstalled. I have to say, it looks like a cool gadget, but I’d perfer it with a bigger harddrive. I guess I’ll have to wait for a year or so. Moving parts in HDD are so 1950s - SSD is the future!
The idea comes from dukelupus (in Estonian)
http://www.engadget.com/2008/03/03/hands-on-with-the-9-inch-eee-pc/

BBC World has a little video from Estonia. It’s not that cold outside, at least not always and not everyday, but it seems that they captured one of the cold days nicely
http://news.bbc.co.uk/player/nol/newsid_7250000/newsid_7258200/7258220.stm?bw=bb&mp=wm&asb=1&news=1&ms3=54&ms_javascript=true&bbcws=2#

It appears Finland is once again having their Eurovision a’la heavy metal. “Missä miehet ratsastaa”? One could translate it as “where the men ride their horses”? A stupid question, but a little suggestion - listen and wipe off that smirk from your face, it isn’t like english sounds much better with classic heavy metal vocals. One must give them credit as they at least try something different from the usual BS. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0BiRGxCMMU

Kodak moment. Amazing footage straight from the land with no speedlimit - Germany, Frankfurt. Clearly they didn’t think it through as an Airbus almost crashes during the landing. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J284VO_md_c

US scientists are wondering why US kids are so stupid. The main paragraph:
The Finns won attention with their performances in triennial tests sponsored by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group funded by 30 countries that monitors social and economic trends. In the most recent test, which focused on science, Finland’s students placed first in science and near the top in math and reading, according to results released late last year.
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB120425355065601997-7Bp8YFw7Yy1n9bdKtVyP7KBAcJA_20080330.html