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Fuel cells electrochemically convert fuel into electricity, without bothering with the awkward combustion process that dooms regular engines to inefficiency...

Learn more about fuel cells - read the whole article!

> Tom's Hardware Guide - Wait... there was some content on that page? Let me check again...

This is why Dan's Data is pretty much the only hardware site I read. Obviously he doesn't review as much stuff as Tom, but his reviews are very detailed and his writing style is quite enjoyable. Only rarely is there more than one page (but it's one real page... with enough content to stimulate your brain, or something like that), and elsewhere on his site he encourages you to block his ads :)

All in all, if his RSS feed isn't in your feed reader, you should add it. :)

No sound, no buy.

I can see them sticking a speaker which would play back some real sounds, something like what they did on this thing, but that's not gonna do it.

This [link to reciprocating saw] can fix anything.

Unfortunately, it can't fix the damage you did to your office equipment (from the perspective of your employer). Companies are often irrationally resistant to non-destructive, 100% reversible alterations to office equipment, but they are 100% rationally resistant to destructive, irreversible alterations to office equipment.

The trick is to work within the system you're given, adding things you can remove, and removing things you can put back later. Other commenters have suggested basic upgrades along these lines, like keyboard trays, shelving, etc., and these are great ideas. A few more simple thoughts from my personal experience:

1. Ergonomic keyboard. Cheaper than an ergonomic chair, but almost as useful. Forcing your hands into a more reasonable position for typing marathons can have (positive) ripple effects throughout your posture and musculature. Some swear by the Kinesis keyboards (my advisor has the "keys-in-a-bowl" version), but these will set you back almost as much as a chair, so I settle for the venerable MS Natural Keyboard (mine is an OEM version of the Pro, resold at Fry's for about $15).
2. Move your desk. If you can't change anything else about your desk, hopefully you can position it so that it's not backed up to a wall. This gives your eyes a different distance at which to focus when you glance away from your monitor (assuming your boss allows you to do this).
3. Hack your furniture. Not applicable if you really just have a big lab-bench-style desk, but for those who are living in Hermann Miller Hell® (a.k.a. a cubicle farm), there are lots of ways you can reconfigure your space, given the right hex driver. Half-walls, shelving, whiteboards--there are cube modules for all of these. Even if your employer didn't spring for all these fancy parts (the office furniture equivalent of purchasing exclusively the "boring" LEGO sets containing only 2x4 bricks (tall)), there are still hacks to be had. At a previous job we connected desks to wall sections out-of-phase, so we could have half-width wall sections cut open between cubicles (for a little bit of collaboration without reverting to an open bullpen layout, or to suspend other improvised half-height divider panels).
4. Use spare moving boxes to create dynamic and interesting office furnishings. OK, this one's a joke (mostly).

Or something like it. Put a few metal plates inside of poorly colored case and you've got a miracle Electro Magnetic canceling device!

The one site in particular that sticks out in my mind has having particularly bad design is MySpace. Total information overload, poor organization of content, and horrible horrible backend code (servers are slow as molasses, and my sessions are frequently expired inexplicably).

I understand that it's a 'community' site, but I honestly don't feel a part of that at all. It's difficult to build a huge online community unless users can selectively segregate themselves into groups. This is part of the reason why Facebook and Flickr are both extremely successful.

Granted, there are ugly sites with truly great content that balances out the fact that the site's rather ugly. Likewise, there are a host of very pretty sites that are lacking in the content department.

Although I used to consider myself more of an content guy and the type of guy who uses the command line for most tasks, I find myself gravitating toward sites that although they may not offer as many features, are easier to use, and are visually appealing. Flickr is probably the best example of this. With CSS, there is no excuse to have a poorly designed site. CSS makes it ridiculously easy to propogate an attractive design across your entire site. If you already know basic HTML, you can pick up all the CSS you need to know in a few days. Likewise, CSS also means people can finally stop using Photoshop as a design tool.

With CSS, formerly ugly sites can make themselves pretty with very little effort. Slashdot went to great lengths with their stylesheet to make sure they preserved the old ugly layout.

They are smaller, they are lighter, energy density is pretty good, and the devices they are meant to power (predominantly cameras & cell phones) tend to be replaced every two to four years by consumers anyway when Newer! Faster! Better! appears on the scene for about what was paid in the first place. My DSC-U30 takes NiMH AAA batteries and I'm thrilled with it. My DSC-F707 takes a proprietary Li-Ion but I found a newly manufactured copy on eBay for like sixteen bucks shipped to replace the 4-year-old used thing that I purchased it with, so I'm happy. More fun battery rant info can be found here.

