Slashdot Mirror

Same with some links and a few extra comments (in []):

Panasonic Viera P905i ([A phone with 854 x 480 display] Think of it as the world's smallest "big-screen" TV)
Raon Everun UMPC (Ultra-mobile PC - a micro laptop)
Samsung 'Soul' SGH U900 [another phone]
NEC ValueStar W (Vista Media Centre that's extra quiet)
Toshiba ApriPoko Robot ([only a prototype?] This 11-inch-tall robot--which looks like the love child of a bird Pokemon and the Pillsbury Doughboy--is actually a voice-activated remote control)
Sony VAIO G2 [Google translation (super-light laptop with all the normal features)
Fujitsu F705i [thin waterproof cell phone]
Aigo USB Dongle (HD receiver [very small -- e.g., for laptops])
NEC LUI (LUI stands for "Life with Ubiquitous Integrated Solutions - basically a combination of media server and PDA or laptop)
Face Bank (Wave a coin in front of the bank's eyes (actually light sensors), and it opens wide to swallow your loose change. Afterward, it looks so pleased that you half expect it to emit a contented belch [okay -- this thing is REALLY weird])

I was going to recommend something like this basically.

If you drop the DVD-R requirement, any PDA or smartphone should do the trick, really. I recently got an HTC S730. The slide-out keyboard is actually pretty good for emails and notes, but I could imagine it'd get old pretty fast if your writing style approaches Neal Stephenson's levels of verbosity. As the parent suggests, this could solved with a bluetooth keyboard, although I'm yet to try that. Unlike the Nokia tablet however, this thing not only is a functional GSM phone, but also looks like one too. This means less attention to yourself since phones are much more common in 3rd world countries than shiny gadgets with huge touchscreens.

Still, if I were doing something like that, I'd probably also consider something more powerful. Like maybe a TyTN II, or better yet, something with a VGA screen. It's quite a bit more expensive than an S730, but also much more capable due to the tilting* touchscreen. I still have my old Asus A600 PDA, and there are things at which it's still much better than the S730. You could write your rants in a full office environment with something like SoftMaker Office, resize and edit the photos from your camera in PocketArtist before uploading them, etc.

I hope this doesn't sound like an ad, I've actually happily used all this stuff (except for the TyTN), and while I'm not sure if this would be my final choice for a trip like that, I'd certainly think about this solution.

PS. Looking at the HTC product listing, they also have some sort of weird laptop/tablet/PDA hybrid thingie called Shift which seems pretty small and light (7", 800g).

*The tilt feature could be useful if you put the device on the table while typing on the BT keyboard.

Actually both Asus and Gigabyte are shipping boards built using engineering samples (!!!). This is visible in the VR-Zone and OCWorkbench reviews, with the chips marked "Secret" "ES". This is a very dubious way to build a retail product.

A lot of services that need some sort of idenity block the IP address of every known Tor proxy. For example, Slashdot has the pink screen of death.

I've REALLY been looking at one of THESE for a while and this kinda just helped me make up my mind.

• K8VNXP VIA K8T800
  
• K8NNXP nForce3 150
  
• M1687 K8.
  
  Looking for a Linux/Windows/Mac admin/support tech monkey in the Los Angeles area? Please see my resume.

• K8VNXP VIA K8T800
  
• K8NNXP nForce3 150
  
• M1687 K8.
  
  Looking for a Linux/Windows/Mac admin/support tech monkey in the Los Angeles area? Please see my resume.

• K8VNXP VIA K8T800
  
• K8NNXP nForce3 150
  
• M1687 K8.
  
  Looking for a Linux/Windows/Mac admin/support tech monkey in the Los Angeles area? Please see my resume.

• K8VNXP VIA K8T800
  
• K8NNXP nForce3 150
  
• M1687 K8.
  
  Looking for a Linux/Windows/Mac admin/support tech monkey in the Los Angeles area? Please see my resume.

I haven't overclocked in a while, but I've always had the impression that AMD chips were more popular than Intel chips among overclockers, maybe because of the price difference - for a couple hundred dollars less, you can make them perform better than the equivalent Pentium. I think many, if not most of the people on the OCWorkBench forum use Athlons (as do I).

Yes, but the Abit MediaXP is a better solution. If you got the MAX line of motherboards of course.

Try the Senfu Super Box. I have one, and I think it's very useful. I keep a screwdriver in there, spare floppy, jumpers, pen for labelling CDs etc.

http://www.ocworkbench.com/hardware/senfu/senfubox /superbox1.htm
Lots of 'em.

found a nice article on how to choose a good PSU. I found this trying to find out why my CompUSA 400w wouldn't boot my Athlon1400/GeForce Ti4200, but another generic 300W would. Switched to an antec 400W (twice the amperage of the CompUSA) and she runs like a charm. Good info on how to calclulate TCO and what TCO should be acceptable (pretty low-tech, but I don't know a soldering iron from a telephone (but I do know what burned hair smells like))

If you have to be such a blatant karma-whore, at least get it right:

http://www.viahardware.com/ss51xpc_1.shtm
http://www.ocworkbench.com/2002/shuttle/ss51/ss51g p1.htm

a board with serial ATA....guess it's time to replace the 'ole AMD 450.

