Thursday, August 31, 2006

British pensioner becomes YouTube star

YouTube, the popular online video site, has an unexpected star--a septuagenarian British widower--whose soft-spoken, humble manner has won the hearts of users of the youth-dominated Web site.

Peter posted his first video on YouTube about a week ago, under the user name geriatric1927, which refers to the year of his birth. He called it "first try."

In the clip, which starts with "geriatric gripes and grumbles" and some blues music, Peter tells how he became addicted to YouTube.

"It's a fascinating place to go to see all the wonderful videos that you young people have produced so I thought I would have a go at doing one myself," he says, sitting against a backdrop of floral wallpaper and family photographs.

"What I hope I will be able to do is to just to bitch and grumble about life in general from the perspective of an old person who has been there and done that and hopefully you will respond in some way by your comments."

YouTube is one of the fastest-growing sites on the World Wide Web and announced last month that 100 million clips are watched every day. The site has almost 20 million visitors a month, according to Nielsen/NetRatings.

In his profile, Peter says he is widower living alone in the country in the middle of England. His favorite music is blues and he has loved motorcycles all his life. He says has no piercings or tattoos. His profile says he is 78 but he says in a video clip he is 79.

He has since posted another five videos on his YouTube page and has had about 79,000 viewings and 6,500 subscribers, putting him at the top of the most-subscribed list on YouTube in the past week.

In his second video, Peter starts with a photograph of himself on a motorbike and says he has received more than 4,700 e-mails. "I am absolutely overwhelmed and don't quite know what to say," says the white-haired pensioner who keeps his eyes closed for most of his videos.

"I just need to say thank you...this YouTube experience has been one of the major changes and breakthroughs in my life and given me a whole new world to experience."

Peter, who talks about his life, the horrors of war and police harassment, has received wide praise for his videos and for proving technology is not just for the younger generation.

"It's great that someone from your generation has chosen to share their views on life, and a shame more elderly people don't too," wrote one commentator.

"I don't have a grandpa, but if I could choose, I'd want you to be mine!" says another.

A few who mocked him were quickly rebuked by the rest of the online community.

"IGNORE all the rude comments because obviously the people who leave nasty comments on your page are those who have the least number of comments on their videos!" said one.

Attempts by Reuters to contact Peter by e-mail were not immediately successful with the latest YouTube star inundated with e-mails.

Story Copyright © 2006 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.

Monday, August 28, 2006

HP offers Debian Linux support

Debian is a steadfastly noncommercial version of Linux. But Hewlett-Packard will give it a big corporate hug Monday with the announcement of a plan to provide support for the open-source operating system.

"We've had a number of customers continuing to ask us to have broader support for Debian," and HP decided to oblige, said Jeffrey Wade, worldwide marketing manager at HP's Open Source and Linux Organization. Red Hat and Novell will remain HP's main Linux partners globally, however.

HP announced the news in conjunction with the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in San Francisco.

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based computing company will offer technical support for installation and configuration during a server's warranty period, Wade said. And later this year, it will begin selling "care packs" to help customers with Debian problems, he said.

The move reflects the continuing price pressure that exists in the Linux marketplace, where free versions of the open-source software always are an alternative to paid versions such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise Server.

Sophisticated HP Linux customers requested the Debian support, after wondering if they could get "a better value with a distribution that doesn't require a subscription fee and subsequent renewals for that subscription," Wade said.

Debian won't be on the same level as Red Hat or Novell, though, Wade said. HP won't market it, and customers will have to download the software on their own. Software combinations with partners such as BEA Systems or Oracle won't be available with Debian. And HP won't formally certify Debian for its servers.

HP expects the Debian offer to appeal chiefly to sophisticated customers who usually have internal software support and a long history of Linux expertise. However, the company is pleased with its support; of the 48,000 Linux-related support calls HP got in 2005, the company answered 99.5 percent on its own, meaning that only 180 had to be transferred to experts at Red Hat or Novell, Wade said.

HP's offer will apply to the current "Sarge" version 3 of Debian and to version 4, "Etch," due in December. (Debian versions are named after characters in the movie "Toy Story.")

The company has a long history of cooperation with Debian. It formerly employed one Debian leader, Bruce Perens, and another former leader and current contributor, Bdale Garbee, is chief technologist of HP's Open Source and Linux Organization.

Monday, August 14, 2006

Play your own Xbox game

Microsoft is trying to turn hard-core gamers into Xbox programmers.

The company plans to show off on Monday a new set of developer tools that will let college students, hobbyists and others create their own games for the Xbox 360 console, for a Windows PC or both.

Dubbed XNA Game Studio Express, the free software is expected to be available in beta form by the end of the month, with a final product available sometime this holiday season.

