neutron_p writes "Ground-breaking work to investigate the migratory movements of marine turtles in the UK Overseas Territories began on the Caribbean "Emerald Isle" of Montserrat this week. Staff from Government of Montserrat attached a satellite transmitter to 'Montserrat', a 150kg green turtle, which will enable her migratory movements to be logged from space and followed live on the internet at http://seaturtle.org/tracking/ Since leaving Montserrat's shores she has already passed through the waters of St Kitts and Nevis but where will she stop? Picture is here."

EconolineCrush writes "If graphics cards that cost more than a mortgage payment make your wallet quiver, it's worth checking out ATI's Radeon X700 and NVIDIA's GeForce 6600 series. Both are based on cut down versions of latest and greatest graphics chips, but at under $200, they sell for a fraction of the price of high-end cards. What's more, these $200 wonders outperform last year's $500 cards, sometimes by embarrassingly large margins. The Tech Report has in-depth reviews of both the GeForce 6600GT and Radeon X700 XT if you're in the market for a next-gen graphics card that's a little more affordable."

vincecate writes "The largest Itanium system maker, HP, has terminated its Itanium workstations. It seems their workstation customers have spoken in favor of x64. In related news, Intel expects to ship over 100,000 Itaniums in all of 2004 while AMD is estimating 1.5 to 2 million AMD64 chips in Q4."

Quantum Skyline writes "Most of us are running on a newer Pentium 4/Athlon 64 box with lots of RAM and a 7200 RPM drive and a uber-sweet graphics card that pushes 100 FPS in Doom 3. Our parents are probably running an old Athlon 700 with half the RAM and a Rage128 videocard, and some think that's overkill while the parents think its not enough. Why debate this? DevHardware has an opinion piece on 'leaner computing' and the author thinks that less might be more." This reminds me of a modern desktop system I saw sitting in a store, running Windows XP just so that it could connect via a terminal to another server and run the store's application. It would seem that even an old VT100 would have sufficed, but someone was able to sell the store a full blown PC.

i4u writes "Casio announces a LCD display with the world's highest resolution. The 2.2 inch LCD display features VGA resolution. The Casio innovation has 368ppi (pixels per inch). The power consumption and size is the same as with current QVGA (320x240) displays. Meaning current mobile phone models could directly be upgraded with a VGA display. So we could very soon see Mobile phones with VGA resolution on 2.2 inch displays. Samsung had the World's highest resolution with 300ppi in early August. Casio took now the lead. More details in Casio Press-Release (Japanese)."

The Fun Guy writes "The New York Times has discovered USB thumb drives: "In some cases, flash drives have suddenly become so commonplace that, as with cellphones, their owners are adding fashion touches [DNA must be on file to read] to lend them a personal identity." Apparently, the most important thing about thumb drives is not that they are cheap, fast, durable, easy to use or hold a lot of data, but that wearing one around your neck identifies you as one of the techno-congniscenti, especially if you personalize it with stickers."

boredMDer writes "Apparently someone who has already recieved their iMac G5 has decided to take it apart. Stupid if only for the fact that he's just voided his warranty." pjcreath writes "Apple has posted official pages listing the components that are 'easy' to install (including the LCD!) and describing how to troubleshoot hardware problems using diagnostic LEDs inside the case. For the very curious, you can download the high-resolution TIFF (10MB) of the iMac's innards from Apple."

rbrander links to this "nice review of all the HDTV Recorders from the Washington Post: DirecTV's based on the TiVo wins for best interface, but Dish Network's gets a few nods. There's also a nice swipe ('...spectacularly stupid decision') at JVC's for allowing only (copy-protected) Firewire input to the one HDTV tape recorder on the market."

skyshock21 writes "iRiver appears to now be taking pre-orders for their H320 hard drive MP3 player. This is the one with the color screen that was featured on Slashdot a while back. Although it doesn't support .flac files like the Rio Karma, it does support .ogg, in addition to the usual file formats (mp3, .wmv, .asf, .wav) and sports a nifty color screen. There is also a review posted on CNET."

Fletcher points to this story in CNET Asia, excerpting "The Korean electronics giant unveiled an 8-gigabit flash memory chip Monday based on the 60-nanometer process, as well as a 2-gigabit DDR DRAM chip based on the 80-nanometer process. Flash chips, which retain data after a host computer is turned off, are used in flash cards and cell phones, while DDR DRAM is used inside PCs."

