Steve K writes "Cost-cutting in IT. Something the beancounters are always looking at, no doubt. Jetway have attempted to provide an answer -- allow two users to utilise one machine at once. HEXUS.net have a review: 'The PT800TWIN is an odd beast. While it's admirable that Jetway have engineered it with MagicTwin support in mind, to go after the low-cost/budget/TCO crowd, you have to wonder about the implementation. It needs Windows XP, adding cost. A large proportion of applications released on Windows require you to have two licenses to run concurrently on a MagicTwin system, adding cost. While you save money on the hardware, you don't on the software.' Not really a revolutionary product, but perhaps it can be taken somewhere with a little more work."

An anonymous reader submits "After purchasing AirPort Express yesterday, I found out that my existing Netgear router didn't work with it in WDS mode. After a lot of searching, I found scattered bits of information about what routers worked and which ones didn't. I decided to start a site that hopefully will become a definitive list of routers that work with AirPort Express. It's not big yet, which is why I am submitting this here. If you have attempted successfully or unsuccessfully to set up AirPort Express in WDS mode with a non-Apple router, please let me know so that future users can find the information more readily."

Rinisari writes "Savebetamax.org, a project of Downhill Battle, has set up a national call-in day for September 14th. They ask that on that day, each person signed up call a specific congressperson about the INDUCE act in an effort to keep a steady stream of calls all day. The "Save Betamax" nomenclature comes from the fact that the INDUCE act could reverse the decision in the 1984 Sony v. Universal case regarding Sony's Betamax VTRs and copying of copyrighted movies."

prostoalex writes "O'Reilly Network posts an update on Project Utopia that produced Hardware Abstraction Layer for Linux simplifying device changes. They also link to the Driver on Demand project on SourceForge, whose goal is to create a central database to enable Linux desktops download the drivers automatically when the user plugs in her new hardware device."

UberGeek28 writes "The development effort pushed by TreoCentral (previously discussed on /. here) seems to have failed. After raising a bounty of $5,812 for the first developer to meet the requirements of a working Bluetooth driver for PalmOS 5.0 with the Treo 600 in mind, no developer has come forward to claim it. The official word has come here. Maybe another effort with wider impact could succeed where this one failed?"

troop23 writes "A blog posting by Benjamin J. J. Voigt says this "The University of Potsdam has a project to develop a .NET VM for the Lego Mindstorms system. Lego Mindstorms just got a higher priority on my shopping list!" While the thought of using .Net to program Lego Mindstorms may not be palatable, having a mainstream dev environment sure is." Perhaps Mono would work just as well.

yerdaddie writes "The just-released Transmeta TM8800 has been integrated into a new ultraportable from Sharp. The smaller 90nm variety clocks and performs better than the older 130nm TM86XX Efficeons. It also seems the Orion Multisystems personal clusters discussed earlier on slashdot will be built around this processor variant. Hopefully Transmeta will be releasing a developer kit soon for eager hardware hackers."

gewg_ writes "If Napster and Bit Torrent had a baby, would it Baxter? As a follow-on to Cringely's last column where he talked about having a backup strategy in the wake of Hurricane Frances, this week he proposes a distributed RAID notion as a solution."

Apple God writes "I was a friend's house and he showed me his Verizion PCMCIA card for internet access. On a whim, I put it in my PowerBook, and it recognized the card and prompted me for authorization to configure the system for use with the card. I entered my password, and was surprised to see an icon in the menu bar for it. I clicked on this icon and selected connect, it worked! I had internet access. Here is a picture of the card that I used. When we checked Verizon's page, they only listed Windows compatibility. To make matters sweeter, my friend was shocked that it 'just worked' because he had to install drivers in XP before it would work."

Chagatai writes "My company is one of America's largest beef and pork producers. Recently I took a trip to see a new computer room that had been built at one of our abbatoirs. While the new environment is nice and sanitary, the old computer room had air intakes that were adjacent to the rendering portion of the plant, and everything smells in an almost unholy way. Management is curious if there are any cleaning agents or means of deodorizing this equipment before moving it into the nice, new office. The only products I could find would clean the outside of the hardware, but the internals would still possess the lovely aroma of boiled dead pig parts. Of course, this is a race against time, as I am sure someone will inevitably squirt Pine-Sol into the system to try to make things better. Does anyone have any recommendations to remove the effluvium of post-mortem porcine matter from our machines?"

