James Evans writes "Wired has an article about a New Zealand company which has developed a technology to transmit data at speeds up to 400Mbps up to 4km. They are working to have it more resistant to changes in weather, as well as increasing the distance. It has a number of advantages, including lack of federal regulation of the spectrum, as it is of course, visible light."

Netsuj asks: "I'm doing some work for a firm which operates in B.F.E. Many miles before even arriving, I loose signal on my GSM phone. What is the feasibility of creating a limited-area wireless telephone network? As it is outside the area of repeater technology (I believe), is there such thing as a simple cellular-to-wireline system? What are the possibilities of this operating on a break-even basis for employees (i.e. charging minimal roaming fees)? Any ideas? Sadly, something like this appears to be the only option; contacting any of the mobile network operators in the larger area resulted in absolutely no interest in expanding their coverage." Unfortunately, along with the technical problems, there is also paperwork. What kind of permits and other red-tape-hurdles would be necessary to satisfy all of the lawyer-types?

interdigitate writes "The new T610 was been unveiled today by Sony Ericsson. This is the t68i replacement and its supposed to improve on it in every aspect. It has a 16bit color screen, Polyphonic ringtones, a built in digital camera, GPRS, Bluetooth (ofcourse), and most importantly it has Synchronization which should mean it will work with apple's iSync! " So... pretty. Must... resist.

interdigitate writes " There is another piece of beta Mac OS X software called Romeo which also allows you to control your Mac using the Sony Ericsson T68i Phone. It works like the Sony Ericsson Clicker except it is freeware." For now, it does not support arbitrary AppleScripts like Clicker does, but it does allow using the phone as a remote mouse. Also note that Apple has put up a page of Clicker scripts.

arth33 writes "Kodak has announced the LS633 Digital camera with OLED display. The camera and imaging specs are pretty standard (3.1 MegaPixels, 3x Optical Zoom, etc) but the viewfinder screen is a 2.2" OLED screen with a resolution of 512 x 218 pixels. According to the press release at DPreview, 'This large, full color, full motion, flat panel display is sharp, bright and features 165 viewing angles for on-camera viewing and sharing. Packaged in a stylish, metal body, the LS633 is perfect for users who want to show off their pictures on a cutting-edge OLED display.' All this and it's pretty cheap at US$399, and is expected on shelves in April in Australia, Europe and Asia. More pics and information is also available at LetsGoDigital."

ekarjala writes "Sony has announced that the first DVD recorder using Blue-Laser technology will be available for sale starting next month. At $3,800 for the unit and media at around $30 per disc, I will not be an early adopter. Still, with 5x the capacity of standard Red-Laser recorders, can't wait for it to drop down into my price range." ellbee adds "The Inquirer ponts to a UK distributor that has pictures and tech specs. At $4k I won't be first in line - and this is a video, not data version - but when the price becomes reasonable the 23GB disks are where my backups will live."

An anonymous reader writes "A BBC article talks about a project where a school bus with 21 Apple Power Macs is connected to the Internet using one 3G phone: 'On the bus, the phone is plugged into a laptop that acts as a server for other machines on board. Despite sharing the connection between 21 computers, the speed has impressed Mr Townsend. ''The service that children are getting through this phone is actually quicker than on their desktop machines in the school,'' he said.'"

tinrib writes "New Scientist reports that a new semiconductor-based technique for entangling multiple electrons could mark a significant step towards the development the first fully-functional quantum computer. The new technique involves using electrons rather than the more traditional photons and ions, and so far they have managed to entangle three electrons. "

MiniDVfanatic writes "Last year I read an article in Slashdot about using MiniDV as a backup medium. Now I've found a recent article about the same topic in bulmalug.net. It's in Spanish, and it just talks about dvbackup, the same tool recommended in some old Slashdot posts, but it adds some interesting ideas such as data compression and interleaved Reed Solomon for error detection and correction, using a tool called rsbep. According to the author's tests, this should let you backup 13GB in a cheap MiniDV tape in a safe manner, and restore it all later. Example commands provided, with simple workarounds for slow machines which cannot feed the tape at 3.6MB per second." You can fish the translation, for those who need - I was able to get by with my high school Spanish. Pretty cool stuff.

Matey-O writes "I just purchased a Linksys firewall/switch router (WAP54g) and two of their 802.11g cards for home use. Like MANY things linux, I found out after the fact that Linksys' 54g products use a different chipset (broadcom) rather than the intersil Prism chipsets of their linux supported 11b products. So my _main_ question is: does anybody know if/when the broadcom chipset will be supported? Google wasn't very helpful, it came up with an online petition to another Broadcom product, but neither Broadcom, not Linksys plan support for linux soon. My secondary question is: Just where does one go to get info on 'cutting edge' linux development? I've used Linux off and on for years, but never needed to see what was going on this deep into the kernel, nor do I know where to look to see if any development is occurring for this chipset. (meanwhile, RH8 is dormant on the laptop as the XP support is adequate.)"