"The tools we are talking about make it way easier to make games than it is today," said Scott Henson, director for platform strategy for Microsoft's game developer group. Microsoft will demonstrate the new software at Gamefest, a company-run show for game developers that takes place in Seattle this week.

The approach is similar to one Microsoft has taken with software development in general, selling its Visual Studio tools to professional programmers while making a more limited "express" version free to hobbyists.

Microsoft released the first version of its XNA tools for professional developers in March 2005, ahead of the Xbox 360's release the following November.

With the hobbyist release, the software giant is hoping to lay the groundwork for what one day will be a thriving network of enthusiasts developing for one another, something akin to a YouTube for games. The company, however, is pretty far from that goal.

In the first incarnation, games developed using the free tools will be available only to like-minded hobbyists, not the Xbox community as a whole. Those who want to develop games will have to pay a $99 fee to be part of a "Creators' Club," a name that is likely to change. Games developed using XNA Game Studio Express will be playable only by others who are part of the club.

Next spring, Microsoft hopes to have a broader set of tools that will allow for games to be created that can then be sold online through Microsoft's Xbox Live Arcade. Microsoft will still control which games get published, and it'll get a cut of the revenue.

Down the road, probably three to five years from now, Microsoft hopes to have an open approach, where anyone can publish games, and community response helps separate the hits from the flops.

That would mark a major shift in the gaming world. While people have long been able to create their own PC software, console game titles have historically been created by a far more limited set of developers.

Everyone says they could do better if only they had a chance, says Envisioneering analyst Richard Doherty. Now gamers can match their skills with the pros, he said. "They may not have a popular game, but they can at least try it."

Plus, in creating a new outlet for enthusiasts, Microsoft is looking for one more way of winning the hearts and minds of the hard-core gamer set ahead of the release of Sony's PlayStation 3 and Nintendo's Wii, both due later this year.

Sony tried something somewhat similar with the original PlayStation, releasing in limited quantities a $750 add-on kit called the Net Yaroze that let people write their own games.

Part of the impetus for expanding the pool of developers is the growing expense of making major video games. Many games take 18 to 36 months to develop Henson said, meaning big game companies only want to back sure hits. "Future titles look like existing titles," he said. "There's not a lot of branching off and taking risks."

A particular target of the new program is colleges, with Microsoft having signed up 10 universities to use the new software as part of their curricula, some as early as this fall.

Doherty said Microsoft is the biggest beneficiary of the program as the effort both helps tie gamers to the Xbox and potentially leads to new ideas.

"I think some new talent is going to come out of it," Doherty said. "I'm not saying it's going to be 'American Idol.'"

Thursday, April 13, 2006

Multi OS dalam satu Harddisk

Setelah browsing sana-sini akhirnya aku dapet juga artikel untuk membelah satu harddisk jadi beberapa partisi dan di isi dengan multi os tapi sementara pake bahasa nggris ya tar aku translate dech. ini dia :
 
 

This article courtesy of Snebjorn Andersen.

Introduction:

This short article is meant as an introduction to configuring your computer system for running multiple operating systems. I have tried to present some general ideas and tips for doing this and provide a few links to places where you can get more detailed information. If some parts of this text need clarification or more detail please don't hesitate to tell me about it.

Disclaimer:

Before I start to talk about actually repartitioning your drives and so on, I want to make sure that you understand a few things:

  • The process of moving, deleting and creating partitions on your disk drives is potentially harmful for your data, some of which may be very valuable to you. It's your own responsibility to have working backups of all important files in case something goes wrong.
  • Failed installations may leave your system in a state where it's not able to boot at all. It's your own responsibility to have installation or boot media available for re-installing.
  • I don't want to scare you away from setting up your computer to run multiple operating systems, but you have to be careful and think about what you do or you're going to run into some very serious and frustrating problems - and I don't want that to happen to you. This is your chance to learn the easy way from someone who learned the hard way!
With that understood we can proceed. If not, stop reading this article.

The ideal multi-OS system:

Whatever your choice and combination of operating systems, there's one thing you should always try to obtain: clear separation between system files and data files. The more clearly your files are divided into these two groups, the easier it will be to:

  • Make backups
  • Install, re-install and update operating systems
  • Share data between different operating systems

Disks are getting bigger and less expensive all the time. If you're at all able to afford them, separate physical disks for each OS/data set is an extremely good idea and will make your life a lot simpler in the long run. The current setup on my home machine is one disk containing the different OSs in their own partitions, well out of sight of each other and one disk containing two large FAT partitions for my data.

All modern OSs support FAT and all my data files are thus available from whichever OS I'm using at the moment. You may not get all the benefits of the more sophisticated modern file systems, but this is in my opinion a small price to pay for all the freedom you get from this setup.

