Introduction

We’ve braved an entire ocean to bring you these bits of knowledge. Sitting crammed in a 747 is about as joy inducing as getting a spinal tap. Trying to sleep in those sardine chairs is only conducive to one thing – a raging neck ache. And sometimes getting back is even an ordeal. One of the FS staff had the joy of hearing the engines on his plane fail repeatedly as they were pulling out of the gate. Check please? Needless to say he got his tail off that plane as fast as his two feet could carry him. Oh did I mention? This would be a China Airlines flight, not exactly coming off a sterling record over the past few months, what with the randomly detonating planes and all. To top it all off, our camera was dead – again. Computex and us are forever going to be pictureless. Maybe it’s the humidity or something…

Following the harrowing flights fraught with food that can only be left unmentionable, we bring you our Computex 2002 coverage. Typically not a show that has much to offer to the eager news seeking masses, this years Computex had quite a few more toys and bits of gossip than last year. To those not in the know, Computex is the Taiwanese version of Comdex. Since Comdex is exceedingly well known, most companies tend to announce their products there. This leaves Computex in a rather tight spot, as it also falls after Cebit, in Germany. The good thing for Computex is that everything announced at the previous shows is ready for mass consumption at this point in time. So the main focus of this show is to display technologies that are available and for resellers to come and buy. The good thing being, almost anything we tell you about here is available anywhere. The bad being – you’ve probably heard about most of the stuff here. We did try to get the morsels that haven’t been mentioned though. We didn’t really see the point in showing you pictures of random motherboards and USB connectors, not that we could have anyways…

Anyways, we have some info on some really intriguing motherboards. Not exactly your garden variety if you know what I mean. The topics then shift over to what the big boys of the industry are doing. And it’s all wrapped up with a bit on the good things going on at Shuttle and Soldam.