2002 GROLIER ENCYCLOPEDIA
The Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia has been a mainstay of electronic educational resources for many years: I remember it being bundled with the first 386 I bought back in the early nineties, and was impressed back then at the video and audio clips, maps and information contained on the CD.

ACER TravelMate 630
ACER TravelMate 630

Artificial man
Earlier walking robots had a more serious side: to discover more about the human brain. Shakey, for example, emerged from the Stanford Research Institute (now SRIs artificial intelligence centre) in 1

Back to the factory floor
Humanoid robots could also take robotics back to the factory floor in the 21st century. Theres a very pragmatic engineering reason to build humanoid robots, and thats because most of our environment h

Dell Inspiron 8200
For as long as the Labs has been running, Dell has been a regular participant, and has also been a consistent performer.

Humanoid home help?
Theres another, equally important, purpose to making humanoids such as Cog human: interaction with other human beings. For human/robot interaction, its good to have something that looks vaguely human

IBM A31p
When it comes to design principles, the IBM embodies a completely different approach to the Toshiba

MOBILE DESKTOP
This month the Labs team cast a critical eye over the latest Intel Pentium
4-based desktop replacement notebooks. Traditionally, desktop replacement means fully-featured, premium notebooks with

PROJECTLAB CENTURY CD
Designed in Melbourne, the Century CD can store up to 100 discs but instead of using the shelf-like arrangement of the Fortuna (reviewed March 2002, page 90), the Century CD sports a turntable arrangement reminiscent of old carousel slide projectors.

QUARKXPRESS 5.0
QuarkXPress defines and dominates high-end publishing in much the same way as Adobe Photoshop does photo editing.

Rossum’s universal reality
Fictional depictions such as these are startlingly accurate, since sci-fi has paved the way for our acceptance of each generation of robots. Capeks prophecies were fulfilled when robots made their fir

SAMSUNG SYNCMASTER 240T
TFT screens are notoriously expensive to manufacture and even more expensive to purchase in comparison to their conventional CRT counterparts.

SONY NET MINIDISC MZ-N1
The major difference with the Net MD MZ-N1 and previous MD players is that it features PC connectivity. The only way you could connect previous MiniDisc players to a PC was either with an optical digital output from your soundcard (and then manually record the audio signal on your player) or by purchasing an expensive accessory from Sony.

Toshiba Satellite 5100
The Toshiba Satellite 5100 attracted by far the most attention around the PC Authority office this month

ULEAD DVD WORKSHOP
Uleads DVD Workshop (DW) is a pared-down digital video editor, designed specifically with DVD fans in mind. Its able to work natively with both MPEG-1 and MPEG-2, as well as AVIs and even QuickTime movies.

Uncharted territory
Reaching the places where human beings cant travel would later propel robotic arms millions of miles away from the factory floor. It started with the creation of the six-jointed, robotic Stanford Arm,

Walking with robots
Humanoid robots arent a new concept. Perhaps the first appearance of a humanoid robot was Elektro, who appeared at the 1939 World Trade Fair in New York. Elektro danced, counted to ten, smoked and rav

ZINWELL PROV
The ProV is a product similar in nature to the Canopus ADVC-100 (page 44), but where the ADVC-100 is used for transcoding video streams with an eye on digital video work, the ProV is used to bring versatility to your computer monitor, or breathe life into any spare monitors youve got laying around.