Slashdot Mirror

larry bagina writes "Jason Perlow of ZDNet is reporting that Adobe will stop developing Flash for mobile browsers and focus on AIR and HTML5 tools. I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if 750 voices screamed out in terror and were laid off. But that noise was overshadowed by everybody else celebrating."

CWmike writes "At long last Adobe Flash has come to an iPad or iPhone, writes Jonny Evans. Adobe appeared at Europe's NAB equivalent, IBC, this week to introduce Adobe Flash Media Server 4.5 and Adobe Flash Access 3.0. Adobe's solution repackages content in real-time, changing the protocol to suit the target device, HTTP Dynamic Streaming or HLS, for example. This should mean that iOS devices will get much of the advantages of Flash video support, without the processor degradation and battery life cost of the format in use on other devices. 'With Adobe Flash Media Server 4.5, media publishers now have a single, simple workflow for delivering content using the same stream to Flash-enabled devices or to the Apple iPhone and iPad,' Adobe says."

MrSeb writes "Invensas, a subsidiary of chip microelectronics company Tessera, has discovered a way of stacking multiple DRAM chips on top of each other. This process, called multi-die face-down packaging, or xFD for short, massively increases memory density, reduces power consumption, and should pave the way for faster and more efficient memory chips. Multi-die face-down packaging is exactly what it sounds like, with memory dies stacked on top of each other like roofing tiles. Much like a normal desktop DIMMs and laptop SO-DIMMs, each of the stacked dies is wired to each other in series — but in this case, the connections are much shorter, as they only have to run a few micrometers to the chip below it. This is where all of the power and speed enhancements come from: shorter interconnects mean less power is needed (and thus less heat is dissipated) and signals propagate faster."

An anonymous reader writes "The president of Peru, Alan Garcia, decided to celebrate the 500,000th One Laptop Per Child XO laptop in that country in style, announcing orders for half a million more and 20,000 additional Lego education WeDo robot kits for public schools, bringing the total number of kits for distribution up to 92,000. The latest OLPC laptop, the XO-1.75, has the lowest power draw ever thanks to a Marvell Armada 600 ARM processor and runs Fedora GNU/Linux with dual desktops Sugar (in Spanish, Aymara, and Quechua) and GNOME. For the first time, the XOs will be manufactured locally; the previous 2 million, including the blue high school variant with grownup keyboard, were all made by Quanta Computer. Meanwhile, parallel development continues on the upcoming XO-3 tablet; OLPC's New Technologies director is exploring software paths including GTK3 for Sugar, Android and Chrome. I, for one, salute our new plastic Peruvian overlords."

Several readers have noted that Intel has agreed to buy McAfee, the computer antivirus software maker, for about $7.7 billion in cash. There is also a press release available if you are into that sort of thing.

TravisTR sends word of research from Bloomberg New Energy Finance which found that direct subsidies for renewable energy from governments worldwide totaled $43-46 billion in 2009, an amount vastly outstripped by the $557 billion in fossil fuel subsidies during 2008. "The BNEF preliminary analysis suggests the US is the top country, as measured in dollars deployed, in providing direct subsidies for clean energy with an estimated $18.2bn spent in total in 2009. Approximately 40% of this went toward supporting the US biofuels sector with the rest going towards renewables. The federal stimulus program played a key role; its Treasury Department grant program alone provided $3.8bn in support for clean energy projects. China, the world leader in new wind installations in 2009 with 14GW, provided approximately $2bn in direct subsidies, according to the preliminary analysis. This figure is deceptive, however, as much crucial support for clean energy in the country comes in form of low-interest loans from state-owned banks. State-run power generators and grid companies have also been strongly encouraged by the government to tap their balance sheets in support of renewables."

Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that American companies like Applied Materials are moving their research facilities and engineers to China as the country develops a high-tech economy that increasingly competes directly with the United States. Applied Materials set up its latest solar research labs in China after estimating that China would be producing two-thirds of the world's solar panels by the end of this year and their chief technology officer, Mark R. Pinto, is the first CTO of a major American tech company to move to China. 'We're obviously not giving up on the US,' says Pinto. 'China needs more electricity. It's as simple as that.' Western companies are also attracted to China's huge reservoirs of cheap, highly skilled engineers and the subsidies offered by many Chinese cities and regions, particularly for green energy companies. Applied Materials decided to build their new $250 million research facility in Xi'an after the city government sold them a 75-year land lease at a deep discount and is reimbursing the company for roughly a quarter of the lab complex's operating costs for five years."

Hugh Pickens writes "BBC reports that Markus Haering's company had been working with the authorities in Basel, Switzerland to try to convert the heat in deep-seated rocks into electricity, but the project was suspended in 2006 when drilling triggered earthquakes, one of them with a magnitude of 3.4, leading Haering's company to pay out $9M in damages. Haering's team planned to drill a series of holes penetrating up to 3 miles (4.8 km) underground with water being pumped onto rocks with a temperature of more than 195C. Basel's location on top of a fault line – the upper Rhine trench – had been deliberately chosen because the heat was closer to the Earth's surface. A risk assessment has since shown that the prospect of further quakes is too high to continue drilling in the city. Haering faces up to five years in prison if the judge finds he intentionally damaged property. Haering has admitted the 3.4 magnitude earthquake was stronger than he had expected and that his team 'had very little knowledge of seismicity' before starting to drill, but called the quakes 'a learning process for everyone involved.' Despite Haering's trial, the Swiss appetite for geothermal projects has not diminished. Engineers are beginning preliminary drilling in Zurich to see whether that area was suitable for a similar scheme, and St. Gallen, in eastern Switzerland, plans to start work on its own geothermal project next year. Drilling efforts are being closely watched in the US, where the energy department is sponsoring more than 120 geothermal energy projects in several states."

The Hearst Corporation has announced their intention to launch an e-reader competitor to Amazon's Kindle and a supporting store and platform that is much more "publisher friendly." More details are available form their official press release this morning. "Launching in 2010, Skiff provides a complete e-reading solution that includes the Skiff Service platform, Skiff Store and Skiff-enabled devices. Skiff will sell and distribute newspapers, magazines, books, blogs and other content. Skiff gives periodical publishers tools to maintain their distinct visual identities, build and extend relationships with subscribers, and deliver dynamic content and advertising to a range of dedicated e-readers and multipurpose devices."

pickens writes "In a victory for Fair Use, Stanford Law School's Fair Use Project has announced that the estate of 20th century literary giant James Joyce, author of the landmark novel Ulysses, has agreed to pay $240,000 in attorneys' fees to Stanford University Consulting Professor Carol Shloss and her counsel in connection with Shloss's lawsuit to establish her right to use copyrighted material in her scholarship on the literary work of James Joyce. When Shloss used copyrighted materials in her biography of Joyce's daughter Lucia, titled Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake, she had to excise a substantial amount of source material from the book in response to threats from the Joyce Estate. However following publication of the book, Shloss sued the Estate to establish her right to publish the excised material. The parties reached a settlement regarding the issue in 2007, permitting the publication of the copyrighted material in the US. Following the settlement, Shloss asked the Court to order the Estate to pay attorneys' fees of more than $400,000. She has now agreed to accept an immediate payment of $240,000 in return for the dismissal of the Estate's appeal. 'This case shows there are solutions to the problem Carol Shloss faced other than simple capitulation,' says Fair Use Project Executive Director Anthony Falzone, who led the litigation team."

