An anonymous reader tells us about a BusinessWeek story claiming that in a few years most wireless plans will be unlimited. And pretty costly: unlimited cell calling, SMS, and data for on the order of $115 - $150 a month. Sprint is conducting a trial of such an offering in San Francisco, with the intent of rolling it out nationwide, and other carriers are said to be sure to follow suit. An interesting claim in the article is that in 5 years time, 40% of the US population will be untethered from landlines and using their cell numbers exclusively (vs. 15% now).

Somnus suggests we check out the latest issue of MIT's Technology Review, where researchers describe how they can dramatically boost engine output and efficiency by preventing pre-ignition, or "knock." How they do it: "Both turbocharging and direct injection are preexisting technologies, and neither looks particularly impressive... by combining them, and augmenting them with a novel way to use a small amount of ethanol, Cohn and his colleagues have created a design that they believe could triple the power of a test engine."

Rob writes "OpenOffice.org project members have written to Dell (pdf), hoping to persuade the company to adopt OpenOffice in response to customer demand. John McCreesh, OpenOffice.org marketing project lead, writes 'Let's have a conversation about how we could build an OpenOffice.org supplied by Dell product to give your customers what they are asking for.' Demand for open source products on Dell's IdeaStorm web site prompted the letter. A somewhat obvious question is raised: why isn't OpenOffice already available by default on new PC's and Workstations?"

TrackinYeti writes "HDMI (High Definition Multimedia Interface), is the first industry supported digital-only interface, that requires a single cable to connect an output source to an HD-ready device, such as a television or monitor and deliver HD video, plus multi-channel digital audio, like Dolby Digital and DTS. Recently, Asus Computer released versions of their GeForce 7600 and Radeon X1600 cards with HDMI outputs on them, driven by an on-board Sil1930 controller. These are some of the first graphics cards to hit the market that can output HDMI natively with an integrated HDCP cipher engine and support HD-audio as well. Just the thing for that HTPC?"

roscoetoon directs our attention to a proposal from an odd assortment of tech companies — Google, Microsoft, H-P, Intel, and others — to reuse TV wavelengths to deliver first-mile connectivity. The Washington Post article is subtitled "Cable, Phone Companies Watch Warily." As well they might. One of the big content companies that the incumbent duopolists propose to soak by dismantling network neutrality, in company with some powerful allies, is striking back at the heart of their business.

jcatcw writes "Intel's first NAND flash memory product, the Z-U130 Value Solid-State Drive, is a challenge to other hardware vendors. Intel claims read rates of 28 MB/sec, write speeds of 20 MB/sec., and capacity of 1GB to 8GB, which is much smaller than products from SanDisk. 'But Intel also touts extreme reliability numbers, saying the Z-U130 has an average mean time between failure of 5 million hours compared with SanDisk, which touts an MTBF of 2 million hours.'"

Searching4Sasquatch writes "Hot Hardware has tested two nearly identical HP systems in an effort to determine the best solution between Intel's Viiv and AMD's LIVE! campaigns. Priced around $999, these general purpose systems are tested straight out of the box with no tweaking or refinement to illustrate how "Joe Consumer" would fare in using one of these platforms."

An anonymous reader writes to let us know that after two years Seagate is finally shipping its full-disk encryption product, and you can get your hands on it in a laptop from system vendor ASI.

A NYTimes story says "Multiple systems have hampered the growth of new services, mobile phone executives say. " The story does a good job of capturing some of the changing dynamics in the mobile OS market — but rightly raises the point that given the sheer size of the mobile market, it's unlikely we're going to see the homogenization we have in the desktop market.

Several people noted a NYT piece about Palm's response to the iPhone. Essentially, their response appears to be to hire a former Apple engineer and a couple other folks -- while also pursuing plans to perhaps sell the company. Nothing like a dual approach to the problem.

Krishna Dagli writes "Two Ph.D. students at the University of California at Berkeley say that Daylight Saving Shift will not do any good or create any energy savings. We are already spending money for software upgrades in the name of saving energy and after reading following article I wonder has congress really studied the impact of DST shift? " I also read some back story on the concept; OTOH, I found TiVo's suggestions that I manually change everything on my Series 1 device to be somewhat...insulting.

