I’ve read books of 2 of the most unique creators of operating systems, that is Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, and Bill Gates, the creator of Microsoft Windows.

Of course, I did get the feeling that Bill Gates was a money-hungry, arrogant, geek-vampire from his book while I got the feeling that Linus Torvalds had bigger things in mind like creating open-source operating system platform and spread of free knowledge.  I think when I was growing up, Linus Torvalds was one of my heroes while Bill Gates too, but Bill kept making bad operating systems for money.

If it wasn’t for Linus, I don’t think we would have Firefox, Google Chrome, and pretty much open source software in general.  (or at least they won’t be as popular)  This is that one guy who made the best open-source operating system and boosted the open-source community by gazillion miles.

Well, to cap it off, here’s an interview with Linux Torvalds on his thoughts with Linux as of lately:

I’ve used different distributions over the years. Right now I happen to use Fedora 9 on most of the computers I have, which really boils down to the fact that Fedora had fairly good support for PowerPC back when I used that, so I grew used to it. But I actually don’t care too much about the distribution, as long as it makes it easy to install and keep reasonably up-to-date. I care about the kernel and a few programs, and the set of programs I really care about is actually fairly small.

And when it comes to distributions, ease of installation has actually been one of my main issues - I’m a technical person, but I have a very specific area of interest, and I don’t want to fight the rest. So the only distributions I have actively avoided are the ones that are known to be “overly technical” - like the ones that encourage you to compile your own programs etc.

Yeah, I can do it, but it kind of defeats the whole point of a distribution for me. So I like the ones that have a name of being easy to use. I’ve never used plain Debian, for example, but I like Ubuntu. And before Debian people attack me - yeah, I know, I know, it’s supposedly much simpler and easier to install these days. But it certainly didn’t use to be, so I never had any reason to go for it.

via oreilly

The Czeers MK1 solar speed boat runs completely on solar power, total of 14 square meters photovoltaic solar cells mounted on all of its top surface.

The solar speed boat is supposedly world’s first solar powered speedboat.

Czeers MK1 comes built with carbon fiber everywhere for light weight and durability.

The boat’s top speed?

The MK1 can go up to 30 knots, an amazing feat for a boat completely powered by the sun with no CO2 gas or any other pollution-causing fumes.

The Czeers MK1 prototype is, as far as its Dutch creators are concerned, the world’s first solar speedboat. The Delft Technical University Solarboat Team built the original platform as an entry in the 2006 Nuon Frisian Solar challenge, which it easily won - and in the process, attracted serious investment power from Rabobank to get a full scale test boat built.

[via gizmodo gizmag]

Video after the jump.

Continue reading ‘Czeers MK1 Solar Speed Boat’

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This one is hilarious. It’s really amazing how creators can market pretty much “anything”….

Yes, just snap some pictures of people who lost weight and then nice snazzy video for a cheap million bucks.

Heck, they might as well sell “invisible” jump rope.

via bb gadgets

HeeKyong Yoon from SpringNote.com, was nice enough to chat with me on their cool “wiki” product, SpringNote:

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FYI, SpringNote.com is a subsidiary of NcSoft.com, the creators of legendary online game, Lineage.

Well, I tried out SpringNote, here’s a screenshot:

It’s very simple to use, just like a real notebook except you have unlimited number of pages plus you get bunch of already-made templates like Bookshelf, Monthly Plan, Recipe, and etc…etc…

What I found most interesting was that it is a “wiki” site but you don’t need to know any wiki markup language and start editing your online notes right away. You also have the option to share your notes or keep them private.

As far as technology goes, I love the fact that SpringNote has incorporated a LOT of AJAX. (probably mostly AJAX)

I might start using it more real soon. The only downside I saw was that SpringNote’s servers are hosted in Korea. Although the site does fairly fast, I measured, 168ms ping times from my PC in San Francisco.

FYI, Zedomax.com get 41ms ping times, 4 times faster as servers are hosted in San Diego, California.

Although they could keep running servers from Korea, I think they can grab much larger audience in the U.S. by simply serving their pages from servers in the U.S. (Besides, it’s probably much cheaper to host it here.)

Other than that, I find SpringNote as the next generation online note web app. I will have to dump my MS Outlook all together and start using SpringNotes, way simpler and easier for mass collaboration.

Wow, this has to be one of the cooler DIY robots I’ve seen in a long time. Basically, it plays drums. Not real drums, but it plays your household stuff like vases as drums. Beautifully done, we give it an A+ for the creators. (Btw, we are not selling the blog for $1000, our readers say it’s too cheap! How much should we sell it for? j/k April FOOLS!)

Notice how the robot first plays on the object it finds (or is forced to find by the angry cameraman), plays a small beat, and records the beat it plays on it. Then this recorded beat is played again, and it starts to play on the object (an belt tracks and everything else it has),and also playing this sampled beat

[via] letsmakerobots

Click to enjoy the video

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Check out these Cool ALAVs (Autonomous Light Vessels) by Jed Berk! Tight! It uses Sun Microsystems SunSpot microcontroller, which can be programmed in Java. I like this idea since there’s a lot of Java embedded processors out there but this ones from the creators. Jed tells me that all the pieces were 3D designed on the computer and laser-cut, kinda cool~

Jed says, Make Store will have these cool DIY ALAV kits soon!

Internet is kinda slow here at the Maker Faire. (That’s why our posts are slow too.) We even switched to a Sprint Broadband but with live video streaming, it’s still too slow but we will keep postin’~

You can come and join us to chat here to while watching our live video.

You can also check out our Flickr photos from Maker Faire Day 1 and Jed’s Flickr for more ALAVs.

Cool robots~

What do a 47 year old wind-turbine designer, a 16 year old high school student, a 30-something hobbyist and ex-R/C car fanatic, and the world�s most well known character-type robot creator have in common?

They all live, eat, breath, and sleep humanoid robots. For them, it�s an uncontrollable passion. Plain and simple, they love robots. And, luckily for all the rest of us robot fans around the world, Kyosho, with support from Kondo brought together this unusual team of robot creators to give birth to the growing line of MANOI Athlete Humanoid Robots - the AT01 and the PF01.

via botmag