florian writes "Macweek is reporting that Prophet Systems, a division of Eternal Computing, is building a sub-$1,000 CHRP desktop system. " Looks like an excellent deal-they are aiming it at Linux and Darwin folks, though I'd like to see the PPC version of Be helped out by this as well.

Joe Rumsey writes "Palm Infocenter reports that Peanut Press is selling books in electronic form. They are encrypted, and the reader currently only exists for Palm devices. The selection is not bad." Looks like a better idea than the SoftBook reader, which costs about as much as a Palm but is big and bulky -- and won't let you do anything but read books and magazines.

Hernan Ochoa asks: "Hi. I'm in the process of buying a palm-size computer. I was all set and ready to buy a palm III/IIIx, but I've just seen the Palm-Size PC Aero 2130LA from Compaq. It costs about $400USD and it has a color screen, 16MB RAM, RISC, WinCE (ugh), audio, infrared, serial port, hotsync, voice recording, etc. So any comments about this? I'm very tempted to buy this one!" Looks good. Has anyone taken one of these for a spin yet?

thal needs help with the following issue: "I just installed the VMWare for Linux demo on my Pentium II 233 with 64 Megs of RAM to make a virtual machine for my Win95 partition. What I'd like to do with it is use the Cakewalk Win95 multitrack music recorder inside of the virtual machine so I don't have to reboot. I know that I'll have to upgrade my processor and memory to do this well, but I want to know for sure it will work well before I put down the cash. With my current setup, giving Windows 32 Megs of RAM, I can't even get an .MP3 file to play without sounding a little bit choppy. Is this an inherent problem with VMWare's interaction with the audio hardware, or is this something I can fix by throwing money at it? Would a Pentium II 450 with 128 RAM suffice? Or should I just scrap the VMWare thing and buy a simple dedicated machine for this task? "

Tails writes "Ever wonder how you could make that useless radio interference your CPU generates into interesting noise? Forcing operations on his CPU and Memory bus, Berke Durak has made a tunable FM signal out of the radio activity his motherboard creates.. " Didn't we see this stuff in Triumph of the Nerds? Looks nifty tho.

ewhac writes "Blue's News is among the first to report that Hercules Computer Technology, one of the longest-standing names in the PC graphics card industry, is going out of business. Hercules' latest claim to fame was the fastest manufacturer-supported implementation of NVidia's TNT2 Ultra graphics chipset, clocking in at 200MHz. People who pre-ordered Hercules TNT2 Ultra cards but who have not yet had their credit card charged are not going to receive them. However, if you happen to be nearby Hercules' Fremont, CA, headquarters and show up in person, they will sell you a TNT2 Ultra for $200 (regularly $250). How good a deal this is without any continuing driver support is unknown."

Alowishus writes "Dell's contest to find the oldest PC still in use has found a winner. It's a MITS Altair 8800b, being used by a lawyer, who has had it for 22 years. Dell's submitting it to a museum and giving the lawyer a bunch of modern hardware. "

A reader wrote to us with the reminder about the GPS rollover tonight. It will occur at midnight, UTC time. Most machines should be compliant, but check out The Coast Guard for more information. Essentiallly, they are rolling over the GPS time, and machines that aren't repaired/replaced will claim that it is 6 Jan 1980, and August 23 will be Jan 7, and so on.

Anonymous PIG writes "On August 19, NPR's Morning Edition aired a story about the ENIAC, the world's first computer, and it's forgotten inventors. It is archived on this page and you can listen to it directly at this link. " The story of how the creators were really screwed on the whole deal is interesting-definitely worth the download time.Update: 08/21 03:30 by H : I sit duly corrected-the first computer was not ENIAC. Arguably, it was Colossus, a British construction in 1943.Update: 08/21 02:18 by H : Alright, alright-stop e-mailing me with earlier computers *grin*. Zuse, Babbage's Engine. I'm saying the abacus, and leaving it at that.

ninjaz writes "Tom from Tom's Hardware has published his first Athlon Motherboard Reviews, where he states "I know for a fact that Asus has designed a highly excellent Athlon-motherboard" , which Asus has mysteriously deciding against selling. This amidst rumors of Intel threats of artificial BX chipset shortages. " You conspiracy nuts are gonna love this one. It does look fishy.

poetbill writes "Palm Computing has obtained a preliminary injunction prohibiting Royal from selling its rival DaVinci handheld device, which 3Com claims was copied from the Palm operating system." Does this remind anyone of a similar case from a few years back?

