A newly discovered cave on Mars was found as the result of an interesting crowdsourcing project. As EMB Numbers writes, "CNET news reports that 'the science class from Evergreen Middle School in Cottonwood, Calif., found the opening while working on a research project with the Mars Space Flight Facility run out of Arizona State University in Tempe. ... The students examined more than 200 images of Mars taken with the Thermal Emission Imaging System (Themis), an instrument on NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter.' The only other similar opening near the volcano was found in 2007, when Glen Cushing, a scientist with the US Geological Survey, published a research paper on the surface anomalies. The opening is estimated to be 620 by 520 feet and the hole to be at least 380 feet deep."

Raul654 writes "OOXML is the Word document format that Microsoft rammed through the ISO last year. Last week, we discussed a blog post by Alex Brown, who was instrumental in getting OOXML approved by the ISO. Brown criticized Microsoft for reneging on its promise to support OOXML in the upcoming release of Office 2010, and for its lackadaisical approach to fixing the many bugs which still remain in the specification. Now, Doug Mahugh has responded to Brown's post, promising that Microsoft will support OOXML 'no later than the initial release of Office 15.'"

Several readers have written to tell us that AMD has published their code to support the Radeon HD 5000 "Evergreen" graphics cards on Linux in an open-source driver. Unfortunately the driver isn't quite as complete as some might hope. The current offering doesn't promise 2D (EXA) acceleration or 3D support. "The DDX driver supports mode-setting on the Evergreen/R800 series GPUs with VGA and DVI connectors while the DisplayPort connectivity is still not working right, according to AMD's Alex Deucher who had written most of this code. These new AMD graphics cards have been around since September while there was no open-source support at that time. In December just before Christmas there was Evergreen Shader documentation that was made publicly available and around that time it was confirmed via our forums that initial VGA mode-setting was working with Evergreen internally on unreleased code. Since then the digital connector support has been added in and this code has finally cleared AMD's legal review. The revised target was to publish this code by FOSDEM, which is this weekend so AMD did hit the target this time."

Vigile writes "Few people will doubt that PC gaming is in need of a significant shot in the arm with the consistent encroachment of consoles and their dominating hold on developers. Today AMD is releasing the Radeon HD 5870 graphics card based on the Evergreen-series of GPUs first demonstrated in June. Besides offering best-in-class performance for a single-GPU graphics board, the new card is easily the most power efficient in terms of idle power consumption and performance per watt. Not only that, but AMD has introduced new features that could help keep PC gaming in the spotlight, including the first DirectX 11 implementation and a very impressive multi-monitor gaming technology, Eyefinity, which we discussed earlier this month. The review at PC Perspective includes the full gamut of gaming benchmarks in both single- and dual-GPU configurations as well as videos of Eyefinity running on three 30" displays."

An anonymous reader writes "AMD invited 100 people up to their private suite in the hotel that Quakecon 2009 is being hosted at for a first look at gaming on one of their upcoming DirectX 11 graphics cards. This card has not been officially named yet, but it has the internal code name of 'Evergreen,' and was first shown to the media back at Computex over in Taiwan earlier this year. The guys from Legit Reviews were shown two different systems running DX11 hardware. One system was set up running a bunch of DX11 SDKs and the other was running a demo for the upcoming shooter Wolfenstein. The video card appears to be on schedule for its launch next month."

technirvana writes "Microsoft's Live Mesh service launched today as an invite-only 'technology preview.' It is Microsoft's attempt to tie all of our data together. Live Mesh synchronizes data across multiple devices (currently just Windows computers, but theoretically it will extend to mobile and other devices in the future) as well as to a web desktop that exists in the cloud. It can sync data across devices used by a single users, as well as create shared spaces for multiple users." And since it's run by Microsoft, you know you can trust it.

Systems Librarian writes "Linux.com is running a story entitled 'Librarians stake their future on open source'. It details a group of librarians at the Georgia Public Library Service that have developed an open source, enterprise-class library management system that may revolutionize the way large-scale libraries are run. The system is Evergreen. The element of this project that has the participants especially excited is the speed. Previously, if users wanted changes to their systems, they'd be put into an 'enhancement queue'. Now, some features are implemented overnight. From the article: 'In fact, the catalog has many features and innovations that are lacking in non-free systems. It does on-the-fly spellcheck and gives search suggestions and adds additional content, such as book covers, reviews, and excerpts. The Shelf Browser shows items ordered along a virtual shelf built out of the holdings of the entire system. Patrons can create bookbags, which are lists that contain a selected collection of annotated titles. Bookbags can be kept private or shared as a regular Web page or as Atom or RSS feeds.'" Linux.com and Slashdot are both owned by OSTG.

RotJ writes "It's fire season again. And the government just grounded 33 aging air tankers on Monday due to safety issues. Looking for a modern solution, Evergreen Aviation has come up with a 747 supertanker with 24,000 gallons of tank space onboard, which allows it to cover seven times the area of today's largest existing airtanker. In addition to fighting fires, it will be able to contain oil spills and 'perform challenging homeland security missions' like neutralizing chemical or biological attacks. And think of how many John Goodmans you could cover with fire retardant. Be sure to watch the videos."

yukster writes "Eric Raymond has posted an open letter to Sun Microsystem's Scott McNealy asking him to 'Let Java go.' He says Sun can 'have ubiquity or [it] can have control.' The excellent improvements made to Java in the upcoming 1.5 release help re-level the playing field with C#. But, it seems like if Sun really wants Java to rule the world, they should heed ESR's advice. Hey Mr. McNealy, listen to this guy... set Java free!"