Slashdot Mirror

> There was one reviewed on the register a little while ago.

Maplin currently sell a MIPS netbook running Linux for 170UKP:

http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?ModuleNo=225532&TabID=1&source=3&C=RSS

But the battery life is only 3 hours and it runs some form of ``locked-down'' OS; not entirely sure what that means:

http://labs.pcw.co.uk/2008/09/maplin-replies.html

Specs here:

http://194.150.201.35/cnmlifestyle/specification.htm

Here's a link to a copy of the article in Personal Computer World magazine, November 1996 which describes the research work done by Chris Winter and others at British Telecom's Martlesham Heath research labs on such a device.

http://www.pcw.co.uk/personal-computer-world/features/2045102/cutting-edge-futures-brain-drain

Never happened. Each time M$ tried, they got their noses rubbed in the pathetic insufficiency of their cruftware publicly :
http://www.pcw.co.uk/vnunet/news/2113313/hotmail-finally-move-windows x
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/12/12/microsoft_hotmail_still_runs/
http://www.geek.com/ms-and-unisys-dont-use-unix-except-now/

M$ set the server identification strings to say IIS and beyond that stopped trying to fool people about that years ago and hopes everyone just forgets.

Though just maybe the weasel word there is "relative". So yeah, on an absolute level it had its pants pulled down and was pushed over in front of a bunch of laughing girls, but relatively speaking (for M$) it went well.

Here is a Tom's Hardware Guide article that shows how to do it: http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/01/09/strip_out_t he_fans/index.html By the way, perhaps PCW wrote about this Very-PC oil submerged server on on 4 Apr 2007. "First oil submerged server to go on sale" http://www.pcw.co.uk/personal-computer-world/news/ 2187185/first-oil-submerged-server-sale This article also contains a link to a home enthusiast oil submerged PC.

MSDOS was originally a clone or CP/M with copyright problems of its own.

"Bill Gates saw the business opportunity of a lifetime. He obtained rights to a cloned design of CP/M, QDOS, from Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer products, licensed it to IBM, and MSDOS/IBMDOS was born. Later, IBM discovered that Gates' operating system could have infringement problems with CP/M, contacted Kildall, and in exchange for a promise not to sue, made an agreement that CP/M would be sold along with IBMDOS when the IBM PC was released. The price set by IBM for CP/M was $250 and for IBMDOS it was $40. IBM's decision to source its primary operating system from Microsoft was the beginning of the end of Digital Research's days as the world's largest manufacturer of software for microcomputers."

http://labs.pcw.co.uk/2006/11/microsoft_bows_.html

Silicon based life forms?

Not yet. Non-aqueous solvent life looks more promising in the Xenochemistry field, FWIW.

Tricorders?

Check.

Holidecks?

Check.

Deanna Troi android?

More or less, although it looks more like Keiko Ishikawa O'Brein.

And, of course, there's Hawking's remark about the Warp Core when touring the set of TNG's Engineering: "I'm working on that." And the resemblance between TOS communicators and modern cell phones.

Aren't you glad Star Trek had a generally utopian view of the future, instead of the common dystopian views? =)

Or even internet access. Value for £13.97 a month, Finest for £24.97 a month, and ordinary services for prices in between.

Yep, Siemen tech is probably using OLED
http://www.pcw.co.uk/personal-computer-world/news/ 2043277/paper-scroll

Here are some alternative reviews and piccies while the site is slashdoted: dutch site, uk site, toms hw, japan.

ok its a google search, but usefull

You'll have to find another way to compensate for your tiny penis. This model fan is apparently just that... a model. This guy says that the ginormous fan was just a model of the _real_ fans.

another website :
http://labs.pcw.co.uk/2005/05/computex_zalman.html

just the picture :
http://vnuuk.typepad.com/.shared/image.html?/photo s/uncategorized/zalman_fan_1.jpg

But it seems quite real (just 3 or 4 times higher compared to regular coolers) so it's maybe not the same we are speaking of. I can't tell, the link and coral links are /.ed

From what Ive HEard And Read (http://www.pcw.co.uk/news/1161455) The Blu-Ray Disks are scratch resistant. I also read something about this in Maximum PC a few months ago.

