Allen Varney writes in this week's edition of The Escapist about the beauty of Rooster Teeth's machinima, why Red vs. Blue is as good as it is, and why there is money to be made in this burgeoning art form. From the article: "Often, by the time we hear of fortunes being made in a new way, it's already too late to get in. But in machinima, the barrier to entry remains absurdly low, the need for professionalism desperate. If you're funny or interesting, can voice-act well, and produce reliably over the medium term - and you don't quit - there's absolutely nothing blocking you from success." I'm rather fond of some of the supremely odd Machinima based in World of Warcraft - such as Illegal Danish -Super Snacks or the Switcher videos. Any machinima you'd like to recommend to your fellow users?

An anonymous reader writes "As first reported on last year, NASA's STEREO mission is set to launch tonight at 8:38pm EST. The two near-identical spacecraft will give us unprecedented stereoscopic views of the Sun-Earth system, hopefully leading to the creation of the first 3-D movies of the Sun! Launch can be watched live on NASA TV with coverage starting at 6:30pm EST."

Nalfeshnee writes "The Register is reporting on the new 'Extended Validation SSL' cert currently being touted by Verisign. Vista and IE7 will be using this but not, apparently, Firefox anytime soon. For this the Verisign Product Marketing Director Tim Callan squarely blames the Firefox dev team for 'not keeping up' with their new technology. However, the whole thing just seems to be a way for Verisign to enjoy ridiculous markup on selling 'more secure' certs."

Xiaoxiaofreak2 writes "Via Joystiq, Reuters is reporting on a new fantasy sports title that draws on a new source — politics." From the article: "Fantasy Congress plays a lot like any other online Fantasy sports game. The game, officially launched on Monday, is a new spin on the popular online fantasy sports games where players chose a team of real-life players and tally points based on their statistical performance. In Fantasy Congress, found at http://www.fantasycongress.us/fc/, a player drafts a team of actual U.S. lawmakers and then competes against other teams. Andrew Lee, a senior at Claremont McKenna College in the greater Los Angeles area and one of the game's creators, said lawmakers were ranked based on the progress of their proposed legislation, picking up points on its journey to possibly getting passed into law."

MaryAlan writes "The National Summit on Video Games, Youth, and Public Policy was this weekend, and almost no one from the game media showed up. In fact, the game industry seems to pretty much be ignoring the whole event. There's an article up on GamesFirst, which attended the summit, that criticizes the mainstream game press pretty hard for not attending. Apparently only one game journalist showed up. From the article: 'The video game media owes it to our readers to come to events like this and listen, come here and think, and come here and base our editorials on the reality of what's being said instead of an interpretation of the talking points that are published afterwords. Too many of the people discussing these issues in forums do so based on the works of the game media, and too few in the gaming media are spending the time to make it justified.'"

Gamespot reports that yet another publisher has joined the ever-growing stable of Steam fans. 2K games is working to bring some of their games to the service, with Civilization III and IV coming to Steam this week, and other titles to follow. From the article: "Also included will be the high-seas adventure Sid Meier's Pirates! and the alternate-history real-time strategy game Shattered Union ... According to a statement released today by Valve, Steam currently has some 10 million customers for both its 'core' products--which include advanced shooters such as Half-Life 2--and casual games, such as PopCap Games' Bejeweled and Zuma. "

luna6 writes to tell us that they have posted a pretty thorough review of Fedora Core 6 with the installation procedure and even a few work arounds for the couple of bugs encountered during the process to help users get up and running smoothly. From the article: "To sum up Fedora Core 6, I will say that once you have it set up properly FC 6 runs very impressively. I had the impression that FC 6 may have been rushed, just because of the handful of minor bugs that appeared. The mixup of arches, i586 & i686 was weird and the first system update having a update conflict was a glaring error, even though it was easy to fix. Setting up the Nvidia drivers was way more problematic than it should have been. I should also note that Mandriva 2007 worked from the start with AIGLX and their 3D drake worked flawlessly. With that stated once the minor problems were fixed, Fedora Core 6 worked as well as any Linux distro I have tried and the visuals were second to none. Well except the default icons...but we have something to look forward to in FC 7 now don't we?"