Glenn Fleishman lets us know that Verizon is finally offering nationwide Wi-Fi access to its high-speed Internet customers, long after Cablevision's similar service went live. While Cablevision is building out an in-house network of hotspots, Verizon is relying on a deal with Boingo Wireless — a strategy with both strengths and drawbacks, as Wi-Fi Net News points out. Neither Verizon's nor Boingo's announcement reveals the mechanics of how existing Verizon DSL and FiOS customers will get access, but an AP report spells it out: "To use a hotspot, the customer must install software that works only on computers with Windows Vista or XP installed. Phones, iPods, and Macintosh computers with Wi-Fi can't access the hotspots."

bfwebster writes "US District Court Judge Andrew Gilford (Central District of California) granted a summary judgment motion in DealerTrack v. Huber et al., finding DealerTrack's patent (US 7,181,427) — for an automated credit application processing system — invalid due to the recent In re Bilski court decision that requires a patent to either involve 'transformation' or 'a specific machine.' According to Judge Gilford's ruling, DealerTrack 'appears to concede that the claims of the '427 Patent do not meet the "transformation" prong of the Bilski test.' He then applied the 'specific machine' test and noted that, post-Bilski the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences has ruled several times that 'claims reciting the use of general purpose processors or computers do not satisfy the [Bilski] test.' Judge Gilford analyzes the claims of the '427 patent, notes that they state that the 'machine' involved could be a 'dumb terminal' and a 'personal computer,' and then concludes: 'None of the claims of the '427 Patent require the use of a "particular machine," and the patent is thus invalid under Bilski.' DealerTrack apparently plans to appeal the ruling. Interesting times ahead."

An anonymous reader writes "AeroVironment, Inc. was awarded a Phase II contract extension in April from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to design and build a flying prototype for the Nano Air Vehicle (NAV) program. As part of this program AV has accomplished a technical milestone never before achieved: the controlled hovering flight of an air vehicle system with two flapping wings (video) that carries its own energy source and uses only the flapping wings for propulsion and control. Two wings for propulsion and control, nothing else."

IamTheRealMike writes "It's been a few months since we last checked in on how the Blu-Ray group was doing in their fight against piracy. In December 2008, a new generation of BD+ programs had stopped both SlySoft AnyDVD HD and the open source effort at Doom9. At the start of January, SlySoft released an update that could handle the new BD+ programs, meaning that Blu-Ray discs could not be decrypted for a period of time about the same length as SlySoft's worst case scenario. The BD+ retaliation was swift, but largely ineffective, consisting of a unique program for every Blu-Ray master. Users had to upload log files to SlySoft for every new movie/region. They would then support that unique variant in their next update, usually released a few days later. Despite that, the open source effort never did manage to progress beyond the Winter 2008 programs and is currently stalled completely; SlySoft is the only group remaining. This situation remained for several months, but starting around the same time as Paramount joined Fox in licensing BD+, a new set of programs came out which have once again made Blu-Ray discs unrippable. There are currently 19 movies that cannot be decrypted. It appears neither side is able to decisively gain the upper hand, but one thing seems clear — only full-time, for-profit professionals are able to consistently beat BD+."

nandemoari writes "The damage isn't just limited to the United States. Shipments of PCs in Europe, the Mid-East, and Africa dipped to records posted around the turn of the century. It was even worse in Asia, which according to Gartner, posted its worst growth rate ever — just 1.8 per cent. Within the industry, desktops took the hardest hit, as was expected. Sales of non-portable computers were down about 16 per cent as consumers opted instead for the rising 'netbook' and similar hybrids. That fact alone is troubling for PC makers, given that $300-$500 netbooks offer a far lower profit margin than more expensive and more powerful laptops and desktops."

zombies-alive writes "Square Enix and Neurosky, maker of wearable sensory equipment, are coming out with a new 'Brainwave-Controlled' RPG. The game will be demonstrated at the Tokyo Game Show for the (Windows) PC, which features the NeuroSky MindSet headset. At this moment, the headset only detects the gamer's level of concentration and relaxation by means of a single electrode placed on the forehead."