Here's a great review of a previous generation of this kind of thing.

http://dansdata.com/pornsweeper.htm

> People, for $100 you can buy yourself a kickass set of headphones, that won't only be well suited for playing games but for enjoying music aswell.

Even for $20, you can have a good headphones. I recommend the Sennheiser HD201s... they're $20 and they sound excellent. I use them when I'm on the train or whatever since they sound decent and block out noise. At home, I use the Sennheiser HD600s (which are like $300, but you get what you pay for) and Beyerdynamic DT880s, which are also wonderful.

I don't play a lot of games, but I noticed that positional audio in games like UT2004 is MUCH BETTER when you have phones that can reproduce all frequencies at a consistent volume (and keep the two channels in phase).

My guess, though, is that these $99 headphones are crap compared to the $20 senns. (BTW, if you don't want to spend quite as much as the HD600s, the HD555 is good too and about $100 cheaper.)

Also, I tend to trust headphone reviews at http://www.dansdata.com/, if you're looking for intelligent reviews before buying.

I think it's obvious to all of us that the NIC is certainly not the weakest link in a connection. I know there has been some effort to produce NICs that handle the TCP/IP stack onboard, thus reducing the load on the CPU, but the potential difference between NICs is on the order of microseconds, if not less!

For those of you looking for quite entertaining reviews of products that are quite obviously scams like this, I highly recommend articles like this one on Dan's Data

I think it's obvious to all of us that the NIC is certainly not the weakest link in a connection. I know there has been some effort to produce NICs that handle the TCP/IP stack onboard, thus reducing the load on the CPU, but the potential difference between NICs is on the order of microseconds, if not less!

For those of you looking for quite entertaining reviews of products that are quite obviously scams like this, I highly recommend articles like this one on Dan's Data

Nonsense. See, for example, http://www.dansdata.com/gz013.htm

I would recommend the Lian Li PC70 case... or buying external drives. =)

So, the Sun server may not be as cheap as building a system out of spare parts lying around in your basement, but it really is pretty cheap compared to the competition in that space.

Already been done by logitech http://www.dansdata.com/ifeel.htm

I dont think you know what you're talking about. There are plenty of ways to get frags by exploiting game bugs instead of being skillful. -- I can get man of the match in many games by just being lame, but thats boring.

* lining the exits of the spawn with mines in enemy territory - no way around that but wait for a team player to step on them and get killed.

* Hiding in places where the player has to walk past but turn around to see you with a rocket launcher

* Being shot with the missile launcher as you spawn in doom3 (no delay before you can be damaged)

* Camping in a single convenient location to frag

* Throwing non stop granades while re-supplying yourself with more (being a field ops)

* Using anti tank weapons while hiding in a different place each time to blow up an enemy engineer from the back

Also read this: http://dansdata.com/t2bastard.htm

Bottomline is there are thousands of ways you can get a shitload of frags by just being lame, not skillful.

I find Microsoft tools like VS.net and even some of their languages (C#) to be surprisingly good.

Compared to what? You haven't used Eclipse, have you? I use both Eclipse and VS.Net 2003 at work, and VS.Net is "good enough" as an IDE but miles away from the productivity you get from Eclipse.

Not only is Eclipse one of the best IDE's out there, it is free/open source and available for multiple platforms. And it's not just for Java, it also does C/C++. And there are plugins for Python, PHP, Ruby, etc.

1) Hardware (keyboards, mice, ...)
certain Microsoft things like Natural Keyboards

I used a Microsoft Natural Pro (the only good one they made) for over a year, but soon realized what an inferior keyboard it was when I tried some older non-split keyboards. But that really applies to most keyboards made these days, they are almost all crap. Pick up a buckling spring keyboard from here and you'll find your typing speed and comfort increase. They are not as loud as you'd think either (maybe the original IBM's were), but they do sound different.

Microsoft's recent keyboards have one incredibly stupid "feature": no Insert key. Need I say more?

I've used plenty of Microsoft mice, from the standard white ones (which weren't too terrible) that used to come with most PC's, to the Intellimouse's (total crap). The Intellimouse I had at work, despite looking cool and having a bunch of fance buttons, was two heavy and did not fit my hand correctly, I eventually ditched it and brought in a Logitech I had at home. All the Logitech mice I have used have been better than any mouse Microsoft has produced. Right now I'm using an MX310 which is great if you don't mind that its not wireless.

Microsoft's products (hardware and software) are "good enough" but not certainly not "great," especially when you compare them to what else is out there. It's hard to realize this if you haven't experienced much else.

My electric shaver recharges this way, and i've been wondering why we don't just have a pad that we can toss our electric gadgets onto for recharging.

