A reader writes "I just ran across this article over at LinuxHardware.org that reviews the Pentium 4 under Linux. It gives a lot of insite as to why anyone would want to buy a Pentium 4 and has some great clips from Alan Cox and Jan Hubicka (from the GCC team). Very thorough job."

BorrisYeltsin writes " A story here at InformationWeek about a guy who has equipped his 3500 feild engineers using the new Agenda VR3 palmtop's. It brings up an interesting issue about the Sharp Linux PDA and how the different libraries and API's will cause problems for developers." Having now seen the iPaq running Linux, KDE, and even Konqueror, I now believe its possible.

A reader sent in a link to an ultra-low-power RISCOS computer designed to be powered by a single small solar panel. They're aiming for a complete system which draws only 8.5 watts, which would be incredible if they can manage it.

Hell O'World writes: "Scientific American has a story on the history of Beowulf Clusters. It's written by the guys who built the Stone SouperComputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory." Nice example of how old hardware can be put to use to make new breakthroughs. Nothing radically new, but hey, it's 4AM Saturday morning, what do you expect. :)

Several people sent in notes about this:"IBM research announced that it developed a wireless security auditor running on a Compaq iPAQ with Linux. The pictures on the IBM web page are much more revealing than the press release. Apparently the auditor can handle GPS input (correlate access points with GPS coordinates?) and associate with access points on demand." The main product webpage has more information about the capabilities, and notes that IBM hasn't decided yet whether to release it as a commercial product or a free tool.

An Anonymous Coward writes: "Just saw this review at GamePC. It's a pretty extensive review of AMD's entry into the multiprocessor arena, full of exciting benchmarking results. The full text is here."

chipwich writes: "Extremetech has an article describing the impending demise of hackable computer systems. What if disposable computers brought a brand-new system within your budget for yearly purchase... Would you be willing to pay a premium just so you could install Linux on last years' model?"

chuckT writes: "After a troubled few months, Psion, makers of the world's finest (if a little long in the tooth) handhelds, have finally withdrawn from the consumer market, and now appear to be concentrating on the corporate market. I switched to a 5mx a while ago, having used Palms, and loved the Psion. A beautifully thought out machine, I particularly liked OPL (the bundled BASIC-like language) and the fold-out keyboard. They had a real opportunity to be as successful as Palm, but somehow, being a British company, managed to cock it up. Bloody typical." Besides the loss of 250 jobs as Psion, this also sounds like a blow to Bluetooth, which Psion's CEO calls "late on the uptake and much smaller than anticipated" in the BBC piece.

Banjonardo writes "On today's edition of The Contra Costa Times , there was an interesting article about an actual appliance that replaces the computer in net-to-phone calls. The phone can be connected to an ethernet port, though I imagine DSL users would have to have their PCs on to log in. The company has a nice website dedicated to it. Lately most PC-to-phone programs have been asking for more money for international calls. Netmeeting doesn't cut it for all video needs, but several alternatives are quite acceptable, even for international calls." The phone the article concentrates on requires broadband and a home gateway to set-up; luckily neither of those things is rare any more. A few of the competing devices are mentioned as well; you can almost smell companies like Cisco drooling to own voice transport.

Skuld-Chan asks: "I'm left handed - so is about 10%-15% of America (depending on what statistic you look at). Is there a PDA out there that has left handed support? I have a Compaq Ipaq and the problem is I have to reach over the screen to grab scroll bars - thus obstructing what I am viewing. My brother has a Palm 7 and he says it doesn't have left handed support either. I think it would be easy to impliment - just reverse all the scroll bars and I'd be happy (the menu items happen to be on the left - just the right place)." You would thing things like this would come out in the usability tests. For those of you lefty's out there who work with PDAs on a semi-daily basis, what do you do to work around this problem?

gnurd asks: "I am toying with the idea of buying a Rackable system for home use. However I'm sure I dont need a 72" cabinet, but i would like a small safe enclosure for a couple of systems. I have had a hard time finding a small (12U) cabinet for home use. anybody try setting up a small racked center at home? Your experience would be appreciated." Would any of the solutions from this past Ask Slashdot discussion help in this case? And has anyone successfully used racks intended for rackable musical instruments to hold servers instead?

