TeaDaemon asks: "I currently have an expensive (dual CPU) motherboard mounted in a rack case. One of the mounting screws is cross-threaded, preventing me from removing the board. The case is designed to prevent access to the back of the risers, so that's not an option. Does anyone have experience with this sort of problem? Can anyone suggest a reliable way of removing said screw without damaging the board or any of it's components? The screw is next to the PCI slots, and has a couple of capacitors and ICs near by. Any help would be greatly appreciated."

Joseph Wharton writes "Mini-ITX.com has a review of VIA's new Nehemiah M10000 EPIA-M motherboard and processor. Some of the new features include a full-speed floating-point unit (finally!), SSE instructions, 64KB of full-speed L2 cache, and (get this) a hardware-based random number generator. Also, there's IO/APIC support in these new procs, potentially paving the way for dual EPIA boards."

SkewlD00d writes "Want power (~10W) and your fat 10/100Mbps pipe (1Gbps maybe) on the SAME jack. Surf the web and recharge your handheld w/o finding its clunky base/transformer, home automation, and control systems are just some of the possibilities. Using suitable hubs/switches or dongle, power can be provided over unused pairs, or possibly raise the signal offset above DC, X10-style (no link, u know why). See IEEE 802.3af DTE Power via MDI Task Force. Maxim (not that one :o) already has some goodies. They have schematics for 8.25W/12.5W single-output and 14.2W triple-output 802.3af PSU. Try FindChips if you're looking for them; they're in production and are NOT vapor-ware!"

Roland Piquepaille writes "Making silicon is an expensive process, which conventionally involves carbothermal reduction, in which the oxygen is removed from silica by a heterogeneous-homogeneous reaction sequence at approximately 1,700 C. Now, Japanese researchers have developed a new technique which uses electricity to remove the oxygen from silica. Their technique is based on the immersion of silica in a bath of molten calcium chloride salt at 850 C, which should reduce the costs of making silicon -- and other elements, like zirconium. Check this column for a summary or read this article from Nature for additional details."

LiquidFun writes "Business undergraduates at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business have written an e-business case for one of their case competitions that describes how to use 802.11g wireless technology to distribute cable content, both interactive and broadcast, throughout the home. They mention features like video-on-demand, cable gaming, etc. and even provide enough of the technical specifications necessary to start believing that this could work. They even make available their PowerPoint presentation that they presented to judges from both Cisco & Deloitte Consulting. I'd say a pretty good job for third-year undergrads."

WotPeed asks: "The company I work for builds extremely sensitive electric and magnetic field sensors. The project I'm just starting needs to use a hard drive to store the digitized data for long-term measurements (no more than 20GB). Unfortunately the hard drive has to be external to the sensor because it generates too much magnetic interference (hard drive needs to be at least 20 feet away). I'm therefore building an ethernet link into the sensor so that it can connect to a remote hard drive. Wireless is an option for a later revision but we're going with wired ethernet at first to keep things simple. There are plenty of network attached storage devices out there but they all assume they will be used in an office environment, and therefore consume a LOT of power. I'm looking for an ethernet hard drive that consumes less than 10W (this system will be used outdoors and runs on 12V batteries). Does Slashdot have any suggestions before I roll my own? I don't need any of the fancy features found in most NAS solutions...I just want a hard drive I can FTP to."

Kong99 writes "Here is a brief interesting read on hacking the XBox at USA Today. They claim an XBox-PC costs a total of $336."

zymano writes "Extremetech has this nice article on the future of 3d graphics. The article also mentions that graphic card gpus can be used for non-traditional powerful processing like physics. A quote from the article, "GPU can be from 10 to 100 times faster than a Pentium 4 and Scientific computations such as linear algebra, Fast Fourier Transforms, and partial differential equations can benefit". My question - If these cards are getting so powerful at computations then why do we need a Intel/AMD processor at all? Just make a graphics card with more transistors and drop the traditional processor..."

