Special Engineering Problems

For example, a discussion of using low wattage components e.g. laptop motherboards, IBM CPU motherboards, Transmeta CPU motherboards. Issue to be checked - is power savings due to idle mode or half speed mode or is it just using superior/cooler VLSI technology? Be nice to get somebody to write this (volunteer anyone?) who's actually built or is building one. Or get e.g. IBM or Transmeta to donate hardware so I can build one and write about it. Oooo, good idea. I'll have to look into this.

Basically, though, the things to be overcome in a portable are:

1. Low weight
2. Small volume
3. Minimal power draw
4. Minimal cooling
5. Shock Resistance
6. Configuration of "head node" and the network.

Probably aren't a lot of Gbps solutions out there, also.