An Anonymous Coward was left with some interesting pieces of hardware he would like some help identifying: "I work on the Yale Solar Racing Team. Recently we were cleaning out our electronics lab and found two ancient-looking boxes that, as the team legend says, originated in an ICBM somewhere and somehow got donated to us!"

SomewhereElse asks: " It's been a few months since Sun introduced the Sun Blade 100 and I wanted to ask Slashdot readers who have had the oppotrunity to review/play with the box what they thought of it. How upgradeable is it? How fast does it feel? And were there any problems with the hardware?"

Sven writes: "Victor will be releasing an optical wireless LAN system for indoor use that achieves 100Mbit/s speed. Being an optical system, a line of sight between stations is required. It will be released in Japan on July 27th. The hub costs 148,000 yen (US$1190), one node costs 49,800 yen ($400). Get more details from their website and from Pricewatch Japan. If you don't grok japanese (gasp!), Cafeglobe.com's babelfish is your friend." We have an older story about building-to-building optical networks, but I think this is first inter-office optical LAN I've seen. Seems like this could be a secure way to do wireless LANs without the leakage of 802.11 - as long as you keep your blinds drawn.

Chase asks: "I have a Motorola I85s (Java phones rock!). The issue I've run into is that from what I've been able to find out, most phones overseas (I'm in the US) support SMS to send text messages between mobile devices. Also alot of two-way devices are now popping up in the US. Nextel (my service provider) only lets me use SMS to other Nextel customers. Their two messaging service is e-mail based. So I end up using a web site to send SMS messages to my friends overseas but we'd really like to send directly each others phones. Is this just a problem with Nextel or do all mobile phone companies in the US have this issue? Are most of the current crop of two-way devices coming out in the US email based, SMS, or something else?"

An anonymous reader sent us a great little article on building a silent PC. Utilizing low noise power supplies, cases with good ventilation, and noise enclosures for hard drives, you can actually here you stereo over your PC again. I've been looking at undertaking such a project myself real soon, so I'm glad this one came along.

BitMan sent in an overview of the next step in addressing large disk drives. I tend to run into these every few years when I try to add a new, large drive to an older machine and find out that some factor is keeping me from being able to use the full drive capacity. Well, the next step will push those limits out quite a ways, giving us a few more years of ever-increasing drive space.

OberonX writes " Psion has issued some new PDA concepts which are quite breath-taking. My favourite is ACE but HALO looks quite neat too. Both of them are concepts, many situations are still to be taken care(like battery life) but they sure look promising. "

yknott writes "It seems that Seagate just released a virtually silent hard drive. It emits only 2.0 bels while spinning and 2.4 bels while seeking; the human ear can't hear sounds below 2.5 bels. No more grinding sounds! It features Fluid Dynamic Bearings, and has an internal transfer rate of 69.3 Megabytes per second. " I'm currently questing to build a quieter computer - and while I'd love to test this, I will definitely say that Silent Drives I recently bought from New England Digital is awesome - but is rated to only work with 5400 rpms drives.

SpdyVkng asks: "Once, I worried if I ever would have the money to buy a significant number of expansion cards for my PC; then I worried about the number of slots available; now most cards I have in my computer use not only one back end, but two (or more in some cases), for their I/O needs. That has me worrying about the cases I can use: 7 knock outs for expansion cards are too few, since I really would need someting like 9 or 10. To make it perfectly clear, I don't need more than 6 PCI slots on the mother board, and an AGP, but I need more physical knock outs in the case to have access to the extra I/O ports I need and which every card seems to have these days." Of course, necessity being the mother of all invention, how difficult would it be to "adapt" some off-the-shelf cases with added ports? I would figure that an adept person with the right tools might be able to add in side and front ports, depending on the case. Are there any places out there that will custom make chassis with these and other modifications?