One great way to make sure you don't accidentally harm your data when installing or reconfiguring your system is by simply not having your important data drives in the computer during the process. Inexpensive removable drive trays are available for IDE and SCSI disks and if you do more than a little recording, they can also be a very convenient way to store individual projects that you need to work on at a later time.

General partitioning theory:

Partitioning is basically just a way to make one physical disk appear as several individual disks. Each partition consists of a contiguous section of disk blocks and is assigned a separate drive letter in Windows. There may be space left on a disk that's not used by any partitions. That space just goes to waste and you generally don't want that. Most PC systems that come with Windows already installed will have just one large partition filling up the entire disk and containing the OS and any bundled applications. When partitioning was first invented four partitions on a disk was the limit. Of course, this soon proved to be insufficient, so a rather confusing but clever system of fitting more partitions in there was introduced: the original four partitions are now called "primary partitions".

If you want more than four partitions, you will have to dedicate one of your partitions to acting as an "Extended Partition" - - a sort of container for all the extra partitions you want to create. (No actual data is stored in an "extended partition."). It is subdivided into a number of so-called "logical partitions." I don't know what's so logical about it, but I hope that knowing about the different types of partitions will help you make sense of other sources of information about partitioning. Now let's look a bit at some of the different operating systems that you could be interested in running.

Windows:

All the different releases/versions of Microsoft Windows share one "quality" - - they want the whole machine for themselves and will gladly overwrite the master boot record on your first disk during installation. In a multi-boot system, this is definitely not what you want to happen, so be careful when upgrading or reinstalling Windows. The partitioning utility in Windows (and DOS) is a rather unfriendly text mode program called FDISK.EXE. You can do terrible things to your system with this crude tool, so be careful with it! It has some rather brain-damaged ideas, one of them is its blank refusal to create more than one primary partition, another is the way it ignores partition types it does not know about, eg. Linux. Still, it's what we have been given to do the task of creating partitions in Windows, so we'll just have to live with it.

Before you can use any partitions you've created with FDISK.EXE they must be formatted. In NT you have the option of using the technically superior HPFS formatting, but if you want to access data on the partition from other OSs I recommend FAT instead. An important feature of FDISK.EXE is the /mbr option that will recreate the master boot record on your disk. In other words, enter the command "fdisk /mbr" at the DOS prompt to get Windows to boot the way it used to before you installed LILO (the Linux loader) or whatever it is that is causing trouble.

Linux:

Linux uses the traditional fdisk tool to make changes to the partitioning tables of your disks. Like DOS fdisk, it's text based and not very user-friendly, so watch your step! Linux will only let you repartition drives if you are logged in as root or "super-user" (this corresponds to the administrator account in NT). This prevents the risk and fear of doing any serious harm to the system when you're logged in as a normal user without special powers. In Linux there's a direct connection between the partition types and the device names used for disks. Primary partitions and the extended partition are given the numbers 1 to 4, logical partitions are numbered from 5 and up. As an example, here's the disk info about my first IDE disk (named /dev/hda) as printed by fdisk:

Disk /dev/hda: 128 heads, 63 sector, 620 cylinder
Units = cylinder of 8064 * 512 bytes
 
As you can see, my main Linux partition is /dev/hda5, one of two logical partitions inside the extended partition /dev/hda2. This demonstrates an important point: unlike most other OSs, Linux will boot from logical partitions. If you're short on primary partitions for multiple OSs, this feature is very handy. Some recent Linux distributions (notably RedHat) will merrily go on and kick out other OSs during the installation process.

Since you're reading this text about running several OSs on your computer, I assume that's not what you want. Make sure you choose the "Custom" installation option instead of the one labelled "Workstation" and generally watch your step. Several very detailed guides to setting up Linux with different other OSs are available on the Internet. Most of what you will need is freely available at the Linux Documentation Project home page at http://www.sunsite.unc.edu/LDP/linux.html.

BeOS:

Creating a partition for running BeOS alongside Windows is very simple and user-friendly. The good folks at Be, Inc. know very well that most people will want to hang onto their Windows systems for the time being, so they've bundled a special edition of PartitionMagic (see below) with the OS. This makes the whole partioning process very easy. The only thing that you really have to know if you're trying to plan your partitioning is that BeOS needs to boot from a primary partition. It has recently been announced that the next version of BeOS (version 5) will be free for personal use. At the time of writing it's still not available, so I don't have any actual experience with installing it, but I would expect it to be as smooth as the current version. For more see Be.

Tools:

There's a number of utilities and tools that can make life easier for you if you plan to have several different OSs installed. Here's a short presentation of some of them.

