Martin Ecker writes "The Orange Book is back in its second edition. Randi J. Rost's "OpenGL Shading Language" (also called the Orange Book because of its orange cover) published by Addison-Wesley returns with 4 new chapters, roughly 140 new pages and quite a few new sample shaders. Like the first edition, the second edition of the book is one of the best introductions to GLSL - the OpenGL Shading Language - that also explains in-depth how to develop shaders in GLSL for lighting, shadows, animation, and other topics. The book targets an audience that is already familiar with computer graphics and with OpenGL. Knowledge of the C programming language is also advantageous for the reader. Since I've reviewed the first edition previously, I will focus on the new chapters of the book in this review." Read the rest of Martin's review.

Gamasutra has a 'Soap Box' editorial up discussing the bad lessons World of Warcraft teaches. From the article: "1. Investing a lot of time in something is worth more than actual skill. If you invest more time than someone else, you "deserve" rewards. People who invest less time "do not deserve" rewards. This is an absurd lesson that has no connection to anything I do in the real world. The user interface artist we have at work can create 10 times more value than an artist of average skill, even if the lesser artist works way, way more hours. The same is true of our star programmer. The very idea that time > skill is alien."

gd writes "MobileTechNews is reporting that a company called US modular has put out a device that taps into your existing mobile phones microSD or Tflash slot to add up to 8GB of storage. The Stik&Stor adds a memory chip to the back side of the battery pack and only costs $199 to add 8GB to your music phone."

The year is finally picking up some steam, with new game announcements, ship dates confirmed, and delays expected. Besides the already announced Zelda delay, Nintendo actually has good news to offer. New Super Mario Bros. is slated for a May 7th release here in the states. Fallout 3 will not be at E3 this year, despite the highly anticipated nature of the game. Oblivion, Bethesda's upcoming RPG, doesn't quite have a release date yet. It should be coming out 'soon', though. NCSoft is apparently working on a dungeon crawler themselves, with the City of Heroes publisher announcing Dungeon Runners at the Taipei game show. For those of you who (like me) loved the title, there are sequels to F.E.A.R. on the way. They won't be carrying the stupid name, thankfully. There will also be a sequel to God of War, slated for release next February. Finally, for classic gaming fans, the GameTap service will be offering the Ultima series of games for play in the near future, probably around the same time that Street Fighter 2 will be on the Xbox 360 Arcade. Looks like we've got a 2006 worth looking forward to. Update: 02/22 20:18 GMT by Z : Changed the God of War information link to Gamasutra; Eurogamer pulled the info after legal threats from Sony.

An anonymous reader writes "First we had Novell's XGL and Compiz technology, which allows for OpenGL-based composite rendering on the Linux desktop. Now Fedora has created the Advanced Indirect GL X project, which aims for similar desktop effects but with a simpler implementation. Sure, at the end of the day it's just eye candy, but make no mistake - the Linux desktop is due for a massive shake-up!"

Gamasutra is reporting on a first: a paid lobbyist for the games industry. The Interactive Entertainment Merchants Association has hired Stuart Spencer to represent the industry's interests in Washington. From the article: "Spencer's experience as a lobbyist comes from his founding role in the Stanton Park Group, where he also served as principal and general counsel. While at Stanton Park, Spencer represented several technology and health care clients. Prior to that, Spencer was a staffer for Rep. Louise Slaughter from 1996 to 2003, where he eventually became the House member's chief of staff."

An anonymous reader writes "Slyck is reporting that Belgian and Swiss authorities have raided and seized Razorback2's servers. From the article: 'Razorback2 was an eDonkey2000 indexing server - very different in nature from an indexing site such as ShareReactor. Unlike indexing sites, Razorback2's index was only available through an eDonkey2000 client such as eMule. While it does not host any actual files or multimedia material, it does index the location of such files on the eDonkey2000 network. The legality of such indexing remains questionable, however this has not deterred copyright enforcement actions.'"

Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Major League Gaming, aspiring to become the official league of professional videogaming, raised $10 million in funding from Ritchie Capital, and named Matthew Bromberg, the former general manager of Time Warner's Moviefone and AOL Games properties, as president and chief operating officer, the Wall Street Journal reports. 'The championship match for MLG's second season will be held this weekend in New York, where individuals and teams of gamers will battle against others in fighting and shooter games like Microsoft Corp.'s Halo 2 for a total of $100,000 in prizes. ... The company says it is in discussions with various cable networks about deals to have its competitions carried on television. "We want this to be covered as a circuit," said Mr. Bromberg.'"

StrongGlad writes "HP has been working on a different take on the home entertainment PC. "Misto" is a hybrid of a coffee table and a tablet PC, featuring a large, built-in touch-screen display. The idea is to allow a group to congregate around the table and share pictures, play board games, or peruse a map. Misto uses a standard desktop PC as its engine, but comes with some specialized HP software for managing the interface. Pricing, availability and style of coffee table are all undetermined, but Misto gives people some idea of how HP wants to develop products that expand on its existing businesses."

Ivan writes " Windows narrowly bumped Unix in 2005 to claim the top spot in server sales for the first time, according to a new report from IDC. Computer makers sold $17.7 billion worth of Windows servers worldwide in 2005 compared with $17.5 billion in Unix servers, IDC analyst Matthew Eastwood said of the firm's latest Server Tracker market share report. "It's the first time Unix was not top overall since before the Tracker started in 1996.""

An anonymous reader writes "Recently, a 16 year old sued the city of Kokomo, Indiana for access to an email list that he suspected the mayor was mis-using for political purposes. Despite the mayor's refusal to give in, the teenager won the case. The city will have to pay not only for the expensive attorneys they hired, but may have to compensate the 16 year old's pro-bono counsel."

gokulpod writes to tell us the Financial Express is reporting that Microsoft is heating up the IP battle once again with warnings about IP indemnifications issues. From the article: "Analysts believe that the core issue at stake is whether open source software increases litigation risks. Open source advocates are quick to point out the IP litigation faced by Microsoft itself. Ubuntu founder and leader Mark Shuttleworth says, 'Linux is growing fast and whenever there is a new way of doing things, people will raise all kind of issues.'"

Lam1969 writes "The Korea Times reports that five U.S. film studios have taken Samsung to court for selling DVD players which allow users to bypass DRM features. The film companies, including Walt Disney and Time Warner, are demanding Samsung recall the players. According to a Samsung spokesman quoted in the article, the movie studios probably 'take issue' with Samsung's HD841 model, which Samsung sold in the United States for five months in 2004."

An anonymous reader writes "Internet News is reporting that a recent statement made by district court judge A. Howard Matz has declared a partial victory for Perfect 10 in their efforts to stop search engines from displaying their photos in an image search. From the article: 'Perfect 10 is likely to succeed in proving that Google directly infringes its copyright by creating and displaying thumbnail copies of its photographs. Perfect 10's copyright infringement case may take years to wend its way through the courts. But a victory could hamstring image search, along with video and audio search services.'"

An Anonymous Coward asks: "It looks like our sale-person is about to land a big contract with a very large US Bank, however there is a large catch in that the bank is demanding that we let them do a full audit on the source code of the software application we are selling them. After the recent rash of identity thefts of credit card and other personal info, they now mandate that all internet facing applications that store potentially private information have to have a full source code audit. This includes software from 3rd party vendors such as my company. They want to run our Java code through some software called Fortify (we looked up the price -- around $80,000) and also do a manual analysis of the code. This software is our company's life-blood. We would be ruined if it fell into a competitor's hands. We aren't storing private information about their customer's; all of the information can be found from government county auditor web sites. I understand their point of view, but it is a very scary step for us to take. Has anyone else done this and how did it work out?"