Thin And Light - Ultraportable Laptops by Sean Nicholls
In recent years, the big players in the laptop arena (Sony, Toshiba, HP, IBM, etc.) have begun producing ever more portable laptop computers, weighing in as little as 2.8 pounds and offering as much as 9 hours playback. Often portability would come at the cost of sacrificing functionality in... Pros: Stylish in silver and red models Decent battery life Integrated supermulti-drive Reasonable price point 6-in-1 media card reader Wireless 802.11a/b/g and Bluetooth 2.0 +EDR Cons: Hard to find replacement or increased capacity battery Windows XP (free upgrade to Vista Home...

What You Need to Know About Networking by Alex Lakatos
Because networking is a relatively young science, it borrows language from other disciplines. Many networking terms come from the realm of physical transportation—terms such as bridge, hub, port, routing, and switching. That borrowing is apt. Just as the transportation revolution, and especially... • Improvements in routing and switching gear: For example, switches with in-line power, which allow placement of wireless LAN access points and IP phones anywhere there's a network jack, without external power.

How To Choose The Best Gaming Laptop by Titus Hoskins
The gaming laptop is coming of age! It is steadily increasing in popularity as performance quality goes up. Gamers now regularly consider laptops or notebooks when searching for that perfect gaming machine. With each new generation of notebooks we are seeing some novel breakthroughs: dual core... It will give you higher performance at a lower power level, saving battery power. ... Serial ATA hard drives uses less power and are ideal for notebook computers, they are also more advanced than PATA hard drives which uses multipe streams of data -- go figure!

Seven Things to Consider When Choosing a PDA by Jason Kohrs
In the early days, Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) were not much more than glorified calculators with the ability to store contact information and brief notes. Now, the line between personal computer and personal digital assistant is blurred thanks to the advanced capabilities of these useful... WiFi will not only allow compatible devices to exchange files, but the high speed will make streaming media and web surfing convenient at home, or at the numerous wireless “hot spots” popping up in public/commercial settings.

Can Hard Drive Phones KILL THE iPod? by Daniel Dwase
A new wave of mobile phones equipped with tiny yet powerful hard disk drives is threatening to put an end to the meteoric rise of the iPod as the public's favourite portable digital music player. When you look at the typical consumer, there are three things that they may come back to their house... Since HDDs used in hadnsets incorporate the same moving parts found in PC and laptop disks, engineers have had to add a series of drop accelaration sensors designed to detect when the phone is starting to fall to the floor and automatically switch off power to the hard drive.

RFID: When You Don't Even Know It's There by Andy Reed
RFID (Radio Frequency ID) enables wireless data capture and transaction processing. Our last column discussed proximity applications, used primarily for access control. This time, we'll take a look at what are broadly defined as vicinity, or long-range applications, used for product tracking,... A central computer can control access, not just to locked doors but to other items or products in a home: computers, a liquor cabinet, dangerous tools (power saws, etc.), or even a gun cabinet. ... While some might cost more than the systems they replace, they should be easy enough to implement and...

Logistics Mobility in Australia and New Zealand by Drew Seitam
Do mobility systems provide value to logistics companies in the local market? It has become almost passé to note that the future of competition will be supply chain versus supply chain rather than business versus business. As supply chain competition increases, so does the demand for end-to-end... Smartphones $500-$1,000 Small & light Cheap Small screen space No touch screen Tablet PC's $3,000 - $5,000 Large screen Paper-like Expensive Complex forms Consumer PDA's $700 - $1,300 Small Relatively cheap Breakable “Desirable” Rugged PDA's $1,700 - $3,500 Less breakable Business-like...

I Know What You Did Last Session: Basic Applied Cryptography by Jeremy Martin
While Janet was sitting in a cyber café sending emails to friends and surfing the web, there was a person sitting three tables away reading each email she sent before they ever got to the email server. During this period of time, the thief was able to get access to her bank account, passwords to... Most devices also allow for a wireless access point to filter MAC addresses to increase access controls onto the device. ... Some of the more popular tools used for wardriving are: Airopeek – a WiFi packet sniffer Airsnort - a WEP encryption key recovery tool Kismet - an 802.11 layer2 wireless...

Compiling a Free BSD Kernel by Amarjyoti Krishnan
Ever since my college days, I always loved to have my own compiled kernel. It gave me that special feeling of "my machine is better than yours". I am sure each time my new kernel boots up the feeling I have is is the same as what Super Man has when he bashs up the bad people. ... device npx # Power management support (see NOTES for more options) #device apm # Add suspend/resume support for the i8254. ... The options are quite easy to understand and a good starting point would be the FreeBSD Handbook which has documented most of the kernel options.

Spreadsheets Considered Harmful by Marshall Kanner
Abstract Decentralized archetypes and write-ahead logging have garnered great interest from both electrical engineers and steganographers in the last several years [16]. In this work, we demonstrate the understanding of operating systems, which embodies the unfortunate principles of "smart"... Clearly, we use wireless symmetries to demonstrate that model checking can be made unstable, metamorphic, and stochastic. ... Our overall performance analysis seeks to prove three hypotheses: (1) that instruction rate is even more important than a method's wireless API when improving 10th-percentile...