yootje writes "ZDNet is running an article about ARM, a chip-maker who controls more than 80% of the cell phone market and 40% of the digital camera market. ARM shipped 780,000,000 processors last year. ZDNet finds it strange that no one seems to have anything against this company. And maybe it is strange: according to the article many would say ARM is a monopolist, but you never hear anyone say 'ARM sucks!'. But then again, why would they?"

CloudShape writes "I've been trying to find a way to make a mobile phone work with my hearing aids for some years now, and I finally managed it a few days ago. Although the procedure itself is pretty simple, the surrounding issues are good for quite a bit of discussion."

js7a writes "Bruce Simpson of New Zealand, the designer of a homebrew cruise missile as reported here, has been left destitute by hastily-imposed restrictions of his national authorities, and is now offering his services to any non-terrorist willing to provide room, board, travel, expenses, and a negotiated rate. There is no question that cruise missile, UAV, bio-warfare, chemical weapons technology, and probably nuclear technologies will all continue to fall in cost significantly for the foreseeable future."

An anonymous reader writes "A British company called Tritium is marketing a piece of cardboard with metal foil on one side. You order it for under US$25, shipping included, and you get a flat envelope with the cardboard. Cut it out, shape it into a parabola and snap it into the little stand. Then slip it over your current antenna. It is advertised to extend the range of your current antenna by 2 to 3 times. See their website for more information on the cleverly named Tritium Flatenna."

The Black Dragon writes "This has got to be the coolest thing I've seen in a while. It's a bipedal (walks on two legs) robot that you can put together yourself and program with movements. The site is in Korean, but from what I've been able to get from translators and currency exchange, it'll cost about $1,400. (There's a movie embedded half way down.)" Gizmodo has a blurb.

securitas writes "The New York Times' Glenn Fleishman writes about the growth of 802.11x WiFi wireless Internet access on commuter rail, bus and ferry boat now that it's commonly available in restaurants and coffee shops. The article also has an illustration by Al Granberg of some of the techniques used to achieve ubiquitous WiFi in motion."

igargoyle writes "France Telecom has done some fun R&D to display pixilated images from your cellphone on your shirt or sleeve. These raver garments can even be used as a standalone device that can animate based on sounds and gestures. With better resolution, designer memes and logos might become the hot intellectual property being shared by the young hipsters. Then again, maybe it will just be another place for advertisers to exploit."

yootje writes "The Register runs an article about the future of backup tapes, which looks pretty good. Although some people say backup tapes are dead, tape systems continue to evolve. To prove that, The Register intoduces some new products that are about to come, like the SL8500."

JimLynch writes "In my last DIY column, I discussed what it was like to build my first system. As time went by, unfortunately, my DIY system wasn't all wine and roses. This column tells the story of how I destroyed my motherboard through a series of ill-planned and stupid actions. It should stand as a shining example of What Not to Do for DIYers everywhere."

The Importance of writes "Two reviewers make head-to-head comparisons of TiVo and Windows Media Center Edition (here and here). TiVo still comes out ahead, but MCE is improving. Of course, some tout the flexibility of PC-based DVRs, while others question what this flexibility means when you have things like the broadcast flag and the INDUCE Act."

i4u writes "We got our hands on new Flash MP3 Players from two Korean Manufactures. Both players feature audio functions not seen in MP3 Player before, like SRS, WOW and TruBass. The Muzio JM-200 uses a two color OLED display. The Eratech EMP-100 is betting on small size with measurements of only 30x75x16mm." The larger (and stranger looking) JM-200 also lists ogg playback as a feature.

Mark Goldstein writes "What is perhaps more interesting than the 4 new Konica Minolta cameras announced today is the rapid product cycle that seems to have been established by both Konica Minolta and other manufacturers." Rather than the yearly model updates that people have come to expect, the article notes that three members of this batch aren't even a year old, and one is only six months.