For what it's worth, the PlayStation 2 was incompatible with a handful of games for the PlayStation 1. Likewise, the Sony PSX and slim PlayStation 2 introduced hardware incompatibilities. Even the later revisions of the larger PS2 dropped the little-used FireWire port.

LCD panels, to me, have much higher contrast than any CRT I've ever looked at. The brightness and color purity also seem to be much higher overall.

Health benefits aside, LCD panels pull about a third of the power that a CRT monitor uses. This equates to an immediate savings in terms of less electricity used by the monitor, and (over the longer term) reduced air conditioning needs because of the reduced heat load. I suppose one could also make the connection that less electricity burned means less air pollution, assuming a fossil-fuel fired power plant.

All those government agencies who made the switch a few years back are probably getting to the point where the cost of energy saved more than made up for the higher cost of the initial crop of flat-panels.

I'm on my second LCD panel now. My first was an 18" Acer, the most recent one a 19" Samsung. Very nice stuff. I have not the slightest desire to change back to CRT.

Keep the peace(es).

There's also the BBC's Creative Archive, which is not yet launched.

iMP is just entering the second round of closed Beta testing I believe. It's not available for public Beta testing at this time.

I'd also recommend checking out some of the excellent historical footage on the British Pathe site. This archive is now represented by ITN.

To give you an idea of "How this can happen"

UK's NATS has had its share of problems. Their air traffic control system was supposed to go operation in 1996. Instead, the £623m Swanwick centre opened in 2002 - six years late and £180m over budget.

And the kicker at the end of the article, is that this brand new system is dependent upon an ancient mainframe! (the point of the article I linked to is that the mainframe is the bottleneck and problems bringing it online rippled out)

Of course, the US isn't any better. This one made Slashdot and I think the issue was that a technician forgot the reboot a windows pc (I SWEAR TO GORD I'm not making that up!).

The moral is; monolithic systems are hard. and not cheap.

Jim Allchin, a VP at Microsoft said so.

Hi, thanks for the reply, but there will be WiMax notebooks. A Google search on Wimax laptop brings up an article saying:
Intel plans to release WiMax laptop chipsets by 2006.

From what I've read think WiMax uses adaptive antenna technology to increase range and throughput, even in densely populated areas (the antenna actually is several antennae DSP to track a user). But from all I've read about it, there is just no mention of ad-hoc mode. Quite frustrating.

You can read a (very favourable) review of Ability Office here. In their monthly "best buys" guide, they actually rated it above Microsoft Office 2002.

And in this article he mentions "contract" 12 times, but only mentions copyright once, and that's only in regard to removing copyright statements. It's almost as if he is being coy -- making it sound as if there is copyright infringement without ever directly saying it. In other interviews, he also avoids the word, choosing instead words such as "infringing" and "Intellectual Property". The SCOvsIBM page makes a similar observation:

Uncertainty is sown by much discussion of the case in terms of vague or broad terms such as "intellectual property" or "all rights", rather than addressing specific contractual, copyright, patent, or trademark claims. On specific grounds, Caldera/SCO's complaint seems quite limited.

Do you really want to give SCO a new avenue by which to sue you? Given that SCO has not shown any evidence that anyone has infringed their copyrights, I don't see why you'd want to do that. SCO hasn't been exactly acting in good faith recently; I don't know if I'd trust any contracts they write up. Here's what Darl McBride says about SCO's use of contracts against their partners and customers:

Contracts are what you use against parties you have relationships with. From a legal standpoint, contracts end up being far stronger than anything you could do with copyrights.

Microsoft software is carefully designed to keep your company's valuable information in, and unauthorised people and viruses out.

"Many of the products we designed in the past have been less secure than they could have been because we were designing with features in mind rather than security," - Craig Mundie