So, not only is EA selling in-game money for the Godfather via Xbox Live, but now they're actually trying to wring money from consumers so they can know how to play the games they bought. Joystiq has some commentary on EA's newest practice: charging for tutorials. From the article: "We decided to try one of the videos out, purchasing a Passing strategy guide for Madden NFL 07. The 246.34 MB downloaded provided little that would help our game. The video depicts a series of in-game passes with the occasional overhead view; once or twice arrows and yellow circles were used to highlight a player but it did not complement the announcer. To understand the voice-over commentary, it is assumed that you have a good grasp on formation and position terminology. If 'using the safety to cover the back' goes over your head, this video is not for you -- then again, if you are well-versed in football slang, you will likely learn nothing new anyways." I know Microsoft has kept a hands-off policy on this so far, but this stuff has to stop before companies like EA and Q! drag their product through the mud.

Andre Carregal writes "In the second edition of Programming in Lua Roberto Ierusalimschy presents the Lua programming Language in a simple yet precise format for both novice and advanced programmers." Read the rest of Andre's review.

AMD's CTO, Phil Hester, confirmed today that the ATI brandname isn't going anywhere . "Speaking in London today, Hester told Reg Hardware the ATI name will continue to be used in association with what are now AMD's discrete graphics products and its chipsets. Separately, Hester indicated ATI would continue to be the brand for the Intel chipsets, suggesting that AMD at least wants to continue to offer such product."

Stitch_Surfs writes to tell us that the new video instant messaging tool "Veeker" went live today. Able to be embedded in any website, Veeker allows you to share mobile video with your friends. From the article: "In a nutshell, Veeker is instant video messaging. The most basic use case is to shoot 60 seconds of video from your mobile phone and upload this video to Veeker in the form of an MMS. Within about 60 seconds your video is on the Veeker portal where, depending upon whether you sent it to one of three addresses is visible only by you (me@veeker.com) visible to you and your contacts (v@veeker.com) or made available for viewing by anyone who visits Veeker and is inclined to check you out (world@veeker.com)."

Kotaku reports that the Male Blood Elves, from the upcoming World of Warcraft expansion Burning Crusade, have been made more masculine by their Blizzard overseers. Which totally makes sense, because when I think elves I think paragons of masculinity. From the article: "You changed it because your constituency is a bunch of capslock-riding asshats who are threatened by bishy player characters. The reason Blood Elves were Horde in the first place is because everyone was whining about all the Horde races being ugly juggernauts. The point of Blood Elves was to inject some swish into a very physically intimidating set of races. They're not exactly chunky now, and I do not begrudge a game company making prerelease aesthetic changes, but their reasons for doing so are pathetic. " Before and after photos are available in their post.

This morning AMD's CTO, Phil Hester, announced the AMD-ATI platform project, "Fusion" , a CPU/GPU combo. Hester had this to say, " In this increasingly diverse x86 computing environment, simply adding more CPU cores to a baseline architecture will not be enough. As x86 scales from palmtops to petaFLOPS, modular processor designs leveraging both CPU and GPU compute capabilities will be essential in meeting the requirements of computing in 2008 and beyond." In other words, AMD's future "Fusion" platform, which the company says could be ready by late 2008 or early 2009, won't just be an Athlon and a Radeon sharing the same silicon. The companies will truly be looking into the potential benefits of using multiple pipelines along with multiple cores, as a new approach to parallelism in computing tasks."

An anonymous reader writes "A new survey conducted by a Canadian music collective that counts the recording industry as one of its members has found that music downloading has declined dramatically in Canada. The survey found that only 14 percent of Canadians download, down from 21 percent in 2002. The survey also found that P2P is rarely a reason for people who purchase less music."

Have data center, will travel. Sun recently announced their portable data center initiative, though it is not yet available. The "Project Blackbox" , a 20-by-8-by-8-foot shipping container, "holds 120 Sun Fire T2000 or 240 Sun Fire T1000 servers, or about 250 AMD Opteron-based "Galaxy" systems. In addition, a storage-focused container can provide up to 2 petabytes of storage, said Sun Chief Marketing Officer and Executive Vice President Anil Gadre. A container also can offer up to 15TB of memory. The compact design's floor space is about one-third the size of a traditional 10,000-square-foot data center; saves up to 20 percent in power and cooling costs; and can be deployed about 10 times faster, sometimes in a matter of weeks. "Basically, it rolls up to you, you hook up your power, you hook up your water, you hook up your network and you're ready to go," Gadre said."