An anonymous reader asks: "Several years ago, I saw several manufacturers that sold LCD displays that slid out of the 5-1/4" bay, flipped down, and allowed you to have a minimal monitor that stored in the case. Since it slid out and flipped down, that meant it easily fit into 1U and 2U rack mounted hardware. Now that I'm about to get charged beacoup bucks for having a monitor at the CoLo where I have my servers, I'm looking for something like this again. (SSH doesn't help with hardware and BIOS settings.)" Read on for some details on what he's looking for -- you may be after the same thing (or better yet, have such screens to sell).

questamor writes "After reading the recent Slashdot article linking to drivesavers and their list of damaged hardware that was still recoverable, I'm curious about the worst things slashdot readers have done to their hardware and still had it work. So far I've been lucky, and in more than a decade of owning computers I've hotplugged almost everything except a CPU (sometimes accidentally, sometimes through laziness) and never knowingly broken anything. What have you all done to your machines? I imagine there are many stories of dropped, drowned, stolen and generally abused machines still working and doing their thing; or at least, able to be brought back to a working state"

zdzichu writes "A friend of mine is building a personal server. He bought 17 of the cheapest IDE drives available and used Linux' LVM to get them together. The result? Almost two terabytes of disk space in regular x86 PC. The most juicy part - photos are here. For an operating system, he first tried the enterprise-ready PLD Linux Distribution, later he reinstalled Slackware Linux." Update: 03/01 20:24 GMT by T : I'm sure that should be "drives" and not "drivers" :)

Roland Piquepaille writes "Robert Poor is CTO of Ember Corporation. He contends that point-to-point or point-to-multipoint networks typical of industrial wireless communications systems have limited scalability and reliability. 'In contrast, wireless mesh networks are multihop systems in which devices assist each other in transmitting packets through the network, especially in adverse conditions. You can drop these ad-hoc networks into place with minimal preparation, and they provide a reliable, flexible system that can be extended to thousands of devices.' The article is pretty technical and contains several illustrations and a case study about the deployment of a wireless mesh network in a water treatment plant. Check this column for Poor's conclusions or read this Sensors article if you have more time."

Gsurface writes "The first barebones notebook makes its appearance. The barebone notebook features no display, no CPU, no RAM and no HDD, but only the case, with keyboard and touchpad."

Rosyna writes "Apple now allows the general public to recycle their Apple branded computers. It only costs thirty US dollars, too. The dumpster is still cheaper. More details at Apple's page and Metech's page."

MarkRH writes "Over at ExtremeTech, we tracked down some Intel roadmaps that discuss "Grantsdale", Intel's most important chipset in nearly a decade. Grantsdale brings PCI Express to the PC, so get ready to toss out your motherboard, AGP graphics card, and maybe a host of other components, too. Also check out our articles on the "Tejas" microprocessor, Intel's first CPU to forego pins (check out the waffle iron socket!), as well as the real reason Banias saves so much power."

CrezzyMan writes "Today is the five year anniversary of Apple's cancellation of the Newton platform. In spite of this, the Newton community has remained stronger than ever: it has even been the subject of academic research. In just the last few days, an IrCOMM stack and a new connection library have been released, on top of OS X syncing and 802.11b support."

grungy asks: "On several computers I have owned, I have noticed an audible noise related to large screen re-draws. A hardware guy once hypothesized that the large memory-move operation was creating electronic 'noise' which was then picked up and audibly amplified by my speaker. I unwired my speaker, removed it from the machine and put it in a different room, and the phenomenon still occurred. At this point I assumed it was something going on/emanating from the monitor itself. Now I have a TiBook laptop with an LCD panel. At quiet moments I can still hear it when I drag windows around. I have tried doing big memcpy's & the like, I don't get the same noise. I've been wondering about this for years. Anybody know what gives?"

drew_92123 asks: "I've got a friend who does a LOT of video editing but is on a limited budget. He is currently using a raid array and while quite large, it's not as fast as he had hoped. I had an idea and wanted to know if there is a way to make it a reality, so of course I though of all the brilliant minds here. I have about a dozen Pentium II computers with 1GB of RAM. I would like to upgrade them to 2GB and throw in some gigabit NICs and create a 1.9GB RAMdisk on each one. Then I want to use one of the computers to RAID the RAMdisks together to be shared via Samba most likely. They are all 1U systems, with no HDD's, just a 64MB IDE flash disk. Any ideas out there?" Has anyone successfully put together such a system? How well did it work for you and are there any caveats that you would like to share with others who would do the same?