Arminius writes "It looks like Sharp has finally released the Linux based Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 for retail sale. This thing is so awesome! Other than only being able to listen to mp3's thru my headphones only, this thing blows away my iPaq 3835! It even has Opera as the web browser. "

tve writes "Back when moderators were real moderators, karma whores were real karma whores and small, furry creatures living in the mould deep down in your keyboard were real small, furry creatures living in the mould deep down in your keyboard, Slashdot ran a story about ergonomic keyboards. Popular keyboards back then appeared to be the MS Natural keyboard, the famous prehistoric IBM keyboards and for the lucky few who had their company buy it for them, the Maltron keyboard. However, times have changed, keyboards have decayed and new purchases need to be made. So I submit to the Slashdot community: what is the current holy grail of ergonomic typing pleasure, where can I get it and is it affordable for a student on a budget?" Actually we've done a couple of stories on ergonomic keyboards, but since this is asked so frequently I suppose it won't hurt to do another.

1010011010 writes "A company called 'Wherify Wireless' has created a $400 watch with a built-in pager, GPS unit and wireless data connectivity. It's targeted at families with kids. According to their website, 'Wherify's GPS Personal Locator helps keep loved ones safe by combining Wherify's patented technology with the U.S. Department of Defense's multi-billion dollar Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites plus the largest 100% digital, nationwide PCS wireless network.' It includes a pager, clock, two-button '911' calling (parent can disable this), and remote-control keyfob (to lock and unlock it) for the parents. It is apparently water- and kid-resistant, and can be locked onto the wrist so that it cannot be removed (easily). $400 plus $35 a month... that's a lot more money than those stretchy wrist-leashes I see at the mall." There are so many things wrong with this that I don't even know where to begin.

Carthis writes "Sony has officially released their newest Clié handheld, the PEG-NR70, in the USA. This one has a clamshell design, a high resolution 480 x 320 screen (half VGA), Sony's MemoryStick slot, built in MP3 player, enhanced IR port (like the Sony 'T' series), and a REAL SPEAKER for once, instead of the typical piezo buzzer. I want this to have my children. PalmInfoCenter has this story about this tasty new handheld. Following past trends of Sony, this handheld probably won't be available for at least 6 months for us Canadians *grumbles*."

An anonymous reader sent in: "I'm curently working on some 386s at home that use 30-pin SIMMs and all the ones I have are only 512k. Does anybody know where I could get some more? Or does anybody have any that they would be willing to give up? Also, does anybody know where i could get Slackware 3.x other than slackware.com?"

Stin Tankin writes "I was looking for games for my PDA when I came across an empire clone for PDAs called Pocket War. I used to love empire. I also have Mame CE for my Pocket PC which provides a ton of old arcade games. These old games run great because they were made for slow low resolution devices. Does anyone know where I can find more of these old games? I'm really looking for something like Nethack for a Pocket PC or Sharp Zaurus."

An Anonymous Coward writes "I work in a distributed development environment with some 1000 engineers running Solaris on different hardware platforms. We are initiating a project to move to a centralized environment. One of the biggest problems in this project is to identify the amount of resources (i.e.: RAM, disk space, etc) that the centralized environment should provide to the users. For example, each developer is currently building his code in a different desktop on the network. How could we effectively monitor how much resources are been consumed from each desktop during each build? If we find a way to capture this information, considering that the results were gathered from different hardware platforms, how could we normalize the data to get meaningful metrics that would help us define a solution?"

jspectre writes: "Garmin, makers of fine GPS products, has a sneak peek of their upcoming Rino (Radios Integrated with Navigation for the Outdoors). A new handheld combination of GPS and 2-way Radio using the common FRS spectrum. In addition to downloadable maps, trip planning, weighing 8.5oz and being waterproof you can "beam" your location to other Rino users while you talk to them. Your location will show up on their GPS display allowing you to navigate to each other. Expected availability, June 2002. Great fun for geocaching parties I'd think."

yaway_rerout writes "Using the Belkin F5D5020 PCMCIA NIC has be come the most convenient hassle of my life. I have a Hitachi visionbook 4000 plus, running RH 7.1. Setup everything as outlined on the MobiliX site and the card works great... for about 2 weeks. Then I'll boot my box and the card wont load or recognize, and then if I do a /etc/init.d/pcmcia restart my box locks and I am out of High memory.. I eject the card and everything is back to normal. I take the card back to CrampUSA and exchange it for a new one of the same... and viola it works with no need to change config options. Until about 2 weeks later... it craps out again. This has been going on too long... (I'm on my 4th exchange). Anyone else have a similar experience? Could it be the way Linux handles PCMCIA? Is there a way to reset these cards or something? ARG!!!!"

