Larry Sanger writes "Citizendium, 'the Citizens' Compendium' — a free, non-profit, ad-free, wiki encyclopedia with real names and a role for experts — has just announced that it's celebrating the one-year anniversary of its wiki, an occasion for which I wrote a project report. Make up your own mind about whether 'we've made a very strong start and an amazing future likely lies ahead of us.' We have been the subject of a lot of misunderstanding, but we've still proven a lot, such as that a public-expert hybrid wiki is consistent with accelerating growth and leads to high quality, or that eliminating anonymity helps remove vandalism. Signs are good that we are starting into a serious growth spurt. Might the Web 2.0 umbrella be expanded to include real name requirements and roles for experts? It's looking that way."

poet sends us to Computerworld for a story on the intention of the OpenDocument Foundation to drop support for Open Document Format, OASIS and ISO standards not withstanding, in favor of the Compound Documents Format being promoted by the W3C. The foundation's director of business affairs, Sam Hiser, dropped this bomb in a blog posting a couple of weeks ago. Hiser believes CDF has a better shot at compatibility with Microsoft's OOXML, and says that the foundation has been disappointed with the direction of ODF over the last year.

The Slashdot 10 Year Anniversary Charity Auction for the EFF is at an end and the numbers are in. We are still waiting for payment on one of the six items, but the grand total for the auctions is $9186.83. The big surprise was the anonymous reader who bought the Swag Bag AND the Low UID: he decided to donate an extra $1200 beyond his bids! Thanks to Daniel Peacock (who bought Hemos's burnt copy of Watchmen) and Michael Ravnitzk who bought Triton, the case of the first x86 that ran Slashdot in Feb 1998. He then turned around and told us to shelve it, to try to sell it again later. Instead he got a box of shirts. We're still waiting for payment on the email address, but hopefully nobody would be so crappy that they would scam a charity auction. And lastly, we would like to give special thanks to the University of Advancing Technology (here's a Coral Cache link) who paid $3,550.00 for that hyperlink you just read past. They wanted to express their support for Slashdot and for the EFF, and I think both of us appreciate it. Thanks to everyone who bid on items and congratulations to the winners. And the rest of you - don't feel bad that you missed it. You can always make a donation later - the EFF does good work. Tell them Slashdot sent you.

On the heels of the beta of NBC's and News Corp.'s less-than-killer Hulu music store, NBC's chief Jeff Zucker is speaking out and saying the darnedest things. First, news.com reports, with derision, that Zucker demanded a cut of Apple's iPod revenue. That'll sure happen. Next, AppleInsider caught Zucker urging colleagues to take a stand against Apple's iTunes, charging that the digital download service was undermining the ability of traditional media companies to set profitable rates for their content online.

A user writes "Ars Technica has published their in-depth review of the newest version of Mac OS X. John Siracusa both covers the user-visible features such as the new UI tweaks and Time Machine, and dives into the increased use of metadata and the new APIs introduced and what they mean for the future of OS X."

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."

Hulu.com, the online video venture from NBC Universal and News Corp., has launched a private beta program. Early reports suggest it's far from being a YouTube killer. "Although Hulu's parent companies have done a lot of things right with the service, the scheduling leaves something to be desired. For the time being, the site will only feature five weeks worth of content for any given show. From there, it's assumed that older content will get the boot in favor of newer episodes and movies. This isn't necessarily a deal breaker for us, but for a lot of viewers this will prevent the service from becoming with online video Shangri-La they'd imagined. Furthermore, with the lack of user-generated content, it falls short of the end-all be-all site for online video. Viewers are still going to go to YouTube and still click their ads -- but in terms of piracy a minor rebellion may have been quelled."

trogador writes to mention that a group of researchers is taking another swing at the idea of a cyclogyro design for a UAV. Even though the cyclogyro design was invented in the 1930's there are no records of a successful flight. "Cyclogyros have the potential to be highly maneuverable flying robots due to their method of operation, making them potentially more suitable for complex tasks than helicopters and other micro air vehicles (MAVs) with less maneuverability. The biggest challenge in designing the cyclogyros is varying the angle of attack of the rotating wings. This ability would enable the plan to change altitude, hover, and fly in reverse. To achieve this quick angle variation, the researchers introduced an eccentric (rotational) point in addition to a rotational point connected to a motor."

