How's your Japanese? We have to admit that ours is practically non-existent and when we made the mistake of using Lernout & Hauspie's Japanese/English software a while back, one of our readers was kind enough to do a proper translation.

His translation was exactly the opposite of what L&H's software came up with, so we're never using that stuff again.

Here, however, is a lovely little Crusoe mini-notebook with DVD drive, an indication that, as we reported from Computex last year, Trancemeta has made some design wins.

Although an information appliance using Trancemeta's chips doesn't make any kind of sense because of the bill of material (BOM) cost, an x86-based notebook does, given the inflated prices Intel currently charges for its notebook microprocessors. Although that will change on the 29th of this month. A bit. ®