RaD Man [ACiD] writes "Vintage Computer Festival 7.0 will be taking place November 6-7th at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California! In addition to the tours of antiquities and computer history galore, VCF 7.0 will be hosting a unique Retro Video Game Programming Challenge and presenting a number of interesting seminar speakers, such as the inventor of FidoNet, Tom Jennings. The VCF founder will also be appearing on G4TechTV's "The Screen Savers" this Tuesday, October 19th, to demonstrate some of his favorite artifacts."

joemite writes "I-O DATA recently announced the release of their LinkPlayer, which can decode DivX files from DVDs, CDs, USB thumb drives, and network file shares. At $249 suggested retail, I know what I'm wishing for this Christmas!" For simpler (no network shares, no thumb drives) and even cheaper set-ups, a few standalone DVD players -- the Philips DVP642 is one -- will play DivX files from recordable CDs andd DVDs.

Steve writes "HEXUS.net are taking a look at three 'value' CPUs. The Sempron 2800+ and 3100+ from AMD (Socket A and Socket 754 respectively.) The price range of the three is fairly broad, the 3100+ coming out on top, also costing the most. Also, for those of you who enjoy cheap thrills, some overclocking has been thrown in, too." (The third chip reviewed is the Celeron D.)

neutron_p writes "There is a lot of hype around nanotechnology these days, but some things are going to work in a near future anyway. IMEC announced a program aimed at seeking alternatives to the current CMOS manufacturing technologies using nanotechnologies. IMEC will investigate the use of semiconducting wires, carbon nanotubes and spintronics or electron spin." (IMEC describes itself as "Europe's leading independent research center" in the fields of microelectronics and nanotechnology.)

Roland Piquepaille writes "In this interview with CIO Magazine, Ray Kurzweil says that one day, software and computers will reside inside us. He adds that by 2020, "we will be placing millions or billions of nanobots -- blood cell-size devices -- inside our bloodstream to travel into our brains and interact with our neurons." He also says that if we're not enhanced by machines, they will surpass us. But he doesn't think it will happen. According to him, machines and humans will merge. In the mean time, he's pursuing his anti-aging quest and takes about 250 supplements to his diet every day! With this regime, he says his biological age is 40 while he's 56 years old. By 2030, there will be very little difference between 30-year-old and 120-year-old people, says Kurzweil. He's certainly a bright person, but I'm not sure that I agree with someone taking daily such an amount of pills. What do you think? This summary contains some selected -- and biased -- excerpts to help you forge your opinion."

An anonymous reader writes "MP3newswire.net is running a two part article on 15 new digital music portables or "iPod Killers" as the digerati have dubbed them. iPod Killers for Christmas Part I includes what I think is the coolest new player, the Olympus MR 500i with touch-screen technology and and sharp black-on-white color scheme. iPod Killers for Christmas Part II's most interesting portables are the new Epson MPEG-4/MP3 media jukebox and the SoniqCast Aireo 2 Wi Fi. Lots of photos and size specs. Also, Ogg Vorbis is picking up steam as more new players are adding it."

His Eminence writes "The Boosting Engineering, Science, and Technology (BEST) robotics competition has formally unveiled its 2004 challenge, dubbed 'BEST FEVER':'Alas, poor Squeaky has been feeling under the weather. Squeaky has a severe case of BEST FEVER. His system must be treated radically. Only gene therapy can cure him, his DNA must be repaired.' Teams have already started designing and building their 'unique' robot for this challenge."

Whispering Bob writes "Techworld has got an interesting article on the technology behind the Echelon spying networks run by the US, UK, Cananda and Australia. Apparently the super storage and analysing technology used in the US is sold by privately owned Texas Memory Systems. It can deal with one trillion floating point operations per second. Now that's some technology."

stallard writes "Yahoo! News reports this story: 'In November, Digital Lifestyles Group Inc. plans to ship the hip-e, a new Windows-based PC inspired by the iMac, specifically designed to cater to teenagers. It was Chairman and CEO Kent Savage's own experience after his son asked him for an iMac that led to the new all-in-one system's creation.'"

libertynews writes "Here is a project called P.E.A.R.T. where EE students constructed a drum playing robot using USB controlled pneumatic actuators and MIDI files."