BrianH writes "Looks like a close cousin of everybody's favorite self-destructing video format is making a comeback. Four years after Circuit City and its Hollywood backers pulled the plug on the self-expiring DVD concept, FlexPlay Technologies has introduced the EZ-D...a 48-hour self-expiring DVD disk. The difference? This time around you don't need a special player, and "time extensions" are no longer an option. It looks like Buena Vista has already signed on to the format, so Disney, Mirimax, and all of their other companies should be using this soon. As if that wasn't bad enough, it looks like this works for music and software disks too!" Here's an older story on these technologies.

dawiz writes "LinuxGear.info writes (article is in German, this is a translation): "The new Zaurus SL-5500 ROM (V.3.10) was released last night. As Sharp didn't keep the last dead-line due to last-minute bug fixing, it's even more pleasing to see the new version that is claimed to solve most of the issues users had with the older ROMS finally released. [...] One drawback for Linux Users: there's no new Linux version of the QTopia Desktop software yet, that'll probably take another couple of days.""

burgburgburg writes "It seems that T-Mobile International, Europe's second largest mobile phone operator, has decided against introducing a Microsoft SmartPhone after all. T-Mobile had announced their plans in February to introduce the MS SmartPhone this summer. Industry insiders say that the software for the phone continued to have 'fundamental problems,' leading to a high failure rate. French mobile carrier Orange introduced a MS SmartPhone, SPV, late last year. It initially had software security problems which Microsoft has claimed are patched."

AEton writes "News.com is reporting that IBM is developing digital video recorders for cop cars. The systems involve a digital video camera and reusable hard drives which police officers will take with them on their shifts; centralized servers with up to 3.5 TB of storage will hold recordings. The cameras continuously record and cache old video in a "Tivo-like" fashion; tapes will start from three to five minutes before the cop turned on the recorder. Unbiased, high-quality recording could have a compelling social effect; and at the very least, we're headed for HDTV Cops."

Junky191 writes "With the NVidia GeForce FX 5900 recently released, this new high-end card seems to beat out ATI's 9800 pro, yet things are not as they appear. NVidia seems to be cheating on their drivers, inflating benchmark scores by cutting corners and causing scenes to be rendered improperly. Check out the ExtremeTech test results (especially their screenshots of garbled frames)."

daveschroeder writes "Jon "Hannibal" Stokes has posted a long-awaited, very detailed analysis of the IBM PowerPC 970 at Ars Technica. Notable quote: 'The 970 was made for Apple'."

An anonymous reader writes "Check out www.mypce.com. They address the idea of the computer workspaces by treating the it as an overall environment instead of the desk and monitor we're all used to. Hopefully, the industry will start moving in this direction and address more of the physical issues of computing. No idea on pricing, but very cool nonetheless."

functor writes "Ars Technica's Jon Stokes has a treatise up covering the microarchitecture of the high-performance 64-bit PowerPC 970 microprocessor, due to be released by the end of the year, that goes over in detail how this chip is put together, and how we can expect it to perform. This is the follow-up to Stokes' article detailing the PPC 970's design philosophy. 'It appears to hold quite a bit of promise in bolstering Apple's currently almost obsolescent product line, and it appears to have been designed explictly to fulfil Apple's requirements. To say the least, the second half of this year looks to be pretty interesting as Apple's product line promises to become competitive performance-wise with IA-32 and x86-64-based PCs again.''

Nomad7674 asks: "I am part of a team helping to build a site for discussing SmartPhones (i.e. combo cell phone and data function devices). We are trying to become a one-stop shop for SmartPhone-related information and have run up against one brick wall that the Slashdot community may be able to help with. We want to document every operating system that can be sync'd with a Palm or PocketPC or Symbian device. We already have information on the biggies (Apple and Windows), on the moderates (Linux and the Unixes) and a few of the more obscure including Amiga and BeOS. But we seem to have exhausted the searches of Google, Alta Vista, etc. and the knowledge of the general community elsewhere. What experiences have other Slashdot readers had with syncing their Palm, PocketPC, or other PDA device with obscure OSes?"

dybdahl asks: "Now that Red Hat has changed the default character set to be UTF-8, none of the existing filenames that included local characters like æ, ø, å, (Denmark) are handled correctly by Konqueror or can be seen correctly with "ls" in a shell. Is there a tool out there that can convert an ISO8859-1 ext3 filesystem to UTF-8?"

Dan Bricker writes "A guy in Parma Heights, Ohio has a website to promote an idea of linking the east coast to the west coast using standard off-the-shelf 802.11 equipment. He is aiming for a July 4th, 2006 first coast-to-coast ping. This project appears to be totally volunteer based, With no other stated reason than fun with pringle cans and bad weather, and do it just to do it. Can this be done? What real world applications does this have?"

killmore notes a story running on ZDNet talking about incompatible blue laser formats of Blue-Laser DVDs which can store 36GB of data. The new format is from Toshiba & NEC and boasts backwards compatibility with the current standards for DVDs.