Tellme founder and previous Yahoo co-founder, Mike McCue hasn't spoken to past-partner Jerry Yang since the Microsoft takeover bid for Yahoo, but he wanted to let his friend know that being acquired by Microsoft isn't such a terrible proposition. "After being assured that Tellme would be able to retain its Silicon Valley office, identity and quirky culture, McCue negotiated an $800 million sale to Microsoft and agreed to stay on as general manager. It's a decision that he says he doesn't regret 10 months into the marriage. 'We are pretty much doing everything we were doing before - just a lot more of it,' said McCue, 40. Because of the vast differences in size, the Tellme deal obviously isn't an apples-to-apples comparison to Microsoft's proposed $40 billion acquisition of Yahoo, which contends it's worth even more money despite a two-year earnings slump."

SethJohnson writes "Thanks to a $59 million National Science Foundation grant, there's likely to be a new king of the High Performance Computing Top 500 list. The contender is Ranger, a 15,744 Quad-Core AMD Opteron behemoth built by Sun and hosted at the University of Texas. Its peak processing power of 504 teraflops will be shared among over 500 researchers working across the even larger TeraGrid system. Although its expected lifespan is just four years, Ranger will provide 500 million processor hours to projects attempting to address societal grand challenges such as global climate change, water resource management, new energy sources, natural disasters, new materials and manufacturing processes, tissue and organ engineering, patient-specific medical therapies, and drug design."

Lucas123 writes "While the news may fall under the 'Duh' category, it's still relatively shocking how quickly the death knell for HD DVD player sales came on after Warner Bros. announced they were dropping dual hi-def DVD format support in order to back only Blu-ray. According to a Computerworld story, the week after Warner's announcement, sales of HD DVD players dropped to 1,758, down from 14,558 players the week before. In contrast, consumers bought 21,770 Blu-ray Disc players, up from 15,257 the previous week."

An anonymous reader writes "Netcraft has written about a website offering free phishing kits with one ironic twist — they all contain backdoors to steal stolen credentials from the fraudsters that deploy them. Deliberately deceptive code inside the kits means that script kiddies are unlikely to realize that any captured credit card numbers also end up getting sent to the people who made the phishing kits. The same group was also responsible for another backdoored phishing kit used against Bank of America earlier this month."

eldavojohn writes "There has long been speculation on why the Sun's surface is a mere ten thousand degrees while the atmosphere can reach millions. Space.com is reporting that the mystery has now been solved. Researchers looked for Alfven waves in the solar chromosphere and found them. Followup studies employing simulations demonstrated that the energetics work out to transfer energy from the Sun's surface to its overlying corona.. The magnetic waves may also be the power source behind the solar wind."

Joystiq has the NPD numbers for the entire year of 2007 and (of course) December. Last year was a banner year for games, with the industry as a whole coming close to cracking $18 billion in sales. The big winner was the Wii, of course, with some 6 million units sold over the course of the year. The 360 sold about four and a half million, and the PS3 sold about two and a half. The big software seller was (un-shockingly) Halo 3, at 4.82 million sold, with Wii Play close behind at 4.12m. Here are the software numbers for December: "Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (Xbox 360) -- 1.47m, Super Mario Galaxy (Wii) -- 1.40m, Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock (PS2) -- 1.25m, Wii Play w/ Remote (Wii) -- 1.08m, Assassin's Creed (Xbox 360) -- 894K, Halo 3 (Xbox 360) -- 743K, Brain Age 2 (DS) -- 660K, Madden NFL 08 (PS2) -- 655K, Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock (Xbox 360) -- 625K, Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games (Wii) -- 613K"

Henneshoe writes "BBC News is reporting that two research facilities have been given the green light to create part human, part animal embryos. According the the report, 'Scientists want to create hybrid embryos by merging human cells with animal eggs in a bid to extract stem cells. The embryos would then be destroyed within 14 days.' The decision to allow the embryos was made after research showed that people in large are OK with the idea."

miller60 writes "Intel has become the latest major tech company to express interest in using portable data centers to transform IT infrastructure. Intel says an approach using a "data center in a box" could be 30 to 50 percent cheaper than the current cost of building a data center. "The difference is so great that with this solution, brick-and-mortar data centers may become a thing of the past," an Intel exec writes. Sun and Rackable have introduced portable data centers, while Google has a patent for one and Microsoft has explored the concept. But for all the enthusiasm for data centers in shipping containers, there are few real-world deployments, which raises the question: are portable data centers just fun to speculate about, or can they be a practical solution for the current data center expansion challenges?"

