INightmare's ideas

Hello everyone reading!

First I want to congratulate Opera Software on Opera 10 release! It's an awsome peace of software. So much to love...

And second thing is... While everyone outside the US, UK and few other countries supported by Spotify complain about it, a huge free music service is waiting for listeners. So I proudly present the Grooveshark. It's a free music streaming service that requires no registration (though it's possible to register). According to Wikipedia Grooveshark's database contains around 22 million songs! So if you're looking for some free music be sure to check it out.

In computing world these days things tend to get small and there seem to be many.

The Small

What's small? Netbooks. Cheap, small, power efficient. Someone realized that by far not everyone needs mega monster PCs that are on the shelves. Taking crysis into account, no one needs mega expensive PCs and so the netbooks are born. And here I have to mention the Intel Atom processor line. We will remember it later.

The Many

As things aren't really getting more powerful we need more of them. CPUs can't be really made much faster so we just add more of them. Six core CPUs in the market. And lets not forget the Intel's research project with 80 cores.
Since you can't put too much in a box there are many boxes - servers.
Everything is distributed now. Take Google Apps Engine Datastore for example. Event the tables of the same applications database can be on different servers, even the same table... Things are processed in parallel and then joined (the Map Reduce algorithm).

Where are we going?

We are leaning towards merging the Small with the Many to make things Distributed and Specialized.
The trend is to make things specialized. Database servers, storage servers, application servers are no longer residing in a single machine. They are seperated, though usually run on the same operating system, same hardware. And this will have to go... Why waste resources on operating system when the only useful peace of software running is database server? There will be dedicated pseudo-OS'es written that will do their jobs. Traditional filesystems will be gone on database servers, no more files, just the records.
Since we need many, we want power efficient and cheap, right? Dedicated chips for each purpose will come. Why waste silicium on implementing CPU operations that will never be used? You have to agree x86 is a bit of a bloated hardware.
Intel Atom is coming out as dual-core. I wouldn't be surprised if some version dropping multimedia extensions and bringing back some stuff that has bin cut out would be introduced someday (pipelines? - though I don't think they pay off).

Conclusion

Computing buisness will be optimized to squeeze the maximum out of every dollar spent. So Many will have to be made small and specialized.

After all the fuss and discussions about the inclusion of Mono into default Ubuntu install (Stallman's post here), Microsoft seems to have taken action. Yes folks, now all CLI and C implementations are totally legal and Microsoft won't complain about you implementing their technology.

And hurray for me, I finished my exam session and the results are quite good.

The time to upgrade to newer distribution came and it was Mandriva 2009 Spring that caught my attention. Got a Mandriva One KDE iso and in less than 30 minutes I had a working Linux distribution.

First impression

Maybe the theme wasn't the nicest KDE theme I have seen, but it's possible to live with it and even more possible to live after change it.
Mandriva has modified KDE4 which maintains the classic KDE3 look. Standard menu and desktop layout are there by default, but it's possible to switch to widget mode and enable the new Kickoff menu.
It boots fast! And that is really important for me, I'm like most of you... Not a big fan of waiting.


Hardware support

My Atheros wireless worked out of the box, multimedia keys are there and most of the things you would expect, the only thing I needed to change was model for my soundcard, to make the jack sensing work. Also ALSA is routed to use pulseaudio by default so there seems to be no sound issues.

Opera flash problem

The only disappointment was, that Adobe Flash didn't work on Opera, but that was solved by removing 'nspluginwrapper' it seems Opera tried to use this one first and it somehow didn't want to cooperate.

Conclusion

Mandriva 2009 Spring is really worth considering if you're looking for a nice KDE based distribution (GNOME might be nice too, but I haven't tried that). It's fast to boot and use. Something I will use at least until OpenSuSE 11.2 comes out in November.

OK, I know, if you're an average guy like me you would think "How can shopping be fun?" and I understand you, but this case is an exception and let me tell you why. And for girls... This was shopping heaven, "why?" I will answer this as we go on.

The event
A big local shop here in Lithuania decided to do a wholesale on everything except food and drinks. A 40% discount on everything. TV sets, external hard drives, light-bulbs, jackets, you name it and it has 40% discount provided it's not food or a drink (well energetic drink Dynamite had 50% discount, was a good buy too). And the best part this all too place the night from Saturday to Sunday between 0:00 and 06:00. They called it the "Black night".

Our participation
And now the fun. We came about 10:15 PM and there's already people standing in line to get a shopping cart, this is pictured below.


And the whole shop was stuffed with buyers. The queue for home electronics was huge and getting something valuable at the time was already impossible. People would just get what they need and wait for 00:00 to come. Needless to say, it was hard to move in the shop and good hungry crowd really made the atmosphere hot and here an ice-cream cone proved to be a real helper.

But the food section was unusually free...


So, me and my friends gathered stuff we wanted (this included fighting the crowd and moving at 1 step per minute). And it was the time to pay for the goods, but queues, those were amazingly big and at ~00:05 when we decided to go it would have taken us at least an hour to get past, but then a friend helped out and we popped right into the place and took around 5 minutes of waiting. This involved upsetting some people, who were really jealous of our advancement through the queue.


The road to freedom
The exit, now this was a tricky part since all entrances where blocked by people who wanted to enter the shop, but where held back by guardsmen. But then a light of hope shines when one of guardsmen working inside told us to follow him and showed the way out to the freedom.

Unhappy people
As always, there were bunch of people complaining. Ones that thought it was stupid to do it at night, the others that had to exit on the other side than their cars were. And my point is that the people who complained about exit location, should've bin happy they could exit the shop as the entrance block took quite some time.


Morale
1) Well, I saved quite some money, so you could say that I got my new earphones almost for free as other things where ones I would really need at home. Though, I was dreaming about new earphones for quite some time.
2) It was a really fun event, to see what can people do to save some money. Was really worth it. Next time you have such wholesale in your place, be sure not to miss it. And come 8 hours early, so you can actually get some cool stuff.

So that's the story of Hyper Maxima "Akropolis" wholesale.

Have fun!