My wish has been granted!

As for efficiency, I'll refer you to DansData, because he knows the answer to everything.
  Your Answer Here

The only PSU that ever died on me was the most expensive one:
Topower 420. It was in my gaming PC to protect the expensive components. I turn that machine on once a week at best. And no, it wasn't the dust that killed it - it popped a cap and was completely dust free. I also have a no-name PSU that cost me $30 with the case that has been on since mid 2000 (Linux server) with no problems.

Check out the Ghetto UPS which I believe has been discussed here before.
Warning: building something like will probably kill you and others through electrocution, fire, or something completely unexpected.

http://www.dansdata.com/images/buildpc/320/hemosta t.JPG

Useful for moving jumpers, developed for holding blood vessels in surgery.

Yes there is. See Dan's Data which links to a few, such as Unicomp. I've got an original Model M, but you may need to modify it for recent mobos.

And just for the record, there are several other places to get that unmistakable buckling-spring feel:

http://www.cvtinc.com/products/keyboards/menu.htm CVT's Avant models (I'm typing this on an Avant Prime and it feels just like the Model M I use at home)

http://www.pckeyboard.com/customizer.html PC Keyboard, already mentioned in parent of this

http://www.mck142.com/ The Ortek MCK-142 monster with programmable function keys

http://www.cherrycorp.com/english/classic-line/key board-standard-g80-3000.htm Cherry G80, mechnical, but I'm not sure how close to the Model M feel it has...

http://www.ergocanada.com/products/keyboards/dsi_s mk85_compact.html A compact model using ALPS keyswitches. Similar to the Model M style switches.

http://www.ergo-2000.com/ergo2000/showdetl.cfm?&DI D=6&Product_ID=624&CATID=36 Northgate Omnikey models are largely discontinued, but here's an ergo one still being sold using Alps keyswitches. You can also try ebay http://search-desc.ebay.com/omnikey_W0QQftsZ2 for used or remaindered Omnikeys.

Finally, just for learning about the buckling spring/clicky keyboards, here are some great sites for details:
http://www.clickykeyboards.com/
http://www.dansdata.com/ibmkeyboard.htm
http://thesiliconunderground.editthispage.com/2001 /02/08

And for those of you wondering why several of us are going on and on about decades-old keyboards from IBM, you owe it to yourself to at least try one of these and see what you think. Yes, they are noisier than those squishy membrane ones, but the feedback from them is amazing and you get to the point of blazing over them and often catching many typos by sound alone...

I have such a mouse but Logitech discontinued it. (picking a random google result)
http://www.dansdata.com/ifeel.htm

It vibrated over icons,menus etc. As I use OS X now, the desktop software only exists for Win32 so its a basic mouse.

Never to mention, as all logitech stuff, its working for straight 6 years :) Now getting used to using a trackball (optical) again logitech.

Yes, that was a Logitech mouse as well. I was a bit sorry that it didn't really catch on.

Fake! Just search for "atom chip"

Beer and keyboards don't mix. I spilled nearly a pint on mine and its tough working with it now. I won't give it up because its one of those old IBM keyboards and I just love it. But man its tough typing without arrow keys, a backspace and some letters. Reminds me of that Simpsons bit:

Marge: You know Homer, the "E" doesn't work on that typewriter

Homer: We don't need no stinkin' "E"! Ok, "Food Box: Go or No Go" by Homer..no, Earl..no, Bill Simpson!

Posted anonymously (no karma whoring).

Daniel Rutter discusses this in the following article...Minnows 1, whales 0.

1. Keep it small.
2. Keep it specialised.

In the beginning, there was one button. Then there were two. Then there were clickable scroll wheels and programmable toggles and solid-state slides. But nobody made a mouse as easy to use as your Mac.

As the proud owner of a Powerbook, I have to say that the traditional Microsoft optical mouse was pretty damn close, and should have become standard issue on all PCs after it was released.

Dude, I recall some image of a keyboard with two of those eraser like pointers, the keys were mounds, trackers in teh center.

Also, Acer has a keyboard with booblike wrist-rests!

If anyone cares, here's a (good!) review.

$200 but worth very penny. It is also pretty quiet compared to other cases I have used.

Pshaw. You don't need nanotunnels or anything like that to build a better fan. [1] [2]. Check it out. It has a neat "man, I wish I'd thought of that" feel to it.

--grendel drago

You are forgetting the anti-freeze to kill off those nasty algae.

But then again...after you dump the warm water outside, you can probably kiss your lawn goodbye.

