Shippy writes "Straight from Yahoo News on the other side of the pond comes a story about Samsung's latest creation: a five-megapixel camera phone. This is pretty cool considering it's a pretty big jump from the camera phones that are currently available (many max out around 1.5 megapixels). It's expected to be available by the end of the year, but only in South Korea. I doubt it'll take long for a domestic carrier to pick up on this hot new toy." Other readers submitted a closeup picture and the company press release.

jangobongo writes "The U.N.'s annual World Robotics Survey for 2004 predicts that there will be a seven-fold surge in household robots by the end of 2007. Robots that mow your lawn, vacuum, wash windows, clean swimming pools, as well as entertainment robots such as Aibo are all vying to take a place in our homes and ease our workload. The study says that Japan is the leader in consumer robotics, with Europe and North America quickly catching up."

LBArrettAnderson writes "Toshiba will release laptops with HD-DVD under its high-end Qosmio brand and plans to ship one million units in the first year to Europe, the U.S. and China, as well as Japan. The company claims the slimline HD-DVD format is more suitable to laptop PCs than the rival Blu-ray Disc format."

museumpeace writes "Technology review (in exchange for a revealing cookie) has a short article describing a PDA browsing improvement from Microsoft/Asia research. The basic idea is to put the palm top user back in control of page layout by letting them zoom/shrink arbitrary regions of a page with a single stroke of their stylus. A more complete disclosure of the technique will be presented at Seventeenth Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST 2004), in Santa Fe, New Mexico on October 24 to 27."

pronobozo writes with a link to "a cool interface called LEMUR for controlling audio applications. 'LEMUR is a handy and modular touchpanel based controller designed for audio and multimedia real-time applications. Our technology associates multitouch capabilities with visual display. LEMUR is provided with an extensible library of User Interface Objects such as faders, switchs, pads, keyboards, strings, etc.'" It's also vaporware at this point, but looks cool enough I hope it really reaches the market early next year as the site promises.

Mike Bouma writes "Closely following the update for the AmigaOS4 Pre-release, the updated Software Development Kit (SDK) is now also available. Meanwhile some first people have been able to buy Mini-ITX MicroA1-C boards and last weekend at a British Amiga Party one was even raffled amongst its visitors. Also some first photographs of the Micro AmigaOne Industrial motherboard (aka u-A1-I) have been revealed at the party. For an impression with regard to AmigaOS4's current state of development, within this recent show report there are links to some earlier demonstration videos."

man_ls writes "The University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute is working with the U.S. Joint Forces Command to harness supercomputer power, to simulate a virtual continent for use in urban battlefield situations. The simulation, set in the year 2015, involves 100,000 entities to simulate, although the system can support more than a million."

swsuehr (Steve Suehring) writes "Knowing that Jeremy Zawodny works with MySQL in a highly demanding environment at Yahoo! Finance, I have to admit that I was somewhat anxious to crack open a copy of the book High Performance MySQL published by O'Reilly and written by Jeremy and Derek J. Balling. With such high expectations, it would be easy to be disappointed with the content or level of the material in the book. Far from disappointing, High Performance MySQL was exactly what I had hoped it would be and more." Read on for the rest of Suehring's review.

News for nerds writes "It was just 3 weeks ago that we learned IBM's BlueGene/L with 36.01 TFlops edged out NEC's Earth Simulator, but today NEC announces a new SX-8 supercomputer with a peak processing performance of 65 TFlops (press release). It may be available in the U.S. as Cray's OEM like SX-6."

26199 writes "The BBC is reporting on an interesting product from Google -- a shiny yellow box to add to your server rack. The box is a Linux computer, and it provides Google search facilities for your company's intranet. Just remember to think about the security implications before you install one... the article does a good job of discussing the risks." As the article points out, in-house google boxes are not a brand-new product, but now they're pushing them harder.

carbolic writes "Remember the Bluetooth records where we 'modded an adapter' and connected to a cell phone first from 1 kilometer, then from 1 mile away? Popular Science has the hack in the November issue (or online now) with instructions. Additional step-by-step is laid out here for USB, and and here for PCMCIA. Soldering is required, but come on - you can't be a true geek without learning to solder."

s3k writes "Firingsquad.com takes a look at nVidia's new nForce4 chip. It now includes a hardware-based firewall for improved CPU utilization, support for Serial ATA 3 Gigabytes/second hard drives, Gigabit Ethernet, and most importantly, 20-lane PCI Express. Firingsquad includes game performance numbers with nForce4 Ultra and a few performance notes on nForce4 SLI, which, according to nVidia will need a 550-watt power supply!" pacmanfan adds a link to PC Perspective's article (including benchmarks), Necroman points out the coverage at Bjorn3d and Anandtech, and Atif Butt would like you to check ATIF Approved for their take. The same boards, the same NDA -- don't be surprised to find the reviews cover similar ground, and are mostly positive.

Eugenia writes "MobileBurn published a review of Motorola's A768i, the Linux-based smartphone that employs a PDA-style form factor. It may not have much in the way of photo-taking abilities, but the A768i might be the thing for business users as it excels in the phone/messaging category."

CrzyP writes "AnandTech.com has benchmarked the new "Athlon 64 4000+ and the FX-55" in various areas including business application performance, audio/video, gaming, and much more in this first look at AMD's newest 64bit chips. Just after AMD's announcement, AnandTech posted this article to help consumers choose between Intel and AMD."

vasqzr writes "Apple has announced new iBooks. New features include G4 processor up to 1.33GHz, built-in wireless networking capability, a DVD-burning SuperDrive and up to 1.25GB of memory. G5 PowerBooks can only be closer...They also show a single processor 1.8GHz G5 PowerMac desktop for $1,499"

Eugenia writes "Facing stiff competition and low sales, a Sharp representative has informed InfoSyncWorld that the company has decided to fully withdraw its Zaurus SL line of Linux-based handhelds from the U.S. market and focus on its home market in Japan. The recent similar withdraws of Sony and Toshiba pretty much left PalmOne and RIM fighting alone HP and Dell in a saturated PDA market inundated with U.S. brands. People don't seem to be willing to pay a premium for gadgets and alternative systems, and primarily in the corporate market customers prefer to buy from the same suppliers as for their corporate hardware."

grazzy writes "Microsoft is set to release its Windows Media Center Extender for Xbox mid-November. The device will allow you to view recorded and downloaded media content stored on your PC via your Xbox.""

backBeat writes "This is a descriptive article about one man and his dual monitor odyssey. After reading the snippet I had to read the article: "The productivity increase lasted for about two days. At this point I realized that I could to work on one monitor and watch a full screen DVD on the other. This was pretty cool until I realized how counterproductive it could be. Luckily I am quite adept at concentrating on my writing, while typing, while watching a movie." The Dual Monitor Experiment did not disappoint."

mpost4 writes "This last week the CMU Robotics Institute showed off some of the stuff they were doing. They were showing the new stuff they were working on. I with two of my coworks drop by there and we got this video of it, so you can see some of the cool stuff they are doing."

sushi writes "Australian IT is reporting that 'The British Library is creating an archive to store the emails of the nation's top authors and scientists, as the written word is replaced by electronic messages.' A spokeswoman says it welcomes emails from prominent people in all walks of life. "We want people with a canon of work behind them," she says. The article also talks of the need to read data from (now) obsolete computing platforms..."