LinuxScribe tips a piece up at Linux.com with inside details on the design and construction of the Apollo 11 code. There are some analogies to open source development but they are slim. MIT drafted the code — to run on the Apollo Guidance Computer, a device with less grunt than an IBM XT — it had 2K of memory and a 1-MHz clock speed. It was an amazing machine for its time. NASA engineers tested, polished, simulated, and refined the code. "The software was programmed on IBM punch cards. They had 80-columns and were 'assembled' to instruction binary on mainframes... and it took hours. ... During the mission, most of the software code couldn't be changed because it was hard-coded into the hardware, like ROM today... But during pre-launch design simulations, problems that came up in the code could sometimes be finessed by... computer engineers using a small amount of erasable memory that was available for the programs. The software used a low-level assembly language and was controlled using pairs or segments of numbers entered into a square-shaped, numeric-only keyboard called a Display and Keyboard Unit... The two-digit codes stood for 'nouns' or 'verbs,' and were used to enter commands or data, such as spacecraft docking angles or time spans for operations." Reader Smark adds, "The Google Code Blog announced today that the Virtual AGC and AGS project has transcribed the Command Module and Lunar Excursion Module code used during the Apollo 11 moon landing. The code is viewable at the VirtualAGC Google Code Page."

Modern games are extremely expensive to make. High-profile, AAA titles have budgets in the tens of millions, and even the smaller, independent titles can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to make. Couple this with development times that frequently reach three or four years and you have publishers who are very shy about investing in new projects, particularly for unproven IPs. Valve co-founder Gabe Newell recently spoke about a new way of funding such games: "There's a huge amount of risk associated with those dollars and decisions have to be incredibly conservative. What I think would be much better would be if the community could finance the games. In other words, 'Hey, I really like this idea you have. I'll be an early investor in that and, as a result, at a later point I may make a return on that product, but I'll also get a copy of that game.'" Such a system would certainly relieve some of the pressure to stick with tried-and-true concepts (and possibly get management to grant a little more leeway with deadlines and resources), and it would make the video game industry more of a meritocracy than it already is.

An anonymous reader writes "I have just moved overseas on a 2-year working holiday visa and so I picked up a netbook for the interim, an MSI Wind U100 Plus running WinXP. I love it to bits. But as I am traveling around I am somewhat worried about theft. Most of my important stuff is in Gmail and Google Docs; however, I don't always have Net access and find it useful to gear up the offline versions for both. Ideally I would like to securely delete all the offline data from the hard drive if it were stolen. Since it is backed up in the cloud, and the netbook is so cheap I don't really care about recovery, a solution that bricks it would be fine — and indeed would give me a warm glow knowing a prospective thief would have wasted their time. But it's not good if they can extract the HD and get at the data some other way. All thief-foiling suggestions are welcome, be they software, hardware, or other."

barnyjr writes "A teenager could face federal charges after investigators say he made online threats to kill Americans on a plane from Indianapolis to Chicago. According to investigators, a monitor of the online interactive game World of Warcraft saw the alleged threats in an on-line chat and called Johnson County authorities. She told investigators the chatter didn't seem like a game." I'm not sure who's crazier, this guy or the guy who just became the first World of Warcraft player to rack up 10,000 achievement points.

An anonymous reader recommends an Ars Technica account of a breakthrough in efforts toward quantum computing. German scientists have managed to get cesium atoms in a state called a "quantum walk": basically a superposition of all the possible states of a particle. "Quantum walks were first proposed by physicist Richard Feynman and are, in terms of probability, the opposite of a random walk. A random walk might be modeled by a person flipping a coin, and for each flip he steps left for heads and right for tails. In this case, his most probable location is the center, with the probability distribution tapering off in either direction. A quantum walk involves the use of internal states and superpositions, and results in the hypothetical person 'exploring' every possible position simultaneously." In the abstract of the paper from Science (subscription needed for full-text access), the researchers say: "Our system allows the observation of the quantum-to-classical transition and paves the way for applications, such as quantum cellular automata."

quintin3265 writes "Today Overclocked ReMix released its latest free fan tribute album, Final Fantasy IV: Echoes of Betrayal, Light of Redemption. The 46-track album is described by the project's coordinators as a 'narrative' set 'to recreate the story of Final Fantasy 4.' 36 artists contributed in a variety of genres, from classical to techno. This album is the latest of several free entirely fan-created albums produced by Overclocked ReMix, which recently composed the professional soundtrack for Super Street Fighter II HD Turbo Remix. Individual tracks can be downloaded from the website, or you can grab the torrent."

