quickjump writes "PSP Updates and Lik-Sang yesterday kicked off their second PSP coding contest, the Summer Homebrew Competition. Programmers now have 45 days to submit a new program, to be screened by people such as Fanjita and others, and then put up for a popular vote to determine the 3 winners with over $500 in PSP prizes, including a 4GB Datel drive, Blaze TV adapter, faceplates, battery packs, cases, a 1GB memory stick and more!"

The rumours have been swirling since last night, when MMOG discussion site F13 posted the surprising news that Blizzard plans to make MMOGs of Starcraft and Diablo. Turns out that while the possibility still exists, that's not exactly accurate. The CessPit has some of the slides from Vivendi's presentation, (courtesy of SirBruce). The last of these would seem to show the mere possibility (not confirmation) of expansion into the Massive and console markets for the company's intellectual properties. However, this is coupled with a flat denial by lead designer Rob Pardo: "Nothing in that rumor is true in regards to Blizzard. If I had to guess, there was some confusion between what Vivendi has planned for its game division versus what Blizzard has planned. While Blizzard is owned by Vivendi, their game division operates separately from Blizzard." So, while not out of the question, I find it unlikely we'll be hearing about World of Starcraft any time soon.

WeAz writes "GameSpot has news that 3D Realms has no plans on rushing Duke Nukem Forever. Despite the $500,000 bounty that Take-Two Interactive was found to be offering for the game after a filing with the SEC last week, George Broussard, President of 3D Realms, has given his official response: 'We're certainly not motivated by that amount of money, after all this time, and getting the game right is what matters. I would never ship a game early (even a couple of months), for 500k.'"

Polarism submitted a good article about net neutrality that is currently running on Ars. It's a good explanation of where the pieces of the problem are, the government issues, the industry issues, etc. Worth a read.

An anonymous reader writes "Flickr and Second Life fans seem to have collided head-on over a little known policy on Flickr that 'delists' an account from public areas, including search, when more than half of your content is non-photographic in nature. Flickr stated that most people searching the site are looking for photographic content so the restriction is in place merely to keep the site focused on its original intent. From the article: 'As a result, many screenshots on Flickr are AWOL — at least as far as the general public is concerned. That's angering and confusing some of the people who carefully stage scenes in the popular virtual world and religiously post the results online.'"

valdean wrote in with a NYTimes article about Google which says "On the banks of the windswept Columbia River [in Oregon], Google is working on a secret weapon in its quest to dominate the next generation of Internet computing. But it is hard to keep a secret when it is a computing center as big as two football fields, with twin cooling plants protruding four stories into the sky...' What's the goal of this new complex? Expanding Google's raw computer power. It's one more piece in the Googleplex, the massive global computer network that is estimated to span 25 locations and 450,000 servers.'

JamesO writes "Digital Leisure has announced the development of Dragon's Lair HD, for release this autumn for the PC. Remastered is usually a term associated with DVD movie release, usually referring to the cleaning up of the film's print. It's not that odd then that the term is being used for what is essentially an interactive cartoon. Dragon's Lair HD promises to do what it says on the tin, offering the original game in true high definition. " I still remember the first time I saw Dragon's Lair in an arcade. I'd love to play it again in HD — in the arcade it was a quarter eater.

Sad Loser writes "The future of the mobile phone is here, or at least a bunch of Nokia-sponsored industrial design students' take on the problem. The BBC also has more pictures." Most of these designs are quite silly (a necklace with squeezable beads for an address book?) but at least amusing.

Mhrmnhrm writes "After totally closing off public access to documentation for their chips roughly five years ago, Hifn is again offering them, but with an invasive registration requirement. Needless to say, Theo de Raadt and the rest of the OpenBSD team were not amused, and following a Hifn manager's missive, the gauntlet has been thrown. Either open the docs fully, or be removed from the system. This wouldn't be the first time... the same thing happened to both Adaptec and Intel following similar spats."

netmucus writes to tell us that UK astronomers have spotted a giant cloud of methyl alcohol that spans approximately 288bn miles. From the article: "The booze cloud was spotted using the UK's MERLIN radio telescopes in an area of our own galaxy rather uninspiringly called W3(OH). According to the Royal Astronomical Society blurb, this is a region where 'stars are being formed by the gravitational collapse of a cloud of gas and dust.'"

An anonymous reader writes "XYZComputing has a review of Razer's new Krait mouse which is specifically designed for massively multiplayer online gaming as opposed to the usual design focus of first-person shooters. From the article: 'The criteria for an appropriate mouse for each style of gaming are different, or at least Razer would want you to think that this is the case. With the market starting to accept products like gaming mice and gaming keyboards, it was only a matter of time until someone introduced a mouse for a certain type of game. While it is easy to be skeptical of such an idea, Razer has a great reputation and may actually be onto something here.'"

An anonymous reader writes "Scientists are claiming to have a new type of optical security that doesn't require embedment. Optical security includes many different options but up until now they have all required that the secret image be embedded in a host image which left it vulnerable. From the article: 'To address this problem of finding the secret image in the watermark, scientists have developed a new optical security method that doesn't require embedment. Instead, the technique uses a phase retrieval algorithm to generate specific optical and phase keys that extract the secret information when applied. The optical keys contain information and are distributed to an individual through a personal identification number (PIN). The information contained in the phase keys (the main source for determining extraction) is distributed to the individual separately.'"

Jane Walker writes to tell us that the Christian Science Monitor is becoming quite the proponent of open source. The aggressive nature of OSS was a large part of what drew CIO Curtiss Edge into the fold, it seems. From the article: "But beyond the tangibles like open source code it was the community that made a convert of Edge. Behind all the open code, it was the forums and flexibility that were the driving forces he believes breeds better developers than those that toil away with proprietary code. Open source software makes developers more aggressive and more apt to go out into the communities that exist around the software to find solutions to their problems, Edge said, rather than holding on some proprietary help desk line while tech support looks up the answer."

Ian Price writes "Red Hat is shrugging off Microsoft's entry into the cluster computing space after Microsoft announced that it has completed the code for its Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 targeting high-performance computing. From the article: 'Scott Crenshaw, general manager of enterprise Linux platform at Red Hat, dismissed Microsoft's entry into cluster computing. "They're playing catch-up," he said. "Linux is often associated with high-performance computing, but Windows has never achieved that on a large scale."' Crenshaw also commented with respect to Ubuntu: 'Their user base is still small, so we're not seeing the impact of it [Ubuntu] so far.'"

new-black-hand asks: "We are in the process of setting up a very large storage array and we are working toward having the most cost-effective setup. Until now, we have tried a variety of different architectures, using 1U servers or 6U servers packed with drives. Our main aims are to get the best price per GB of storage that we can, while having a reliable and scalable setup at the same time. The storage array will eventually become very large (in the PB range) so saving just a few dollars on each server means a lot. What do people out there find is the most effective hardware setup? Which drives and of what size? Which motherboards, etc? I am familiar with the Petabox solution which is what the Internet Archive uses — they have made good use of Open Source software. So what are some of the architectures out there that, together with Open Source, can give us a storage array that is much better than the $3 per GB plus that the commercial vendors ask for?"