Tempest wrote to us:"Ever wanted to soar over tall buildings with the greatest of ease? In a few years, with the help of NASA and a Silicon Valley engineer, Michael Moshier, you may be able to do so. After a lengthy training program, of course. " The specs are impressive: 80 MPH, 20 MPG. You can check out the story on CNN or the company's website.

Tekmage writes "HP has announced the release of it's HP2100 bioanalyzer. It makes use of a little chip by Caliper Technologies. Yet another tool for the genetic engineers among us; Caliper describe various aspects of the tech here. "

Mike Knell writes "The Irish Times has an article on a robot volleyball tournament held at the British Association Festival of Science in Sheffield yesterday. Teams from five universities took part in the contest to design and produce volleyball-playing robots from off-the-shelf Lego, with the 'droids developed by Trinity College, Dublin emerging as the victors. "

Thanks to Ian Hopper> for the current story on CNN about the Visor. Pictures-and in a very cool turn of events-two very cool peripheral ports in the back of the machine. It runs about 20% faster then the Palm III or V, 8 MB of RAM in the high-end version of the machine. Oh-and about 2/3 the cost of a Palm V. Check out the Palminfocenter for more details, as well.Update: 09/14 03:33 by H :The corp. website appears to be up and running as well.

Nobody writes "JavaSoft has a cool article on how they've used their JINI technology to allow a Palm Pilot to control a Lego Mindstorms brick. " The scary thing is that this is one of the more useful applications of Java I've seen...

Matt Booth writes "New Scientist has an article about a new cellphone from Nokia which is also a digital TV and web browser. It runs linux, and apparently it won't be available in the States because of the poor Digital TV standard there. " Cursed am I!

RoboChicken writes "3Com announced today that it plans to spin off the Palm computing division into a new, separate company. 3Com will deal with networking equipment, and the new company, "Palm Computing" (?) will be the PalmPilot company. "

patSPLAT submitted this artful submission: "I'm asking Slashdot: What kind of box does Linux need to handle the Slashdot Effect? I'm an artist, and I'm working on a sculpture which will be self-documenting with a running server/webcam. Since the server will be a part of the piece, I don't want to spend more than I need. I do want it to be able to handle a heavy load if my piece is well recieved. I'm planning on getting a 10/100 Ethernet, but I'm wondering about processor and memory. Could I get away with an older Pentium? Would a Celeron running in console mode do the trick? 64MB? 128? What do you think I could get away with? The website on the piece would be no larger than 5 megabytes, and webcam would obviously require some resources. I'm not sure how much the webcam would take yet, so give me the minimum and I'll go up a step to account for the webcam. "

Trazom28 asks: "Anyone else noticed how much memory prices have jumped in the last few months? For example, back in early summer, I purchased a 128 meg stick of PC100 for around $100 from Micro Trends. It's been on a steady increase the last few months, and today, it goes for $182. So.. anyone else heard of why, or is this artifical market inflation? "

Bearpaw writes "ZDNet reports that that Handspring -- founded by original Palmers Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky -- will release the first of their PalmOS-based devices on Tuesday. " They have some sketchy details (Same OS, faster hardware, optimized applications, prices) but not much real meat. I'm looking forward to more data.

Chris O'Byrne writes "Psion have announced the Series 7 laptop computer. It's sub-notebook sized, around $1,000 (though only initially available in the U.K.), with 8.5 hours battery life, 640x480 colour LCD touch-screen display, instant-on, and all the usual connectivity and other extras from a Psion computer. The O.S. is Symbian EPOC 32. Looks like an expanded and beefed-up Series 5mx. "

Obscura writes "Tired of reading about everyone else's cool case designs, I spent the weekend making the Rust-Box. I coated my case with a paint made of iron filings and then soaked it with a special solution that causes it to rust instantly. (yes, its sealed so your hands don't turn orange when you touch it)" Allright, thats pretty cool.

GFD writes "The Register has a story about a 1.6ghz alpha with 8 paralell rambus channels (8oomhz) and a transputer like channel to 4 other cpus (10ghz), integrated memory controller and l2 cache. Science fiction? Maybe, but oh my God what specs!!"

webslacker writes "A company called Total Impact is announcing multiprocessor PowerPC systems using IBM's PowerPC Open Platform (POP) with Linux as its OS of choice. In fact, their short press release states that their base model config will be a 5 processor box, and that they've even gotten a 128 processor system running under the MacOS. " five cpus?! Sweeeet.

PHroD writes "Project UDI today announced the release of the UDI (Uniform Driver Interface) 1.0 specs. This hopefully means great strides in new drivers for all our favorite obscure hardware! " They've got most of the 1.0 materials out-grab the official specs, in PDF, from their site.

Zoyd writes "Just out with the world's smallest PII motherboard is Cell Computing. Dimensions: 3 x 5 x 0.7". Weight: 170g. "

Hai Nguyen writes " nVidia officially unveiled the GeForce 256 (the chip formerly known as NV10). Its architecture emphasizes both triangle rate and fill rate, so the chip can render 3D landscape with highly detailed 3D environments and models, and smooth framerates. Go get the full info." Holy moses. I want one. Now.

FlavorFlav writes "The PalmInfocenter has more information out about the Palm Gameboy emulator project here. The EMU now runs Tetris, with screenshots! A beta release is expected soon. If you want some background info on the palm GB emu project see this article that broke the story. "

Wirenut asks: "After another WinDOZE based round of laptop upgrades, I've got a pile of Toshiba (among other) laptops with beautiful displays and crappy processors. Anybody know a techie-way of making these work as flat-panels for regular PC's? I could save a lot of room om my tech bench. PS> I'm pretty handy with a soldering iron, so let me have it. " Interesting thought. Could something like this really work?

leiz writes "The Tech Zone has a preview of the Creative Labs PC. Due out in September, this PC (made with many Creative components) features front side USB, audio I/O, joystick, MIDI, SPDIF, optical, and Firewire ports. Other unique features include a FM tuner, and a volume knob built into the case. Could this be the future of multimedia/gaming/pc integration?"