CaryMenage asks: "I live in Philadelphia where there is a chock full of row houses and MDU (Multiple Dwelling Units) buildings. I was wondering if other Slashdot readers have been involved with community networks and what methods they have used. I have been looking at several different ways to distribute a T1 circuit to multiple end users; WiFi, Powerline, HomePNA. Due to the physical and legal complexities of older buildings and crossing public streets, I feel that some type of hybrid mixture of different topologies would work well in many situations. Has anyone implemented any of this on a large scale installation?"

raarky asks: "My company will be running a stand at a rather respectable geek conference and I would like to ask the developer and sysadmin crowd what sort of demonstration software would be cool to see running on some of the highend server, workstation and mobility (notebooks, handhelds etc) hardware we have available. Ideally it has to appeal to the intended audience and show off the capabilities of these systems (read: intensive). My first thoughts were something like a renderfarm or some great open source 'end to end solution' that crunches lots of data and has client software to display the results." What software would you use to show off hardware capabilities?

An anonymous reader writes "Possio AB has launched a Linux-based wireless access point that allows users to connect to the Internet through 3G (third-generation) mobile telephone networks, which carry Internet data at broadband speeds. According to the Swedish company, which has filed for a patent on local-to-cellular routers, the PX30 can bring broadband wireless Internet service to small sites such as cafes, temporary hotspots such as building and event sites, mobile hot-spots such as buses and limos, and hot-spots in locations without a wired backhaul alternative. It can also be used, Possio says, by mobile-only carriers wishing to offer broadband Internet service, and in data acquisition and remote management applications such as M2M (machine-to-machine) applications."

ryewell asks: "I have an IBM Thinkpad 390 Laptop, PII 266Mhz, 128 MB RAM, with USB 1.0 port and a 3.5 floppy drive being the most important stats I would assume for this question. So my hard drive died, and I've been using a DOS boot disk and a program called Mel to do my word processing.Would it be possible to boot the laptop in Linux using a 3.5 disk, then using drivers access the USB memory stick that had an adequate Linux system on it?" With USB thumb drives getting to be as large as 512 megs, memory sticks weighing in at 1 gig, and Compact Flash cards getting into the 2 gig range, this might not be such a bad idea. There's the Linux Mobile System that looks to implement something like this, but are there other distributions or similar projects that might be of interest? If you were going to put together a custom system for something like this, how would you do it?

Dieppe writes "Robot couriers are being used in hospitals CNN. The robots are being used as delivery 'bots to deliver medicine and other hospital supplies. They are polite, and even can be overly cautious. I wonder if at night they supply them with saws, arms and other cutting devices and let them at each other? Turns out they're cost effective as well!"

Jon H asks: "I'd like to teach myself various platforms or technologies, involving accessing databases. The problem is, my ideas for projects to learn on usually are boring, toy projects, involving lots of boring data entry in order to create a useful database. Things like personal library databases. This doesn't particularly interest me. It would be much easier if I had a big, interesting dataset which I could load into an SQL database without too much trouble. Then I could spend my time on the php, or WebObjects, or JBoss, or whatever. I'd like something more real than the usual toy demo databases. Something weighty, 20 megabytes and up, big enough for poor software design to cause performance issues which might not be seen in smaller databases. Ideally, it'd be in a form that could easily be loaded into an SQL database, perhaps even including a schema. Any links would be appreciated. Do such beasts exist?

mcabiling writes "SansWire Networks will demonstrate their "Stratellite" technology next week. For those of you who aren't familiar with SansWire, they plan to build a wireless network with balloons or "airships" as they call them. "A Stratellite(TM) is a high-altitude airship that when in place in the stratosphere will provide a stationary platform for transmitting various types of wireless communications services currently transmitted from cell towers and satellites. It is not a balloon or a blimp. It is a high-altitude airship." Looks like a blimp to me..."

An anonymous reader writeswith a link to a BBC story which mentions in passing the Urban Tapestries project for distributed, collaborative location-based note-taking, excerpting "In practice this means giving people a specially-equipped mobile phone that allows them to wander around central London and leave virtual notes for other people to read by writing them on the phone and then 'sticking' them to a building. It works because the position of each phone is constantly tracked so when a note is written the place can be noted - when someone else goes to the same place, they can read the note."