1Up reports that Amazon has launched a new service for getting certain games into the hands of customers on release day, rather than simply shipping the games on release day. According to the press release, the service will be free for Amazon Prime customers, and available to everyone else for a $5.98 charge on upcoming titles Tiger Woods PGA Tour 09, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, Fable 2 and Gears of War 2. They tested the program recently with the release of Soul Calibur IV.

nickull wrote in his journal that "Today Adobe systems made an announcement that it has provided technology and information to Google and Yahoo! to help the two search engine rivals index Shockwave Flash (SWF) file formats. According to the company, this will provide more relevant search rankings of the millions pieces of Flash content. Until now, developers had to implement workarounds for exposing text content used in Flash to search-engine spiders and other bots such as using XHTML data providers. While the Flash content is exposed, it is not yet clear how it will be utilized by the search engines, as they have not revealed their algorithms. The SWF specification is openly published."

A two-count lawsuit filed by Chicago company LimitNone alleges that Google misappropriated trade secrets and violated Illinois' consumer fraud laws when it developed "Google Email Uploader" which competes with LimitNone's "gMove" application. "Google claims its core philosophy is 'Don't be evil' but, simply put, they invited us to work with them, to trust them — and then stole our technology,'" said Ray Glassman, CEO of LimitNone, in a prepared statement. The lawsuit was filed by Kelley Drye & Warren LLP, the same commercial litigation group which challenged Google over the company's online advertising system.

bughunter writes "Today GE announced the successful demonstration of the world's first roll-to-roll manufactured organic light-emitting diode (OLED) lighting devices (press release). This demonstration is a key step toward making OLEDs and other high-performance organic electronics products at dramatically lower costs than what is possible today. The green crowd is thrilled as well. Personally, as the parent of a 3-year-old technophile, I'm dreading the animated cereal boxes." Now can I get my Optimus Keyboard for less than $1,299?

Anti-virus firm Trend Micro is suing Barracuda Networks over their use of the open source anti-virus product ClamAV. The issue is Trend Micro's patent on 'anti-virus detection on an SMTP or FTP gateway'. Companies like Symantec and McAfee are already paying licensing fees to Trend Micro. Groklaw carries the word from Barracuda that they intend to fight this case, and are seeking information on prior art to bring to trial. Commentary on the O'Reilly site notes (in strident terms) the strange reality of patents gone bad, while a post to the C|Net site explores the potential ramifications for open source security projects. "Barracuda has been able to leverage open source to bring down the cost of security. Early on Barracuda was blocking spam and viruses at roughly 1/10 the price of the nearest proprietary competitor (that was only selling an antivirus solution). Barracuda has helped to bring down prices across the board, and it has been able to do so because of open source. More open source equals less spam and more security. Trend Micro is effectively trying to raise the price of security." Slashdot and Linux.com are both owned by SourceForge.

christian.einfeldt writes "Computers and handheld devices running default GNU Linux or Unix OSes have swept Amazon's 'best of' list for 2007, according BusinessWire.com for 28 December 2007. Best selling computer? The Nokia Internet Tablet PC, running Linux. Best reviewed computer? The Apple MacBook Pro notebook PC. Most wished for computer? Asus Eee 4G-Galaxy 7-inch PC mobile Internet device, which comes with Xandros Linux pre-installed. And last, but not least, the most frequently gifted computer: The Apple MacBook notebook PC."

Despite the upbeat tone of IDG's official release about the first 'E for All', commentators are noting that the reported figure of 18,000 attendees is lower than expected. Wired is blunt about it: E For All has nothing on PAX. "Penny Arcade Expo was everything E For All dreams of being: a well-attended show packed wall-to-wall with crazy game fans. But it's also inexpensive: three days and two nights of musical performances for way, way less money than an E For All ticket, let alone the additional cost of Video Games Live. And it's got a whole mess of community events, like panels, gaming rooms, and other opportunities that make E For All's extracurriculars look slim. The show floor is just one part of PAX, but it's practically all of E For All."

