The Great Geek Manual

In the last three news, MIT’s One Laptop per Child (OLPC) initiative has topped the headlines. Since the possibility of the public actually being able to buy one of the little beauties arose, people have been salivating. Two hundred dollars doesn’t seem like much for such a nifty piece of hardware, but can you realistically match that value at home? Tom’s Hardware Guide (a fantastic tech site) has come close. This week, they’ve featured an article walking you through building a $300 desktop, step by step.

The resulting desktop runs at 3.2 GHz, which beats my old laptop (which I still use to tinker with programming projects). I hope that they revisit the topic in six months. I would be interested in seeing the improvement in performance six months would yield.

The article is definitely worth checking out, and the site is worth a bookmark.

This Friday, Resident Evil 4 for the PC finally hits the shelves in the EU. Those of us in the good ol’ United States will be forced to wait more than a month for the April 2nd release – likely with our EU buddies rubbing our nose in it the entire time. It was released for the Playstation more than a year ago, and the wait has been excruciating. Unfortunately, however, JemyM of the Warp2Search forums may not have been worth the wait. What’s more, you don’t need to take JemyM’s word for it, a French website has posted screenshots.

Here are the principal complaints:

Darkness is removed. Where the console version covers the game in eirie darkness, night is almost as bright as daytime in the PC version removing most of the feel.

Here is the PC screenshot.
Here is the GameCube screenshot.

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Call Samuel Jackson, we’ve got Linux on a Plane! Err… wait. I guess that’s not a bad thing. In fact, it kinda rocks! Check out the Flickr photos. Vista may be “so secure it could run life support systems,” but I think I might have second thoughts if I found out it was loaded on a plane I was boarding.

If you live in a large city and not an armpit of civilization like I do, you may find this plug-in useful.

iConcertCal is a free iTunes plug-in that monitors your music library and generates a personalized calendar notifying you when bands you listen to are playing concerts in your city. It is available for both Windows and Mac OS X.

After installing iConcertCal, the iTunes visualizer becomes a calendar that lists local concert dates for bands in your library. Clicking on each listing in the calendar lets you buy tickets, and changing the city and state brings up personalized listings for other cities.

Of course, if you’re an old music buff, this plug-in won’t do anything but serve as a depressing daily reminder that your favorite bands are off in retirement doting on their grandchildren. If you’re a young music buff, this little beauty will save you all the time of signing up for each of your favorite bands’ mailing list. It’s also a good excuse to find the time to clean up those ID3 tags.

NewsWeek interviewed Bill Gates about Vista, its reception, and Apple, among other things. On the complaint that some of the features in Vista appear to come from the Mac, Gates had this to say:

“You can go through and look at who showed any of these things first, if you care about the facts. If you just want to say, ‘Steve Jobs invented the world, and then the rest of us came along,’ that’s fine. If you’re interested, [Vista development chief] Jim Allchin will be glad to educate you feature by feature what the truth is. I mean, it’s fascinating, maybe we shouldn’t have showed so publicly the stuff we were doing, because we knew how long the new security base was going to take us to get done. Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine.”

Read the Entire Story…
Source: MSNBC

Blogger’s Note: Yeah, you read that right. Gates dares someone to exploit Vista. Looks like someone is off his meds. I don’t know why he didn’t just dare Osama to drive a plane into the Microsoft campus while he was at it. My guess is that Vista users are going to be paying out the ass for that statement in the months ahead.

DownloadSquad posted a great article yesterday, “Common Linux myths dispelled.”

Fanboy FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt), it comes from all sides of the computing landscape. The three most well known operating systems, Microsoft Windows, Apple’s OSX and the open source Linux have been called everything and accused of almost anything you can imagine in one press outlet or another. Linux is lousy for games, Windows is a memory hog, OSX will force you get a Liberal Arts degree and recycle… but, I digress. We’re here to dispel the myths, not spread them.

Linux is great, too bad there aren’t any good applications
-or-
On Linux, you can’t open files other people send

False. Linux applications are plentiful, well written and widely compatible with their OSX or Windows counterparts. Microsoft Office files are easily opened by Open Office. Photoshop’s functionality can be found in The Gimp, or better yet with GimpShop. Audio editing, maintaining your mp3 library, file management, databases, instant messaging, personal information management, etc… They’re all available and, in the vast majority of situations they’re free.
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Wordpress, one of the most popular Blogging Content Managers on the web, has just been improved! Early yesterday morning, Wordpress 2.1, code named “Ella” was released to the general public.

Some of the more significant improvements offered by the latest upgrade include:

• An autosave feature (similar to Gmail)
• A tabbed editor that switches between WYSIWYG and code
• A spell checking feature
• A frontpage feature
• Blogroll subcategories

Read more about the release.

It seems as though the assimilation of American consumers is inevitable and resistance is futile. But do you really need to find the nearest all-night software vendor, or is there good reason to wait before upgrading? If you’re not certain, join the club. The good news is that while you’re making up your mind, APC Magazine has already drawn up a list of pros and a list of cons.

10 reasons not to get Vista

1. You don’t actually need it
2. Cost $$
3. On that note, it’s outrageously overpriced
4. Upgrading hardware
5. Driver support
6. Applications that don’t work
7. It’s a big fat target
8. UAC (User Account Control)
9. DRM (Digital Rights Management)
10. The draconian license
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