angry tapir writes "MenuetOS is an operating system written entirely in assembly language. As a result it's extremely quick and compact (it can even fit on a floppy disk, despite having a GUI). It can run Quake. Two of the developers behind MenuetOS took time out to talk about what inspired them to undertake the daunting task of writing the operating system, the current state of Menuet and future plans for it."

A round-table discussion at Gametopius looks into the state of downloadable content for games as it has evolved over the past several years, going from an occasional, welcome supplement to being a common marketing strategy for most of the industry, frequently causing irritation over pricing and availability. "All of the map packs so far released for the Call of Duty games have been $10 each to download on consoles through closed networks, while PC gamers could download those same packs for free off of FileShack or somewhere else. Valve's own Team Fortress 2 has received a significant amount of DLC that's been completely free on the PC. Xbox owners of the same game, however, have only received perhaps half of that content, and they have had to pay for it in $5 packs. Why is this? The idea of this kind of content delivery was scarcely heard of on consoles, so console gamers see no reason not to pay for it. But on the PC, these amounts of content are usually just considered parts of patches. Furthermore, why pay for a few extra maps and costumes when modders are making and offering new ones for free all the time?"

Slate is running a story about how searching the internet and keeping up with events through instant communication can fulfill biochemical needs within our brains. Research has shown that anticipation and simply "wanting" can stimulate dopamine production in the brain, and an internet full of answers plays right into that. Quoting: "For humans, this desire to search is not just about fulfilling our physical needs. Panksepp says that humans can get just as excited about abstract rewards as tangible ones. He says that when we get thrilled about the world of ideas, about making intellectual connections, about divining meaning, it is the seeking circuits that are firing. ... The dopamine circuits 'promote states of eagerness and directed purpose,' Panksepp writes. It's a state humans love to be in. So good does it feel that we seek out activities, or substances, that keep this system aroused — cocaine and amphetamines, drugs of stimulation, are particularly effective at stirring it."

1sockchuck writes "With capital scarce, data center developers are prioritizing projects in northern Virginia, where the Obama stimulus plan and federal shift to cloud computing are likely to boost data center demand from government agencies. This is forcing them to delay or scale back large projects in Santa Clara, setting the stage for a supply/demand imbalance in Silicon Valley, particularly for large space requirements. One potential mitigating factor: some currently occupied data center space could become available through the failure of venture-backed startups."

olddotter points out a story up at Yahoo Tech on companies' decisions to distance themselves from the GPL. "Before deciding to pull away from GPL, Haynie says Appcelerator surveyed some two dozen software vendors working within the same general market space. To his surprise, Haynie saw that only one was using a GPL variant. 'Everybody else, hands down, was MIT, Apache, or New BSD,' he says. 'The proponents of GPL like to tell people that the world only needs one open source license, and I think that's actually, frankly, just a flat-out dumb position,' says Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, one of the many organizations now offering an open source license with more generous commercial terms than GPL."

MojoKid writes "A common concern with the current crop of Solid State Drives is the performance penalty associated with block-rewriting. Flash memory is comprised of cells that usually contain 4KB pages that are arranged in blocks of 512KB. When a cell is unused, data can be written to it relatively quickly. But if a cell already contains some data, even if it fills only a single page in the block, the entire block must be re-written. This means that whatever data is already present in the block must be read, then it must be combined or replaced, and the entire block is then re-written. This process takes much longer than simply writing data straight to an empty block. This isn't a concern on fresh, new SSDs, but over time, as files are written, moved, deleted, or replaced, many blocks are a left holding what is essentially orphaned or garbage data, and their long-term performance degrades because of it. To mitigate this problem, virtually all SSD manufacturers have incorporated, or soon will incorporate, garbage collection schemes into their SSD firmware which actively seek out and remove the garbage data. OCZ, in combination with Indilinx, is poised to release new firmware for their entire line-up of Vertex Series SSDs that performs active garbage collection while the drives are idle, in order to restore performance to like-new condition, even on a severely 'dirtied' drive."

circletimessquare writes "The spleen doesn't get much respect — as one researcher put it, 'the spleen lacks the gravitas of neighboring organs.' Those undergoing a splenectomy seem to be able to carry on without any consequences. However, some studies have suggested an enhanced risk of early death for those who have undergone splenectomies. Now researchers have discovered why: the spleen apparently serves as a vast reservoir for monocytes, the largest of the white blood cells, the wrecking crew of the immune system. After major trauma, such as a heart attack, the monocytes are disgorged into the blood stream and immediately get to work repairing the damage. '"The parallel in military terms is a standing army," said Matthias Nahrendorf, an author of the report. "You don't want to have to recruit an entire fighting force from the ground up every time you need it."'"