Day: October 11, 2010

Check it out! ARS Technica has a neat article on the new Ubuntu 10.10… it looks like it is worthy of a download and install on my netbook!

Ubuntu 10.10 arrives with impressive new netbook environment

“Canonical has announced the availability of Ubuntu 10.10, a major update of the popular Linux distribution. The new version introduces the Unity netbook environment, which offers a custom desktop shell that is optimized for ease of use on small displays and has a global menubar to conserve vertical screen space. Ubuntu’s installer got a major overhaul in this release, with substantial user interface improvements and new features. The new installer can start downloading updated packages during the early stages of the configuration process in order to save the user from having to run a full update immediately after installation. It also has a new option that lets users choose to automatically install closed-source components, such as multimedia codecs.”

Yeeeaaah! I don’t think I would trust it yet! Can you imagine a blue screen of death being a REAL blue screen of death? Yeeshh!

Google Car Test Drive

“You didn’t actually think that you’d need to drive the next wave of cars, did you? The seemingly all-conquering Google has announced that it’s road-testing cars that steer, stop and start without a driver. The cars use video cameras on the roof, along with radar sensors and a laser range finder to ‘see’ other traffic. The aim? To ‘help prevent traffic accidents, free up people’s time and reduce carbon emissions’ through ride sharing and ‘the new ‘highway trains of tomorrow,” project leader Sebastian Thrun wrote Saturday on Google’s blog. Engineers told the New York Times that venturing out to the highways was pretty much incident-free, save from a bump when the car was reportedly hit from behind at a traffic light. The cars have so far covered 140,000 miles, taking in the likes of San Francisco’s Golden Gate bridge (as well as the city’s sloping streets) and Lake Tahoe.”