coondoggie writes to tell us that Lockheed Martin has landed a $485 million contract to create the spacecraft for NASA's MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN) project. "MAVEN is the second mission in NASA's Mars Scout Program — a series of small, low-cost, principal investigator-led missions to the Red Planet, NASA said. The Phoenix Mars Lander was the first mission under the program. Lockheed Martin is the industry partner on the Phoenix mission. It designed and built the spacecraft, and also provided flight operations and currently surface operations for the lander. The mission has been extended through Sept. 30, 2008."

An anonymous reader writes to tell us that a relatively unknown Taiwanese company just rolled out what they claim is the world's fastest DDR3 memory kit. "Gingle DDR3 1800 memory module features high performance (1800MHz on P45/ 2000MHz on 790i), lower latency (8-8-8-24), and lower power consumption (1.84V~1.94V)."

Ortega-Starfire writes "A 30-ton transformer in the Large Hadron Collider malfunctioned, requiring complete replacement on the day the LHC came online. No one at CERN reported any problems, and they only released this data once the Associated Press sent people to investigate rumors of problems. I guess it's hard to just sweep a 30-ton transformer breaking under the rug."

Robert writes "Along with many other techies, I share an interest in the world of finance (bubble-era stock options pulled me in). Unfortunately, as someone with a strong preference for GNU/Linux as my operating system of choice, I have found that software in this area seems quite sparse. For awhile I have made do with Python, R, Gnumeric, Gnucash and a telephone, along with some small utilities I have written myself. What I would like to know is: what FOSS software do you use for financial analysis, trading, system development, and testing in a Un*x environment? Are there programs you would like to see written or ported? Do any brokerages, data providers, or other services provide good support for we the few? And finally, what commercial entities do you know of that are using FOSS software in their operation?"

After four days of "head-start" players getting the run of the servers, Warhammer Online launched today to the rest of the public. Mythic took the opportunity to explain why they think World of Warcraft players should give them a chance, highlighting their focus on PvP (or Realm-vs-Realm in this case), and their desire to keep time-intensive activities to a minimum. Creative director Paul Barnett says it's "a bit like Batman." 1.5 million copies of the game have already been sent to retailers, so they're clearly expecting a solid launch. The folks over at Massively have developed an excellent series of guides for players looking to get into the game. They explain and contrast general career choices and look at individual classes as well. They also have a variety of interviews and descriptions of gameplay.

Howling writes "I've been a PHP programmer for a few years and after taking a trip through many sites Ive learned that www.php.net is probably the most complete source when looking for information/documentation. I have been trying to find similar sites for every other language (Java, perl or ASP, for instance) without equal success, though. I ask: what is the best documentation/reference site for your preferred programming language?"

Soft Image is running a detailed story about the making of Metal Gear Solid 4. They explain the game's development cycle, from the art direction to the animation of characters to the building of models and textures. "In terms of bones used for constructing the bodies of characters, about 21 joint bones were used that contained animation data and were activated through these data. But many auxiliary bones were also used to supplement movements such as the twisting of knees, elbows, legs and arms. These were not activated by animation data. Rather, they were linked to the values of the basic joints that were activated by animation. ... They also used a tool to automatically generate the rig for controlling eyeball movement and the muscles around the eyes. Because the area around the eyes is also controlled using both shapes and bones, when the eyeball locator is moved, the muscles move smoothly just like they do for the mouth. Further, even if the shape is edited to redefine the eye edges, it does not spoil the blinking or brow furrow expressions at all."

brothke writes "In the TV show House, M.D., a premise that protagonist Dr. Greg House holds dear is that people are liars and stupid. Real life is often not far from House's observation. At the general public level, people are often misled by their lack of common sense, their deficiency in understanding statistics and basic science, and therefore fall victim to the lies of the myriad charlatans that claim to have something that fixes everything. A piece I wrote on that issue, New York News Radio — The voice of bad science, details that. While it is too broad to call the authors of Fuel efficiency of commercial aircraft: An overview of historical and future trends liars; their mediocre research created the scenario that far too many took their research as reality. Known as the Peeters report, after lead author P.M. Peeters, the authors of Plane Simple Truth refute the wide-spread belief that the fuel efficiency gains in the commercial aviation sector are erroneous, which is the principle theme of the Peeters report." Keep reading for the rest of Ben's review.