Michael Larabel writes "AMD has issued a press release announcing 'significant graphics performance and compatibility enhancements' on Linux. AMD will be delivering new ATI Linux drivers this year that offer ATI Radeon HD 2000 series support, AIGLX support (Beryl and Compiz), and major performance improvements. At Phoronix we have been testing these new drivers internally for the past few weeks and have a number of articles looking at this new driver. The ATI 8.41 Linux driver delivers Linux gaming improvements from the R300/400 series and the R500 series. The inaugural Radeon HD 2900XT series support also can be found in the new ATI Linux driver with 'the best price/performance ratio of any high-end graphics card under Linux.' While this new driver cannot be downloaded yet, in their press release AMD also alludes to accelerating efforts with the open-source community."

An anonymous reader writes "Last week, a press release was issued by Ellacotya that suggested something quite startling — HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol, aka Web traffic) had for the first time in four years overtaken P2P traffic. However a new article from Slyck disputes this, and contends that P2P remains the bandwidth heavyweight."

UncleFluffy writes "AMD gave a sneak preview of their upcoming R600 GPU. The demo system was a single PC with two R600 cards running streaming computing tasks at just over 1 Teraflop. Though a prototype, this beats Intel to ubiquitous Teraflop machines by approximately 5 years." Ars has an article exploring why it's hard to program such GPUs for anything other than graphics applications.

finfife writes to tell us that GE has announced an advancement in incandescent technology that promises to increase the efficiency of lightbulbs to put them on par with compact fluorescent lamps (CFL). "The new high efficiency incandescent (HEI(TM)) lamp, which incorporates innovative new materials being developed in partnership by GE's Lighting division, headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio, and GE's Global Research Center, headquartered in Niskayuna, NY, would replace traditional 40- to 100-Watt household incandescent light bulbs, the most popular lamp type used by consumers today. The new technology could be expanded to all other incandescent types as well. The target for these bulbs at initial production is to be nearly twice as efficient, at 30 lumens-per-Watt, as current incandescent bulbs. Ultimately the high efficiency lamp (HEI) technology is expected to be about four times as efficient as current incandescent bulbs and comparable to CFL bulbs. Adoption of new technology could lead to greenhouse gas emission reductions of up to 40 million tons of CO2 in the U.S. and up to 50 million tons in the EU if the entire installed base of traditional incandescent bulbs was replaced with HEI lamps."The California legislature may want to revisit the wording of their proposed ban on incandescents (AB 722). How about mandating a level of efficiency rather than assuming that innovation can't happen?"

Readers VE3OGG and FFFFHALTFFFF write in with three pieces of a global picture that is emerging of governments and corporations moving away from Microsoft and towards open source. First, France: the French automaker Peugot Citroen has announced that over the next several years they will be integrating up to 20,000 Novell SUSE desktops as well as 2,500 SUSE servers into their facilities. (Let's hope that, in Novell, Peugeot Citroen hasn't bought a lemon.) Next, Sweden: the Swedish Armed Forces has made a decision to migrate its Windows NT servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Finally, Russia. VE3OGG writes: "It would seem that after the recent Russian piracy debacle that could see a school headmaster jailed in a Siberian work camp for purchasing pirated copies of Windows for his school, the Ministry of Education in Russia has decided that the school boards will no longer be purchasing any commercial software."

nickull writes "Adobe announced it will release the entire PDF specification (current version 1.7 ) to the International Standards Organization (ISO) via AIIM. PDF has reached a point in its maturity cycle where maintaining it in an open standards manner is the next logical step in evolution. Not only does this reinforce Adobe's commitment to open standards (see also my earlier blog on the release of flash runtime code to the Tamarin open source project at Sourceforge), but it demonstrates that open standards and open source strategies are really becoming a mainstream concept in the software industry. So what does this really mean? Most people know that PDF is already a standard so why do this now? This event is very subtle yet very significant. PDF will go from being an open standard/specification and de facto standard to a full blown de jure standard. The difference will not affect implementers much given PDF has been a published open standard for years. There are some important distinctions however. First — others will have a clearly documented process for contributing to the future of the PDF specification. That process also clearly documents the path for others to contribute their own Intellectual property for consideration in future versions of the standard. Perhaps Adobe could have set up some open standards process within the company but this would be merely duplicating the open standards process, which we felt was the proper home for PDF. Second, it helps cement the full PDF specification as the umbrella specification for all the other PDF standards under the ISO umbrella such as PDF/A, PDF/X and PDF/E. The move also helps realize the dreams of a fully open web as the web evolves (what some are calling Web 2.0), built upon truly open standards, technologies and protocols."

