HarvardFrankenstein writes "Gamespot's Greg Kasavin will be playing The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion for 12 straight hours tonight (Monday, March 20th) and the entire marathon session will be broadcast live. Kasavin will be 'offering commentary about the experience as it transpires. Subscribers will see a picture-in-picture view of Kasavin as he spends an increasing number of successive hours playing the game, and they will be able to chat with each other over the course of the event.'" The event starts tonight at 6pm PST, if they get started on time.

Jason Lind writes "Much earlier than anticipated, Microsoft announced the release of Atlas this afternoon at MIX 06. For those who don't know, Atlas is Microsoft's AJAX API for ASP.NET 2, which they claim will greatly reduce the effort in developing AJAX style applications on their platform."

Thomas Hines writes "NVIDIA just launched a new SLI Physics technology. It offloads the physics processing from the CPU to the graphics card. According to the benchmark, it improves the frame rate by more than 10x. Certainly worth investing in SLI if it works."

The Miami Herald is reporting that a new game based on Monopoly is taking a crack at Patriot Act and what creator Michael Kabbash describes as the curtailed freedom that has resulted. From the article: "The object of the game is not to amass the most money or real estate, but to be the last player to retain civil liberties. 'I've had people complain to me that when they play, nobody wins. They say "We're all in Guantanamo and nobody has any civil liberties left," he said. 'I'm like "Yeah, that's the point."'"

CNet is reporting that with the telecommunication industry's annual powwow coming up the hot button seems to be television rather than phones. From the article: "Judging from the diverse list of keynote speakers, it's easy to see that the phone business is readying itself for cataclysmic change. The traditional telecommunications market has already begun consolidating in anticipation. [...] Putting itself back together two decades after being broken apart, the new AT&T faces an entirely different competitive environment. Phone companies and cable companies will soon be competing directly with each other not just for broadband customers, but also for TV and phone customers."

LXer has an interesting look at the big three operating systems with some surprising results. From the article: "If you think that a Linux advocate cannot make an objective analysis of desktop operating systems, then you need to read this report. You may find yourself surprised with some brutal honesty that leaves out the free software philosophy."

Wired is reporting that Blomberg is working on an invention to help users maintain a greater control over the volume output of portable music devices. Many people have expressed a growing concern about hearing loss in recent years due to the increased use of headphones and exposure to loud music. From the article: "Les Blomberg, executive director of the Noise Pollution Clearinghouse, described hearing loss with a nice analogy: 'If you have a field of grass and you walk on it, you compress the grass and it bends down over the night, and in a few days, it springs back up and is OK again. But if you keep doing that over and over, you wear a path in it. And that's kind of what happens with hearing loss.'"

Keith Williams writes "Ever wondered what's inside your TFT monitor? Bit-Tech took one apart and stripped it down to the panel to find out. There's also some great explanation of the technology that goes into your desktop display."

Linux.com (Slashdot sister site) has a quick look a file encryption using EncFS and Loop-AES as examples before briefly examining other options. From the article: "you can find a number of options for filesystem encryption in Linux exist, depending on your needs. The most important thing when choosing which one to use is to be clear about your needs. Will the size of the files you need to encrypt grow or stay static? Do you need to encrypt certain files or entire partitions? What level of security do you need? Answers to these questions will help determine the most appropriate program to use."

nywanna writes "After seeing the example of Plenty of Fish and the reports of the site earning over $10,000/day in Adsense revenues, I quickly realized that there are a lot of ugly websites that are extremely successful. The reason for this, according to the article, is that ugly websites do a few things that beautiful websites tend to lack."

Jan Slupski writes "New release day today. Fedora Core 5 CD images are now available for download (i386, ppc, x86_64) on the ftp servers or via the torrent page." Linclips also has a short screencast on some of the default functionality.

hpcanswers writes "Given the increasing popularity of social-networking sites among the young and affluent, Nike has introduced a new site dedicated to the world's most popular sport: soccer. While Nike provides the content (via its army of sponsored athletes, among others), Google provides the technical expertise. Orkut has been very popular in soccer-crazed Brazil, so Google may be able to make a brand extension here. Joga.com is currently invite only, though a form at the bottom of the home page takes requests for invitations." I actually found the launch of a site like this interesting not because of the content, but because of the trend in "private label" sites. It's a Shake'n'Bake Social Network, and you helped make it.

An anonymous reader writes "GeekPunk is announcing that their flagship comic book title featuring superheroes patronizing their favorite bar & grill during their off-hours will now be entitled Hero Happy Hour beginning with the fifth issue of the ongoing series. According to creator Dan Taylor, "The decision to change the title was brought upon by the fact that we received a letter from the trademark counsel to 'the two big comic book companies' claiming that they are the joint owners of the trademark 'SUPER HEROES' and variations thereof." " Read the recent boingboing post for more background as well.

diegocgteleline.es writes "Linux 2.6.16 has been released after two months and two weeks of development. You can check the comprehensible changelog (text mirror of the site). The new features include OCFS2, a clustering filesystem contributed by Oracle, new unshare(), pselect()/ppoll() and *at() system calls, support the moving of the physical location of pages between nodes in NUMA systems, support for the Cell processor, cpufreq support for G5s plus thermal control for dualcore G5s, improved power management support for many devices and subsystems (libata, alsa...), a new mutex locking primitive, high-resolution timers, per-mountpoint noatime/nodiratime, 64-to-32-bit ioctl compatibility for the v4l2 subsystem, IPv6 support for DCCP, the TIPC protocol (Transparent Inter Process Communication, ACL support for CIFS filesystem, HFSX filesystem support, new configfs filesystem (which complements sysfs, not replaces it), support for running executables from v9fs (plan9 9P distributed filesystem), support for many new devices, improved support for others and lots of other changes. Check it out from kernel.org"

Nikoth writes "It seems that Billy West got it wrong when he announced that there are 26 new episodes of Futurama on the way, and instead there will only be the 4 movies as planned. "