lennier writes "How exactly did George Lucas develop the script for the first Star Wars? Why were the prequels so uneven when the originals were so good? Did he really have a masterplan for six, nine, or even twelve episodes, and why did the official Lucasfilm position keep changing? And just how big an influence were the films of Akira Kurosawa on the whole saga? Michael Kaminski's The Secret History of Star Wars, Third Edition is a free, thoroughly unauthorized, e-book that brings together a huge amount of literary detective work to sort fact from legend and reveal how the story really evolved. Download it or have your nerd credentials revoked."

sprkltgr writes "Our HR department is implementing new software. The HR Director has tasked me with sending our data out of our network to the consultant that's loading it in to the new package. Obviously this data includes items such as SSN, name, birth date, etc. Upon being told that I would not email this data to her, the consultant asked what my security requirements were for sending the data. What would be on your wishlist for the best way to send sensitive data to someone outside your firewall?"

mollyhackit writes "The Open Graphics Project, which we've been following since it first started looking for experts four years ago, has just announced that the OGD1 is available for preorder now. The design features 2 DVI, 256MB RAM, PCI-X, and a Xilinx Spartan-3 FPGA along with a nonvolatile FPGA for programming on boot. FPGAs are reprogrammable hardware which means the graphics card can be optimized for specific tasks and execute them faster than a general purpose CPU. The card could be programmed for certain codecs to speed up encoding or decoding. An open hardware design means potential for better driver support. Of course you could always use the FPGA for something else... say crypto cracking."

Following last week's sour review of Indiana Jones, Seamus123 links us to "A spoiler-free review of the brilliant new Indiana Jones film, The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Much has been made of the revival of the series: is Harrison Ford too old, is Shia LeBeouf any good and can it live up to the three previous movies? All these questions — and some surprising answers — are found in Den of Geek's review." Personally I'll see it no matter what.

Odinson writes "In late 2005 I released a draft of a science fiction novel under the by-nc-nd CC license. I started accepting edits in the hope of polishing a manuscript for submission to a publisher. A publisher never materialized, but after thousands of comments the draft started getting really solid. So a couple of months ago I decided to buy an ISBN and sell hard copies from Lulu. While doing research for a press release, I was unable to uncover the first community-edited, CC-licensed work of fiction. I strongly suspect that my novel is the first. Can anybody point to a prior example? How about under other licenses? If someone has traveled this road before, I'd like to ask them how it went. I would also like to vet this question here before staking a claim to be the first."

buzzardsbay writes "While technologies such as virtualization, multi-threading, and blade servers have made the data center leaner, those who work there are getting... well... not leaner. According to a new study by CareerBuilder.com, 34 percent of IT workers say they have gained more than ten pounds in their current jobs. And 16 percent say they've gained at least twice that. The culprits seem to be the stressful-yet-sedentary nature of tech work coupled with our famously poor eating habits. According to the survey, some 41 percent of IT workers eat out for lunch twice or more per week, making portion and calorie control difficult. Eleven percent buy their lunch out of a vending machine at least once a week."

Leemeng writes "I'm looking for a simple, free, and F/OSS flat-file database program. I'm storing info about Wi-Fi access points that I come across, maybe 8-9 fields per entry. I've outgrown Notepad. This info is for my own reference only; it is not going on a Web server. Googling was unhelpful, with results skewed towards SQL, Access (MS), and Oracle, all of which would be overkill for my purposes. My criteria are: it must be simple, F/OSS, must work in Windows Vista, preferably use a portable format, must not be an online app, and must not require Java. Does such a beast exist?"

An anonymous reader writes "I am a college student new to corporate culture. For the last few weeks, I have been working on a very large project: revamping our customer service website with tons of new tutorials and information. Recently, I got an e-mail forwarded from my supervisor of improvements that HIS supervisor requested. I am fine with compliments and complaints about my work. However, I realized in the e-mail that my supervisor took credit for the development of this content. I have been under his direct supervision in this whole process; much of the new content was his idea that I ended up implementing. Is it out of line to request that in the future I get mentioned for my work?"

Back in March Blizzard released patch 2.4 and significantly altered a good portion of the overall gameplay and provided a much more casual experience. Since then Blizzard has continued to make the game more approachable through new dungeons and removing attunements and other restrictions throughout the game. While this may open up a lot of new content to the masses and help the game's overall appeal, does this continuing trend promise to alienate the high-end players who thrive on new challenges? Should Blizzard care?

Attacked-by-gremlins writes "I have a larger family and various items in the house (some tools, some pieces of clothing) 'travel' unexpectedly. We joke about gremlins doing that, but it's tiring never to be sure that I'll find an object where I left it two days ago. For the sheer hacking fun of it, I'm thinking of sticking RFID tags on some and trying to triangulate a position with several tranceivers placed in the house. Has anyone have any suggestions for this amateur 'Google Home'? Thanks."

An anonymous reader lets us know about a recent analysis of retail computer sales numbers that shines a spotlight on Apple's sales growth as the PC market has flattened. In the lucrative >$1,000 PC segment, in the first quarter of 2008, Apple's retail market share was 66%. This includes a 64% market share for laptops and a market share for desktops of 70%. The article attributes the bulk of this success to Apple's stores. Fortune picked up this report and pointed out the somewhat obvious fact that the >$1,000 PC segment is Apple's by default, since Dell, HP, and Lenovo sell the bulk of their machines in the $500-$750 range, and Apple has only one model selling for less than $1,000. As the analyst said, "If you don't give people a choice [in the Apple stores], people will spend more."

LWATCDR writes "A company out of the UK is selling an Intel Atom-based Mini-ITX motherboard. It has a riser for two PCI cards, two SATA ports, and an IDE ports so it could make a great little NAS, firewall, MAME box, or low-power workstation. To add to the fun it has a real parallel port 'perfect for hardware hacking,' a real RS-232 port 'perfect for data acquisition,' and two USB ports. The price is around $100, give or take, and hopefully it will come down over time. All in all a nice system to run Linux, WindowsXP, BSD, or maybe even OpenSolaris on."

getupstandup1 writes "Ulteo today unveiled their Virtual Desktop (screenshots, download) which is a free, full Linux desktop that runs seamlessly on Windows. It's interesting because it's not running under Xen or VMWare, but instead uses the coLinux patch, which they claim allows the system to achieve 'great performance, close to a native installation on the PC.' No need to reboot the system anymore to switch from Windows to Linux." We discussed Ulteo when the Ubuntu-derived distro was announced a year back.

jlunavtgrad writes "I recently attended an embedded engineering conference and was surprised at how many vendors were selling tools to analyze source code and scan for bugs, without ever running the code. These static software analysis tools claim they can catch NULL pointer dereferences, buffer overflow vulnerabilities, race conditions and memory leaks. Ive heard of Lint and its limitations, but it seems that this newer generation of tools could change the face of software development. Or, could this be just another trend? Has anyone in the Slashdot community used similar tools on their code? What kind of changes did the tools bring about in your testing cycle? And most importantly, did the results justify the expense?"