mikemuch writes "You can spend 150 bucks or over a thousand on a processor, but how do you know which gives you the most power for your money? It's a little like MPG for CPUs. ExtremeTech's Loyd Case does extensive benchmarking on twenty-three current desktop processor flavors from AMD and Intel. While of course most folks won't make dollar-efficiency the sole basis for their chip decisions, it's interesting to see which CPUs get you, for example, the most frames per second in Far Cry for a dollar." From the article: "Take PC games, for example. The cheapest CPU available may have the best frame rate per dollar ratio. But you still need an adequate frame rate for an optimum gaming experience, and the cheapest CPU may not deliver that. On the other hand, office applications are generally not as sensitive to raw performance, and the lower cost processor may be better. It's all in what you do."

linumax writes "With so many DVDs featuring letterboxed or wide-screen versions of films, consumers' fascination with larger screen sizes is changing the size and shape of the laptop industry, stated an IDC report issued on Monday. The wide-screen format, found in only 39.2 percent of laptops expected to ship this year, will become dominant in mid- to late 2006. It will nearly eclipse standard screen dimensions by the end of 2009, the market research firm estimates. Samsung has already unleashed its upcoming 19-inch laptop. The product is expected to ship later this year. Dell, a major partner of Samsung, could easily adopt the large screen format for its high-end XPS laptops. And, LG Philips is also touting its 20-inch LCD displays for laptops."

Spy der Mann writes "A unique system that can produce Hydrogen inside a car using common metals such as Magnesium and Aluminum was recently developed by an Israeli company. The system solves all of the obstacles associated with the manufacturing, transporting and storing of hydrogen to be used in cars. And it's completely emission free."

vladcole writes "Xbox 360 kiosks are getting shut down by some Wal-Mart employees sick of having their handheld inventory devices and printers malfunction, according to this compilation of Joystiq reader reports." From the article: "There's no reason to get worried about the Xbox 360 launch date (there, we recognized the elephant in the room), but the breadth and frequency of these reports point to a compatibility issue between the Xbox 360 and Wal-Mart, at least." Next Generation confirms that Wal-Mart is having issues with the 360 pods.

schnikies79 writes "In an interview with IGN, Microsoft's Corporate Vice President Chief Architect J. Allard said he wants to work with competitors on the XBox 360. From the interview: 'I'm pro consumer on this one to the end,' says Allard. 'Anybody in my company who thought this was a bad idea to plug in Sony or Apple devices into this thing, I ended that conversation pretty quickly. This is the right thing to do for consumers. Once they invest $500 in their digital media library, you can't ask them to go buy a 360 music player and a 360 digital camera, and a 360...NO! They got their stuff. They're going to want to plug it in. We're going to be open here, guys. And if anything, I wish we could be more cooperative with the other companies that are doing those things. And if Sony or Apple were to call me up and say, "Hey, we want to some special things with the 360," I'm on it. I think it would not be in anybody's interest to say, we're not going to work with 360. It's good for them, it's good for us, and it's good for consumers.'"

DD writes to tell us ZDNet is running a story about a new Santa Clara, CA based startup that is boasting a new line of low-power, Power chips, the same architecture found in current day Macs and IBM servers. From the article: "The company's first so-called PWRficient chip will feature two processing cores, run at 2GHz and consume on average about 5 watts, thanks to an emphasis on integration and circuit design. At a maximum, it will consume 25 watts, far less than the single-core Power chips that can hit 90 watts found on the market today."

An anonymous reader writes "From the article: "Once my original Mini-ITX project was completed I finally had a chance to sit back and use the computer. After a couple weeks of general internet browsing, emailing, and so forth, I was able to get a better understanding of the system and a feel for its design. Knowing how simple my needs were, the Mini-ITX project computer was orginally designed to be as basic and quiet as possible. This meant no hard drive, no extra accessories- just a stripped down system. While this suited my needs well at the time, its lack of versatility soon became an issue. This meant it was back to the drawing board for a retooling of the Mini-ITX project computer. The changes include a new case, operating system and boot device, along with improved cooling. The new system was tested using Slax and then MEPISLite." Even better link is the site itself which regularly carries mods.

