Slashdot

Mattintosh writes "A blogger at C|Net takes a moment to consider the impact Netflix has had on Blockbuster. Some notable highlights include heavy losses ($35 million), job cuts ($45 million worth), and store closings: 'Much like the print media and retail stores refusing to change, Blockbuster has been a victim on an online company finding new and inventive ways of bringing a product to a customer. And due to its size and outdated corporate culture, there really is no salvation for Blockbuster at this point. Try as it might, the future of Blockbuster is bleak, at best. Sure, the company still enjoys revenue that climb into the billions of dollars, but with an ever-increasing net loss and a public refusal to focus on Total Access--the area where Netflix continues to dominate--what is the impetus for us to jump on the Blockbuster bandwagon?'"

PJ1216 writes to mention that vinyl seems poised to make a comeback in the music industry. Some are even predicting that this comeback coupled with the surge in digital music sales could possibly close the door on CDs. "Portability is no longer any reason to stick with CDs, and neither is audio quality. Although vinyl purists are ripe for parody, they're right about one thing: Records can sound better than CDs. Although CDs have a wider dynamic range, mastering houses are often encouraged to compress the audio on CDs to make it as loud as possible: It's the so-called loudness war. Since the audio on vinyl can't be compressed to such extremes, records generally offer a more nuanced sound. Another reason for vinyl's sonic superiority is that no matter how high a sampling rate is, it can never contain all of the data present in an analog groove, Nyquist's theorem to the contrary."

Fidel Guajardo writes "Because the iPhone runs on OS X, we should see some new or existing applications ported over to the iPhone. Here is a short list of some possible killer apps that would truly be convenient to operate from an iPhone. While some of these concepts already exist, I believe the iPhone would make them even more user-friendly and popular."

BlueVoodoo writes "Python made metaprogramming possible, but each Python version has added slightly different — and not quite compatible — wrinkles to the way you accomplish metaprogramming tricks. Python has recently grown "decorator," which are the newest — and by far the most user-friendly way, so far — to perform most metaprogramming."

konijn writes "Angband is together with Nethack and ADOM one of the 5 big roguelikes. Ever since january 20, 1997 the maintainers have been dual licensing their code and now we are looking to find the last of the missing contributors to get it 100% GPL. We need your help to find these last people and get them to support our GPL initiative! You can find more information here : http://entai.co.uk/projects/angband/opensource/ , the list of missing people is here : http://entai.co.uk/projects/angband/opensource/lis t.html"

chinmay7 writes "PBS has posted three different pilots for a new science show, that they want viewers to weigh in on and help choose one as a regular science show. All three pilots are viewable as vodcasts.
Wired Science aired on January 3rd. The pilot certainly is polished as expected from Wired Magazine, and deals with interesting topics: "Meet rocket-belt inventors, stem cell explorers and meteorite hunters."
Science Investigators (Air date: January 10) seems to be the most 'science' show: "The investigators examine 30,000-year-old Neanderthal DNA, vanishing frogs, mind-boggling baseball pitches and more."
22nd Century (Air date: January 17) is pretty gimmicky and loud (for my tastes, at least) but delivers interesting content — "In the coming decades will all our brains be wired together like networked computers?"

So watch and vote. Choose our new public TV science show."

paniq writes "According to the Linden Blog, Linden Labs released the client software to their Second Life Online Game as open source, licenced under the GPL v2. From the Article: "A lot of the Second Life development work currently in progress is focused on building the Second Life Grid — a vision of a globally interconnected grid with clients and servers published and managed by different groups. Expect many changes and updates in the coming months in support of this architecture." While the open source community might be positively surprised about this move, will it also mean a new wave of exploits on Second Life servers?

— if you reject this story, please privmsg me with a short explanation — i write stories on an occasional base, they usually get rejected, and i never have a clue why. linking the faq is not enough — thank you."