captainJam writes "Handtops.com has a piece about the effects of handtops (text version) such as the OQO, FlipStart and others on the computing experience. With a physical size that's slightly larger than a PDA, a handtop has the power of a standard ultra-portable laptop - 1GHz, 256-512MB RAM, USB, FireWire, etc. These factors, coupled with a dock (plug in a monitor, keyboard and mouse) allow one to imagine a world where maybe they won't need a desktop, or laptop, or mp3 player, video jukebox, digicam, etc. Maybe one day companies might even be willing to pay for part of your handtop, knowing that they would have to invest less in upgrading? It's not all rosy, the devices are still under $2000 and aren't due out until later this fall (OQO) or Q1-2 2005 (FlipStart), but this is an important shift worth letting the mind ponder." Of course, the OQO has been in development for a while, now.

phatlipmojo writes "I'm a librarian in the process of opening a brand new small public library from the ground up (literally; we don't even have a building yet). The library director and I are considering our options for public computing terminals. Having experienced the frustration of dealing with Dell machines running Windows XP on a daily basis, we're trying to consider other options, and we've been talking about maybe using thin clients. Have any of you used or worked in a library (or similar environment) that uses thin client stations for public computing? What are your impressions? What are the perks and what are the drawbacks?"

antimatt writes "Everyone knows WAP is dead. It was dead on arrival. Right? Wrong. WAP use, at least in the UK, is up 42% in the last year. Are we seeing postmortem twitching, or a phoenix rising from the wireless ashes?" While the first incarnation was pretty rough, WAP is slowly growing into what people had hoped the first version would be. Now if only it just lost the stigma attached to it.

neol'schmoe writes "There's a new solution to the age old problem of physical movement within a virtual world. Researchers in Japan have come up with tiles that move in concert with a user's pace and motion to allow free range of motion while literally walking in a virtual environment and never leaving a very small area in the real world."

gbjbaanb writes "eek! the BBC is reporting the first mobile phone virus that causes damage is out and about. The virus only works with the Symbian Series 60's OS (no, not the Smartphone) and spreads through an adapted copy of the legitimate Mosquitos game. Once installed, a hidden program sends SMS texts to premium rate numbers. That's not so bad, no doubt the premium rate numbers will be switched off soon but the worst is yet to come - "typically we see them in the wild then copycat ones come along soon after," said Sal Viveros, director of wireless security at McAfee."

Jochen Bedersdorfer writes "According to golem.de, a research project in the area of Augmented Reality created a technology to project videos onto arbitrary existing screen surfaces, like wallpapered walls or window curtains. ... Quite awesome. Now I can use this ugly corner in my living room effectively."

Bruce Perens writes "Slashdot has often featured attempts at improvement upon the QWERTY keyboard. Here's a one-handed USB keyboard that you can buy for $25 online, or a bit more at the CompUSA. There's one catch: someone will have to design a keying pattern and hack up software for it. It's a task just crying out for an Open Source project." Bruce has also included on the linked page code with which to read the output from the device.

juan_buhler writes "SIGGRAPH 2004 started Sunday in the Los Angeles Convention Center. I am chairing the Sketches program for 2005, and along with Nishant Kothary, who is chairing the Web program in 2005, Danah Boyd and others, we are running a pilot with a blog and a wiki. Check them out. The blog has almost real time posting of what's going on at SIGGRAPH, so it's a great way to see it if you couldn't make it this year" Read on for a few more notes from Siggraph.

jed101 writes "I just stumbled upon this news release by Sharp introducing a 3D monitor that doesn't require special glasses. The technology was devised for high end medical instuments and such but this could be the gamers new dream toy."

bic2k writes "AlphaGrip has opened their doors to pre-orders this past week. (Previously mentioned here.) Press release can be found here. They look a lot like an xbox controller, but contains 42 buttons and a analog stick. Shows up as a standard USB keyboard and mouse. Has a USB expansion slot, which will possibly be used for wireless connectivity. They claim typing speeds of 50 WPM or better after a month or so. They're waiting for 5000 pre-orders before going to manufacturing, so it may be awhile before they actually ship these."