It doesn't come easy wrote to mention the announcement that Madison, Wisconsin will soon be home to the newest Municipal Wi-Fi network. From the article: "'I made a commitment in 2004 to bring Wi-Fi to Madison,' said Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz in a statement. 'This is an important new service for Madison residents and businesses.' The Madison network will be rolled out at no cost to the city and the providers have secured initial funding from service agreements from ISPs. The initial phase of the Madison network will cover users in the downtown region of the city with plans to later cover the entire city." I love my town. Zombies and Wi-Fi. What more could you want?

Neurotoxic666 asks: "Like many others, my friends and I are going to hold a costumed party for Halloween, however we do not want it to be the typical haunt. We have some talent in computers and electronics, but we're short of ideas. Are there any good gadgets and props that the average geek can build to spice up the party? Of course, there will be the usual ambient sounds and decoration, but we're looking for more interactive, dynamic and techie stuff. One idea I've had is to use the living room computer on the TV and have white noise, ghosts and other creepy effects appear throughout the night. Does anyone have some suggestions, ideas we could build, effects that worked well in your parties? Anything from heart-beating books to special lightning to mad science devices is welcome!"

Kasracer writes "Web Sites The Register and GamePC received several of the new dual-core processors from Intel, dubbed 'Paxville', and ran a battery of tests on them. What did they find? From the article: 'There's no doubt about it, Intel's dual-core Xeons are their most power hungry Xeons to date ... Even when idling, two dual-core Xeons consume nearly 400W of power at any given time, which is amazingly high, even by Intel's standards ... their new dual-core chips (while powerful in their own right) simply are bested across the board by AMD's dual-core Opteron processors. Even worse, the Opterons typically perform much better while running at slower clock speeds and only having half the amount of on-die L2 cache to utilize.'"

illtron writes "British scientists at the University of Manchester were apparently bored and decided to find out, once and for all, if the Velociraptor was as mean as Jurassic Park would like everyone to think. They created a robotic Velociraptor leg to simulate the effect that leg would have on pig and crocodile skin. It turns out that disemboweling a dino probably would have been out of the question, since the best that big claw could do was usually just to leave a deep puncture." From the article: "I realized that the sick-claw was not a knife, but was rather more like the claw of a cat. Cats use their claws to pierce and hold prey, not to disembowel. Whereas my work was mostly theoretical, Phil took one step farther as he was given the opportunity to mechanically test the disemboweling hypothesis. His work is very important,"

Timbotronic writes "The UK government's chief scientific adviser has sent his clearest signal that Britain will need to revive its nuclear power industry in the face of a looming energy crisis and the threat of global warming. In an interview with the Guardian, Sir David King said there were economic as well as environmental reasons for a new generation of reactors." From the article: "His remarks come in the build-up to international talks in Montreal on how to address the threat of climate change when the Kyoto protocol expires in 2012. He denied suggestions - sparked by comments from Mr Blair that he was changing his mind on whether international treaties were the best way to tackle global warming - that Britain was moving closer to the stance of the US, which has refused to back Kyoto-style emission reductions."

mikejz84 writes "As the owner of a PocketPC PDA I am a very happy camper, with wifi internet access, Skype Voip, video playback, and of course the ubiquitous mp3 playback. In an era were everyone seems to talk about the Video iPod, and the next generation of mobile devices, it leaves me wondering - I already have all those abilities in a PDA that costs about as much as an iPod. My question for Slashdot: Given that modern PDAs have almost all the functionality of these separate devices, how has Palm and Microsoft/PocketPC developers failed in making PDAs a force in this new era of portable media devices? It is the poor marketing, bad media apps, public perception, or do people simply not want an all-in-one for mobile media?"

An anonymous reader writes "Oki Electric this week began marketing a technology that inexpensively adds face recognition to camera-equipped cell phones. Oki's 'Face Sensing Engine' middleware decodes facial images within 280 milliseconds on a 100 MHz ARM9 processor, and can restrict access to mobile devices by recognizing their owners. Its purpose is to safeguard sensitive personal data -- such as email addresses and phone numbers -- in the event of loss or theft of their devices. The technology works by locating and mapping key facial features -- such as eyes, eyebrows, and mouth -- and adapts to changing facial conditions such as winking and smiling, according to Oki."