GigaGamez is reporting that the humorously-named Bunnyfoot research company (which specializes in behavior studies), has found that in-game ads just don't work. Some games which featured semi-stationary areas (like NBA Live) ended up with ads sticking in the minds of players. Games like Project Gotham Racing 3 ended up with the players having a 0% retention rate for ads that whizzed past. From the press release: "These results demonstrate a significantly poor level of engagement with consumers and exposed an apparent weakness within games to efficiently capture consumer attention. Despite following the model of real world sports advertising, current methods are not optimizing consumer engagement and are failing to influence the consumer in any significant way, the key driver for any marketing campaign and its validation. 'These results reflect the industry's concern relating to brand value and return on investment. Understanding consumer interaction at a deeper level of analysis allows us to measure the value of advertising investment' said Alison Walton, Head of Visual Engagement."

eldavojohn writes "I found a short but interesting list of predicted evolutions of search engines that will most likely be implemented in 2007. While some are vague and obvious like a better human interactive experience, there are others that are worth looking into like alternative means of indexing and using semantics — not keywords — for matching documents. The author of this list is Dr. Riza Berkan, also the author of 'Fuzzy Systems Design Principles.'"

Now that all three consoles are competing in the online market, regular news about the three systems is beginning to be regularly released, as Virtual Console tries to top Xbox Live which in turn tries to overshadow e-Distribution. Sony's online offering is still being finalized now that the console is on the market, and limits on the system are still being decided upon. 500 MB is apparently going to be the cap for downloadable content via the service (much larger than Live's 50 MB limit). The company has also confirmed they'll be offering new version of retro games, to compete directly with Microsoft's service. Speaking of which, Double Dragon will be joining the other classic games on Xbox Live sometime in the future. This week's update was a patch for Texas Hold Em' , while the week before saw the much-anticipated (and well reviewed) Small Arms released to fans. Related to Microsoft's service, the much rumoured Xbox Live Arcade joystick was formally announced by MadCatz this week. Not to be left out, Nintendo's Virtual Console grew by three titles this week; gamers can now download Super Star Soldier, Golden Axe, and Genesis classic Ecco the Dolphin. Like Microsoft, Nintendo has plans to release new content every week for the forseeable future.

Design Reactor is helping the industry go virtual with a highly interactive tradeshow experience. AMD was one of the first companies to leverage the virtual trade show solution, marketed as the AMD Virtual IT Experience . With more than 450,000 visitors to the AMD Virtual IT experience, the virtual tradeshow is proving successful. "This revolutionary concept takes the best that tradeshows have to offer and leaves out the travel, expense and fatigue. This industry-changing marketing event is aimed at providing a new and interactive way to help customers solve their problems. Through a virtual tradeshow venue, AMD is extending its reach to a broader audience by providing information in a familiar yet more accessible format. The complex layering of 3D animation, graphics, video, sound, text and interactive communications helps ensure a true trade show experience."

BcNexus writes "According to the Associated Press, a California judge has ruled that a lawsuit brought against the Target Corporation may proceed under the Americans with Disabilities Act. The catch here is that the suit, leveled by the National Federation of the Blind, concerns the design of Target's website. Could this set a precedent and subsequent flood of lawsuits against websites? What if another design is not tractable?" From the article: "'What this means is that any place of business that provides services, such as the opportunity to buy products on a website, is now, a place of accommodation and therefore falls under the ADA,' said Kathy Wahlbin, Mindshare's Director of User Experience and expert on accessibility. 'The good news is that being compliant is not difficult nor is it expensive. And it provides the additional benefit of making accessible web sites easier for search engines to find and prioritize.'"

prostoalex writes "The FirefoxFlicks competition has announced the winners of the Firefox video promo campaign. The winning videos are DareDevil, Wheee!, Fox Fever, This is Hot and Give me the the soap."

deeptrace writes "California company D2Fusion has announced they are hiring Dr. Martin Fleischmann (of 'Pons and Fleischmann' fame). The company belives that they can produce a commercial fusion based home heating prototype within a year. They are also looking at other applications, such as using it as a heat source for a commercially available Stirling electrical generator."

