Next Generation is running an article penned by DFC Intelligence Analyst David Cole, exploring the overwhelming popularity of World of Warcraft. Coles asks Is It Possible to Surpass World of Warcraft? He explores the reasons behind WoW's success, and what it means for the market as a whole. From the article: "All of these factors point towards one conclusion: World of Warcraft's success, admirable as it may be, will be extremely difficult to duplicate. This will be bad news for all the frothy investors who are suddenly discovering the MMOG business model. In the new DFC Intelligence Online Game Market report we forecast revenue in the MMOG market to grow over 150% from 2006 to 2011. However, this doesn't account for all the investment money that is likely to be lost chasing after that revenue growth."

Gamespot reports on the rumours swirling about a possible second edition of the PSP. The verdict: Bogus. From the article: "The PSM article does cite 'PSP developers who have been briefed on Sony's plans' as saying that the handheld will have 'a high degree of connectivity' with the PlayStation 3--something Sony has stated publicly on numerous occasions. Also, 'sources familiar with its development' confirmed the new PSP would be 'thinner and lighter' than the current model. However, that's all the article said was set in stone, and PSM is upfront about the rest being speculative."

Dracos writes "Dell batteries you say catch fire? Well don't worry about that Dell battery, look inside your PC case at your HDD, mine just went up in smoke and flames..." Could be worse. It could be ball lightning. I hear there's a lot of that going around inside servers these days.

Via Joystiq, an article at the GameInformer site generally about Valve's upcoming plans for Half-Life, Team Fortress, and Portal. In that article, they mention that some of the writing for Portal is being handled by veterans from the Old Man Murray site. From the article: "When you have that style of game it could just be very stale and very dry. It's just puzzle solving and you could put in a little techno music in the background and leave it at that. But we thought it would be much more interesting if we introduced this idea of the narrator. The original idea came from the training room in Half-Life 1 where you had that voice that was talking to you and whatnot. She was a little bit cynical, but not nearly as so as the voice in Portal. The writing for that is being done by Chet [Faliszek] and Erik [Wolpaw] who used to be Old Man Murray. They're at Valve now and one of their first projects they've been tasked with is to do the writing for Portal. So if you were a fan of Old Man Murray you're going to be a fan of that voice in Portal because it's the same wry cynicism."

Pluvius writes "The top-ten list of party schools published by the Princeton Review every year has always been a popular metric among prospective American college students for determining the 'most compatible' university to attend. Because of this, the Global Gaming League has come up with a more geek-oriented list: The First Annual Top Gaming Colleges Survey. The entries were selected based on such factors as proximity to gamer meccas such as Southern California, the frequency of LAN parties, and the existence and strength of a game design curriculum. Here's an excerpt from the number one entry, UT/Austin: 'Last, if you don't feel like leaving your dorm, there's nothing to worry about. A blistering Internet connection will give you LAN pings inside Texas, 30 milliseconds of latency to the East coast and 40 to the West coast. "The Internet connection at the dorms is ****ing amazing. I was [on it] freshman year; I miss that part about moving out of the dorms."'"

An anonymous reader writes "This is the transcript of the talk with Richard Stallman, the father of GNU in the background of the 4th International GPLv3 Conference being held at Bangalore where RMS is a prominent delegate. He answers questions related to GPLv3, DRM and a couple of other queries."

Dhiram writes "Japan based Y-E Data Inc. has announced the development of the "Wireless Hub" based on UWB (ultra wideband) wireless technology. It is the first UWB commercial application announced. The Wireless Hub mounts a UWB wireless communication module, as well as four USB ports. It comes with a USB dongle with UWB connectivity which connects to the PC. Other USB peripherals can be connected to the wireless hub, which then connects to the PC through UWB and has an effective data rate of 100 mbps over a 10-m distance without obstacles."

Derek Dongle writes "This is great — Toshiba plans to bring out a limited edition 16GB USB dongle. What would you do with 16GB in your pocket? Who knows? As the writer of this story says, "It may be one of the occasional cases of: who cares? It's a 16GB USB drive that fits in your pocket and weighs 12 grams!" I'm not quite sure I want to call it a dongle. At 8x2 cm it's not the smallest thing to attach to a keychain. But at 16 GB you could keep a good bit of your life there, provided you aren't working in audio or video. I keep a 1GB stick on my keychain, which is enough for almost anything.

jonney02 writes "The BBC NEWS is running a story about how Wikipedia plans to take back control due to the recent onslaught of malformed articles." It's always been a scary balance between allowing total anonymous participation in a web forum, and preventing yourself from being overrun. I don't envy the Wikipedia designers one bit.

eastbayted writes "InfoWorld reports a new web browser designed to protect users privacy is available for download. Called Browzar, it 'automatically deletes Internet caches, histories, cookies and auto-complete forms.' It also boasts a search engine, which the company will use to generate income. The 264KB application is the brainchild of Ajaz Ahmen, known for creating the U.K.'s first ISP Freeserve. The forthcoming version is for Windows only, but Mac and Linux versions will be available eventually."

ErisCalmsme writes "In this email Charles Hannum (one of the founders of NetBSD) tells us that 'The NetBSD Project has stagnated to the point of irrelevance. It has gotten to the point that being associated with the project is often more of a liability than an asset. I will attempt to explain how this happened, what the current state of affairs is, and what needs to be done to attempt to fix the situation.' What will happen to NetBSD?"

KingSkippus writes "You've got mail! ...and no job! The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is reporting that RadioShack has notified 400 workers by e-mail that they are being laid off. The e-mails state, 'The work force reduction notification is currently in progress. Unfortunately your position is one that has been eliminated.' Nothing says thank you for your years of service to our company quite like an e-boot out the door."

CranberryKing asks: "What is it about backups that always seems so difficult? I am trying to do a simple backup on my home XP system/s (about 30GB of files) that will write to my DVD burner. I don't want compression (most of it is MP3s, which don't compress well). I want a routine to simply write my selection to the DVD writer and spread it across however many discs are required (rather than me manually approximating and copying to each disc). I want the files on the disc readable from any system, so no proprietary backup wrapper or DAT files, please. My last attempt was using a free program that looked good called Simply Safe Backup, but it created two coasters before crashing with an unknown error. If I can just get a full backup to work smoothly, then I'll worry about scheduling, incremental, and encryption. This seems like a very common scenario for home & small offices. Is there an elegant, reliable & cheap (free) solution to this?"

Gramie2 asks: "I was toying with the idea of throwing my son in the car and driving for two days to watch the latest shuttle launch. I didn't, but it occurred to me that I don't know the logistics of going to watch a launch. Where is the best place to stay near the site? Where do you view from? I imagine that there are restrictions, so do you have to get tickets or make other arrangements ahead of time? How do you find out the launch schedule? What about smaller launches? How do they compare? Is there one time of year that is better than another? Does anyone have other recommendations for the whole experience?"

duplo1 writes "According to an article on CNN, "Selling your old phone once you upgrade to a fancier model can be like handing over your diaries. All sorts of sensitive information pile[s] up inside our cell phones, and deleting it may be more difficult than you think." It seems that corporate security policies need to extend their disposal standards to mobile devices; but what is there to educate consumers regarding such a potential breach of privacy?"