Paladin144 writes "The CIA's venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, has announced a strategic development agreement with SkyBuilt Power Inc. The CIA seems to be interested in SkyBuilt's new Mobile Power Station, which can be parachuted into remote locations and be up and running in a few hours with only 2 people needed to set it up. The MPS harnesses both solar and wind power and is capable of up to 150 kilowatts of electricity. The devices uses off-the-shelf components and easily swappable parts to be cost-effective."

Carl Bialik writes "The Wall Street Journal's Walter S. Mossberg has an interesting review of Apple's video iPod. From the article: 'It's a surprisingly decent video player, with crisp, smooth vivid playback of TV shows, music videos, short films, video podcasts and home videos. We wouldn't want to watch a full-length movie on this iPod -- the screen is just too small. But, for short things like music videos, video podcasts or even hourlong TV shows shortened by stripping out the commercials, as Apple is doing, the new iPod provides a pretty good experience. However, there are some significant downsides to the video function on this iPod. Some of them are due to Apple's design decisions, while others are due to restrictions imposed by media companies, or to the simple human factors that go into watching video.'"

DiZNoG asks: "I work from home and run two businesses from there. Sick of server and switch noise in my home office, I've been thinking of taking an old hallway closet that used to house the furnace (since moved) and turning it into a literal server closet for my various servers and networking gear. I have 4 servers and various networking gear and even a system for getting everything in and accessible worked out. Bonus, the room already has power and is perfect placement for my access point (already secured, thank you!) However, I am running into problems finding a small air conditioner for the size of room. It's literally 15 sq. ft. and maybe 100-125 cubic feet total. By my estimates that's something on the order of 150-250 BTUs (or less) with the hardware. Does anyone on Slashdot know of micro A/C units to keep such a small area in server friendly temperature efficiently? I did see this homebrew action, but I'm looking for much less maintenance."

It doesn't come easy writes "Honda unveiled their next generation FCX fuel cell concept car, along with a home hydrogen generation filling station, at the Tokyo Motor Show this week. The car has a range of 350 miles (560 kms) using two separate 350 psi hydrogen storage tanks. The tanks use a newly-developed hydrogen absorption material that doubles their capacity without raising the required storage pressure and thus allows the concept vehicle to exceed the DOE's targeted driving range for hydrogen powered vehicles. The home refueling station uses natural gas to produce electricity, heat and hydrogen. Honda estimates that the HES system [will] lower by 50% the total running cost of household electricity, gas and vehicle fuel. As the FCX is a concept car, no mention of when the technology might be introduced in a real automobile or what it will eventually cost, but the advances demonstrated by the car are quite amazing."

rustbear writes "The BBC reports that researchers looking to the skies to provide super-fast internet access via airships have proved it can successfully operate a data rate link of 11Mbps. Trials were conducted using a 12,000 cubic metre balloon, flying at an altitude of around 24 kilometres for nine hours. 'Proving the ability to operate a high data rate link from a moving stratospheric balloon is a critical step in moving towards the longer term aim of providing data rates of 120Mbps,' said Dr David Grace, the project's principal scientific officer. 'Balloons hovering in the stratosphere could become an attractive alternative as consumers demand ever higher bandwidth", said Alan Gobbi, the acting manager of the York Electronic Centre. With each airship being able to support an area of 60 kilometres, there would only need to be "a handful" to offer complete coverage in the UK, he added. Trials of the technology will continue in Japan next year.'"

ThinSkin writes "Not just for large corporations, NAS is creeping into the homes of normal computer users who want to share and back up their data. ExtremeTech is running a roundup of six NAS solutions and has benchmarked the performance of each to see which one is a good investment. They have also considered other factors in choosing a good NAS device, such as the amount of drives it can run, dimensions, memory, interface, supported OSes, and others."