YesSir writes to tell us IBM scientists are reporting that they have created a new low-cost wireless chipset that could allow devices to communicate up to ten times faster than current technology. From the article: "Using the IBM-pioneered chip-making technology called silicon germanium, the chipset is able to send and receive information in a portion of the radio spectrum that is both unlicensed and can carry a much higher volume of data, a key advantage as data-intensive digital media formats, such as HDTV, become more pervasive."

duplo1 writes Tenable Security has announced the release of Nessus 3.0. Nessus is an enterprise level vulnerability scanner and this new version brings a complete rewrite of the Nessus engine redesigned for increased speed and efficiency running on the average, twice as fast as Nessus 2. From the release: "In addition to gaining dramatic improvements in performance, Tenable also provides an optional Direct Feed subscription service for Nessus 3.0 which provides immediate access to new vulnerability checks and entitles Nessus 3.0 users to commercial support from Tenable. The Tenable Plugins include support for a rating methodology called Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) that can be used to express the criticality of a discovered vulnerability or threat."

xlilacx asks: "The video game industry is worth $25 billion, and predicted to rival the global music industry in the next 10 years. Even Grandma is joining in on the fun. My husband and I bought three video game retail stores two months ago, and so far sales are dismal (down 25% from last year's sales), which seems to be an industry trend. I've noticed a few things that are contibuting to our lack of profits: the people who weren't able to get an XBox 360 have decided they will wait to get one (which most likely will be after Christmas), and they will not buy any games for their old systems in the meantime; people are automatically conditioned to go to the EB-Games and GameStop stores at the malls, even if they give less in trade-ins and have horrible customer servicr; lastly, kids come in with piles of junk games (Madden 2001, etc..), and get enough store credit to buy the latest greatest game that we only mark up like 5%-10%. I'd like to ask Slashdot readers if these observations are a good reflection of the mentality of video-game buyers everywhere, and what suggestions they have for a small ma-and-pa video game store. With all the huge retailers in the video-game market and the EB/GameStop merger, is there a place left for the local game store?"

m3lt writes "Business Wire is reporting that Concurrent announced today that Lockheed Martin Space Systems has selected RedHawk(TM) Linux as the operating system for their United States Army Theater High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) program." From the article: "Lockheed Martin selected RedHawk for the THAAD program due to the precision and guaranteed response time of Concurrent's RedHawk Linux real-time operating system. Only RedHawk Linux was able to ensure the high frame rates required in their HIL simulation without frame overruns, thereby ensuring the highest quality of system test."

anonymous cow-herd writes "Businesswire reports that several leading technology companies including Intel, AMD, Microsoft, IBM, Dell and HP and others have formed the Unified EFI Forum. The non-profit corporation will assume responsibility for the development and promotion of the EFI specification, a pre-boot interface originally developed by Intel that is intended to replace the aging PC BIOS."

krygny writes "There is speculation that with $7.5 billion in cash, and liquidation of other assets, Sun could leverage a buyback of all publicly traded shares of SUNW at between $5 and $5.50 per share. I suppose, that would relieve them of Sarbanes-Oxley requirements, which Scott McNealy never really liked. (Who does?) For anyone at Sun who survives the tumult, hopefully, there could also be a return to the former corporate culture."