miller60 writes "What assets retain value in the midst of a financial panic? Data centers. When assets of bankrupt Lehman Brothers were sold to Barclays Tuesday for $1.75 billion, Lehman's data centers and headquarters accounted for $1.5 billion of the value in the deal. That echoes the JPMorgan-Bear Stearns fire sale, in which Bear's two data centers and HQ represented much of the sale price. Amidst financial turmoil, Wall Street's high-tech data centers become the crown jewels for buyers of distressed assets."

guzzibill writes "Joel Spolsky has announced the beta release of Stack Overflow, intended to be a high-quality source of answers to software questions. Post a software question and watch the answers flow in. Popularity voting is very much woven into the site, where both questions and answers can be edited for clarity and voted up or down for correctness. Correctly posed questions and insightful answers float to the top. This site has reached critical mass." From Joel's description, he was envisioning a source of technical Q&A about programming. So far, many of the questions are broader and less technical, such as advice on the best book about software development. It will be interesting to see where the community that's forming takes it.

Robert Hodges, CTO of Continuent, has an interesting blog entry about a new approach to database replication that they are undertaking. The new approach aims to provide easier access to replication for low-end Oracle users in addition to the alpha offering they already have for MySQL. "It's not a coincidence that we chose to implement MySQL and Oracle replication at the same time. MySQL has revolutionized the simplicity and accessibility of databases in general and replication in particular. For example, MySQL users have created cost-effective read scaling solutions using master/slave replication for years. MySQL replication is not free of problems, but there is no question MySQL AB helped by the community got a lot of the basics really right. On the other hand, Oracle replication products offer state-of-the-art solutions for availability, heterogeneous replication, application upgrade, and other problems, albeit for high-end users. For example, Oracle Streams and Golden Gate TDM offer very advanced solutions to the problem of data migration with minimal downtime. The big problem with these solutions is not capabilities but administrative complexity and cost."

What do you find is the best text editor for Python software development? I've tried several, and I'm always frustrated by the limitations of each. Eclipse is cool, but it's huge, and I've had multiple problems with corruption of the workspace. It got so bad at one point that every week or so I was tearing it down and recreating it. I spent so much time re-creating Eclipse's workspace that I found any productivity gains were lost due to Eclipse's brokenness. (Read more below.)

An anonymous reader writes "I've recently found a spot in a large company, and I'm noticing that here a lot of people on the technology side are very anti-business. Tech makes up about 40% of the total line of business staff, but the whole LOB is only a tiny percentage of the larger company in the financial industry. I personally haven't seen this before in prior jobs, but I'm told that this animosity is commonplace. So I come to Slashdot to find out if others have experienced this adversarial relationship between business and tech, and if so, what was the effect on the overall success of the business?"

Parz writes "Gameplayer has gone live with their winners for the best gaming laptops money can buy as of Q3 2008. The analysis is broken into three sections to cater for three different budget requirements. There is a detailed explanation of why each laptop was selected, going into each hardware component individually. Regular Slashdot users will remember the site's article from a few weeks ago, which analysed the Best Gaming PCs that Money can Buy. Prices may vary depending on where you live."

An anonymous reader writes "After having my university degrees, a couple of IT certifications, and over ten years of work experience in the industry, with 2-4 years of verifiable employment with each employer, working with a wide range of technologies, is it reasonable to ask me to take some test on a job interview? The same companies don't ask other professionals (lawyer, accountant, sales, HR, etc.) to submit to any kind of in-house tests when they are hired. Why are IT professionals treated differently and in such a paternalistic way? More importantly, why do IT professionals accept being treated less favorably than members of other professions? Should IT professionals start to refuse to be treated as not real professionals?"