The HP Tablet PC has just exceeded 1 million sales. Robert Scoble (Scobleizer) from Microsoft said the following:

At any other company that’d be considered an outstanding success. Getting a million people to do ANYTHING is pretty tough.

Walking around the TechFest this week I came to the realization that the Tablet PC is dead.

In the general sense, tablets may not be ideally mobile and handy tools, but they appear to be gnawing at sales of PDA‘s and laptops. The figures challenge critique about their size and reliability. Slashdot recently reported and boasted Linux installations on the Tablet PC, which makes one wonder about the direction tablets may take.

Palm have recently looked into the possibility of replacing Palm OS with Linux on their devices, as well as the provision for Cobalt, which makes Palm-powered handhelds run much, much faster. The next Palm, which is due to be unveiled this spring, should incorporate Cobalt, whose exclusion from the Tungsten T5 was a great disappointment to many.

Cited by: PalmAddict

ver a year ago I started fiddling about with a rendering package called POV-Ray, which stands for Persistence of Vision Raytracer. I never got quite so far, though I was astounded by what can be achieved after a few hours or days of work. One of the better-known artists in the field is Gilles Tran (Oyonale) and his galleries are definitely worth browsing.

Season of the playful penguins from Oyonale

CNET expose Intel’s comeback to the Mac mini. These are both inexpensive boxes which can be easily carried from place to place and connected to some peripherals.

or software vendors, support is a key problem and a significant source of expense. For this very reason, only few high-end products are made avaliable to Mac and Linux users. Quite simply, too many Linux distributions require different support and too many unexpected errors can crop up. It turns out that revenue comes before religion (relating to open standards and inter-operability) in today’s industry.

Moderate use of computer resources and good net citizenship both are issues which are close to my heart. I recently started to worry that, quite inevitably, I have become one among the culprits. At the time of writing, I use about 30 Pentium 4′s, some of which will run computer vision experiments for 24 hours. This is done due to urgency (a near deadline), but my general advice is to always set the priority of your tasks as low as possible so that the scheduler prioritises other users.

I typically connect to remote computers via SSH. I have made my ‘hogging’ scripts public in case somebody is interested in modifying them for personal purposes.

Remote sessions, shaded on the left monitor (click to enlarge)

Bill Gates arrested in his younger days (photo in public domain)

A popular article from Joel on Software explains about the way Microsoft-owned sites exploit/misuse cookies.

…One day, Expedia could start offering higher fares to customers who have more than a million dollars in their Investor stock portfolio. There’s not really anything technically impossible about this, and it’s probably legal, too…
 
…The scary thing is that if you use Internet Explorer, Microsoft controls your web browser…

Filters and forwarding make management of a large amount of E-mail easier. Based on sender/s or subject line/s, one can create and populate many separate boxes. Each box is then checked at different intervals depending on its importance.

Remember:

• A sophisticated network of filters is like having your own secretary.
• Manage many different E-mail addresses. Messages are best discriminated by the actual account.

Separating boxes is the key