1up.com has coverage of the meeting held yesterday in which Sony let more details slip on the future of the PSP, plans for the PS3, and the state of the Playstation 2. From the PS3 update: "One big piece of news is that Sony will be including both Havoc Complete and AEGIA, two physics modeling solutions, with the PlayStation 3 SDK. Even more importantly, Sony themselves will be providing 'frontline support' for Japanese developers. This should be a big boon to next generation development, as a lack of Japanese language documentation and support has been one of the major hurdles for Japanese developers to adopt middleware solutions."

Mictian writes "The risk to the space shuttle from launch debris, mainly ice falling off the external tank, has been reduced and is now low enough to be considered 'an acceptable risk,' NASA's shuttle engineers and managers concluded in the debris verification meeting held Saturday at Kennedy Space Center. The board recommended a green light for a July launch, which Shuttle Program Manager Bill Parsons accepted. The independent Return to Flight Task Group will hold its final meeting on June 27th to determine if the remaining 3 (out of 15) hurdles to launch are cleared, as mentioned in previous Slashdot coverage."

Neverwinter Nights introduced a new generation of gamers to D&D style roleplaying. When Knights of the Old Republic was released it was arguably the best Star Wars tale told since the end of the original trilogy. Given the chance to create their own world, Bioware has produced an immersive action/RPG with a compelling plot, memorable characters, and entertaining gameplay. Jade Empire is a most worthy addition to Bioware's library of games. Read on for my take on one of the most original RPG's in recent memory.

Earlier this month, you asked questions of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy executive producer Robbie Stamp. Robbie's been kind enough to answer more than the usual number of questions, and has provided much interesting information about the casting, Douglas Adams' influence, and more -- read on below for his answers.

A long, long time ago, you asked questions of Mark Shuttleworth -- astronaut, entrepreneur, activist, and now chief of Debian-and-GNOME based distribution Ubuntu Linux. Mark's been understandably busy running the world of Ubuntu, especially considering the imminent release of the group's newest version, Hoary Hedgehog. He's answered below questions on everything from what makes it worth paying for a trip to space to how software offered with source, for free, and under a liberal license (aka Free software) can sustain itself and its creators. Read on for his answers.

fahrv asks: "I use a MythTV-based Linux PVR. I'd like to see if there are ways to implement automatic Tivo-like program recordings based on personal preferences (and Amazon-like analysis of what other people recorded based on what you've recorded.) I know that the Amazon patent on 'Other people who bought XX also bought YY' could be an issue, but then Tivo is able to record shows opportunistically as well. I don't see any technical hurdles to doing this by analyzing people's MythTV viewing habits in an opt-in kind of system; I'd be interested in building one. Might any of you have some thoughts on this subject?"

Shipud writes "The sixth Bioinformatics Open Source Conference will take place this June in Detroit, MI. Open source licensed software has proven to be the most popular and useful for bioinformatics research. This includes the EMBOSS suite for sequence analysis, the Biopython; Bioperl, and Biojava collaborativelty constructed toolboxes; the ubiquitous RasMol and PyMol molecular visualization tools, and more, much more. Here is one opinion as to why open source and collaborative development have been such a raging success even at big pharma, despite the apparent IP hurdles."

The Other Side of the Coin asks: "I've been doing a relatively interesting job until now, but they've pushed me into management recently. Although the new position is pretty boring (I manage normals), I do still have time for all the geeky stuff I used to do before. My problem is: I have no formal (or any other, for that matter) management training. Sure, I'll read a lot about it (and take some education), but what are your experiences as geeks in management? For example, I naturally started to use Borgish management methods, and this wasn't received well by people, to say the least. What are the most difficult hurdles for a manager geek to jump, and can our personality be used as an advantage in management?"

comforteagle writes "One of the greatest hurdles for people wishing to 'switch' to FOSS and Linux is finding a good replacement tool for what they are accustomed to using. In Open Source Alternatives to Dreamweaver Templating Mark Stosberg investigates what open source solutions are available to replace Dreamweaver's powerful templating capabilities." Update: 01/09 by J : Hey, just for the record, Template Toolkit, which provides the solution Mr. Stosberg settles on, also powers much of Slashdot.

bblackfrog asks: "Is a Federal nuclear energy program viable? That is, can the USA eliminate our economic dependence on crude oil with a large scale federal program to build and maintain enough nuclear power plants to replace our current oil-based energy needs? The obvious political hurdles are (a) the left opposes nuclear energy, (b) the right opposes federalizing energy, and (c) the oil companies and Saudis wield a lot of clout. This makes a federal nuclear energy program far fetched I admit, however I'm more interested in the economics. Slashdot has covered advances in nuclear power technology. China's doing it." (Read more, below.)

Roland Piquepaille writes "Tele-immersion is a technology which allows cooperative interaction between groups of distant people working in the same virtual environment. At the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) at UC Berkeley, interdisciplinary teams are deploying this technology. It involves three real-time steps: taking images of a subject with 48 cameras, transmitting the images over a network, and implanting them in a virtual world. For example, it will allow students and professors on different campuses to meet -- virtually -- and discuss -- lively -- while being in ancient sites of Greece or Italy. The technology offers more promises than academics discussions. Imagine a nurse telling a diabetic how to make an insulin injection while being far away from him. Of course, this technology is facing some hurdles, such as the cost involved to model you with so many cameras. This summary shows you some details about the image processing involved in this project."

