RKBA writes "Federal regulators have endorsed a plan to use vacant TV bandwidth for wireless Internet connections. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael Powell says it would 'dramatically increase' the availability and quality of wireless Internet connections -- especially for people in rural areas. Powell says it would be like 'doubling the number of lanes on a congested highway.' But TV broadcasters oppose the proposal. They argue that it would interfere with over-the-air television signals for millions of people. The FCC commissioners voted unanimously to begin the lengthy rulemaking process for the plan."

Roland Piquepaille writes "Devin Balkcom, a Carnegie Mellon graduate student in robotics, has built the world's first origami-folding robot as the subject of his thesis. Origami, the geometry of paper folding, looks simple when you're a kid. But it's actually quite challenging to design a robot to do it. Movements are quite complex, and paper, because it is flexible, is difficult to be manipulated by a robot. This news release says that the project uses kinematics, the study of mechanisms, to determine how folding is done and how paper can be treated as a flexible and rigid material. You'll find more details and references in this overview, including some frames extracted from videos showing the robot at work." Balkcom's website has movies, information and a couple of academic papers.

bl8n8r writes "By the summer of 2005, the United States will have an underwater network of robots monitoring the nations fresh water supply. Realtime environmental details will be used to help safeguard the nations drinking water. The robots would take on the painstaking, time consuming, and sometimes dangerous, task of collecting water samples which is currently being done by carbon based lifeforms."

Oily Pakora writes "Those of us in the United States are so used to our Letter and Legal paper sizes. We've seen the A4 paper size option in our printer trays and in printer preference menus. Metric sizes used almost everywhere in the world, save for the US and Canada. Here is an interesting article that discusses all of the aspects of metric paper. For those who enjoy a bit of math, did you know that in the Metric paper system, the height-to-width ratio of all pages is the square root of 2? This means that you can place two sheets of A4 side-by-side and they will equal an A3 sheet exactly, and two sheets of A3 will equal an A2."

mobilemag writes "Sion Power is showing off its new Lithium-Sulfur battery design this week at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC). SION believes that its new Lithium-Sulfur (Li-S) batteries are the answer to the power hungry devices on the market today."

An anonymous reader writes "Via Technologies has teamed up with Ministry of Mobile Affairs (no, it's not a government agency) to build a handheld game console based on Windows XP Embedded that runs existing PC games. Described as the world's first handheld gaming device based on the x86 architecture, the Eve Mobile Gaming Console is said to be capable of instantly running thousands of existing PC games. Eve's embedded computer is built around a 533MHz Via Eden-N processor (which supports SSE and MMX) equipped with 128MB DDR266 SDRAM, and a 20GB hard drive. A built-in 4-inch LCD screen supports resolutions up to 640 x 480 pixels." The initial impressions are pretty grim, and the form factor leaves something to be desired, at least for a product vying for a share of the GBA market.

G.A. Wells writes "Ars Technica has the scoop on a new, Alienware-developed graphics subsystem called Video Array that will let users run two PCI-Express graphics cards in parallel on special motherboards. The motherboard component was apparently developed in cooperation with Intel. Now if I could only win the lottery."

Gudlyf writes "First the blinking LED security issue, now this: listening to tell-tale keyboard clicks to decipher from afar what a person is typing. This isn't limited to just computer keyboards -- ATM's, telephone keypads, security doors, etc. Apparently with $200 worth of sound equipment and software, these keyboard clicks can be translated to within 80% accuracy. Of course, a whole lot of this is just theory."

CRC'99 writes "The Queensland University of Technology has today announced yet another flaw in 802.11 products. AusCERT has the official statement, noting: 'An attacker using a low-powered, portable device such as an electronic PDA and a commonly available wireless networking card may cause significant disruption to all WLAN traffic within range, in a manner that makes identification and localisation of the attacker difficult.' Nice to know that a simple PDA could bring a WiFi network to its knees."

mindless4210 writes "Oki announced today that the world's first fully compliant IEEE 802.15.4 and ZigBee chip has been developed. The technology promises to start a new generation of wireless sensor networks, utilizing the unlicensed 2.4 GHz spectrum. The new IC integrates the digital circuit-based MAC and PHY with the analog circuit-based RF onto a single chip. The company also developed a kit which enables fast production of sensor networks which could control air conditioning, lighting, fire alarm systems, and many other applications. The low power consumption of the chip enables multi-year operation with only dry-cell batteries."

