Chroniton writes with news of a Silicon Valley company, Luxim, that has developed a tiny, full-spectrum light bulb, based on a plasma of argon gas, that gives off as much light as a streetlight while using less power. The Tic Tac-sized bulb operates at temperatures up to 6000K and produces 140 lumens/watt, almost ten times as efficient as standard incandescent lamps, and twice the efficiency of high-end LEDs. The new bulbs also have a lifetime of 20,000 hours. There's no mention of mercury or other heavy metals, which pose a problem for compact fluorescents.

ThinSkin writes "DirectX architect Alex St. John swims against the current and predicts the demise not of PC gaming, but of game consoles, in an exclusive two-part interview at ExtremeTech. In part one, Alex blasts Intel for pushing its inferior onboard graphics technology to OEMs, insists that fighting piracy is the main reason for the existence of gaming consoles, and explains how the convergence of the GPU and the CPU is the next big thing in gaming. Alex continues in part two with more thoughts on retail and 3D games, and discusses in detail why he feels 'Vista blows' and what's to become of DirectX 10."

Simon P. Chappell writes "I missed the partying in the 70's and so was not exposed to the full groovy experience that was available. You could say that I was a late developer (pun intended). Thankfully, I am now able to make up for lost time by learning the Groovy scripting language. For those of you not familiar with Groovy, it is a dynamic language designed to run on a Java Virtual Machine and be easy for Java programmers to work with; it looks very similar to Java and will freely inter-operate with Java objects and libraries. I've been tinkering with Groovy on and off for about two years now; learning Groovy in the old days, prior to this year, was a challenge with all of the design changes that were taking place. Groovy in Action (GinA) is the book that I'd wished was available back then. Dierk König, a committer for the Groovy project, has written this definitive guide to Groovy and after what has seemed an eternity to those of us on the Groovy mailing list, it is finally available." Read below for the rest of Simon's review.