Rob Dye writes "According to an article at RadioWorld Online, AudioScience has GPL'ed their hardware abstration layer that allows access to the DSP power provided on their audio interfaces. Stating that 'Linux is becoming more important to the broadcast and professional audio industry,' they also released full documentation for this code and intend to release ALSA drivers for their boards. This is terrific news for professional sound under Linux, especially considering the reluctance of video card manufacturers to open their HAL's."

hhutkin writes "Sure, Wi-Fi is great for my home network. But what else can it do? After reading this article, I'm convinced that cellular is becoming more ubiquitous with wireless networking than wi-fi will ever be. Just look at all the devices that are coming on the market using cellular technology. I can send email and pics, browse the web, plus listen to MP3s all on one cellular device. It makes the notion of a hotspot almost meaningless." But 802.11x is high-bandwidth, and often unmetered ...

EyesWideOpen writes "Verizon has announced (NYTimes - free registration required) that it would drop its opposition to the proposed F.C.C plan that would allow callers to keep their wireless phone numbers when they switch carriers. Verizon, the nation's largest mobile phone company, was seen as 'the standard-bearer of the opposition against wireless number portability' but has shifted it's position citing the recent court ruling as the reason for doing so. The F.C.C has set a deadline of November 24 for it's rules to take effect. Other mobile phone companies such as Cingular Wireless and AT&T Wireless are still expected to appeal the court ruling. Several previous stories on number portability here(1), here(2), here(3), here(4), and here(5)."

Schart writes "I can't seem to find any pictures of exactly what they mean by 'collapsible LCD,' but NEC today announced a new line of low(ish) priced LCD screens that 'fold up for easy portability.'" Anyone out there who can supply visual documentation?

prostoalex writes "The low-cost Linux PC market so far dominated by Lindows got a new entrant. According to News.com, Linare plans to sell a $199 no-monitor model with 1GHz VIA CPU, 128MB RAM, 20GB HDD, KDE, OpenOffice. An extra $50 would get the user upgraded to a 2GHz Athlon. Company is located in beautiful Bellevue, WA, which, as News.com noted, is quite close to another Seattle suburb - Redmond, WA."

NinjaPablo writes "Business Wire is running a story about the polynesian island of Niue. Niue has just completed an island-wide wifi network, making it the first country with nationwide free wifi access. This comes after countrywide email was started in 1997, dialup access in 1999, and broadband this Spring, all free for anyone."

Shadow Wrought writes "The Register is reporting on (alternate ZDNet article) the latest list of the top 500 supercomputers in the world. Top of the list is the Earth Simulator Center in Yokohama, Japan, with a benchmark performance of 35.86 Tflop/s. HP and IBM claim 159 and 158 of the systems respectively. I wonder how many teraflops Deep Thought could have done?"

In the hardware part of his keynote address at WWDC, Jobs officially introduced the G5-based computers previously leaked on the Apple store.

Airspirit writes "For those of you who believe that bigger is always better and have multiple computers in your house, this system may be a way to keep them all cool and organized. As an added bonus, it will heat a medium sized apartment all by itself! This article at Pro/Cooling gives a step by step walkthrough describing the evolution of this five gallon monstrosity. Not only does this cover the construction of the cooling system, but the drawbacks such as algae prevention and maintenance as well."

An anonymous reader writes "Monday, June 23 was a big day for Microsoft's mobile devices software strategy. The company: (1) rolled out Pocket PC 2003 (and renamed it); (2) unveiled a new "Windows Mobile" branding strategy; and (3) launched a collaboration with three leading high-speed wireless service providers to provide easier access to more than 3,500 Wi-Fi wireless "hot spots" by Windows-powered PDAs throughout the US. All this (and more) is covered in this "special report" at WindowsForDevices.com (including a detailed list of enhancements in Pocket PC 2003)."

Nathan writes "The Intel 3.2GHz Pentium4 has passed its NDA with reviews coming out over the net, including this one at MBReview, This one at HardAvenue, This one at TweakTown and this review at HotHW." Yay. Benchmarks. Wowee-zowee.

