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OK so the drive is really cute, especially next to that coin. But I drop my phone about once a month, in haste I've slammed my Palm into a phone booth wall, and I keep my MP3 player in my sweaty pocket at the gym. Is it just me, or does little moving parts and sensitive magnetic equipment not seem to mesh well with these environments?

I couldn't find an article about Turbolinux, but on the same new site there is an article about migrating to ipv6. It is pretty cool

AFAIK, there have been lots of reports on single-electron transitor for several years.

Though not ready for production, actual implementation do exist today, and since transitor has more area in application, memory-only device at atomic scale is not a news.

Try "googling" with "single-electron transistor SET", and you should find tons of resources on this topic.

• http://luciano.stanford.edu/~shimbo/set.html
• http://www.nikkeibp.asiabiztech.com/nea/200103/ale rt_124812.html

Here's an article with barcharts showing that Sony's electronics business lost money while the game business made money. So the PS2 profits could be larger than net Sony profits.

Seriously doubt the validity of this one.

Try this one instead, then. It claims the opposite - that Quantas has had trouble, and they're losing the iMac production contract.

In a better world, this would be turn out to be something relatively toothless, like the "copying allowed" bit that's present (though always ignored) even in the current CD Audio spec.

But odds are it'll be something horrible in the hardware. Then I won't mind that this format is probably going to die a lingering death.

Is anybody going to come out with a format that's as free as CD-R with more capacity?

Ironically, if anyone does it's going to be a country as un-free as China, which makes a lot of $$$ off SVCD.

Except that the Chinese Communist Party and the RIAA would probably get along too well. They have hobbies in common-- like the whole ruthless-monopoly-on-power thing...

Sony Recalls Crusoe Notebooks after NEC

November 30, 2000 (TOKYO) -- A defect in a certain manufacturing batch of U.S. Transmeta Corp.'s energy-saving "Crusoe" microprocessors has affected major PC makers in Japan. Sony Corp. confirmed the defect after NEC Corp. decided recall.

The defect was identified in the "TM5600" Crusoe microprocessor that operates at a clock speed of 600MHz. When a certain set of conditions (such as the operating voltage) are met, the Level 2 cache operates in error.

Hitachi Ltd., which just launched its model with that version of Transmeta's CPU on Nov. 27, said it is making utmost efforts to identify the problem.

Full story at http://www.asiabiztech.com/wcs/frm/leaf?CID=onair/ asabt/cover/118386

A nice link to a readable and somewhat technical overview of fuel cells.
http://www.memagazine.org/contents/current/feature s/pems/pems.html

A nice Scientific American article.
http://www.sciam.com/explorations/122396exploratio ns.html

Two nice links to NEC's proton polymer battery.
Asian Biz Tech article.
EE Times article (short and sweet).

I'm still waiting for the car that runs on happy thoughts and chocolate that John Stewart promised me.

Then, try this one

Some figures from the article:
NEC's proton polymer battery, however, offers a power density of 1,000W/kg and a weight energy density of 10-20Wh/kg - a reasonable combination of power density and weight energy density. Performance is roughly midway between existing double-layer capacitors and batteries.

____________________

Here is a more recent article (August 2000), so it appears to be truthful. It includes more correct info pertaining to power vs. energy density as well.

The power density is high for this material, NOT the ENERGY DENSITY. Power density is a measurement of high-current discharge per unit of time per unit of volume(or weight).

The power density for these devices is in excess of 1,000 Watts/Kg, much higher than the few hundred for lead acids/NiCd's etc. Although--- the energy density of the NEC proton batteries is still rather dissapointing at 10-15 WattHours/Kg compared to the 20-30 WattHours/Kg of lead-acids'. But since it's such a new technology IMHO there is much prospect for improvment in this area, and getting competitive(in terms of batteries) energy densities out of these things is only a matter of time.

There is an article in the "Nikkei BP AsiaBizTech" site here: http://www.nikkeib p.a siabiztech.com/nea/200008/cmpo_108677.html

For many people not wedded to the desktop metaphor, the cellular phone route is much more convenient as an internet appliance than personal computers or their retarted cousins, the set-top box. NTT DoCoMo has had great success with i-MODE, which unlike WAP uses HTML. 2 Million people have signed up so far since service started this year.

It looks like millions of first-time internet users in Japan are taking advantage of some basic server-side services to leapfrog the whole modem thing. Check out Mobile Phone Subscribers to Eclipse NTT's Fixed Telephone Customers. And what can you do with an i-MODE phone? Internet-Capable Mobile Phones Support Games, Music, E-Commerce. And what do you care, anyway? DoCoMo plans i-MODE everywhere. These phones are all under 70g and 70cc. In other words, smaller and lighter than your average Snickers bar. Small screens though :) Next up: high-bandwidth streaming video and music, color displays, Java, etc.

By the way, some simple ideas like Motorola's iTAP can reduce keypad time. And of course new phones have basic voice recognition already.

For many people not wedded to the desktop metaphor, the cellular phone route is much more convenient as an internet appliance than personal computers or their retarted cousins, the set-top box. NTT DoCoMo has had great success with i-MODE, which unlike WAP uses HTML. 2 Million people have signed up so far since service started this year.

It looks like millions of first-time internet users in Japan are taking advantage of some basic server-side services to leapfrog the whole modem thing. Check out Mobile Phone Subscribers to Eclipse NTT's Fixed Telephone Customers. And what can you do with an i-MODE phone? Internet-Capable Mobile Phones Support Games, Music, E-Commerce. And what do you care, anyway? DoCoMo plans i-MODE everywhere. These phones are all under 70g and 70cc. In other words, smaller and lighter than your average Snickers bar. Small screens though :) Next up: high-bandwidth streaming video and music, color displays, Java, etc.

By the way, some simple ideas like Motorola's iTAP can reduce keypad time. And of course new phones have basic voice recognition already.

Ken Kutaragi, CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. and former manager of Sony's Playstation research and development, is known to be interested in Linux and the possibility of encouraging other parts of Sony to adopt their new CPU e.g. for embedded systems products. However, a recent interview with Kutaragi by NikkeiBP showed his initial goal is limited to using Linux only as a development environment to create software for the Playstation. Look up Sony!

Real-Time Linux + PSX CPU would be a great environment for embedded systems. Sony should realise the opportunities and start marketing in the next year or two before the price/performance advantage is lost. Sony could get Linux ported to the PSX with absolutely minimal investment assuming they gave adequate technical documentation to the open source community. Perhaps somebody in Sony (Japan) will read this and take up the suggestion.

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