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Technology

Vaporware - the Tech That Never Was 192

Posted by Zonk from the beautiful-vapour-hanging-in-the-air dept.
An anonymous reader writes "CNet has published an incredibly detailed look at the most critical examples of vaporware ever seen in the tech sector. We're familiar with Wired's yearly round-ups, but this decades-long retrospective look at the most promising of all technologies that never saw the light of day, holds some fascinating technology I've never even heard of, including the wonderfully-named three-dimensional atomic holographic optical data storage nanotechnology. 'Continual delays, setbacks and excuses are the calling cards of a product that becomes vapourware. Windows Vista ran the risk of joining the club, and the terrific multiplayer first-person shooter Team Fortress 2 was in production for almost a decade before it was released in 2007. Devoted TF fans feared it would become a distinguished entrant in the who's who of vapourware. You might say Google Mail is in the running, having been in beta since 2004.'"
Sci-Fi

CERN Scientists Looking for the Force 284

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the yes-that-force dept.
An anonymous reader writes "National Geographic has a fascinating article on the God Particle, which can help explain the Standard Model and get us closer to explain the Grand Unified Theory. The obligatory Star Wars-angle summary is even better: 'CERN's scientists, the fine people who brought us the W and Z particles, anti-hydrogen atoms and hyperlinked porn web pages, are now hard at work building the Large Hadron Collider to discover something even cooler: the Force. Yes, that Force. Or like physicists call it, the Higgs boson, a particle that carries a field which interacts with every living or inert matter.'"
Book Reviews

The PHP Anthology 2nd Edition 80

Posted by samzenpus from the read-all-about-it dept.
Michael J. Ross writes "When veteran PHP developers have specific and nontrivial functionality that they want to implement in their code, they can do so from scratch, but this can be time-consuming or essentially reinventing the wheel. They can adopt completed code posted in an online discussion forum, but such code tends to be buggy. They can use an open source library or other packaged code, but this approach can oftentimes prove to be overkill. Consequently, many developers prefer focused solutions found in PHP cookbooks, such as The PHP Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks." Read on for the rest of Michael's review.
Role Playing (Games)

Submission + - Wowhead sells out to Affinity Media (wowhead.com) 1

Submitted by MattHock
MattHock writes: Wowhead, the fastest growing database of World of Warcraft in-game information, has been confirmed as having been sold to ZAM (Affinity Media), owners of several other WoW databases, including Thottbot and Allakhazam. Until recently, Affinity was also the owner of IGE, a highly controversial company that sold in-game wealth for real life money, until Affinity recently sold IGE, which Wowhead claims as the reason they allowed the sale to go through. But did ZAM really sell IGE? Industy insiders highly doubt IGE and ZAM actually distanced themselves from each other, believing that the supposed sale was just actually a means of restructuring to hide the relationship, similar to how IGE's relationship to Thottbot was hidden for a number of months through a convoluted set of parent companies.

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