WTF! IBM and Georgia Tech have demonstrated a 500 GHz Silicon-germanium (SiGe) chip, operating at 4.5 Kelvins. The chip was fabricated by IBM on 200mm wafers, and, at room temperature, the circuits operated at approximately 350 GHz. More info here.

I couldn’t watch the match from world championship yesterday as czech team played poorly. So I decided to play some computer game … and the only one I have installed on my brand new Ubuntupowered system was Doom3. I played with some borrowed hardware a long time ago and stopped it because of terrible performance. But yesterday I lowered the resolution to 640×480, turned off the details and keep on playing even if I had something like 10fps many times.

I went through Delta Complex and Central processing to Site 3 and Caves and it was in-fucking-credible to play those dark tunnels, industrial sites and ancient caves. I finished the game … but I heard something about strange signals coming from Mars :)

Looks like I’m in sort of weird group of portable audio players customers as there is no product from any vendor to satisfy my needs. And this situation has been lasted at least for couple of years. And there is no hope to change soon :(

I thought these requirements are not something really exotic, are they ?

• User friendly & easy to use
• Great design / aesthetic look
• Ability to use it with Linux
• Support for OggVorbis
• Adequate battery life

I tried Neuros, but it looks awful and battery life turned somewhat to 2 hours which is not acceptable. But at least it has cool feature of transmitting the output on selected FM frequency, so I still use it in the car.

Nothing else meets that criteria … Creative, Emgeton, iAudio … nobody. For a long time the closest is Apple with iPod. No Ogg support makes me beg after sending mails & signing petitions:
APPLE, IF YOU CAN READ THIS, INCLUDE OGG VORBIS IN NEXT FIRMWARE VERSION,
PLEASE!