Hitachi floats water-cooled laptop

The idea of water-cooled laptops is not all that new but until now it has been the stuff of fiction. Now Hitachi is doing just this and is shipping a 1.8GHz mobile Pentium 4 with a flexible tube that carries water over the chips to cool them down. The new Hitachi laptop apparently also pumps the heated water into a visible water reservoir on the back of the LCD panel. The idea of sloshing around a laptop could well make the Hitachi one of the "coolest" tech-gear items of the season. According to TheRegister, the advantage of water-cooling is that it is quieter than air-cooling, although its efficiency is on a par with the air equivalent. For now the water laptop is only available to Japanese customers, but the company says it will look at waterproofing its future range if the response is positive. [More at TheRegister]

TheRegister reports that developers in China are planning to build their own version of Windows 98 in an effort to rid the country of Microsoft products. The initial plans appear to be aimed at producing an operating system that can run applications compatible with Office 2000 and Microsoft Word. What is not clear is what base is going to be used. China already has a home-grown Linux distribution known as RedFlag which could well be the base for the compatibility project. Local newspaper The People`s Daily says the plan is to break the "monopoly of foreign office software". They aren`t short of willing helpers as 18 different universities have already signed up to lend a hand. [More at TheRegister]

The New York Times is now fully digitised, thanks to a project known as ProQuest Historical Newspapers. The programme, which is trying to digitise a number of newspaper archives, has converted more than 148 years of New York Times news into digital format. That`s nearly three million pages and 25 million articles. The archives stretch back to 1851 and are stored in such a way as to present the articles in their original context while also being searchable. The technique, which involves zoning and relating articles, can be searched by keywords and relevancy searches or users can simply browse through the publication page by page, much like a standard newspaper. And it is not only the words that have been preserved, but also every photograph, advertisement and editorial.

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