RustNeverSleeps writes "Computerworld reports that Microsoft will be including a new document format called 'Metro' with Longhorn. Apparently, Metro is intended to be a competitor to Adobe's PDF and Postscript formats. The format will be open and available for royalty-free licensing, and will be based on XML. Can we expect Microsoft to do this right? If they do, I think it could be a good thing." Reader gsfprez is less optimistic: "... I noticed the main, and probably most important difference between old and busted PDF and new-hotness Metro (besides the Queer Eye styled name)... 'We will offer products based on this next generation RIP technology and make them available under license to printer manufacturers and software integrators worldwide.' Yes, I can see it now - entire industries undoing their time-tested, battle hardend PDF-based workflows with free and open files all for the chance to use patented, pay-for-use Microsoft proprietary workflows, software, and files. Good luck with that, guys."

Rollie Hawk writes "Worldwide law and news sifter LexisNexis has some bad news of its own this time. Actually, "bad" might sharply understate the situation. More than a month after disclosing information on a database breach that led to 32,000 customer IDs being stolen, the results of an internal review showed that in fact the damage was nearly ten times worse than previously thought. LexisNexis is already "offering free support services, including credit bureau reports, credit monitoring for one year and fraud insurance" to the nearly 300,000 additional victims it will soon be contacting, according to a Reed Elsevier statement to the Regulatory News Service. So far, no identity thefts have been reported by earlier victims, at least some of whom had private information such as addresses and Social Security numbers unwittingly divulged."

Yet another license falls into the hands of the EA sports game crafters. The Business Wire is reporting that EA Games has signed a six year agreement with the Collegiate Licensing Company. This allows EA the exclusive use of teams, stadiums, etc, etc. From the article: "Our NCAA football franchise is a key element in our EA SPORTS brand lineup and we are pleased to have secured the NCAA license...There is an unrivaled loyalty our fans have for the game, and this agreement with CLC allows EA to continue to deliver to fans the best, most innovative college football experience now and for years to come."

Jamesday writes "Yahoo! Search will also be providing support for Wikipedia. Discussions, started at the same time as the aforementioned Google announcement, have been ongoing with both Yahoo! and Google but only the Google news leaked. It's now more clear why Wikipedia said there was no need to worry about undue influence from any single sponsor."

2d is the new 3d writes "PopCap Games has Open Sourced the framework used to make their hit downloadable web games. From the press release: 'The PopCap Games Framework provides developers a quick and easy way to get their projects off the ground, allowing more time to be spent on game design instead of compatibility bugs and multimedia programming issues. For the first time, casual game developers will have access to a refined, reliable framework that has been tested in dozens of games played by millions of customers. ...The PopCap Games Framework is available now at developer.popcap.com. It currently supports Windows 98, ME, 2000, and XP operating systems."

Voodoo Extreme has the story that earlier this week Grand Theft Auto creator David Jones announced the upcoming release of APB, a massively multiplayer game in the vein of Grand Theft Auto. It won't be out until 2007, but will make an appearance at E3 this year. Business Wire has details on the game's developer, Webzen, as well. The company sounds as if it's going to be making a major push into the market. From the article: "In addition to APB, Webzen, Inc. plans to bring multiple online game titles to the U.S. market. The titles include the massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), SUN, releasing in the third quarter of 2005, and a massively multiplayer online first person shooter (MMOFPS) called Huxley, that leverages the latest Unreal 3 game engine and is scheduled to release in 2006."

antifoidulus writes "According to Businesswire there is a Family Guy video game in the works, set to hit the street sometime next year. The game is being developed by Take-Two Interactive. The press releases contains only a few scant details, but the game will be a 3rd person action game that puts you in control of various members of the once cancelled animated family." From the article: "The massive licensing and merchandising program on tap will coincide with the new series launch for Family Guy on May 1st, and is expected to be one of the company's largest product blitzes to date."

currivan writes "In a move that's been in consideration for a long time, the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) approved new rules requiring employee stock options to be treated as expenses for reporting purposes. One of the reasons so many tech companies have given options to IT/engineering workers is that until now, they haven't counted against profits in quarterly reports. If markets were truly efficient, this wouldn't make a difference, but in reality, the tech industry is strongly opposed to the rule, though it should please Warren Buffett."