If you can imagine working in the office of a school for gifted, troubled, and criminally insane children, inside an international airport, you can get a taste of what it is like to do support for Slashdot. I've worked here around 5 years now and have seen some crazy things. From a guy showing up at the office and offering me a car if I let him "reverse engineer Rob Malda's life", to people shaking and on the verge of tears because they got a Slashdot sticker. I was really tempted to take the car by the way but the thought of Rob spending his last few weeks in a hole, while this guy lowered a bucket of lotion and water down to him once a day, made me feel bad. Most of my time is spent answering email. Most days I receive about 50. When it's busy I can get well over a hundred. As everyone knows, people are precisely 500% more rude and angry online than they are in real life. Something about not having to see the tears or dodge the fist of the person you are swearing at brings out the worst in some people. We decided it would be fun to go through some of the more 'interesting' mails we've got through the years as part of our 10 year anniversary. Below you'll find some of my favorite rants, conspiracy theories and tantrums. (CT: Don't forget to put in your charity bid for the EFF- time is almost up.)

BioShock, the moody drama-driven FPS for the Xbox 360 and PC, was released last month to rave reviews from the major gaming news sites. Since then the internet has been ablaze with outcry about the game's high rating scores. It's hard to understand why. The work of Ken Levine and Irrational Games on the spiritual successor to System Shock 2 is sublime. It's incredibly atmospheric, the game's story is well written and compellingly told, and the first-person shooter gameplay is a respectable, tightly crafted experience. It's a really, really good game. I'll tell you now: it's a 5/5. So why all the angst? Why the backlash? Read on for my review of BioShock, and a few comments on the dangers of 'merely' being a good game.

M Saunders writes "Not long after we enjoyed playing with the device at LinuxWorld 2007, Palm has announced that it is shelving the Foleo handheld PC, before it was due to ship, so that the company can focus on a 'next-generation platform.' Palm hasn't ruled out a 'Foleo II' at some point, but for those of us looking forward to dinky Linux-powered laptops it's a bit of a disappointment. Still, with the Asus Eee PC nearby — and at a very low price point — perhaps it was a sensible move by Palm."

willatnewscientist writes "Forget flippers, the latest idea from the guys at DARPA is a tail-like prosthetic for divers. The (forward-facing) tail, demonstrated at DARPA Tech 2007, is designed to help a diver maintain a speed of 2 knots for up to 300 metres. 'The unpowered, carbon-fibre structure straps to a diver's shins and is used with a motion that is not unlike the way Patrick Duffy swims in The Man from Atlantis. The design is inspired by the way mammals like Seals and Dolphins swim. I caught this video of Powerswim (3.5 MB .avi) at the DARPATech 2007 gathering in Anaheim, California. It would be nice to grab one and try it out when I next head down to the beach, but unless its designers DEKA (the same people who make the Segway) come up with a budget version, the $500 price-tag is going to keep me firmly in my flippers.'"

E++99 writes "Homeland Security has contracted with Intelligent Optical Systems, Inc. to develop an "LED Incapacitator," a nonlethal weapon consisting of a large flashlight with a cluster of LEDs capable of emitting "super-bright pulses of light at rapidly changing wavelengths." Sounds innocuous enough... until they they shine "the evil color" at you and you start puking! A working prototype has been completed, and they will soon be putting it through its paces. Homeland Security hopes to give it to Border Patrol agents and National Guardsmen by 2010."

destinyland writes "An online critic of Scientology was confronted at a routine hearing Tuesday with surprise arrest warrants and thrown into jail. Six years as a fugitive ended in February. (After picketing a Scientology complex in 2000 over the unexplained death of a woman there, he'd been arrested for 'threatening a religion' over a Usenet joke about 'Tom Cruise Missiles.') But 64-year-old Keith Henson had been out on bail, and was even scheduled to address the European Space Agency conference on Space Elevators. He's a co-founder of the Space Colony movement, and one of the original researchers at Texas Instruments. In this interview he discusses both space-based solar energy and his war with the Scientologists — just a few days before he was arrested."