By now you've probably seen the NY Times's long piece on distracted driving — about how most drivers and most legislators willfully ignore the evidence of the dangers of talking on a cellphone, texting, and other electronic distractions while behind the wheel. According to this article, cellphone use while driving causes over 1,000 fatalities a year in the US. Another shoe has now dropped: it seems that the US National Highway Safety Administration blocked a proposed definitive study of the risks. The NHSA now cites concerns about angering Congress. Two consumer safety groups had filed a FOIA request for documents about the aborted study, and the Times has now made the documents public — including the research behind the request for a study of 10,000 drivers.

snydeq writes to recommend Peter Wayner's inside look at the frustration iPhone developers face from Apple when attempting to distribute their apps through the iPhone App Store. Wayner's long piece is an extended analogy comparing Apple to the worst of Soviet-era bureaucracy. "Determined simply to dump an HTML version of his book into UIWebView and offer two versions through the App Store, Wayner endures four months of inexplicable silences, mixed messages, and almost whimsical rejections from Apple — the kind of frustration and uncertainty Wayner believes is fast transforming Apple's regulated marketplace into a hotbed of bottom-feeding mediocrity. 'Developers are afraid to risk serious development time on the platform as long as anonymous gatekeepers are able to delay projects by weeks and months with some seemingly random flick of a finger,' Wayner writes of his experience. 'It's one thing to delay a homebrew project like mine, but it's another thing to shut down a team of developers burning real cash. Apple should be worried when real programmers shrug off the rejections by saying, "It's just a hobby."'"

alphadogg sends in a Network World piece on the unexpectedly effective technologies Iran is now employing to thwart their citizens' access to the Net. "While the government's initial efforts to censor the Internet were blunt and often ineffective, it has started employing more sophisticated tools to thwart dissidents' attempts to communicate with each other and the outside world. Iranian dissidents are not alone in their struggle, however, as several sympathetic hacker groups have been working to keep them online. One such group is NedaNet, whose mission is to 'help the Iranian people by setting up networks of proxy severs, anonymizers, and any other appropriate technologies that can enable them to communicate and organize.' NedaNet project coordinator Morgan Sennhauser, who has just written a paper detailing the Iranian government's latest efforts to thwart hackers (PDF), says that the government's actions have been surprisingly robust and have challenged hackers in ways that the Chinese government's efforts at censorship have not."

1sockchuck writes "A Texas startup called Baryonyx plans to build data centers powered entirely by renewable energy. Its first project will be a wind-powered server farm powered by 100 wind turbines in the Texas panhandle. The company has also leased 38,000 acres in the Gulf of Mexico, where it hopes to build hundreds of 300-foot wind turbines that can each generate up to 5 megawatts of power to support additional facilities. Baryonyx plans to sell excess capacity to the local utility, which it will use as a backup when the wind dies down."

alphadogg writes with an excerpt from Network World that might save you some money: "Imagine downloading a two-hour HD movie in three minutes to your new cell phone, then plugging the phone into your TV to watch the film. Make unlimited phone calls, surf online as much as you like and send unlimited text messaging for $70 a month, without a contract. Sign up to sell the same service to other people and get $10 a month for each person you sell to. That's what a group of related companies including Zer01 Mobile, Buzzirk, Global Verge and Unified Technologies Group are promoting heavily online and at industry trade shows. The offer is attractive enough to garner coverage in top business and technology publications, at least one positive review from an analyst and even a 'best in show' award from a magazine at the CTIA wireless industry trade show earlier this year. Does it all sound too good to be true? If so, that's because it probably is. What little information is available about the services is technically inconsistent, and doesn't match up with public records."

DavidMatuszek writes "I will be teaching Java again this Fall. Students work in pairs, but unfortunately (after the first hour) typically not physically together. I would like to find collaborative software that is (1) dead simple to use, because that's not what the course is about, and (2) free. Google Docs would do, but students will be sharing code — plain text — not RTF or HTML or Word files. Is there such software for plain text?"

An anonymous reader writes "Linux distributions track upstream projects, releasing a particular version with each official release. But how far behind the latest versions do these releases linger? Scott Shawcroft did an interesting new study into this relationship between distributions and upstream projects. Shawcroft says: 'Over the last 10 months I've been working on Linux evolution research. Similar to distrowatch, I track the current versions of packages in a number of distributions and the current upstream version. Based on that data I then graph a number of metrics to understand the relationship between upstream and downstream.' His presentation on the topic scheduled for [this] week's open source convention, OSCON, should provide an interesting insight into that relationship. Currently he is tracking 20 projects including the Linux kernel, Firefox, GCC, OpenSSH and GNOME on Arch, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, openSUSE, Sabayon, Slackware, and Ubuntu."

griffjon writes "In an interview, Nicholas Negroponte claims that the biggest mistake OLPC made was the revolutionary Red Hat-based Sugar desktop environment — instead, he says, they should have built Sugar as an application that ran on a 'vanilla' Linux OS. Some disagree."

brothke writes "A recent search on Amazon for travel guides returned over 30,000 results. Most of these are standard travel guides to popular tourist destinations which advise the reader to go to the typical tourist sites. The Geek Atlas: 128 Places Where Science and Technology Come Alive is a radically different travel guide. Rather than recommending the usual trite destinations, which are often glorified souvenir stores, the book takes the reader to places that make science real and exciting, and hopefully those who exit such places are more knowledgeable than when they went in." Read on for the rest of Ben's review.