What Makes the New Ubuntu 11.10 So Great?
Watch the video below to see!
Day: October 20, 2011
The New Puppy is Very Friendly for Older PCs
Puppy Linux, that is! I really like Puppy Linux! Especially for older machines. If you haven’t tried it, download this new version and install it on one of your older, clunkier systems, and watch it fly!
Puppy Linux 5.2 (Wary) optimized for older PCs
“The Puppy Linux project announced version 5.2 of the legacy-PC friendly ‘Wary’ version of its small-footprint Linux distribution. Puppy Linux 5.2 (“Wary”) features an SMP-optimized version of the Linux 2.6.32.45 kernel, an upgrade path to Xorg 7.6, an updated PuppyPhone 1.1 VoIP app, and a new PupCamera app for automatically detecting digital cameras, says the project.
As with previous Puppy Linux releases — including Puppy Linux 5.0 and Puppy Linux 4.3 — Puppy Linux 5.2 is a fairly ‘minimalist’ distro designed for those who like their operating systems fast and lean. It is available in a 123MB ISO image, and can load entirely into RAM for faster performance, according to the project. The distro can boot off a flash card or USB device, as well as CD-ROMs and other media.
In order to fit that footprint, you won’t find many big-name applications built in. Most are minimalist apps developed by the Puppy community.
Puppy Linux 5.2 is one of many Puppy variants built on the project’s ‘Woof’ build system, including Lucid, Racy, FatDog, and Slacko. Introduced in November 2008, and joined in 2009 with a related Puppy Package Manager (PPM), Woof can build a Puppy variant from the packages of any Linux distro, including Debian, Ubuntu, Arch, Slackware, and T2, the foundation used by this latest Wary release.
In addition to ‘Wary,’ the other major variant is called Lucid Puppy (‘Lupu’), which was released in its 5.2.8 version in August. Based on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, Lucid Puppy offers Ubuntu compatibility and more cutting-edge features. For example, the latest release added C and FFmpeg libraries optimized for i686 computers rather than the older i386 computers, thereby improving performance, says the project.”
A Camera That Allows You to Snap Now, Focus Later
This is kinda weird. Imagine a camera where you snap a picture, then later, at home, say, you can focus and manipulate the image? That’s what they are claiming for the Lytro camera.
Lytro Cameras On Sale Now: What You Need To Know
“Camera maker Lytro is now taking pre-orders for its much-hyped light-field cameras that promise to let you snap a picture and refocus it later on your computer or the camera’s touchscreen.
Unlike traditional cameras, Lytro devices are able to capture 11 million light rays (11 megarays) and record aspects of light such as color, intensity and direction, some of which traditional cameras miss.
The ability to capture all that information, along with help from Lytro’s image processing software, is what allows you to refocus the image, change the image’s perspective and even view the photo as a 3D image on your 3D HDTV.
Although pre-orders are underway now, the Lytro cameras won’t be arriving in time for the holidays, shipping in early 2012 instead. And Windows users might be disappointed at launch as Lytro software is currently compatible with Mac computers running OS X 10.6, Snow Leopard or higher. Pricing starts at $400.”
MC Hammer at Web 2.0?
Yep, and promoting a new search engine, no less! “Can’t touch this!” Well, apparently he wants you to touch “Wiredoo,” a search engine that is supposed to offer more “relationship information” to search results. Sounds vaguely risque, huh?
MC Hammer Unveils Plans for WireDoo Search Engine
“One of the odder bits of news to emerge from this week’s Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco—okay, the oddest—is that rapper MC Hammer is launching a search engine.
Wait, it gets funnier. He’s calling it WireDoo, which sounds like something we wouldn’t want to touch, regardless of whether MC Hammer says we can or can’t.
But before we all have too many laughs at the expense of the entertainer who briefly made baggy harem pants popular with men, consider that MC Hammer has pretty much displayed superlative entrepreneurial abilities his entire life, starting from when he parlayed a busking act in the Oakland Coliseum parking lot in the 1970s into a job as a clubhouse assistant and batboy for the Oakland A’s.
MC Hammer also managed to sell a whopping 50 million records worldwide despite rapping skills charitably described as merely adequate to compliment his real talents, dance and promotion. And let’s say it again—he made baggy harem pants popular with men. This is not a fellow whose business acumen should be taken lightly.
Nor is Hammer is a newbie to the tech scene. Like fellow entertainer-turned-tech investor Ashton Kutcher, Hammer has become a fixture at tech events like Web 2.0 and Tech Crunch Disrupt in recent years.
Hammer, born Stanley Kirk Burrell in Oakland, Calif., says WireDoo will not be an attempt to compete with mainstream search engines like Google or Bing, according to reports.
Instead, the still-in-development WireDoo will ‘add relationship information to search results,’ reports The New York Times. Sounds a little vague, but gist is that if you search for something like a car, what you’ll get is a bunch of information related to cars like insurance offers and consumer safety ratings.”