wally writes "Something for the older geeks; it 'started as a bit of a joke around the office, about doing stupid things with old technology' he said. 'Stupid things like, "Well, I can calculate fractals on an abacus!" or "Well, I can surf the web on my Game Boy!". Then one person said, "Oh yeah? Well, I can display video on my XT!". And later that day I kept thinking about it and came up with a way to do it.' And he really did. With video proof and a full explanation with all the needed code, full motion video on an original 8088 IBM."

EconolineCrush writes "The Tech Report has a review of Gigabyte's i-RAM, a relatively affordable solid-state storage device that uses plain old DDR memory modules and plugs into a standard motherboard PCI slot and Serial ATA port. Performance is generally excellent and occasionally jaw-dropping, but the i-RAM's appeal is ultimately curbed by its slower Serial ATA interface and limited capacity. Still, it's an interesting solution for anyone looking for faster I/O, and since it behaves like a normal hard drive without the need for drivers or software, it should work with just about any operating system."

Philoneist.com writes "Treehugger is reporting that the 'Minister for Sustainable Development Mona Sahlin has declared that Sweden is going to become the first country in the world to break the dependence on fossil energy.'" Sweden's hope is to have all of the country's energy supplied by only renewable resources, ridding the country of cars that run on gasoline and oil-heated homes.

worb writes "The tiny mobile browser Opera Mini was officially released worldwide today. Opera is known for its PC and mobile browsers, but even the cell phone version Opera require more memory than most phones today are capable of. Opera Mini works by passing pages through Opera's servers to strip them down before they are displayed on the phone. Also, the Register has a story on how this actually means that Opera now offers a reason not to buy a smartphone, a market Opera currently has a strong foothold in."

Pray_4_Mojo writes "Geek.com is reporting that Intel's errata (bug) documentation shows that the Intel Core Duo chip has 34 known issues found in the 20 days since the launch of the iMac Core Duo. (you can read the list) with only plans to fix one of them. While bugs in hardware is nothing new (the P4 has 64 known issues, at this time Intel does not plan to fix a single one) this marks one of the first times that Intel released a processor with known bugs, and some of the bugs are of higher severity than in the past. Also alarming is the rate the flaws have been found, at one and half per day since the launch of the iMac Core Duo."

jmke writes "With the increasing heat output of recent processors both Intel and AMD are shipping larger and heavier heatsink/fan combo's to cool them down. AMD has now incorporated heat pipe technology, which is usually only found in more expensive third party CPU cooling solutions. This test compares the new heatsink to a popular 3rd party product and it turns out that the new AMD unit is very impressive: high performance and silent operation from a free CPU cooler? AMD has done it! Now if only Intel would follow."

Mad_Rain asks: "I saw over on Make Magazine an article about using your cell phone on the Internet, except instead of browsing the web from your cell, you can serve webpages from your phone. Of course, it uses Apache, Python and a Nokia S60 series cell phone. I can imagine a couple of creative applications for webservers in strange places, but what else can be done with this?"

Steve from HEXUS writes "ATI have done more than just boost clock speeds for their latest GPU; they've concentrated on boosting particular aspects of the GPU. This doesn't necessarily mean a boost in performance in all apps, however. HEXUS has a review: 'Even current synthetic benchmarks designed to show off theoretical rates in 3D hardware can have a hard time exploiting the tripling in fragment processing ability. That's not to say the performance increases at the same clocks as R520 are invisible. Clearly they're not without increases, especially at the higher resolutions, of up to 30% in the games we tested, clock-for-clock.'"

ntropic asks: "I/ve recently bought a Belkin 802.11G USB adapter and was dismayed to find, after a few hours of struggling with it, that there seems to be no one who has managed to get it working under Linux. During the search for clues, it seemed that sum total of Linux support for wireless networking are the linux-wlan project, and the linuxant wrappers for Windows drivers. The former seems to support only Prism chipsets while the latter is a commercial solution, albeit quite an inexpensive one. Is that all, or are there better sources for wireless networking support?"

Delph1 writes "Laptops often comes with two Achilles heels, heat and limited battery time. There are, if not cures, at least remedies to make them less obvious. By lowering the voltage to the processor you can not only drastically lower the heat dissipation, but also increase the battery time significantly. NordicHardware gives a nice walk through on the process and was able to boast 18% lower temperature and a 20% reduced power consumption."

