Finally, the investigation was over. The riddle solved. On August 18, 2008—after almost seven years, nearly 10,000 interviews, and millions of dollars spent developing a whole new form of microbial forensics—some of the FBI’s top brass filed into a dimly lit, flag-lined room in the bureau’s Washington, DC, headquarters. They were there to lay out the evidence proving who was responsible for the anthrax attacks that had terrified the nation in the fall of 2001.

It had been the most expensive, and arguably the toughest, case in FBI history, the assembled reporters were...

How do you create what might be the world’s cheapest computer? Easy: You strip it to the absolute bare minimum.

Toshiba’s NB505 netbook isn’t quite as skeletal as that, but it’s awfully close. And at all of $288, asking for much more would probably be a bit greedy.

The specs don’t merit a whole lot of notice: A 1.66-GHz Atom CPU and a paltry 1 GB of RAM ensure performance scrapes rock bottom. Though it couldn’t actually run most of our benchmarks, those that the NB505 did complete were near-record-breaking … on the bottom end, that is. A 250-GB hard drive is more than plenty, and the three USB p...