An anonymous reader writes "EE Times reports that the future of industrial automation lies in wireless mesh sensor networks. From the article: 'It is the holy grail of the factory floor: hundreds of sensors wirelessly connected, monitoring motors for problems and drastically reducing energy consumption -- all with the precision and rhythm of a philharmonic orchestra.' (Other articles here(1), here(2), and here(3).)"

jens writes "More than 150 participants (including Matt Westervelt, Seattle Wireless) from 30 countries will discuss on how to overcome the digital divide building wireless community networks. The freifunk.net summer convention 2004 takes place from 3rd to 10th September in Djursland, Denmark. The convention's location is well chosen -- DjurslandS.net (in Danish) itself is probably the most ambitious wireless community network of the world. About 200 volunteers installed more than 100 masts on the remote area's 32 000 sq mi. Using the wireless standards 802.11a/b/g about 1'500 households enjoy a symmetric 1-2 MBit internet connection via WI-FI (the WI-FI network has 8 direct uplinks to the danish backbone and several DSL fallbacks). The wireless4development track organized by wire.less.dk will show other projects how to follow the DjurslandS.net example. The convention starts off with a 3 day program including VoIP, development for the meshcube and antenna building and finishes off with a 5 day hands-on workshop."

legrimpeur writes "Anandtech has a nice performance comparison under Linux (AMD64) between the recently introduced 3.6GHz EM64T Xeon processor and an Athlon 64 3500+. It is disappointing to see how the Athlon gets trounced in FPU intensive benchmarks. No memory-bound benchmarks (where the Athlon is supposed to have an edge) are presented, though." Update: 08/09 23:34 GMT by T : As the Inquirer reports, many Anandtech readers take issue with the comparison.

Krafty Koder writes "The Register is reporting that a consortium of Taiwanese firms are to launch a 2 Terabyte memory card at the Taipei International Electronics Show (Taitronics) on the 8th of October, with mass production expected to start next year. The card will measure 3.2 x 2.4 x 0.1cm according to this DigiTimes.com report" The reports say that this is supposed to be a "new type" of card, so the details are still quite sketchy. Offical unveiling will happen in early October.

Acidus writes "While researching for an embedded systems project (a magstripe enabled Coke machine), I was shocked by the lack of magstripe information: Programs/code that would run on a modern OS were all but nonexistant, articles that were 6-10 years old, etc. Further research proved hard, because I had become google's authoritative source. So Stripe Snoop was born, and is now at 1.5 . Stripe Snoop is a suite of research tools that captures, modifies, validates, generates, analyzes, and shares magstripe data, with an ever-growing database of card formats. Decoding everything from driver's licenses to banking cards, its features can analyze non-standard cards, such as NYC's Metrocard."

eric434 writes "According to a security alert released by Security.Org, the Kensington laptop lock that many of us use and love isn't secure. In fact, it can be opened in 30 seconds after about a minute of practice with a $1 worth of equipment. (A Bic pen, and a pair of scissors. In the interest of giving people some time to stop using the locks, the actual method of opening the lock is left up to the reader.) To make matters worse, Kensington's 'We'll give you $1500 if someone steals your laptop' guarantee doesn't apply -- because the process of opening the lock doesn't damage the lock or cable." Mind the source, though -- security.org wouldn't mind selling you a book on locks and safes.

Sterling D. Allan writes "A story in the Deseret News cautions governments and corporations from deleting legitimate email. Expensive measures are being called into place to archive the mail for future subpoena purposes. Think Enron on one hand. Think Monicagate on the other. Next they'll ask us to keep recordings of all our phone conversations? Big brother gets bigger -- with good reasons, as always. What about all those business propositions I get from Nigeria. Do I have to keep those too? "Get rich from home" (to pay for the purchase of a new hard drive to contain all your spam). One man's junk is another man's treasure. You never know what an IRS agent might find lucky."

VL writes "Sure, power supply reviews aren't all that interesting, but we take a look at one nice PSU that delivers power where it counts, and best of all, it is the best modular setup we've seen in this market segment."

Asakawa writes "With manufacturers like Alienware and Voodoo sucking up the low-volume/high-margin high-end gaming market, it looks like Dell wants a piece of the action. The machine that these guys have reviewed looks pretty awesome, but they reckon it's overpriced. It will be interesting to see if Dell can shake off its grey box image and entice the more fussy gamers and enthusias."

Yoeri Lauwers writes "Tweakers.net investigates matters a bit more clearly and decides that AnandTech and Storagereview should think twice before they shout that "RAID 0 is useless on the desktop". Tweakers.net's tests illustrate the contrary"