.mrt memo

Really weird and some useful ideas at freshome.com.

Feel Seating System looks cozy and the ceiling bed is very useful in tight conditions, although I somehow think it’ll fall down from the ceiling after pushing/pulling it like 100 times or so..

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.

See how 37signals is thinking out of the box. They’re experimenting with different “workplace hacks” to make peoples lives and specifically their jobs at 37signals more enjoyable and relaxed. A great effort. It’s my philosophy that your everyday work doesn’t need to be hard or challenging all the time. You’re not in this world to work, but to live and enjoy. So all the managerial types, cut some slack will ya!
http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/893-workplace-experiments

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#