An anonymous reader writes "infoSync World writes about two new high-end Pocket PC models from JVC, the MP-PV131 and MP-PV331. Running on Windows Mobile 2003, the Pocket PCs boast 128 MB SDRAM, built-in Wi-Fi and MPEG4 video and audio streaming and capture capabilities. The new devices are also equipped with software for use along with JVC camcorders. The new models will be available in the U.S. in September at $499.95 US and $599.95 US respectively"

bwdunn asks: "Do we need to run screen savers again to prevent the burn-in we saw on the very old CRTs? Dell's latest and greatest laptops, the Latitude D800 and Inspiron 8500 both suffer from horrible screen burn-in problems with burn-in visible after as little as 2 hours. Dell claims this is an industry wide problem. The high end displays from Apple also seem to have this problem. I have never seen this problem before 2002. Is this something new due to inferior LCD screen manufacturing compared to screens from just a few years ago?"

jonknee writes "MobileTracker pointed to an article in the latest New Scientist about some new 3G mobile phone software that tries to learn your habits and start making your decisions for you. This sounds like science fiction, but it's happening now. The phone will be able to make reservations for you at your favorite steak house and then save seats for you at the hot event in town. Neat!"

Dan writes "Quentin Garnier has made a loadable kernel module (LKM) version of the NVidia drivers on NetBSD. This release is very preliminary, rough and mostly meant to test the installation procedure. You will need a NetBSD-current system but the downloadable drivers code itself should be quite backward compatible with some caveats. For example, you need 'options KVM86' in your kernel config. His NVidia drivers on NetBSD page indicates that known working hardware includes RIVA TNT2 Model 64 (PCI), GeForce2 MX/MX 400, Vanta(AGP) and more!"

Rejoice, Radeon owners! For those of you who bought an nForce2 motherboard with the hopes of doing a bit of linux gaming on it, I'm sure it was a pretty hard let down to find out there was no AGPGART driver for the nForce2 -- until now. nVidia has finally released a kernel patch for the 2.4.20 release that is now providing GART support. Perhaps this means that nVidia is re-thinking their closed source-isms in favor of a more open policy in the future. A note on AGP 3.0: Note that AGP 8x mode is not available in 2.4.xx series kernels. If you find that X will not start, try disabling 8X mode in your BIOS. AGP3.0 has been implemented in the 2.5 series.

Sander Sassen writes "Prior to the official launch of the Microsoft PocketPC 2003 platform next Monday, Hardware Analysis puts an Asus MyPal a620 PocketPC to the test and details what new features PocketPC 2003 brings to the table and whether it is worth it to upgrade from 2002."

prostoalex writes "OQO was supposed to be a big advance in the personal computing field, but, alas, made it quick to vaporware list. Now another company will try its luck with a mini-mini-PC. The Register, PC World and MSNBC are all running paragraph-long blurbs about pocket-size Nimble V5 from Nimble Microsystems. The specs are - VIA 733 MHz, 128 DDR266, 30 GB HDD, USB 2.0, PCMCIA, no display, $699, supposed to ship this fall. Full specification available from company's Web site."

ninjagin writes "While not an OC-er, I do enjoy reading about the lengths people will go to on their way to a better CPU cooling solution. I ran across this very interesting article at overclockers.com about this guy's immense 15-liter water cooling rig for his home office PC. Might be just the kind of thing to have the contractors include when they pour your next garage slab."

cdn-programmer asks: "I've got a couple UPS's that are now about 5 years old. They are MGE EL4 units - rated at about 450VA /280W. These originally came with a battery rated for 2x6V - 7.2Ah I've found an inexpensive replacement battery: SBS60 rated at over 50Ah and I've done a little mod so the unit 'fit' together. I've also done as much reading as I can on float currents and ripple currents and so forth basically covering the care and feeding of your UPS battery system. People can find some good information in the SBS web site and the specific data sheets are here. Look under the SBS section for the manuals. If people find alternative batteries there seems to be some excellent tech specs here. Having read these it seems to me that there should be no reason that I cannot 'redesign' the UPS to give it a significantly increased power reserve. The load is the same... the only difference is that a larger battery is used so this means that the recharge times will potentially be much much longer. So what? We are not interested in cycling the battery. Indeed the power here is quite stable and we get very few outages per year."