J. Dzhugashvili writes "What would you say to a video card that performs like a $400 GeForce 8800 GTS for $200-250? Say hello to the GeForce 8800 GT. The Tech Report has tested the new mid-range wonder in Crysis, Unreal Tournament 3, Team Fortress 2, and BioShock. It found that the card keeps up with its $400 big brother overall while drawing significantly less power and — here's the kicker — generating slightly less noise."

Jamie found a story about a new web tool that is trying to break ground into the semantic web. It's called twine, and it supposedly will intelligently aggregate your data, be it youtube videos, emails, or whatever you accumulate in your travels. Not the first, not the last, but here's hoping something comes out of the ideas someday.

Ponca City, We Love You writes "October saw the launch of Veropedia, a collaborative effort to collect the best of Wikipedia's content, clean it up, vet it, and save it in a quality stable version that cannot be edited. To qualify for inclusion in Veropedia, a Wikipedia article must contain no cleanup tags, no "citation needed" tags, no disambiguation links, no dead external links, and no fair use images after which candidates for inclusion are reviewed by recognized academics and experts. One big difference with Wikipedia is that Veropedia is registered as a for profit corporation and earns money from advertising on the site. Veropedia is supposed to help improve the quality of Wikipedia because contributors must improve an article on Wikipedia, fixing up all the flaws, until a quality version can be imported to Veropedia. To date Veropedia contains about 3,800 articles."

christian.einfeldt writes "According to long-time OpenDocument Fellowship member Russell Ossendryver, it appears that GNOME founder Miguel de Icaza's widely-publicized praise for OOXML as a 'superb standard' is being followed up with on-going support by the GNOME Foundation in 'resolving' the thousands of criticisms leveled against Microsoft's proposed standard. In an open letter in his blog, Ossendryver urges the GNOME Foundation to halt its apparent support for OOXML as a standard and to put its efforts behind enhancing adoption of the genuinely open standard, ODF, which was approved by the world standards bodies as ISO/IEC standard 26300 on 2 May 2006."

GamesIndustry.biz notes that today marks the seventh anniversary of the PlayStation 2's US launch. Stats for the console's lifetime include more than 120 million hardware units sold, and more than a billion units of software sold, with 30 million of those sold this year alone. The article notes that Sony is committed to keeping the console alive for at least another three years, with another 160 titles due out for the system through March 2008. Here's the console's top sellers list: "Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (13 million), Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (12 million), Grand Theft Auto III (11 million), Gran Turismo 3: A-Spec (11 million), Gran Turismo 4 (8.79 million), Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (7 million), Kingdom Hearts (5.6 million) Final Fantasy X (5 million), Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (3.7 million), Final Fantasy XII (3.68 million)."

gbulmash writes "Microsoft is spending a 'non-trivial' amount of money to get Windows XP working on the OLPC project's XO laptop. But why? Despite the conjecture that the Linux-based XO could convince millions of people in the developing world that they don't need Windows and build a huge base of developers for Linux, there still remains the question of how Microsoft would convince owners of XO laptops to buy and install Windows XP over the functional Linux-based OS already on it. It's doubtful that Microsoft could encourage or coerce Negroponte to put XP on the machine, so whose arms will they twist?"

PhoenixOne writes "In an article that will probably tick off a lot of PS3 owners, Will Wright calls the PS3 and 360 'incremental improvement(s)'. 'The Wii feels like a major jump - not that the graphics are more powerful, but that it hits a completely different demographic. In some sense I see the Wii as the most significant thing that's happened, at least on the console side, in quite a while ... I still, for the most part, prefer playing games on the computer - to me the mouse is the best input device ever. Every generation it's like 'the PC's dead! The PC's dead!'. But it carries on growing when consoles are flat for five years. At the moment I can get better graphics on my PC than I can on the PS3.'"