Logged in users have noticed for some time the request to drink from the Slashdot Firehose. Well now we're ready to start having everybody test it out. It's partially a collaborative news system, partially a redesigned & dynamic next-generation Slashdot index. It's got a lot of really cool features, and a lot of equally annoying new problems for us to find and fix for the next few weeks. I've attached a rough draft of the FAQ to the end of this article. A quick read of it will probably answer most questions from how it works, what all the color codes mean, to what we intend to do with it.

IO ERROR writes "An internet-draft published this month calls for an IPv6 transition plan which would require all Internet-facing servers to have IPv6 connectivity on or before January 1, 2011. 'Engineer and author John Curran proposes that migration to IPv6 happen in three stages. The first stage, which would happen between now and the end of 2008, would be a preparatory stage in which organizations would start to run IPv6 servers, though these servers would not be considered by outside parties as production servers. The second stage, which would take place in 2009 and 2010, would require organizations to offer IPv6 for Internet-facing servers, which could be used as production servers by outside parties. Finally, in the third stage, starting in 2011, IPv6 must be in use by public-facing servers.' Then IPv4 can go away."

eldavojohn writes "IEEE Spectrum is running an article on the inventor of the motion sensor that the Wii uses. The microelectromechanical system (MEMS) gives Wii its core ability to sense motion in the controller. What's really interesting is where Benedetto Vigna wants to take this technology. He has plans to make the sensor smaller and tougher, and hope to place it inside of things like shoes, textiles, and medical devices to aid in data collection. He continues, 'Then I want to make a three-dimensional gyroscope, to measure rotation around three different axes. Today, such products are quite big, a cube 10 centimeters on a side. We want to do this in less than a 30-millimeter cube, to serve as an image stabilizer in cameras and to track a person's position in the intervals when he can't get a GPS signal.'"

sporkme writes "A new nanocoating material developed by a team of researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has the lowest level of reflectivity ever seen ... or not seen in this case. The amount of light reflected by the composite of silica nanorods and aluminum nitride is almost the same amount reflected by air. From the article: 'Schubert and his coworkers have created a material with a refractive index of 1.05, which is extremely close to the refractive index of air and the lowest ever reported. Window glass, for comparison, has a refractive index of about 1.45. Using a technique called oblique angle deposition, the researchers deposited silica nanorods at an angle of precisely 45 degrees on top of a thin film of aluminum nitride, which is a semiconducting material used in advanced light-emitting diodes (LEDs). From the side, the films look much like the cross section of a piece of lawn turf with the blades slightly flattened.' Suggested applications include increased efficiency in solar cells, more energy-efficient lighting and advances in quantum mechanics."