A user writes, "A company called Small Tree just announced the release of InfiniBand drivers for the Mac, for more supercomputing speed. People have already been making supercomputer clusters for the Mac, including Virginia Tech's third-fastest supercomputer in the world, but InfiniBand is supposed to make the latency drop. A lot. Voltaire also makes some sort of Apple InfiniBand products, though it's not clear whether they make the drivers or hardware."

Bender writes "The Tech Report has a review of the new Seagate Savvio hard drive. This little SCSI drive is roughly one-third the size of the Cheetah 10K-RPM drives so popular for servers, but the benchmarks all show it performing about the same. Not only that, but noise levels and power consumption are both lower than 3.5" SCSI drives. Is it time for 1U servers to convert to 2.5" hard drives?"

An anonymous reader writes "There is an article over at News.com that talks about a small Florida company called Hybrid Mobile Solutions, that hacked XM Radio. They created a cable and software that makes the new XM Commander and XM Direct units work just like an XMPCR. They are in negotiations with TimeTrax to allow recording of XM Radio to MP3's. XMPCR was canned due to this late last month."

Phantom69 writes "Ixbt Labs have spent a month testing 101 graphics cards in 14 different games. They used one reference system, and tested at two different resolutions (800x600 and 1024x768). The cards cover virtually all the major manufacturers ATi, nVidia, 3dfx, Matrox, PowerVR and S3 from 1999-2004."

ctid writes "On 10th November, Sharp will release its new Zaurus PDA. The SL-C3000 includes a 4GB hard drive, a 416MHz Intel XScale PXA270 CPU and 64MB of RAM. All of that in a package weighing 298g! There is no news as to whether Sharp will release this ludicrously desirable toy in the West, but I'm not hopeful personally. Maybe we can rely on suppliers like dynamism.com (in the USA) or shirtpocket.co.uk (in the UK) to help us out?"

goosman writes "The ARRL is reporting that the FCC has approved revised Part 15 (unlicensed services) rules to specifically regulate the deployment of broadband over power line (BPL) technology. The Commission adopted a Report and Order in ET Docket 04-37 when it met in open session today. At the same time, three members of the Commission, including Chairman Michael K. Powell, specifically mentioned the concerns of Amateur Radio operators at the open meeting and expressed either assurances or hope that the new BPL rules will adequately address interference to licensed services."

An anonymous reader submits "A French company has created a teensy MP3 player that also boots PCs into Linux. The 1.7-inch diameter, half-ounce Medaillon (way smaller than an iPod) has been around for a while, but 128MB and 256MB models of the Z2 version are now supplied with Shinux, an embedded Linux distribution that includes lots of cool open source applications." The list of included apps, from AbiWord to Xchat, is pretty impressive for a device intended primarily as a music player.

dark_requiem asks: "I've just built a new system based on a Shuttle SN45GV2 XPC, and it's a great little system. However, I'd like to make it more portable by attaching a flip-up LCD display (preferably with speakers) to the top of the case. My video card has TV Out, so connecting via composite or s-video is no problem. The case is just under 8" wide, so the width of the LCD cannot greatly exceed this (it wouldn't fit in my carrying bag then). Thus far, I have been looking at the various 5.4" displays for console systems like the Gamecube, but all of these connect to the systems via proprietary connectors that stick out of the front of the displays and would interfere with mounting it to my case. Has anyone from Slashdot ever attempted a mod like this, or does anyone know of an LCD display that would suit this purpose well?"

igrp writes "Japan-based electronics manufacturer Olympus just announced their plans to enter the HD-based MP3 player market currenly dominated by Apple's iPod. What makes this stand out from all the other 'iPod killers' are their players' specs. Their top-of-the-line 'MR-500i' model sports a 1,22 MP camera, a 3.7" color touch screen VGA display with a slick-looking red backlight, JPEG support and according to this German newssite weighs in with a battery life of 8 hours. No word on prices and availability in the U.S. yet."

BlueMoon writes "TeamXbox released information today about the launch of the Voodoo VIBE, a Central Home Theater and Entertainment PC running on Windows MCE 2005 that is designed to sit in your home office as a central media server PC. What's special is that you can then hook up a custom VIBE XBOX to your TV that will allow you to record and pause live TV. You can also stream videos, display slide shows, play MP3, play live FM Radio, and even burn recordings to DVD from your VIBE XBOX on the VIBE HTPC."