mikejuk writes "It is reported that Microsoft has sent an email to DirectX/XNA MVPs which informs them that they are no longer needed because XNA and DirectX are no longer evolving. What does this mean? If you don't need MVPs then presumably you anticipate nothing to support in the future."

Hugh Pickens writes "Senior US District Judge John Kane says there are serious questions about the validity of Righthaven's copyright infringement lawsuits in Colorado, and has put them all on hold. Kane says the main case in which he'll rule on the jurisdiction issue is that of Righthaven defendant Leland Wolf, who was sued over a Denver Post TSA pat-down photo. Wolf's attorneys filed briefs saying that based on Righthaven's lawsuit contract with Review-Journal owner Stephens Media LLC, its lawsuit contract with the Post is likely similar, and that their contract doesn't give Righthaven standing to sue. 'Righthaven very likely is neither the owner nor exclusive holder of any rights in the copyrighted work underlying this lawsuit,' say attorneys for Wolf. 'As such, Righthaven has suffered no injury or other cognizable harm required for it to have standing.' Judge Kane says he wants to resolve that issue before proceeding. 'Because there are serious questions as to whether my exercise of subject matter jurisdiction over Righthaven's claim of copyright infringement is proper, I think it most prudent to stay the proceedings in all pending cases in this district in which Righthaven is the named plaintiff,' wrote Kane. 'Should I find that I lack subject matter jurisdiction over Righthaven's claim of copyright infringement, it is likely that I will be required to dismiss all pending actions.'"

An anonymous reader from the Macmod forum wrote in with this appealing hack: "This is one of the coolest mods I've seen all year. Mac Moder EdsJunk submitted this mod to our forums late Thursday night. By cracking open a MacBook he was able to put a second monitor inside of the screen. The end result is sweet. The second monitor can make the Apple logo have any kind of background, like the clown fish, or the flurry screen saver."

rememberclifford writes "A survey of about 3,000 people who were tagged in a '25 Random Things About Me' note on Facebook found that memes spread through social networks in a remarkably similar way as diseases do. A biologist who looked at the data says that '"25 Things" authors can be seen as "contagious" under what's known as a "susceptible-infected-recovered" model for the spread of disease,' with a propagation factor of 0.27 in this case. But like an infection, the whole thing died out as quickly as it exploded once the number of 'victims' — people who were willing to write 25 things about themselves — was depleted." The '25 Things' meme was at least as annoying as a light flu.

An anonymous reader writes "Following the appointment of RIAA's champion Donald Verrilli as associate deputy attorney general, here's a complete roundup of all the RIAA and BSA-linked lawyers comfortably seated at top posts at the Department of Justice by the new government. Not strange, since US VP Joe Biden is well known for pushing the copyright warmongers' agenda in Washington. Just in case you don't know, Verrilli is the nice man who sued the pants off Jammie Thomas."

Got To Get Me A Git writes "Distributed version control systems (DVCS) seem to be the next big thing for open source software development. Many projects have already adopted a DVCS and many others are in the process of migrating. There are a lot of major advantages to using a DVCS, but the task of migrating from one system to another appears to be a formidable challenge. The Perl Foundation's recent switch to Git took over a year to execute. The GNOME project is planning its own migration strategy right now after discovering that a significant majority of the project's developers favor Git. Perhaps some of the projects that are working on transitions from other mainstream version control systems can pool their resources and collaborate to make some standardized tools and migration best practices documentation. Does such a thing already exist? Are any folks out there in the Slashsphere working on migrating their own project or company to a DVCS? I'd appreciate some feedback from other readers about what works and what doesn't."

snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister lays out his development predictions for 2009. These include further struggles from Microsoft in retooling its image, a more open source mindset for Java, twilight for Sun, the Web as platform of choice, and a dearth of innovation due to dwindling economic prospects. 'When customers aren't buying, tool vendors don't innovate — so don't expect many groundbreaking new technologies to debut this year,' McAllister writes, adding that smart companies will realize that 'process automation is one of the best ways to reduce costs in any business,' making 2009 the ideal time to 'revisit old software schemes that got shelved back when staffing budgets were flush.'"

An anonymous reader writes "SIFO (a major Swedish survey company) has conducted a gaming survey right before the launch of Dreamhack Winter. One of the results is that gaming is bigger than football and hockey combined."

An anonymous reader writes "As a third-year PhD math student, I am currently taking Partial Differential Equations. I'm working hard to understand all the math being thrown at us in that class, and that is okay. The problem is, I have never taken any physics anywhere. Most of the problems in PDEs model some sort of physical situation. It would be nice to be able to have in the back of my mind where this is all coming from. We constantly hear about the heat equation, wave equation, gravitational potential, etc. I'm told I should not worry about what the equations describe and just learn how to work with them, but I would rather not follow that advice. Can anyone recommend physics books for someone in my position? I don't want to just pick up a book for undergrads. Perhaps there are things out there geared towards mathematicians?"

Toren Altair writes "Soyuz TMA-13 with ISS Expedition Crew 18 and Richard Garriott successfully launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome at 7:01 UT (3:01 EDT). The Soyuz capsule will dock to the ISS in two days. Garriott will return to Earth with Expedition 17 crew members, Commander Sergei Volkov and Flight Engineer Oleg Kononenko on October 23." With the extra attention on this launch, the Russians have gone out of their way to say that the return of the Soyuz vehicle will be safe, after a couple of different malfunctions in the past year. Garriott is in space partly for recreation, and partly as a promotion for his latest MMO, Tabula Rasa. He took with him a hard drive filled with information about humanity, as well as DNA sequences from Tabula Rasa players and various celebrities (including Stephen Colbert and Stephen Hawking) to 'preserve' that data in case of a disaster on Earth. Garriott will also spend time running and participating in experiments. Coverage of the Soyuz mission is ongoing at NASATV.

eldavojohn writes "Here's a short update on the Novell Vs. SCO case we've been following. Our good friend Darl McBride made some interesting comments in court yesterday. He stated (under oath): 'Many Linux contributors were originally UNIX developers... We have evidence System V is in Linux... When you go to the bookstore and look in the UNIX section, there's books on "How to Program UNIX" but when you go to the Linux section and look for "How to Program Linux" you're not gonna find it, because it doesn't exist. Linux is a copy of UNIX, there is no difference [between them]." This flies directly in the face of what SCO found in extensive investigations in 2002 and contradicts what SCO Senior Vice President Chris Sontag had just finished testifying earlier that day (testimony that McBride did not hear)."