HaiLHaiL writes "MSNBC has an article on a water strider-inspired minirobot built by a Carnegie Mellon engineering professor. Nice." The article also summarizes some interesting recent research that explains how the real-life striders glide as they do. Update: 09/11 21:37 GMT by T : Thanks to Hank Zimmerman, I see that I missed this story the first time around -- mea culpa.

An anonymous reader writes "We've been hearing about the paperless office for years now, but we never seem to get any nearer to that environmentally friendly nirvana. It's just too easy to jot things down on a piece of paper, far easier than using a PDA. So maybe a digital pen and paper is the answer? The people at Pegasus, inventor of the Mobile NoteTaker certainly think so. Unfortunately, the guy who reviewed the NoteTaker thinks otherwise."

thehomeland writes "NewScientist.com reports of a new device produced by Bernhard Nebel at the University of Freiburg in Germany that allows one to play foosball solo -- with a robotic opponent. May be available next year for 20,000 Euros." What about ping-pong?

GlucoPilot writes "This guy bought a Rio Carbon Mp3 player because he figured he could rip the 5GB CF Card out of it. He did, and put it in his prosumer 6MP digital camera. Now he can take 1,500 six-megapixel pics in one sitting. Oy." The card is apparently a 5GB Microdrive, note, not 5GB of Flash memory.

Lord_Slepnir writes "Cnet is reporting on a consortium of companies that wish to develop a Serial ATA hard drive interface for Miniature hard drives called CE-ATA. The goal of these new drives would be to cut power consumption and use smaller connectors, not to provide an increase in speed. 'The purpose is to design a new interface tailored to the consumer electronics and handheld gadget segment,' said Intel's principal engineer for CE-ATA, Knut Grimsrud. The consortium consists of Intel, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, Marvell Semiconductor, Seagate Technology, and Toshiba America Information Systems."

`Sean writes "Pepper Computer debuted their $800 Pepper Pad 2 at DEMOmobile 2004 this week. Specs include a 624 MHz XScale processor, 8.4" 800x600 TFT touchscreen, 802.11b+g, and 20 GB HDD running MontaVista Linux CEE. Out of the box the Pepper Pad 2 loads the Pepper Keeper as its GUI, but a full-blown Linux distribution with Java 2 JRE and X-Window System is sitting under the covers just waiting be customized. I personally can't wait to get a hold of one of these to turn into an OBD-II and telemetry workstation for the rally car."

enrico_suave writes "Whoot.org (linked via Coral P2P Cache because the poor guy is hosting on a ADSL line) has cool design pics, a now removed video clip, and some interesting details of the process. From one of the plog entries: 'We've developed a print head that will print 5mm 'pixels' of the consumable. It basically acts as a pump. It's a medium sized lego gear (driven by a worm gear attached to the motor) with four axles that repeatedly squeeze and release a pipe attached to a funnel that holds the consumables. a half-rotation of this wheel yields a blob.'"

prostoalex writes "The Wi-Fi Alliance approved Wi-Fi Multimedia (WMM) technology that allows packet prioritisation to the multimedia data streamed wireless LANs. Broadcom already announced that one of their access points and one reference design are WMM-certified. Other news outlets report that WMM will accelerate Wi-Fi adoption in consumer electronics and mobile devices."

Grump writes "This story reports that 'The makers of TiVo and ReplayTV digital video recorders have agreed to limit how long consumers can keep pay-for-view movies stored on future versions of the VCR-like devices.' Is this fair, or erosion of more fair-use rights?"

An anonymous reader writes "The X-Tender Case Mod for Xbox is a complete kit that will allow you convert your Xbox into a mini rack mount server or media center with activity LEDs and expanded space for two internal hard drives. Molded to perfectly integrate with your Xbox, this kit comes with a custom front panel, a 3 activity LED, a custom made hard drive mounting plate to accommodate one or two additional drives, and a custom molded rear panel. Specially designed X-Tender rods are included to internally support the expansion, allowing you to securely reassemble the machine. Additional space on front panel will allow the support of one LCD display on each side of the system, or additional LEDs or cold cathode lights. You can switch between the newly added drives via the buttons at the front."