MaxTardiveau writes with an excerpt from an article where the pictures are worth clicking through for: "Ten years ago, in February 2000, NASA mapped the entire world in eleven days. It's true: the mission was called the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM), and over the course of eleven days, it used a big radar attached to the space shuttle to get elevation data from the vast majority of solid Earth; practically all land between 60 degrees North and 56 degrees South was included, with a resolution of 30 meters (90 feet). Over 9 terabytes of data were captured. It then took two years to process that data and make it usable (and it is still being refined to this day). This data is freely available to anyone, and the number of possible applications is almost infinite. It's been used in GIS, cartography, environmental planning, weather modeling (weather patterns are enormously influenced by the topography), flight simulators, Google Earth, and the list goes on. In this short article, I would like to give you a quick tour of the kinds of things this data can reveal. My hope is to get you thinking about what else could be done with this incredible resource."

An anonymous reader writes "Tuxradar did some benchmarks comparing Firefox's Windows and Linux JavaScript performance. 'We did some simple JavaScript benchmarks of Firefox 3.0 using Windows and Linux to see how it performed across the platforms — and the results are pretty bleak for Linux.' Later on, they tried Wine. 'The end result: Firefox from Mozilla or from Fedora has almost nil speed difference, and Firefox running on Wine is faster than native Firefox.'"

Electronic Arts announced at New York Comic Con that the Battlefield series would be getting two more titles. Battlefield 1943 will be focused on multiplayer, and it's due out for download this summer. It will be available through the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live, and there will be a PC version as well. A website has been launched for the game, and it contains a trailer. Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is scheduled for winter, and it will be available for the PC, PS3, and Xbox 360 also. Details for Bad Company 2 are sparse, though one exec said, "... it takes everything that players liked in the original and ups the ante — more vehicles, more destruction and more team play."

cyrus_zuo writes with this month's round-up of independent game reviews. Leading the pack is World of Goo, a popular puzzle game in which you build structures to get blobs of goo from one place to another. "WoG could have zero personality and still be a good game, but on top of the tremendous technical execution, you are presented with a quirky and odd world that teems with character. WoG has a style all its own and the flair and dynamics of the world just add to the pleasure of losing time with the game." Also scoring high were action RPG Mount & Blade and the third release in the Strong Bad series.

Ernest Hemingway's micro-story, "For sale: baby shoes, never worn," is one of my favorite examples of how less is sometimes more. Sometimes a few sentences say it all; you don't always need a hundred pages to convey an idea. Most of the mail I get is brief and to the point. Others are just brief. To be honest, I appreciate the short, crazy email more than the long rants, and they can be just as funny. Read below for this week's mail snippets.

Slashdot has one of the best discussion systems there is. It's grown and adapted over the years to meet various challenges and suit the needs of our users. A lot of time and effort has gone into it and we are always open to user input to help make it better. Some of our best ideas start as user suggestions and we appreciate the feedback. Of course they can't all be gems and sometimes the suggestions we get are unworkable or just bizarre. Here are a few of my favorite unhelpful, helpful suggestions.

dcblogs writes "Thanks to Wall Street's implosion, the chairman of Stanford University's Computer Science Department says he is seeing more interest from students in computer science. Ditto at Boston College. Computer science enrollments crashed after the dot-com bust as students turned to hedge fund majors. And are computer science grads getting jobs? The professor at one university program that graduates about 45 students a year with CS degrees, wrote in a comment: 'Last year 87% of our seniors were employed before graduation. The median starting salary was $58,500. A majority of CIS students had multiple job offers. From where I sit, there is a huge demand for entry level IT professionals in IS and in CS.'"

Erik J writes "Microsoft has announced that the PC version of Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto IV will exclusively use Games for Windows Live for its multiplayer mode when it hits shelves November 18th. Rockstar founder Sam Houser explained the decision: 'As we work toward the release of the PC version, Games for Windows Live affords us the opportunity to seamlessly translate the multiplayer console experience for PC gamers, the service is a natural fit for the platform and we strongly believe it will help in building a strong online community around GTA IV PC.'" Wired is running a story suggesting that this release could save the rather unpopular Microsoft PC gaming platform.