Here's some close-ups:
http://www.ocworkbench.com/2002/asus/p4s8x/p4s8xga llery2.htm

You could have MAME and other emulators running on it, and just connect up some Playstation controllers via a USB adaptor. Then it could double as a DVD/video/music system via an infrared remote control, cordless keyboard and/or mouse. It wouldn't be that expensive either as looking at the specs it looks most above are already taken care of. The only concern would be the noise generated but I don't know enough on that to comment. Maybe you could downclock the machine and use a smaller fan.

Anyone know the availability of these in Australia? I couldn't find anywhere via google that sold them locally.

Call me lazy, but I hate it when people spit out links without the HTML formatting. You expect me to go through the trouble of copying/pasting http://www.ocworkbench.com/2002/abit/at7/at7previe w1.htm into my location bar? Pfft.

On a more serious note, though, at the rate that companies have been spewing out USB devices, I'm surprised that a mobo manufacturer hasn't taken the hint to give us more USB ports before this point in time. I've been resorting to just switching in/out USB devices all the time just to function (yes, this means that I am too lazy to use a USB hub, yet I'll swap mobo's without thinking about it).

-Sou|cuttr

I built a K7S5A system for a friend, at the first go it couldn't install Windows, it turned out we had faulty RAM, so we replaced it, but problems persisted, went to the shop to had the thing looked; the motherboard was faulty. Got a new motherboard but even that didn't go smoothly. After spending 3 hours getting Windows installed, the system rebooted by itself and couldn't get back into Windows because of a corrupted registry file. I looked on the internet, and found this forum and it turns out the problem is widespread. Read especially this FAQ. K7S5A, blah.

I built a K7S5A system for a friend, at the first go it couldn't install Windows, it turned out we had faulty RAM, so we replaced it, but problems persisted, went to the shop to had the thing looked; the motherboard was faulty. Got a new motherboard but even that didn't go smoothly. After spending 3 hours getting Windows installed, the system rebooted by itself and couldn't get back into Windows because of a corrupted registry file. I looked on the internet, and found this forum and it turns out the problem is widespread. Read especially this FAQ. K7S5A, blah.

Try 2.8 GHz

Or why not 3.0!

-----

I am posting this on a new K7s5a with a 1GHZ AMD,
Unfortunately, you will probably have to get out the soldering iron and a 150-200 ohm SMD resistor to fix the board. Damn ECS is pretending the problem doesn't exist, but I have three K7S5A boards and three AMD CPUs saying otherwise. Grrr.

A K7S5A message board

From http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/01q2/010514/palomi no-09.html:

"AMD chose two notebook chipsets for Mobile Athlon 4 and Mobile Duron. It's ALi's MaGiK1 and VIA's KT133A chipset. The MAGiK1 is able to run with PC100/133 SDRAM as well as PC1600/2100 DDR SDRAM, but so far we weren't too convinced of its performance in desktop systems. VIA's KT133A is a good performer, but it does not come with DDR-SDRAM support."

Because of supposed performance problems no vendors have announced any laptops w/ ALi's chipset, so at this point in time the mobile Athlon, which is certainly *my* choice of a dream portable processor, is not being offered with DDR.

I really wish today we were seeing a mobile AMD 760 or SiS 735 DDR PC-2100 solution, but these chipsets do not have mobile versions.

Ideally we would be ogling the Athlon 4 on the nVidia "Crush" chipset. As I recall, Crush uses a 128 bit memory bus to DDR memory that allows for a hideous amount of low-latency bandwidth, something like 3.6 GB per second.

But I digress, it is enough to have a mobile Athlon solution that absolutely wipes the floor with anything offered by their x86 competitor. :) Good for AMD, today is another proud day for them. :)

And I am sorry if anyone misread my initial comment, DDR compatibility is a function of the chipset, not the processor. Hopefully with the other two explanations I have posted here this has been clarified for one and all. I am off to bed, this was a bitch of a day. ;)

yeah, OC Workbench has a little thing with a link to some high-magnification pictures of what can happen to your CPU if you don't treat it OK. Can you say "sliced Pentium"?

Members of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to CPUs (SPCC) should not look....! It looks like it could have hurt ("megahurt", as The Register has it).

Liquid cooling indeed. Why do I feel we have come full circle? I remember the liquid cooled machines at CERN - I thought we had gotten rid of those....

yeah, OC Workbench has a little thing with a link to some high-magnification pictures of what can happen to your CPU if you don't treat it OK. Can you say "sliced Pentium"?

Members of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to CPUs (SPCC) should not look....! It looks like it could have hurt ("megahurt", as The Register has it).

Liquid cooling indeed. Why do I feel we have come full circle? I remember the liquid cooled machines at CERN - I thought we had gotten rid of those....