You're full of it. No 5-year old PC motherboard can possibly support an AGP 4x or higher graphics card. Might as well chuck out that whole PC if you want a new graphics card.
not that i support the grandparent poster, id just like to make you realise youre a moron too

A7V, note the agp 4x support
a review, note the date. now this wasnt the first mobo to support agp 4x, not by a long shot. only reason i use it as an example is i owned one so i knew you were wrong.

so anyhow, what was that about no 5 year old mobo supporting agp 4x?

One caveat: they can be a bit shorter than "true" AAAA cells. This site details the trials and tribulations of finding a decent set of AAAAs in a review of a penlight using the same; it contains some nice pictures of opening a 9 volt battery case, too.

Was the most expensive one:
Topower 420
It was in my gaming PC to protect the expensive components. I turn that thing on once a week at best. I also have a no-name PSU that cost me $30 with the case that has been on for the past five years with zero problems. Go figure.

Also, check this review for another unusual keyboard.

I can't believe nobody has posted the above info yet. Slashdot has really gone downhill as of late.

It's no dual Opteron server, but this Dan's Data article reviews what are probably the cheapest 1U servers you can buy. Definitely something to consider of you're going for cheap.

1) The main factor for making something "seem small" is to make it thin. The 15" Powerbook is actually quite large, but because it's thin it seems small. This thing is 3/4" thick.

2) Brighthand seemed to indicate that it would make a good portable storage device for your digital camera. I don't get that either. The casual photographer who might want to offload vacation pictures isn't likely to buy a $500 device to do so. You can buy a lot of huge SD cards for $500. The professional photographer, who WOULD find this device useful, all use cameras that use CompactFlash. If this USB-thing Brighthand mentions actually works, then maybe--but the idea of having a seperate device is to pull out the card, put it in the device, replace the card with another card, and keep shooting. Also less than 4GB isn't much when you're dealing with 4-7MB RAW files (which I guarantee the LifeDrive app won't be able to read, although it may be able to pull out the JPEG preview). This may be quite the swell device for a Brighthand reviewer, but that's a terribly small niche market.

3) What is the deal with WiFi on PDAs? People are obsessive about this, just as they all clamor for megapixel cameras on their cell phones. WiFi is a power hog. If I wanted to use WiFi on a Palm, I'd go for one of the Enfora portfolios where I don't have to use my Palm's battery. Battery life is king on a PDA. At some point you would do better to simply go with a 12" Powerbook or iBook, and a 3/4" thick device with WiFi but no keyboard is probably that point. (And getting a megapixel camera on your phone is stupid so long as the image is taken through a shitty, fixed focus plastic lens. You get more blurry pixels--that's a Big Win there, chief.)

4) Too expensive. I understand that in order to offer all these goodies, you have to charge for them, but if you drop this thing on the ground, or into the toilet, you've just ruined a $500 device. Everybody's tolerance is different, but for me, $200-ish dollars is that cutoff where I feel like I can replace 2 or 3 devices a year and not feel royally screwed. If I have a $500 device, I'm less likely to take it somewhere out of fear of busting it.

5) Related to 4), but unrelated to the LifeDrive; professional reviewers suck for this reason: they didn't have to buy the damn thing with their money, so they aren't interacting with the device like other people would. If a professional reviewer accidentally sits on the fucking thing, they just phone up Palm and say, "Oopsie, send me another please." They also tend to parrot specs and press release material, and are pathologically uncritical. I've hardly ever seen a review where the reviewer revisits the device after using it for a few months--mostly because after the initial review, the reviewer has moved on to using whatever the next latest-and-greatest toy is, because, you know, everybody has endless time and money to constantly upgrade. Jesus Christ, I'm still using a IIIxe because it works, it's reliable, and I'm not swimming in free time and cash. (The best reviewer in the world is probably Dan even though he does have goodies provided to him on occasion.)

6) No poofters.

When I can get one of these in the US for less than $100, then I will agree. Until then, there is more mass to be had before criticality.

Flashing your pinky is definitely more convenient than spelling your name or getting a card out of your wallet. But that's identification, not authentication.

And are you certain that nobody can pick up your hair from the pavement, clone it in their kitchen, then spray it at a crime scene ?

In related news, hand-transplant surgeons, fearing that their profession might become illegal under the proposed biometric ID plan, are protesting worldwide.

But if you're naive about the net and you go online maybe once a month...then you're a raw piece of meat in a pool full of sharks.

I am one of those naive that really don't have a clue what hardware review sites to trust. My comfort is that I am probably far from alone, in this matter.

