I’ve been waiting for this for quiet some time and now it is finally here. I am talking about Personal Super Computers.

Five years ago I purchased a brand new laptop computer. It is a decent computer – I am still using it today. It cost me around 1500$ U.S. Obviously, today it is less powerful than those 300$ netbook computers.

Netbooks have changed things quiet a bit. However, as a matter of fact, there is nothing special about them. This is how technological progress works. At first you have something that costs a lot, then some company that wants to break into the market, releases a new breaking through product, that lowers the prices. This is what happened with Asus when they released their eeePC – the first netbook.

This had happened multiple times before. It really constitutes the beauty of capitalism.

As a result, modern netbook costs half the price and has the same processing capabilities as my good old five y-o HP Pavilion.

But what about super computers? There is a ongoing race to build faster super computer. They say that the most powerful super computer today is as powerful as a human brain – an extraordinary acquaintance if this think about it.

So here is one natural development that I expected to see long time ago. According to the article below, nVidia are making and selling Personal Super Computers. Although these beasts are far away from top 500 most powerful computers in the world, they still provide very impressive teraflops of computing power.

Here is the article: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/08/personal-supercomputers/

Oh, and I forgot to mention… These computers don’t run Windows 7

I am in the middle of CentOS and Ubuntu comparison frenzy. It started with an attempt to assert quality of Linux distributions made for busy people. Today I am considering packaging.

When comparing Ubuntu and CentOS packaging systems, first thing that crosses my mind is that, well, size matters. Ubuntu has nearly 70000 packages. CentOS has around 6000.

Obviously, it is very handy to have every possible package just couple of clicks away. Instead of looking for the package, understanding its version system and available architecture. Instead of looking for the vendor’s web-site, seeing all the ads, etc. What you do is just open Synaptic manager, enter the name of the program, or just a couple of keywords describing what you need. Then you do couple of clicks and you’re done.

But when I started using this system I found that there’s something broken in it. There are several things that bother me.

Yes, most of the programs are easy to install, but still, some programs are not in the repository. Others are outdated. Here is one example.
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This Saturday I tried to configure VNC server to start in the background automatically at boot. You know, in Ubuntu you normally run VNC server when you need it and stop it when you don’t need it anymore.

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Carla Schroder of Linux Today has posted a nice list of her Linux tips and tricks, here.

One tip I could not make work is Cracking Passwords. The program simply refused to identify my passwords file. I found that it might be because it doesn’t support this kind of encryption or something like that.

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There has been a new development in the subject I raised a day ago. It seems that there has been some effort on Microsoft’s side to clarify the legal issue with the Mono Project. According to this article in iTWire, Microsoft will extend its Community Promise to the C# and CLI standards.

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Apparently, there is a serious breach in Apache’s security. Attacker can launch a denial of service attack on Apache based web-site causing it to stop responding.

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There’s an ongoing discussion about the Mono project. Mono is somewhat controversial because it is an open source implementation of C# programming language and .NET platform. Mono has constantly being bullied because both C# and .NET are creations of the cause of all evil on earth, Microsoft corp.

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I am naturally reviewing and following many blogs and news sites related to Linux. There are two themes that keep strong presence in the Linux related media. This are of course:

1. Is Linux ready for being Desktop operating system?
2. Bitching Microsoft.

I must say that I am myself is guilty of expressing my point of view on the first issue.

As for the second issue, I must say that I am truly overwhelmed with amount of dirt that being consistently spilled on Microsoft. I am not a great fun of the Redmond giant, but this blind hate has never did any good to anyone.

At last, there is one sane voice in the crowd. Have a look: http://www.pcmech.com/article/good-linux-users-dont-talk-about-microsoft/

I am wondering what it takes to be a QA engineer, testing software. As a software engineer I am looking for ways to solve problems. I’m usually being told where the problem is and there I am looking for a solution. It takes me hours and sometimes days. I am trying various configurations. I am hacking the code looking for the problem.

Things are pretty simple on our end. Finding what causes the problem is 90% of the solution. The rest 10% can be difficult sometimes, but only because there may be many different solutions and it takes a little effort to find the best thing to do.

Not so with QA engineers.

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This is a first out of several articles describing Bazaar, the distributed version control system. This series is intended for Subversion users, who may decide that they need a little more from their version control system.

Read the article here