RotJ writes "Some crafty Germans have created an electromechanical conversion of the game Pong: "Pongmechanik is an absolutely physical game. The game is realized electromechanically, and essentially consists of four elements: A relay computer, the mechanical movement with collision detection, the display and the acoustic components." Talk about analog retro chic." saccade.com adds "This amazing device faithfully re-creates the classic original video game with pulleys, wires, motors and a (pre-chip, pre-transistor, pre-tube) relay based computer. They were partly inspired by Konrad Zuse, who created some of the first electromechanical and electronic computers."

An anonymous reader writes "Found this on a European site. It's a PCMCIA card that connects you to the internet over a 3G network. With a download rate of 384kb/sec, it's close to broadband speed, and it works wherever there's network coverage. If you're tired of searching for a WiFi hotspot when you need one, this could be the answer."

ptorrone writes "If you have an old digital camera laying around and pick up a $1.50 Timer Chip from RadioShack or DigiKey you can turn it in to a great aerial photography camera, this how-to from Engadget shows how they did it along with some other projects with the modded camera." We also linked to part 1.

gManZboy writes "Phil Sherburne and Cary Fitzgerald, two senior technologists over at Cisco, have written an in-depth overview of VoIP for developers and the like (not for everyone who's ever used a phone). Like Queue's earlier You Don't Know Jack about Disks, this article covers the history, the basic technologies, how they work, and where they're headed. If you found the blog post yesterday lacking, check this one out."

mcc writes "PlanetGamecube is reporting the upcoming Nintendo DS handheld has been given a launch date of November 21st and a price of $150 ! It is also being reported that the Nintendo DS will ship with PictoChat (a sort of chat/whiteboard software) and some form of the Metroid Prime Hunters multiplayer FPS bundled in. A fact sheet is also available."

Grump sent in a story saying "Ask any iPod user what they like the most about their device, and most will probably mention the scrollwheel. Here is the story behind the company that makes it (hint: it's not Apple). Great not just for the history, but insight as to both how Apple's design process works, and how the scroll wheel itself works."

Brad Templeton writes "I, (of EFF/ClariNet/rec.humor.funny) along with Brent Chapman (Majordomo/Building Internet Firewalls) and the satellite dish of John Gilmore (EFF/Cygnus/Cypherpunks/etc.) put together an engaging hack -- a battery-powered free phone booth using 802.11, VoIP and a satellite IP uplink. This was placed in the desert at the Burning Man arts festival deep in the remote Nevada Black Rock playa, exactly where you wouldn't expect a working phone booth to be. With cheap VoIP people were able to call all over the world. The reactions of people to such incongruous technology were great fun and emotional as well. There's a page about the phone including details of building it and live experiences including totally non-gratuitous photos of naked people using technology. (There, that ought to stress-test my new server!)"

wgadmin asks: "I am a sysadmin for a 500-node Linux cluster. We are doubling the size of our compute nodes, so, as a consequence, we need a new switch. We currently have a Foundry FastIron 1500 -- however, a) it doesn't have enough ports (only 208) and b) it is extremely unreliable. We want something that's solid as a rock. We process mostly serial jobs. And we will probably require ~320 ports. What's everyone using for their HPC clusters? There's so many high performance switches on the market, we hardly know where to start."

CrzyP writes "AnandTech puts the latest and greatest AMD and Intel CPUs, including 32-bit and 64-bit versions, to the test in their first ever "Linux Desktop CPU Roundup" to see which performs the best in various Linux applications including database, compiling, rendering, encryption, and more. They suggest the Athlon 64 3500+ over the P4 560 for "balancing price and performance". Very informative!"

sargon writes "O'Reilly will begin publishing a new magazine, 'Make,' in early 2005 which is aimed at the do-it-yourself crowd. To quote the home page: 'Make brings the do-it-yourself mindset to all the technology in your life. Make is loaded with exciting projects that help you make the most of your technology at home and away from home. This is a magazine that celebrates your right to tweak, hack, and bend any technology to your own will.' The first issue will focus on kite aerial photography." Any suggestions for what they should cover?