LondonLawyer writes "There was a Slashdot story back in March about a port of the popular (and free) SSH client PuTTY in beta for Symbian OS. For the rest of us there's a 'pre alpha' port that has been released for the Pocket PC that seems to have slipped under the Slashdot radar. 2003 is available now and by all acounts works well. 2000/2002 are apparently in the pipeline for a planned June release. See here ( http://pocketputty.duxy.net/ ) for more details. The download can be found here. They are also talking about porting to MS Smartphone 2003 after the Pocket PC 2002 port has been done."

Homey R writes "As I'll be joining the staff there in a few months, I'm very excited to see that Oak Ridge National Lab has won a competition within the DOE's Office of Science to build the world's fastest supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Lab in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. It will be based on the promising Cray X1 vector architecture. Unlike many of the other DOE machines that have at some point occupied #1 on the Top 500 supercomputer list, this machine will be dedicated exclusively to non-classified scientific research (i.e., not bombs)." Cowards Anonymous adds that the system "will be funded over two years by federal grants totaling $50 million. The project involves private companies like Cray, IBM, and SGI, and when complete it will be capable of sustaining 50 trillion calculations per second."

jm2morri asks: "I am currently in the market for a new cell phone and while I'm at it I'd really like to combine my PalmOS based PDA into my new cell phone. I'd really like to keep PalmOS based so that I can sync with my wife who has a PalmOS based PDA as well. However I don't want a camera since there are new security laws being written, as I type this, to restrict the use of camera-phones. Has anyone used one of the smartphones on the market? What is the voice quality like? How often does it crash? Do you have any other observations?"

Otto writes "This AP article over at CNN talks about Motorola's plans to create a cell phone that can seemlessly switch calls between cell networks and VoIP over WiFi, when it sees WiFi available to it. Thus reducing on call costs. Personally, I think it'd be cool just to have a cell phone that could use my own WiFi at home and be cellular when I'm out in the rest of the world."

mindless4210 writes "The 1394 Trade Association has approved a specification for the development of wireless FireWire applications, which will let 1394-enabled devices, both wired and unwired, to connect with each other. The new spec will enable communication between a variety of devices, such as set-top boxes, HDTVs, tuners, and DVD players, all of which will be able to interoperate in home networks. Officials speculated that in the future there could be plug-in cards for set-top boxes enabling wireless connection to DVD players and hard-disk drives. The trade association also said it will work with the WiMedia Alliance to jointly develop collaborative products."

mrperkins asks: "I have been asked to help a friend setup a Linux DVR (Digital Video Recording) system for security cameras. Previously this has been done on Windows XP using Avermedia video capture cards from the MP3000 and MP5000 series, and using their bundled software. They have a Linux version but the software is horribly broken. The Windows software allows playback/recording/backup from 4-16 cameras. This works reasonably well but certainly has it's share of problems - the PC's hardware being only one. Can this be done on Linux using Free Software and compatible hardware? I have heard that the frame rates achievable under video4linux are simply too slow, but I would like to prove otherwise! Are there any software packages that can do this kind of thing (not just a single stream but a fully featured package)? Also, what cards (pref. up to max $200US) would you recommend? If anyone is already doing this kind of thing please let me know what you're using!"

karnifex writes "Filled up your LaCie Bigger Disk already, and looking for a little more storage space? Good news! The Petabox is ready! 'The petabox by the Internet Archive is a machine designed to safely store and process one petabyte of information (a petabyte is a million gigabytes).' And luckily, as the Internet Archive notes, it's shipping-container friendly (20' x 8' x 8'). So save on delivery costs and order two!"

RichiH asks: "The monsoon, started about a month early in India this year. While it is not sure if that is due to global warming or not, there are more pressing issues for the IT world at hand. Until about the end of July, there will be major thunderstorms in this area. How do you protect a network that is spread over 100 square kilometres in a land where the concept of a lightening arrestor is next to unknown? The network in question consists of about 2500 boxes of various kinds which are connected using 10BASE2 (aka BNC), 10BASE-T (aka RJ45) and 10BASE5 (aka thicknet), where only the last one may be new to some readers. The big question is: how can you protect yourself against these storms in a way that is both fast to implement and does not require laying of new lines?"

smatt-man writes "Over at Linux Gazette they ran some tests on popular Linux filesystems (ext2, ext3, jfs, reiserfs, xfs) and the results may surprise you."

my1wong writes "Sony Japan has launched a DoVaio campaign which features a lot of new stuff. ... Main new stuff included wide screen notebooks ( E series), multimedia desktop replacement ( A Series), long-awaited evolution update to the ultra small U101, and this time it's a tablet indeed ( U series). Last but not least, the expected challenger to iPod, it's called VAIO pocket, VGF-AP1. All very sexy... Guess Sony has been woken up by Apple's success with iPods and Powerbooks."