Ars has a great post up on the 5 ways Ubuntu has made Linux more human in commemoration of the distro’s fifth birthday. They bring up some good points, including how being philosophically driven has helped Canonical drive development, its easy installation (which has gotten even simpler over the years) and setup process, and their focus on desktop usability. When using most other Linux distributions, I often feel that they’re developed by and for engineers–Ubuntu doesn’t feel like that at all.
I suppose its no surprise that Apple’s latest hardware announcements have taken over the tech news waves today. After all, the announcement of sexy new 27″ iMacs, coupled with the future availability of Intel’s next generation Core i5 and i7 processors, is sort of hard to ignore. There were upgrades across the board for the Macbook, Time Capsule, and Mac Mini as well–but strangely enough, the most compelling announcement to me was that of a lowly input device: The Magic Mouse.
If there’s one thing that’s annoyed me most about PC gaming, it’s all the work that goes into keeping up with the hottest video cards on the market. It’s sort of a crazy experience, especially for average consumers, and it’s something that I’ve always felt has kept significant portions of the PC gaming market far too exclusive to survive in the long run.
The Lucid Hydra 200 doesn’t solve all of these problems, but it makes it possible for people with less hardcore computer rigs to throw in any video card they choose to get a bit more power. Effectively, you could have an ATI and an nVidia card running in tandem without having to worry about their multi-GPU nonsense (Crossfire or SLI). It also seems like it’s not that expensive for motherboard manufacturers to implement this feature, which means we can see adoption spread quite quickly. Over time, perhaps the costs could even be driven down to fit the $100-$150 motherboard market.
Moreso than PhysX, this is the sort of innovation we need to see in the PC gaming segment.
Last night I attended my first session of the New York Tech Meetup, and it seems I’ve found exactly what I’ve been looking for in the city when it comes to a vibrant tech community. I recently moved to New York from Western Massachusetts to pursue a career writing about technology and film–after several years of IT work and dreaming about making the jump to writing full time. I had already gotten my taste of the film blogging world after covering Comic-Con and several press screenings for Slashfilm, but I had yet to get a full sense of what being in New York means for my tech interests until last night.
The first thing I noticed during the evening’s introduction (by NYTM organizer Nate Westheimer) was that New York techies seem to have a major complex towards the Silicon Valley and Boston tech communities. There’s a clear cultural difference between NY and the Valley, but as someone who spent their entire life halfway between New York and Boston (I grew up in Hartford, then went to college and worked for four years in Western Mass.), it never really occurred to me how the NY tech community was different than Boston. Westheimer mentioned one key difference (which he also wrote about on his blog)–that the NY community fails at connecting the university and commercial spaces.
I’m about ready to give up on Digsby. I’ve been a faithful user for the past year and a half, and I’ve written about it positively as well, but it seems as if they have no desire to implement two of the biggest missing features since the beta: Group chat, and in-line text formatting (the ability to bold/italicize/etc. individual letters and words). Instead, they seem content to push forward with more complex social networking features (today, it’s URL shortening and better MySpace Newsfeed support), all the while ignoring what I consider basic features for any IM client.
I don’t think I’m being greedy by asking for these features. Group chat (and chat room) support was a part of AIM since the 90s, and it’s also a feature of every major IM platform that Digsby supports. It’s shocking to me that so long after Digsby’s release, I still need to open up another client or head to Meebo to participate in group chat.
Sony’s Idea of Corporate Synergy: Smashing PS3s into Bravia TVs at 50mph
I’m not sure if there’s a point to this video at all, but for the sake of stuff getting smashed, here goes: Gizmag is reporting on a recent Australian Sony press event held at a crash test facility, wherein they propelled shiny new slim PS3s into 46″ Bravia televisions. The stunt was apparently part of an Australian promotion that sees Sony giving away 25,000 120GB PS3s with certain Bravia models.