An anonymous reader writes "Two MIT students relaunched MIT's believed-legal music sharing network today, using a Linux-based consumer audio device that also launches today as a commercial product. The 'Library Access to Music Project' (LAMP) system was first launched a year ago, but shut down after its content supplier encountered legal hurdles. The re-incarnated LAMP is based on StreetFire Sound's RBX1600, which network-enables multiple inexpensive consumer audio jukeboxes. So... what do you think? Does the new version look legal?"

Roland Piquepaille writes "Today, our handheld devices are powered by batteries, which are heavy and inconvenient. Fuel cells are just arriving on the market as a replacement. But there is a new contender: micro gas turbine engines under development at the MIT. Engineers there shrunk jet engines to the size of a coat button. And their blades which span an area smaller than a dime can spin a million times per minute and produce enough electricity to power your PDA or your cell phone. While there are still a few hurdles to overcome, these micro turbine engines should be operational in two or three years, with commercial products available four years from now. These micro jet engines also have the potential to free soldiers or travelers from carrying heavy batteries. The engineers even think their engines on a chip could be used in poor countries to bring electricity there. This summary gives you the essential details about a technology which promises to free us to carry extra fuel instead of batteries."

tarzeau writes "Today, the OpenStep API celebrates its 10th anniversary. What started out as a joint adventure of NeXT and SUN to define an application development standard that would run on all machines, making 'write once, compile everywhere' a reality, is still unfolding within the vivid and active community of GNUstep, old NeXT and Apple lovers. The magic 10 appears in GNUstep's current 1.10.x release and in Apple's Mac OS X 'Cocoa' release. Programmers worldwide can develop their programs on Mac OS, Linux, the BSDs, Solaris, and with a couple of hurdles -- even on Windows. This solid and well-defined standard is reaching out to the world of software development, slowly but surely. Program your applications in days or weeks, rather than years or never. Use the advanced API of a development framework that hasn't needed significant modification for 10 years, because it rocks, is stable and just works."

William Nichols writes "With a couple of projects coming up that are going to require complete W3C CSS and XHTML validation (with 1 client requiring just a pure CSS layout) I thought it was time to brush up on some CSS knowledge, and maybe learn a new thing or two. I have spent the past week with a newly released book (and one of the smaller CSS books out there), the Web Standards Solutions The Markup and Style Handbook. The author, Dan Cederholm, has now become my right hand man, so to speak." Read on for the rest of Nichols' review.

what_the_frell writes "Looks like the Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, will be online and in use for at least another six months, after surviving the lowest point of the Martian year, in terms of sunlight. New Scientist has a fascinating article on this and some of the other hurdles the rovers have tackled. It's pretty cool how the rovers have far exceeded their initial 30-day mission (today is Day 263), and that their new projected mission is now well over 365 days."

13.7BillionYears writes "Slate explores the technical hurdles VoIP faces in providing 911 emergency services and points to some technical, legislative and commercial workarounds that just might work. Some are the author's own ideas, some are already in the works. Until this little doozie gets solved, VoIP will have to suffer plenty of FUD of the credible variety and may never spark a real revolution. Of course you can always keep analog POTS (plain old telephone service) around like floppies--just for emergencies--but it'll cost you and tie you down in a number of ways."

sydb asks: "I am currently persuading my employer to try out Linux. We are heavily dependent on IBM software technologies just now, and it's a very conservative operations organization. As a challenge, I am trying to persuade them to use my preferred distro but there are hurdles: IBM doesn't officially support Debian as a platform, though I have anecdotal evidence that most of it can be persuaded to work (with alien etc). Does Slashdot have experience shoe-horning Debian into this kind of scenario? Most importantly, how have things gone getting IBM support? My rationale for pushing Debian boils down to its vast array of packages available to apt-get, easy upgrades, apt-get itself, and the overall quality and consistency of the system."

Roblimo writes "Lawrence Rosen, attorney for the Open Source Initiative, doesn't seem to be as worried about software patents' effects on open source development as some Slashdot readers. In this article he says, 'Don't be too paranoid about the patent problem. It's a real problem, but not a catastrophe. Any patent owner that tries to assert its patents against open source software has many hurdles to leap before the royalty checks start to arrive.'"

Sam Hiser writes "Tom Adelstein makes some sound if subtle points about where GNU/Linux really is in the government space -- not far enough. With OpenOffice.org and Mozilla (Firefox) now popular harbingers of file format freedom and browser security on Windows, he says, there is hope that public mindshare is catching up with reality; and that the 'Microsoft Two-Step: Shrug & Reboot' will soon be a thing of the past. Adelstein, in his column today in Linux Journal, discusses the significant advances made by GNU/Linux and its achievement of Common Criteria certification for government and enterprise use in a world where Microsoft still dominates in mindshare and governmental purchase orders."