Migraineman writes "NASA has released a 400-page Columbia Crew Survival Investigation Report [16MB PDF.] If you're interested in a detailed examination and timeline of the events leading to the destruction of Columbia, this is well worth the time. The report includes a number of recommendations to increase survivability of future missions." Reader bezking points out CNN's story on the report, which says that problems with the astronauts' restraint systems were the ultimate cause of death for the seven astronauts on board.

unassimilatible writes "Michael Meeks, who works full time developing OpenOffice, writes in his blog that the project is 'profoundly sick.' 'In a healthy project we would expect to see a large number of volunteer developers involved, in addition — we would expect to see a large number of peer companies contributing to the common code pool; we do not see this in OpenOffice.org. Indeed, quite the opposite we appear to have the lowest number of active developers on OO.o since records began: 24, this contrasts negatively with Linux's recent low of 160+. Even spun in the most positive way, OO.o is at best stagnating from a development perspective.'"

Valve announced yesterday that their extension of Steam, called Steam Cloud, will launch later this week with the Left 4 Dead demo. Steam Cloud is "a set of services for Steam that stores application data online and allows user experiences to be consistent from any PC." We discussed an early announcement for it back in May. Valve adds that "Steam Cloud will be available to all publishers and developers using Steam, free of charge, and Valve will add Cloud support to its back catalog of Steam games. Cloud services are compatible with games purchased via Steam, at retail, and other digital outlets."

Tjeerd writes "Because the 'green revolution' is accelerating, I felt it was time to get involved. Last week I started with buying a portable solar energy charger for my mobile phone. But soon I was thinking of also recharging my Asus Eee netbook with a portable solar energy recharger. I found things like the Portable Power Pack, Foldable Solar Chargers, and the Solar Gorilla. The Solar Gorilla looks quite interesting and might be able to recharge my netbook and fits nicely in a rucksack. But I would like some real-life feedback. If you have experience with these or other portable solar devices, what has worked for you?"

Bergkamp10 from ComputerWorld writes "Microsoft's leader of C# development, writer of the Turbo Pascal system, and lead architect on the Delphi language, Anders Hejlsberg, reveals all there is to know on the history, inspiration, uses and future direction of one of computer programming's most widely used languages — C#. Hejlsberg also offers some insight into the upcoming version of C# (C#4) and the new language F#, as well as what lies ahead in the world of functional programming."

Barence writes "Microsoft is working on a web-based operating system called Midori, as it looks to life beyond Windows. Midori is expected to be a cloud-computing service, and so not as dependent on hardware as current generations of Windows. It's also expected to run with a virtualization layer between the hardware and the OS, and is expected to be a commercial offshoot of the Singularity research project which Microsoft has been working on since 2003." If this story sounds familiar to you, it probably is.

Knuckles writes "Austrian newspaper Der Standard continues its recent series of in-depth interviews with free software developers. This time they sat down with Novell's Vice President of Developer Platform, Miguel de Icaza of Gnome and Mono fame. The interview was conducted at GUADEC (GNOME Users' And Developers' European Conference). Miguel talks mainly about Mono 2.0 and .Net 3.5 compatibility, enhancing the collaboration with Microsoft over Silverlight ('Moonlight' in Mono), and the larger political situation of Mono and Moonlight. When the interviewer asks whether Moonlight is only validating Silverlight on the web, Miguel gives a quite detailed answer that includes a possibly well-deserved swipe at Mozilla ..."

ruphus13 writes "Now that Gates has 'retired' from Microsoft, ZDNet is speculating that Microsoft will become much more Open Source friendly. From the article, 'We already see quite a different approach to dealing with OSS and OSS companies from Sam Ramji's group [which is] doing a great job in establishing dialog,' said Rafael Laguna, CEO of Open-Xchange and a former marketing exec at SUSE Linux. 'With Gates' departure, the only mammoth remaining is Ballmer. With him away in a near future, Microsoft will definitely open up. They have to.'" Microsoft could become the world's largest open source company; they've certainly made some concessions to it lately.

labourstart writes "Meetup.com wasn't designed to help presidential candidates and Twitter wasn't supposed to be a campaigning tool. But LabourStart's Eric Lee argues that Twitter may be just what unions and other campaigning organizations have been looking for — a way to cut through the background noise and reach their members."

Dude With An Afro writes "What could have been a great Google project is now history. For those who never used it, Google Browser Sync was a Firefox extension that synchronized your bookmarks, web history, browser sessions and passwords across multiple computers by temporarily saving them to Google's servers. According to the Google Browser Sync team: 'It was a tough call, but we decided to phase out support for Browser Sync. Since the team has moved on to other projects that are keeping them busy, we don't have time to update the extension to work with Firefox 3 or to continue to maintain it.' For all of those who fell in love with Google's Browser Sync, our only hope now is to resort to poorly maintained 3rd party extensions without Google's blessing." While it was undoubtedly a useful utility, the argument can also be made that it wasn't the most secure extension in the world, what with having your personal data kept on Google's servers and shot around the internet.

Kurtz'sKompund tips us to news that Microsoft has released a finished version of the Open XML software development kit. Microsoft has made additional resources available with the download. Quoting Techworld: "The SDK includes an application programming interface (API) simplifying the creation of code for searching documents, creating documents, validating document parts, modifying data and other tasks, Microsoft said. The API can be used in any language supported by the Microsoft .Net Framework, the company said. The current SDK supports the version of Open XML supported by Office 2007, which is not the same as that ratified as a standard by the ISO, due to changes effected during the ratification process."

sasserstyl writes "eWeek reports that Microsoft's Silverlight platform will support Ruby client-side scripting, enabling ARAX — or Asynchronous Ruby and XML. Would be cool to have the option to script client-side in something other than Javascript. 'In essence, using ARAX, Ruby developers would not have to go through the machinations of using something like the RJS (Ruby JavaScript) utility, where they write Ruby code and RJS generates JavaScript code to run on the client, Lam said. "Sure, you could do it that way, but then at some point you might have to add some JavaScript code that adds some custom functionality on the client yourself," he said. "So there's always that sense of, 'Now I'm in another world. And wouldn't it be nice if I have this utility class I wrote in Ruby...' Today if I want to use it in the browser I have to port it to JavaScript. Now I can just run it in the browser."'"

Larry Meistrich started making movies with next to no money. He's the founder and chairman of NEHST Studios, "a diversified film production, financing and distribution company" that opened its doors in May, 2007. As the above links show, Larry is a serious expert on the inner workings of the movie and TV production business, with a long string of production successes on his resume. Ask him whatever you like. Usual interview rules apply. And who knows? Maybe NEHST will finance your next movie.