Don’t worry - the Mission Impossible link is completely warranted here, as this idea was launched with Mission Impossible 3 in Japan last year. So the idea is Flexplay made a DVD with a certain air-reactive chemical on the surface, that when opened from it’s air-tight packaging makes the DVD useless in 48 hours.

So what’s the point? Why not just go to Blockbusters - why would the film studios think this is a good idea - other than as a gimmick? Then there’s the question of what happens to your DVD player if it’s playing one of these when the chemical goes off! Plus if you wanted to keep it, what’s stopping you making a copy like a regular DVD? I think I’m saying that I’m struggling to see the benefit (cost or otherwise) to this idea! Thankfully not available in the UK yet (if they ever will be).

No sooner do I mention small laptops, and in particular the Eee PC’s from Asus, than Tech Radar report the Ebox, their soon-to-be-released desktop version.

Completely different to the Xbox (which is what I keep saying as I read it), the Ebox is thought to be Linux based, supporting the same apps as the Eee PC, and is to be unveiled next week. The home user will probably not be able to get their hands on the Ebox for a few months yet unfortunately, but when you can it should make an excellent second PC, as it comes with 160Gb HDD and 2 Gig of RAM.

Well, you can’t actually buy an open source laptop from VIA, but you can download the specs and get the chips from VIA. The laptop itself, featured in a techcrunch article, is another one of those “small form-factor & cheap” deals that everyone seems to be jumping up and down about. Laptops like the OLPC, the Eee PC & Intel’s Classmate. I’ve always thought that if you want a laptop for surfing, get yourself on Ebay and buy a cheap Compaq and install Linux on it. A quick surf reveals one with Windows 98 on for just £10. Of course it won’t win any beauty contests like the others here, and will probably deduct cool points instead of adding them, but it can’t be beaten for surfing.

An odd one, this one. Microsoft filed a patent on December 20th, 2006, for a device called the “Guardian Angel”. The idea is to have a device to detect the number of people in a room, single them out and recognise them. And then gather information on them, presumably from the net, about previous convictions and stuff.. Hmmm, not saying that people need to be safe, but two things come to mind straight away:

1) If there are dangerous people in the room, shouldn’t they be in another room, like, oh I dunno, a jail or something?

2) If the device flags someone as “dangerous” I guess it doesn’t matter if that person has already served his time, and probably gone through rehabilitation? The person could be completely different to his criminal record now.

So I think I’m saying this is a massive invasion of privacy, and straight away sets a machine up to pass judgement on someone else in the room. Surely this is wrong? The original article by slashdot can be found here. Another interesting feature of the Guardian Angel was a “heart monitor” like people need a machine to tell them they’re having a heart attack, or that they’re dead? Well I guess it hasn’t stopped Microsoft in the past for providing “features” to things that they think the buying public need - just look at Vista..!

Thruvision, based in Oxfordshire, are to show off a new product, the T5000, that can see if people are illegally concealing items. The system can pick up on various materials that have a different “signature” to the human body. Items made from substances such as metals, plastics, gels or even explosives will be picked up by the T5000. You can have a look at some of the features of it’s predecessor, the T4000 [here].

Of course if you happen to be carrying personal things legitimately I guess it will pick up on those too. And the best thing about this new system? It’s non-invasive or “passive.” That’s secret agency speak for “you don’t know you’re being scanned.” The initial idea is a great one, but as with all of these things, it shouldn’t invade on citizen’s normal rights to walk around. We want to feel safe, but scanning everyone by invading their privacy in the hope of catching that one possible terrorist seems like stretching the imagination a little too far. [SHOW ME]

And we know what starts in the server market finishes on the desktop. Intel released details to Sun of their next chip and wanted them to keep it pretty secret, however Sun let it slip on a public server over the weekend - oops. Maybe Intel won’t be so eager to announce their intentions to Sun in the future! [SHOW ME]

Just recently an institute in Georgia, America has announced it has created a material that can produce electricity when it’s worn. Every tiny movement in the material would produce an electrical current, because of the make up of the fibres. Potentially, a 1 metre square piece of material would have enough power to charge a mobile phone or your iPod. The only problem with the technology, at this early stage, is that the fibres corrode in water - but thankfully the professors are hard at work trying to fix this - otherwise you’ll be saving the planet, but not making any friends! [SHOW ME]

There’s a serious “Geek alert” on this article. If you don’t know what IPv4 or IPv6 is then I suggest you look away and read the next article.. For those who are still reading, IPv6 address have been implemented on almost half of the root servers which means that IPv6 systems can communicate with each other without any legacy IPv4 stuff being used.

Why do we care? Well the number of IP addresses that are currently allocated on the internet is going to hit a very real limit in about 3 years time. This is because the pool of IP addresses available within IPv4 is nearly all used up. Of course back when the IPv4 standard was drawn up in the 70’s, it was never thought that there would be a need to address more than 4 billion computers on the internet. Thankfully with the IPv6 standard, which has had a real push for implementation, that upper limit of IP addresses goes up by a factor of 4 - a number roughly equivalent to 3 followed by 38 zeroes. Hopefully this will be enough for another 30 years! [SHOW ME]

In a story that has made an appearance in Tech.co.uk today, the East Japan Railway Company have installed piezoelectric generators in the floor of a ticket gate in a bizarre field study. The generator will capture the commuters’ stepping power as they walk through the gates. The amount of power produced at the gates is irrelevant - I think the real story is in the moral implications.

If it proves to be efficient enough at the ticket gates, what’s to stop the railway from putting the floors throughout the different areas of the station? And then other stations? Or on the trains? Pretty soon the technology would become common place and perhaps even be used in different buildings or complexes? Using this system, essentially means a corporation is harnessing energy from it’s rail service passengers without their permission. I don’t think people would mind as long as they would see benefits & they were asked for their opinion on it. But then how will it work? Would you sign something to say “JR-East can harness my energy”? It’s a really cool idea that needs to concentrate on execution, I think, but sounds too easy for it to fail.. [SHOW ME]

In a much anticipated move, AMD has announced that the Phenom processor is available today for sale. Also, in another announcement, in partnership with the ATI section of the company, the new Spider motherboard platform has also been announced.

The Phenom has 4 cores and comes in either 2.2Ghz or 2.3Ghz flavours initially. It requires the AM2+ socket to really be used to it’s potential, but can also be used with the current AM2 socket - for compatibility reasons - it just means not all of the chip’s new features are available. The Phenom is the first true quad core chip available to the home market. The cores are all on the same die. Intel’s current quad core chips are essentially two dual cores hard-wired together, so there is potential for the chip to not run as smoothly or with the same performance as a true quad core. If AMD have also manufactured this chip to the same standards then the raw speed is probably not going to be a telling factor as to the real-world speed on the desktop. I await some benchmarks on both high-end chips!!

Also announced was the Spider platform. A motherboard chipset and design ethos that incorporates the new quad core CPUs, up to 4 graphics cards - in CrossFire mode - incorporating the new Radeon HD GPU and the new 7 series chipset. All wrapped up into one package, this will be a very formidable gaming platform, and has been quoted by AMD as being a very stable and highly optimised PC Desktop system. [SHOW ME]