An anonymous reader writes "The Greenphone comes at a time when there are countless mobile Linux platforms, but not many of them are open for easy development. This little device aims to fill a niche for a community-oriented mobile development platform. How does it perform? Linuxlookup.com has the Trolltech Qtopia Greenphone and SDK review."

rowleyrw writes "The BBC are reporting, 'The British military is set to take one of its most significant steps into the digital age with the launch of the first Skynet 5 satellite. The spacecraft will deliver secure, high-bandwidth communications for UK and "friendly" forces across the globe.' It's not yet the Skynet of Terminator, but how long before it becomes self aware?"

tcd004 writes "How do you set up a cell network when there's no power grid? Namibia, India and Nigeria are building towers using localized power sources to provide critical cell phone access to the most remote parts of their countries. Wind/solar hybrids, and biofuel power plants will power the radio towers, peripheral communications, and even the protective fencing around the installations."

Lucas123 writes "An article in Computerworld states that Apple and LG each plan to launch new laptops — one that's supposed to ship this month — with hybrid disk drives. The new drives are like hybrid cars in that the NAND flash memory works in conjunction with the spinning disk, kicking in data that can be cached like portions of the operating system, which can make for much faster boot up and resume times."

LWATCDR writes "Has a great write up on combining LinuxBios a Linux kernel, busybox, X, a window manager, and rxvt into a two meg flash chip. So what does get you? A six second boot time for one. All sorts of uses come to mind. Terminals to use with the Linux Terminal server. A very fast booting embedded system like a Car computer. With every one pushing for multi-core cpus, mega gigabyte drives and many gigabytes of ram it is interesting to see how small you can go."

Station writes "Intel's new phase-change memory technology (PRAM) will begin sampling this year. Samsung, IBM, and Hitachi are all working on phase-change memory as a successor to flash as it has a lower (~20ns) read latency than flash (50-90ns). 'Intel says they plan to ship the first PRAM modules as a straight-ahead NOR flash replacement so that they can work the kinks out of the design before trying to move it up the memory hierarchy. The company claims a much higher number of read-write cycles (100 million) than flash, as well as a potential 10 years' worth of data retention. NOR flash is typically used as program storage memory for mobile devices like cell phones, while more durable but slower NAND flash is used for mass storage in devices like the iPod nano.'"

writertype writes "ExtremeTech reports that Samsung has become the first company to begin shipping hybrid hard drives as discussed last fall on Slashdot. (Some photos here.) Unfortunately, there's no word yet (beyond 'soon') on when retail shipments will begin, or when (or if) 3.5-inch models will be available. Note that these hybrid drives are different than the ReadyBoost USB flash drives optimized for Vista; hybrid drives contain a smaller amount of flash, and work as a write cache for your notebook drive, extending battery life."

Snad writes "The UK's Evening Standard is reporting that Boeing plans to roll out aircraft remote control systems in a bid to eliminate the threat of terrorist hijackings, and prevent any repetition of the events of September 11 2001. 'Scientists at aircraft giant Boeing are testing the tamper-proof autopilot system which uses state-of-the-art computer and satellite technology. It will be activated by the pilot flicking a simple switch or by pressure sensors fitted to the cockpit door that will respond to any excessive force as terrorists try to break into the flight deck. Once triggered, no one on board will be able to deactivate the system. Currently, all autopilots are manually switched on and off at the discretion of pilots. A threatened airliner could be flown to a secure military base or a commercial airport, where it would touch down using existing landing aids known as 'autoland function'.'"

goldaryn writes "The BBC is reporting that the South Korean government is working on an ethical code for human/robot relations, 'to prevent humans abusing robots, and vice versa'. The article describes the creation of the Robot Ethics Charter, which 'will cover standards for users and manufacturers and will be released later in 2007. [...] It is being put together by a five member team of experts that includes futurists and a science fiction writer.'"