AnamanFan writes "MacNN reports that Palm has released the final golden version of the Palm Desktop 4 with features such as improved synchronization, privacy, vCard, vCal, and most importantly, Mac OS X native. A Mac OS 9 version also available. Japanese, French, Italian, German, and Spanish versions are available, but only as betas." Note, however, that most conduits need to be updated to work with version 4, so for now you can't use Vindigo or AvantGo with the new version. For now, I am sticking with the old version.

viperjsw writes: "Earthweb is running an interesting article on how there seems to be a failing trend in newer 7,200 RPM IDE hard drives. I am the lead hardware engineer for my co with four thousand 7,200 RPM ATA100 Maxtor and IBM hard drives. I have not seen any failure trends, though failure rates are at about 5-10%. Are Earthweb's reports verifiable?"

Matey-O writes: "I realize most of you built your systems youself (with mad overclocking style) but if you've purchased a fully built system receintly from Compaq, Dell, HP or Apple, you may have a computer built by Quanta, a very quiet, very successful Taiwanese manufacturing company. NY times article here." (This is true at least of notebooks.)

ewhac writes "Recently, on a whim, I bought one of those tiny little battery-powered vacuums, pitched as effective in cleaning the schmutz out of your keyboard. After trying it out, I found out that it sucks. Or rather, it doesn't suck. Er... It fails to remove the aforementioned schmutz. This came as little surprise to me, since there's obviously an upper limit to the volume of air you can move with a pair of AA batteries. But I suddenly became curious as to whether an effective "keyboard vac" exists at all. So I thought I'd ask here: Has anyone encountered an effective, small hand-held vacuum that doesn't suck? ...er, does suck? Sucks well? Whatever..."

Mario Valente writes "Using my glass topped desk it should probably be possible to build your own digital playing desk, commonly referred in VR circles as a projection-table. I guess I'd need at least an LCD projector for rear-projection onto the desk and a mouse/finger tracker. Has anyone had experience building this type of stuff ? Are there any non-highend commercial systems available? -- Mario Valente"

Cranial Dome writes "According to this Cnet.com story, the Department of Energy (DOE) is working to interconnect the first two computers which will form the genesis of the DOE Science Grid, a virtual supercomputing system which will eventually encompass many more systems at several locations. The larger of the two machines: DOE National Energy Research Science Center's (NERSC) IBM SP RS/6000, a distributed memory machine with 2,944 compute processors. This machine, together with a smaller 160 processor Intel system, will make up a combined 3,328 processor Unix system with 1.3 petabytes(!) of storage space. And this is only the beginning..."

Anonymous Coward writes "Our SB Office runs a small 2 Server network with 4 workstations in the LAN, each connected to a dedicated APC Surge protector. The building has a backup power generator thus we didn't see the need for a UPS. For some odd reason all our monitors flicker a lot. We've tried everything from changing resolutions/refresh rates/video cards/monitors and spacing the monitors farther apart from each other - all to no avail. Could this be a building power supply problem? Some have suggested there may be some magnetic interference but visually inspecting the surroundings doesn't leave us with a culprit for the cause. Could this be fixed by the simple addition of a good UPS? Any help, tip or information would be gladly appreciated. Thank you."

An Anonymous Coward asks: "I'm looking to purchase an external Ethernet print server with an USB printer interface. I've only found two such beasts HP JetDirect 175x and Sercomm PS5800). Do I have any other hardware options? Do USB print servers work with any USB printer, or are there driver issues?" Comments, anyone? Information about running such a box under free operating systems would also be nice.

An Anonymous Coward writes "How cool is the iPod? Cool enough that Christian Dior is selling an iPod case. It was designed by Dior Homme's Hedi Slimane, because he didn't know where to store his own iPod. It's black leather."

Jared writes: "Small Form Factor is taking off, Viahardware wrote a review on the new Shuttle SS PC. In a case about the size of a shoebox, you get Pentium 4 support, DDR memory, firewire, tv out etc. Great box for all kinds of uses like a media box for the living room, file server, gateway, LAN box. Slashdot posted about the SV24 last fall, and this is the follow up product. Very cool." We've looked at some other Shuttle systems before.

mach-5 writes "I recently had an Iomega Jaz disk fragged by the drive (the data is corrupt from simply using the disk in another drive). I know that I can easily get a free (beer) replacement from Iomega, but what I really want is my data back, which is far from free. This is a little unfair considering their drive corrupted my disk. Has anyone had any success in having their data recovered by a drive company. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to deal with this particular company?"