Fold is the new way of seeing portals. It is a virtual desktop, based on AJAX principles, that hopes to become our everyday start page. All it needs is a Mozilla Foundation browser (Mozilla Suite Navigator or Firefox).
It is still on beta, but it shows what will happen in the future.
Try it in: http://beta.fold.com/
IDEMA (International Disk Drive, Equipment, and Materials Association) has formed a commitee to investigate future specs for magnetic storage devices - yeap, hard disk drives.
Well, the commitee recommended to replace standard of 512 bytes/sector - a 30-year-old standard - with sectors of 4096 bytes.
Windows Vista are said to support this. So, developers, start modifying your programs if you use aggressive buffer that relied upon 512 byte sectors.
More in: http://www.geekzone.co.nz/content.asp?contentid=6076
I the Linux Game Tome, one can find all the available open-source games for Linux. Seems good to me 
There is a nice - although very shocking - video in Google Video. It shows a woman giving birth to her child. I think it is a must-see for everyone - please DO NOT SEE IT IF YOU BELIEVE THAT NUDITY OFFENDS YOU.
Seth Godin has made a speech, which is now available from Google Video. His audience is Google people. A must watch for everyone that is interested in marketing - even remotely.
Anyone remembers Tablet PCs? You know, that small PCs that look like big notepads (or books) and can be used with a pen. Well, there was much hype 2-4 years ago for those little machines - however, they were too big, too heavy and very expensive.
Now, Microsoft has resurrected the tablet PCs with the Origami Project. It looks like a cut-down PC or a big Playstation Portable (PSP). Could this be MS’s response to the successful Sony PSP? I dunno… However, if they pack it with useful software - and not just beautiful or innovative software - and sell at an affordable price - for God’s shake, 1000$ is too much guys - it could possibly find a place in many homes and replace some ordinary PCs or laptops.
And maybe give some specs out and see real innovation with Linux, XGL and some other really interesting open-source projects.
I am an ATI fan and I am using Linux (SuSE 10.0 that is) as my main OS - I occasionally boot into MS Windows XP as well.
I am an unfortunate guy that has an ATI Radeon 9600XT and X.Org 6.9. Yes, truly unfortunate… ATI has released new drivers (8.22.5 as of this time). Although my distribution is fully supported, X.Org 6.9 is not. None of the patches that I have found work - but of course, the drivers are for X.Org 6.8, not 6.9. So, I have a pretty good card and I cannot test any 3D application, game or composite manager.
The open-source driver - r300 Project - does not support my card.
And I am asking - is it that difficult to create a new driver? If only I had the time and resources and assist you guys in ATI.
I am thinking very seriously of selling my card and buying an nVidia one. Although I don’ t think they make better cards, they surely have better drivers. I am accepting donations through Paypal, using ipapadop_at_inf.uth.gr
My blogsite now uses Google Adsense and has some ads. Although this is really annoying for some people - and I do apologize, if you need to complain you know where to do it - it is more like a test to me, to see if this is can make some money. Since I am currently a student, I could make use of any financial help I can get - and test if Adsense really works.
For entering ads like this:
I use the AdSense-Deluxe, which is pretty good… For having the neat sidebar box, I modified sidebar.php in my theme, according the instructions from http://www.tamba2.org.uk/wordpress/adsense/
If I earn some money, I’ll tell you so - and how much…
From time to time, and since I use my keyboard a lot, my right wrist hurts. I can control it, however I tried to find another way of controlling my PC. So, the regular way is through voice and speech recognition.
Since I do not have the funds to acquire a commercial system and I certainly do not want to return to MS Windows just to use speech recognition software, I tried to find any speech recognition software that is available in GNU/Linux. Voice recognition in open-source systems is non-existant, period.
There was only one commercial system widely available, IBM’s ViaVoice - for only 40$. However, I cannot find it now. There was also XVoice which integrated ViaVoice with the X Window System. As I can’t find ViaVoice, it is also dead to me - the site hasn’t updated for many years.
One promising system is Sphinx-4 from Carnegie-Mellon University. It is a complete rewrite of C-based Sphinx-3 in Java. It looks good, it works somewhat OK and has had to be updated for 2+ years. Shame… I have used it and didn’t work flawlessly. However, I believe it is the best choice out there.
We also have the Open-Source Speech Recognition Initiative. It has started, but never released anything. The site is a bit poor, but expect miracles if the guys get proper funding. Nothing more.
The last piece of software is cvoicecontrol. It worked fine with me, although it needs to be taught to recognize your voice. Unfortunately, its author is now an employee in a speech recognition software company, so he stopped the active development. Anyone with speech recognition knowledge to resume development?
Although we’ ll have a full 3D environment in Linux in a few year’s time, we’ ll only detach ourselves from the keyboard in a decade or so. Unless Apple comes out with speech recognition software and integrates it with MacOS X. Because if Apple does not do such a thing, no-one will ever care.