Quite a number of you have written in with the news about Sony and Nippon Zeon Co Ltd announcing plastic hard drives. The current estimate is that it will cut production costs by 30-40%, on 5 gig drives. No word, however, on when production/testing will start.

EvilNight writes "Did you ever find a use for all the old hardware laying around you house? I've used mine to build a computer for my entertainment center. Components: PII350, 32mb ram, 1GB IDE HDD, Pioneer DVD drive, keytronics remote keyboard, and an ABIT BH6 (1.0) motherboard. I want to use the computer for the following tasks: Video playback on TV (all formats), Video Capture (800x600 if possible), Boot a desktop on the TV (no monitor), and playing DVD on the TV. All I need is a good graphics card. This isn't as simple as it seems." Yep! It gets more complex. Click below for more.

hfcs asks: "I'm looking for sources for an affordable, 4-6 channel, compact, stereo, line-level audio mixer. In my office I have 4 PCs (Linux, W95, NT, Mac) and CD player, each demanding their own speakers for audio output. Low end pro-sumer stuff (Radio Shack & the like) start at $200 for this, but it's huge. Decent mixers start well above that. A master volume would be nice, but since each device can do it's own output level, so I don't need channel level control. I just want to be able to hook everything up to one nice set of amplified speakers rather than 4 independent mediocre sets without damaging any of the sources. Any suggestions?"

Dixie_Flatline writes "This chipset looks pretty cool to me. I'm suprised that it hasn't shown up on slashdot before now, based on it's immense hoopyness. And it's got Linux support...and it hasn't even been released yet. Go here. " Basically this thing claims to crush everything else on the market. If it makes for better games, I'm all for it.

The always excellent Russ Nelson sent us a report on the competition for the lucrative title of "World's Smallest Web Server". Apparently there are a few folks going for it. He writes "HP has one. Dallas Semiconductor has one (only $50). MMC Embedded has one that isn't even in the running, although it does have COM1-4 and LPT1. Dawning Technologies' entry is a joke: far too big to be "smallest". Stanford has one which is best known. And Rt-Control has one named uCsimm because it fits in a SIMM module. The latter two get bonus points for running Linux. Phar Lap claims to have one, but it's a non-starter, being PC-104 based. Dekad Ltd says theirs is really small, but they don't have an Ethernet interface. The one from iReady really seems to be the smallest, but it too lacks Ethernet. Emware's one is so small it doesn't need any hardware (how they claim it's smallest without reference to any hardware, I'll never know). "

jglassco asks: "Building an Intel Linux box is trivial, but what about building a PowerPC based Linux box? I have searched the /. archives yet have found nothing on this topic. My purpose here is to find sources for the two components that seem the hardest to locate, namely: a motherboard (2 or 4 processors) with 4x AGP slot, and processors. I want to build the rest using the common components found as commodities. Is anyone experienced with this?"

Croaker writes "Hmm-the PalmPilot as a fetish object? This article makes a pretty interesting case that, since people are pushing the Pilot to do things that are really outside its simple, elegant design, that it's more of a fetish symbol than tool " Interesting account of Palm experiences.

Noel writes "Princeton University electrical engineer Stephen Chou who directs the NanoStructures Laboratory, has created CDs that can concentrate data 800 times more efficiently than current discs. " Tiny storage is my friend.

Marc Merlin writes "This excerpt from Yahoo News tells it all:
(...) But according to marketing materials from Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq:CSCO - news), the No. 1 maker of computer networking equipment, cable companies will be able to work behind the scenes with sophisticated software included in Cisco products to slow down and limit access to selected Web sites. " As you would imagine, this has got the hackles of consumer groups up-Cisco brochures are saying that this stuff would allow cable companies to make competing sites appear more slowly then preferred ones. I'm speechless.