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Moon

Submission + - SPAM: Keep On Truckin' all the way to the Moon

Submitted by
WirePosted
WirePosted writes: "NASA is developing the latest way to drive a truck on the lunar surface, complete with crab steering, six-wheel drive with independent steering for each wheel, active suspension, no doors or windows, and no seats, but, hopefully, with cup holders for their Tang®."
Link to Original Source
Networking

Submission + - Time Warner Cable Wins State-Wide Cable Franchise (state.oh.us) 1

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: Time Warner Cable has received the second state-wide franchise agreement, covering 260 communities, in 60 of Ohio's 88 counties, for 10 years. AT&T was the first to earn a state-wide franchise contract, after a law was passed in September that allowed operators to negotiate a single state-wide agreement. Normally operators negotiate franchise agreements at the local level.
Businesses

Submission + - The Epic Battle between Microsoft and Google 1

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "There is a long article in the NYTimes well worth reading called "Google Gets Ready to Rumble With Microsoft" about the business strategies both companies are pursuing and about the future of applications and where they will reside — on the web or on the desktop. Google President Eric Schmidt thinks that 90 percent of computing will eventually reside in the Web-based cloud and about 2,000 companies are signing up every day for Google Apps, simpler versions of the pricey programs that make up Microsoft's lucrative Office business. Microsoft faces a business quandary as they to try to link the Web to its desktop business — "software plus Internet services," in its formulation. Microsoft will embrace the Web, while striving to maintain the revenue and profits from its desktop software businesses, the corporate gold mine, a smart strategy for now that may not be sustainable. Google faces competition from Microsoft and from other Web-based productivity software being offered by start-ups but it is "unclear at this point whether Google will be able to capitalize on the trends that it's accelerating." David B. Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School, says the Google model is to try to change all the rules. If Google succeeds, "a lot of the value that Microsoft provides today is potentially obsolete.""
Sci-Fi

Submission + - Goodbye from the STARTREK.COM Team 1

Submitted by Curlsman
Curlsman writes: Goodbye from the STARTREK.COM Team

Sadly, we must report that CBS Interactive organization is being restructured, and the production team that brings you the STARTREK.COM site has been eliminated. Effective immediately.
We don't know the ultimate fate of this site, which has served millions of Star Trek fans for the last thirteen years.

If you have comments, please send them to editor @ startrek.com — we hope someone at CBS will read them.

Thank you for your loyal fandom over the years. It has been a pleasure to serve you.

http://www.startrek.com/startrek/view/news/article/2316633.html

Is this site worth a write-in campaign?
United States

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: New York City for Geeks

Submitted by
blueboybob
blueboybob writes: "What places in new york city must all geeks see. I dont want to be the stereotypical tourist. What museums and places of geeky historical value are a must to see?"
Google

Submission + - Google reinvents Wikipedia (blogspot.com) 1

Submitted by teslatug
teslatug writes: Google appears to be reinventing Wikipedia with their new product that they call knol (not yet publicly available). In an attempt to gather human knowledge, Google will accept articles from users who will be credited with the article by name. If they want, they can allow ads to appear alongside the content and they will be getting a share of the profits if that's the case. Other users will be allowed to rate, edit or comment on the articles. The content does not have to be exclusive to Google but no mention is made on any license for it. Is this a better model for free information gathering?
PC Games (Games)

Submission + - Riding the Failure Cascade

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Escapist has an article investigating what causes the death of certain guilds called Riding the Failure Cascade.

"Guild leaders function as coordinators and morale officers as much as they do running the group, because volunteers are easier to lose than they are to come by. And once a guild begins to lose a steady trickle of members, it's only a matter of time before that trickle turns into a full-on waterfall. "

For those of you that have been through a guild breakup, has this been your experience?
Hardware Hacking

Submission + - Chip usage models may be like cellphone plans (digg.com) 3

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: Researchers at University of Illinois have proposed four economic models for many-core computing that seem like cellphone plans. Models include allowing upgrading/downgrading the number of usable cores on demand, renting computational capability on one's own chip, and paying bills to the vendor based on usage. Models are enforced in hardware.
Software

Submission + - Dutch government adopts open code and standards (google.com)

Submitted by
christian.einfeldt
christian.einfeldt writes: "The Dutch government has set a target date of April 2008 for its agencies to start using open standards-based software, the Netherlands Economic Affairs Ministry said Thursday, according to a 14 December 2007 Associated Press article by Toby Sterling. Government organizations will still be able to use proprietary software and formats but will have to justify it under the new policy, ministry spokesman Edwin van Scherrenburg said. Microsoft Netherlands spokesman Hans Bos claims that Microsoft's Office productivity suite will still be used widely in the Dutch government until April, and that Microsoft Office will comply with the new Dutch rules once Microsoft's so-called "Open Office XML" standard is approved as an international ISO standard in February, as Microsoft sees it. The Dutch policy directs government organizations at the national level to be ready to use the Open Document Format to save documents by April, and at the state and local level by 2009, according to the AP's Sterling."
Movies

Submission + - Harry Potter 5 Standard DVD Defective by Design

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Many people I know — and unsurprisingly, many people online — have already written that the quality of the Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix standard DVD is of such poor quality that a VHS tape is a superior version. Even older DVDs from earlier movies in the series stand up with higher quality than this release. Is this a ploy by Warner Bros. to push the HD versions of the film?
Digital

Submission + - 10 Tech Concepts You Need to Know for 2008 (popularmechanics.com)

Submitted by mattnyc99
mattnyc99 writes: As they report from the heady International Electron Devices Meeting with advance word on cheaper photovoltaic cells and nanogenerators, new flexible "communications sheet" furniture and predictions from Intel's Penryn chip team, Popular Mechanics has listed its annual 10 tech concepts you need to know for next year. The short list: EEG game controllers, self-healing materials, high-k transistors, vertical search, clear-pixel cameras, pay-per-glance advertising, flexible displays, embedded voice recognition, self-defending bots and nano cancer therapy. See how that stacks up to how we debated the list from last year (and the year before that), and let the guessing begin...
KDE

Submission + - KDE 4.0 Release Candidate 2 (kde.org) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: December 11, 2007 (The INTERNET). The KDE Community is happy to announce the immediate availability of the second release candidate for KDE 4.0. This release candidate marks the last mile on the road to KDE 4.0.
Toys

Submission + - Technology Roadmap for Productive Nanosystems (e-drexler.com)

Submitted by
WillWare
WillWare writes: "The working group for the Technology Roadmap for Productive Nanosystems is 70-some scientists and researchers from academia, industry and the U.S. National Laboratories, who for the last two years have been figuring out how to get from today's technology to real working advanced nanotechnology. Their report has finally been published in PDF format, available to the general public. It surveys relevant current research efforts and looks at the most fruitful directions for future work."
Space

Submission + - Near Earth "Asteroid" Turns Out to be Spac 1

Submitted by iamlucky13
iamlucky13 writes: Last week, the IAU's Minor Planet Center asked professional astronomers around the world to help track a previously unknown asteroid, labeled 2007 VN84, that will pass the earth at the alarmingly close distance of 5600 km on November 13. However, Denis Denisenko of the Moscow Space Research Institute then noticed something peculiar: the object's trajectory exactly matched that of the European Space Agency's Rosetta probe, which will perform a gravitational slingshot around the earth on that date on its way to study and land on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The MPC's editorial notice on the error also comments critically on the current means available to identifying distant spacecraft such as Rosetta.

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