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Hi, I saw something like that from Czech company RETIA.
Or what about camero-tech and their Xaver 800?
It seems to have better resolution.

Recently it looks like this is the normal Slovak approach to doing things :D

Look here. They have built a house around a phone cable, so that the cable no goes through the newly built house, through walls and through the rooms. It's best visible at the very end of the video.

Another current affair: they have introduced system to collect toll from lorries. it became active 1.1.2010. Since then there are huge queues of trucks and lorries probably on all border crossings into Slovakia.

And if I understand it right, the lack of on-board units causes that even Slovak companies are in trouble.

Do you know what my first thoughts were when I saw Monkey Island for the first time ever back then in 1990? Can't remember my exact thoughts, but it was something along the line of "This are the best damn graphics I have ever seen in a game", "Maniac Mansion" earlier on the C64 triggered similar feelings. Adventure games simply were one of the best looking games around that time, all those Jump'n Runs and other tile based games just looked flat in comparism to the '3d' scenary you got in an adventure game. Now I am not saying that the technical aspects of graphics are overly important, but graphics itself, ie. the art behind them certainly is. MonkeyIsland1 vs MonkeyIsland4 kind of demonstrates that in a drastic way:

http://www.vgmuseum.com/end/scd/a/monkey-25.gif
http://bonusweb.idnes.cz/obrazek/na_mi05.jpg

vs

http://www.activewin.com/reviews/software/games/m/ images/mi4_019.jpg

MonkeyIsland1 might suffer a bit from limited resolution and color palette, but boy, the art in there is just lightyears ahead of that shit that they put into MonkeyIsland4. So what does that mean? Not much probally, but it shows that advances in rendering don't necessarily lead to a better looking a game.

Now that brings us back to the Wii, on one side I don't see its limited abilities as much of a problem, especially since we don't know how limited it really will be (will there be HDR and Shaders support?). However its limits won't be a problem only as long as the developers make good use of what they have at hand. If they just try to develop the same style as they do for PS3 the Wii will probally end up with a bunch of ugly and jerky games, just look at 'Burnout' or 'NfS:Most Wanted' for the NintendoDS to see how wrong games can get if they are rushed and don't make proper use of the hardware.

In the end I think you are right, even with shiny high-end graphics, most of the 'world' in a game exists still mainly in our head and not just on the screen. What is shown on the screen however can and has to support the imagination and not work against it to make the game as a whole work. 'Photorealistic graphics' when done wrong can easily fall into the uncanny valley and spoil all imagination, while cartony graphics on the other side are reasonably save for most part. Now I don't want all games to look chartony, but developers have certainly to be carefull to create an overall pleasant looking game and pure CPU/GPU power alone won't help to compansate lack in arstitic skill. And as such lack of CPU/GPU power won't stop people from creating great looking games either, the days of 4 color CGA where lack of graphic ability might have hindered good looking games are long gone and no matter how much power the Wii has, it will certainly be more then enough to bringt some good graphics onto a TV screen.

Screenshot of that:

http://bonusweb.idnes.cz/obrazek.html?obrazek=alpr ofil06.jpg

I don't see how would it stagnate anything. On the contrary, we get two competing versions, where each can make its own design choices. Neither Gnome not KDE have full control of everything. If one of them doesn't want something, the other one might accept it.

And nowhere near as bad? Here on my laptop I have exactly one look: KDE. Very infrequently I use a lone Gnome app. That's very far from the mess I often see on Windows. Please try at least some of the following: Winamp, Sonique, AdAware, ZoneAlarm, any antivirus, Trillian, MSN, Norton Utilities.

Let's take a look at these programs:
Winamp
Sonique
AdAware
ZoneAlarm
Panda Antivirus
Trillian: Norton Utilities
MS Office 2003

Let's see... Winamp and Sonique are completely non-standard, and aren't even used the same way. AdAware has its own pretty widgets. ZoneAlarm has its own non-standard looking interface. Every antivirus I've seen at least paints lots of bitmaps everywhere. And even MS Office has menus that aren't found anywhere else.

Where's the consistency? Every Windows desktop I see these days is full of stuff like the above. And every Linux desktop I see is 99% KDE or 99% Gnome, with once in a while some lone app from the other environment.

Mobile cells for disaster relief or for big public gatherings (concerts, festivals..) have been in Europe for years.. Here are pictures from floods in Prague in 2002.

I doubt if this will replace iPod, but I'm definitely looking forward to checking this little toy out. I was eligible for a free phone upgrade almost a year ago, but back then none of the devices really caught my attention and my old Sony CMD-J6 is still working just fine.

According to this article www.mobil.cz it should be on sale in the Czech Republic (sorry article in Czech, but this is the only intresting piece of info). So this makes me believe it should be available in Europe as well.

For me the ultimate issues will be battery life and the ability to synchronise with kde-pim tools. We'll see how it works out. The fact that it's running Linux is definitely a good start. The question is how "open" will it be, e.g. whether it'll be possible to use, say perl, to read the internal database, add the length of calls and do an accurate analysis of how much money I'm spending etc.

...or even a luddite, but: one creates a virtual keyboard?I happen to like the idea of having some sort of tactile feedback when I write. If I'm going to write so much on this sort of future PDA so much I need a keyboard to do it, I would much prefer either a keyboar like the Psion Series5 or a good system for transforming handwritting into input (hey, if they are going to add a camera anyway, why not put it to good use?)

Sorry NEC, but 'hammering' my fingers into the desk isn't high on my list of things to do... which isn't the same as to say that it is a stupid idea for everyone.