At the recent adult entertainment awards, host Greg Fitzsimmons highlighted the deep relationship between the internet and pornography stating "'The Internet was completely funded by porn,' he said [...] And if it wasn't for the Internet, he added, 'you guys would be completely out of business.' The audience, packed with porn actors and adult entertainment moguls like Jenna Jameson and Larry Flynt, roared with laughter." Now it appears that the adult entertainment industry has chosen to ante up in the DRM battle as well. Some companies have chosen to take sides, like Digital Playground who will be supporting Sony's Blu-Ray. Others, like Vivid Entertainment, seem to think that the answer is diversity and will be supporting both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD.

Gallamine writes "Many people claim that pets are good for their owners. But, what about robot pets? Some scientists at the Center for the Human-Animal Bond at Purdue's Veterinary school say yes, robot pets can benefit humans. Petting an AIBO caused the human stress hormone cortisol to decrease in patients, much like a real dog, although the effects weren't as pronounced. Also, AIBOs sent to nursing homes caused the residents to be less depressed and lonely. Similar research is being done by Dr. Dr. Takanori Shibata with his robotic seal named Pero."

gnunick writes to tell us BBC News is reporting that UK citizens waste quite a bit of electricity each year by leaving electronic gadgets on standby or charging. Critics are arguing that standby mode on electronics are completely unnecessary and should be removed for a number of reasons. From the article: "To put it another way, the entire population of Glasgow could fly to New York and back again and the resulting emissions would still be less than that from devices left in sleep mode."

rts008 writes to tell us that TG Daily has an interesting interview with Randy Allen, AMD's vice president of the server products division, about (among other things) AMD's recent stellar fourth quarter numbers. From the article: "Responsible for that shrinking lead is especially AMD's server products group. Intel's CEO Paul Otellini recently acknowledged that Intel had to give up market shares to AMD and will likely be forced to hand over more shares until the next generation of server chips arrives. [...] AMD's Randy Allen explains in this conversation with TG Daily why he believes that Intel will need much more than a new processor to be able to slow AMD's growth."

HaggiZ writes "Here is alternative to the clutter of USB cables and keys sitting on your desk. Now Belkin has announced their own wire-free USB setup. It's a wireless USB hub, allowing your to plug devices into the hub and have your PC/laptop elsewhere and not need to worry about running cables along the livingroom or study to reach. Very handy for laptop users, I can imagine some very handy uses for so HTPCs as well. Shipping in spring for a shave under $130."

Roland Piquepaille writes "Precooling a structure in the morning before temperatures rise has been done before. It later saves energy during times of peak demand and you might even have done it intuitively at home. But now, engineers from Purdue University have developed a control algorithm which promises to reduce energy consumption -- and electricity bills -- by as much as 30 percent for small office buildings which represent the majority of commercial structures. So far, this method has only been tested in California, but the researchers say that their control software could be used anywhere after minor adaptations."

Lifix asks: "I've recently been asked to be caregiver to about 150 Apple desktops. While building my software kit to handle these machines, I realized that I would need a good portable hard drive to restore the machines from when they crashed. Cost really isn't an issue but I only need enough room for 3 partitions each with restore images of less than 10 gigs, so a 40g drive would be fine. It doesn't have to be designer, it just has to work. Does anyone have any suggestions/experience with a drive thats going to be a small form factor (throw it in my messenger bag/toolkit), reliable, bootable, 7200 rpm (!important!) and support Firewire400/800 and USB 2.0?"

ZuperDee writes "It appears AMD has licensed Z-RAM technology from Innovative Silicon for possible use in future processors. According to the article, this could lead to caches about 5 times denser than the SRAM that is normally used right now. C|Net says they will probably make the announcement on Monday."

rrsipov asks: "I work at a small company that processes a good deal of DV (mainly) format video. After trying a number of different technologies we have settled down to using removable hard drives for file storage and backup. When a set of projects are complete, the hard disk they are stored on can be removed and stored offline so that the material is available in for possible future use. The problem is that unlike tapes, etc... we haven't been able to find any good storage cabinet type solutions, and have resorted to a pretty much ad-hoc system of filing the drives. Does Slashdot know of any such system? Ideally we'd like to start with something small, and scale from there if we like the system."

Barry Norton writes "Steve Jobs, at the MacWorld tradeshow, boasted: 'the new iMac [with] Intel processor is two to three times faster than the iMac G5.' MacWorld (the publication) has been putting the iMacs through their paces. The results are a good deal less impressive than Steve's boast, showing an average performance increase of 10 to 25 per cent while performing a series of everyday tasks with software specially designed for the new systems." Ars Technica had another perspective on the new systems earlier this week.