To assist me and other naives(sp?), please join this silly poll and review the following sites (regarding credibility) with a scale ranging from 1 to 10, where 1 is "No credibility at all" and 10 is "Perfect credibility, these guys wouldn't post a biased review for world domination":

About PC Hardware Reviews
Ace's Hardware
Anandtech
Ars Technica
Beyond 3D
Cnet Reviews
Dan's Data
Dev Hardware
Extremetech
Firingsquad
[H]ard|OCP
Hardware Analysis
Hardwarecentral
Hardwarezone
IT Reviews
OcPrices
Overclockers.com
ProCooling.com
The Tech Report
The Tech Zone
Tom's Hardware
TrustedReviews
Viperlair
Xtreme Resources

If you know only a few of them, give your opinion on those.

Maybe someone with the right facilities could set up an independent poll?

Another idea might be to roll your own. This would involve buying a large-capacity 12V power supply capable of running from whatever voltage/frequency combination you'll have in Africa and a high-capacity inverter here in the US, shipping them to Africa, and using them to create a UPS together with car batteries purchased locally. If you have some hardware and driver experience, you could probably create an automatic shutdown system without much trouble, and might even be able to create an automated battery-maintenance system which delivers a slightly higher charge every few months to prevent sulfation (discussed in the linked article). This setup has the advantage of being a true UPS: it will provide power filtering and protection up to the point where either the battery goes dead or the battery chargers take one for the team and catch on fire. Also, it's incredibly scalable; with enough batteries, you could run a computer room for weeks without power.

And if you consider it important enough to spend money on, you can buy a gadget to insure exactly that. (Thanks to Dan Rutter for his reviews of this and other cool geeky toys.)

And if you consider it important enough to spend money on, you can buy a gadget to insure exactly that. (Thanks to Dan Rutter for his reviews of this and other cool geeky toys.)

Anandtech do some pretty reasonable guides. They assume you've been following industry trends but I'm in the same boat as you - I went from a Celeron 400 to a P4 2.6 overclock - that took quite a bit of homework to research.

They have four main guides that they update every month or so: cheap, medium ( = reasonably high end), gamer-money-no-object (admittedly rather old now, from Nov 04), and overclock-city (very old - Sep 04). The theory is that they periodically review one of their guides and make sure it's up to date. Clearly some guides get reviewed more often than others.

I also used to go to Dans Data but I think he's too busy reviewing toys, moving house and having a girlfriend nowadays.

Hope this helps.

Aegilops

Anandtech do some pretty reasonable guides. They assume you've been following industry trends but I'm in the same boat as you - I went from a Celeron 400 to a P4 2.6 overclock - that took quite a bit of homework to research.

They have four main guides that they update every month or so: cheap, medium ( = reasonably high end), gamer-money-no-object (admittedly rather old now, from Nov 04), and overclock-city (very old - Sep 04). The theory is that they periodically review one of their guides and make sure it's up to date. Clearly some guides get reviewed more often than others.

I also used to go to Dans Data but I think he's too busy reviewing toys, moving house and having a girlfriend nowadays.

Hope this helps.

Aegilops

DUH the test was a waste of time and everyone here already knew it was BS, but people, have you SEEN the "cow taser" page linked to from the review article?!! I think I just pissed myself from laughing so hard.

Then it wasn't exactly a waste of time, was it?

Part of the reason people read Dan's stuff (just in case anyone missed the main link to his site) is his entertaining writing style. I almost always learn something from his articles, even if it's got nothing to do with what the article's supposedly about. Dan is obviously fully in on the joke himself or he wouldn't even be linking to things like cow tasers in his articles. It's people like you - who think reviews have to be a "waste of time" simply because the products in question are such obvious bunk - who don't seem to quite get it.

In a world where product reviews often offer little or not information at all, and where the strongest and most specific statement you might read is how one product or another is vaguely "generally good", writers like Dan are a refreshing change - he writes pieces that are always entertaining in and of themselves, often more informative than they need to be, and with plenty of useless but interesting trivia to keep you interested when the product in question is less than worthwhile. I only wish he'd review more stuff that I'm actually interested in buying (though I've become interested in buying a few things I would never have even known about but for his review).

As for this particular review, I think it's worth reminding the Slashdot crowd of the dangers of pseudo-science every now and again - pseudo-scientific articles do occasionally slip through the editing process here, and are often accepted as fact.

I agree of course the sticker is garbage, but his testing was quite poor. His four tests used 3 different charging times. The first two trials he did an overnight charge. The third test was the official charge time. The only test with the sticker was 2 hours longer than the official charge time. If you look at his test results, The battery lasts longer with the sticker than a shorter charge but not as long as with a longer charge. He didn't really prove anything. Just that a shorter charge with the sticker isn't as good as a longer charge without the sticker.