FIPS:

This is a somewhat primitive, but very useful free DOS tool for splitting primary partitions that contain data. Of course, you will have to have three or less primary partitions when you do this or there won't be room for the added primary partition. There can be only four of those, remember? After splitting the partition, you can then go on and install Linux on it or whatever it is you're trying to do. It goes without saying that you shouldn't even think about attempting this potentially disastrous operation without having a working backup of everything of any importance on the disk. Make sure you read the documentation carefully before you start. More information is available at the FIPS home page at http://www.igd.fhg.de/~aschaefe/fips/.

VMware:

A very interesting new software product for people who need to run multiple operating systems is VMware. It basically provides you with a virtual computer running a different OS inside your real computer. This way you can run Windows inside Linux or vice versa. While fantastically convenient for many applications (I use it daily at work) it is not a good solution if you need to run real-time sound processing applications. VMware does not perform well in digital audio applications and does not support MIDI yet but will be soon according to the manufacturer. In short, if you need to run music or recording software, you don't want to run it inside a VMware virtual machine, but it could still be very handy if you need several OS's running at the same time. A trial version is available at http://www.vmware.com. The full product is priced at $299.00, $99.00 for hobbyists and students.

PartitionMagic:

If you often need to juggle disk partitions, PartitionMagic is an extremely handy tool for resizing and moving partitions without data loss. There's a demo version available at http://www.partitionmagic.com. The full product sells for $89.95.

Well I hope this gets you started on the road to safe partitioning. Remember to back up your data first and proceed carefully. There is more to this world than Windows!

di salin dari : http://www.pcrecording.com/partition.htm

Monday, March 20, 2006

Brain Computer Interface

Pagi ini gue baca di PC Mild para peneliti di Berlin telah mengembangkan sebuat perangkat yang di sebut dengan 'mental typewriter'. Perangkat tersebut dapat mengidentifikasi dan memproses langsung dari otak kemudian mengimplementasikannya ke layar komputer.
Perangkat dengan nama resmi Brain Computer Interface ini dapat memberikan manafaat besar, terutama untuk orang cacat dan tidak memiliki kemampuan fisik untuk berkomunikasi dengan orang lain.
Cara kerjanya adalah dengan mengukur sinyal dari otak menggunakan 128 elektroda yang menempel dengan kulit kepala si subjek, atau mirip dengan 'electroencephalogram (EEG). Kemudian dengan bantuan program khusus, sinyal-sinyal otak tadi di terima oleh komputer dalam bentuk informasi.
Sampai saat ini ke-128 elektroda yang melekat di kepala itu masih terlihat aneh, dan para peneliti tersebut akan mengembangkan elektroda yang nantinya akan berbentuk seperti topi. Teknologi seperti ini tampaknya akan terus berkembang untuk berbagai bidang, contohnya kedokteran. Tapi coba anda bayangkan bila teknologi ini di aplikasikan ke dalam game, wahhh bisa seperti film The Matrix dong....

Thursday, March 09, 2006

Selamat Tinggal Windows 98

Mulai tanggal 30 Juni 2006 nanti microsoft sudah meninggalkan dukungan nya untuk windows 98, windows 98 Second Edition dan Windows ME.
Kebijakan tersebut memaksa konsumen untuk beralih ke windows XP ataupun Vista, jadi bagi anda yang masih menggunakan windows 98 bersiap-siaplah untuk migrasi ke XP atau Vista.

Friday, March 03, 2006

Masa peralihan atau trend sesaat

Sudah dua bulan terakhir ini aku memilih blog sebagai tempat untuk menambah ilmu.
Sebelumnya setiap hari berkutat dengan milis dan sekarang dengan berat hati aku meninggalkan milis tetapi bukan berarti benar-benar meninggalkannya karena masih ada beberapa milis yang aku ikuti.
Memang tren sekarang mengarah ke blogging seperti para blogger yang lain.
Mungkin banyak orang yang bertanya-tanya apakah blog ini hanya tren sesaat? Seperti di harapkan oleh komunitas blog semoga bukan hanya tren sesaat sehingga blog pada akhirnya akan menjadi suatu kekuatan yang tidak bisa di anggap enteng. Seperti di ketahui oleh semua orang pertumbuhan blog sekarang ini sangat fantastis baik itu menggunakan situs pribadi maupun menggunakan situs gratisan seperti blogger.com, aku sendiri  sekarang mempunyai beberapa blog yang aku kelola sendiri. Kenapa beberapa? karena topik yang ingin aku angkat berbeda-beda mulai dari pribadi, hobby, bisnis, sampai spiritual.
Masa seperti ini memang aku anggap sebagai masa peralihan karena waktu yang di gunakan untuk ber-milis-ria sebagian terpakai untuk mengelola blog.
 
Semoga saja bukan tren sesaat
 
Semoga