An anonymous reader writes "Rahul Sood, HP's CTO of gaming, argues that the days of a market that wants PCs running three $500 GPUs is history; he argues that it's really a tough or impossible sell. '... let's face it, high-end hardware has delivered diminishing returns in terms of value. This is why you don't see ridiculous offerings like Quad SLI and 2-kilowatt power supplies coming from our company.' But don't the ideas of customization and market pricing for components tend to undercut that? Is the gaming PC dead?"

LucasArts and Bioware held a press conference today to confirm what has been suspected for a long time: they're working on a Star Wars MMO. It will be called Star Wars: The Old Republic, and it will be a continuation of the Knights of the Old Republic franchise. Further coverage is available at Gamespot, and IGN has some of the concept art. An official website for the game was launched as well. "According to the game's official announcement, Star Wars: The Old Republic is set thousands of years before the rise of Darth Vader, with the galaxy divided by war between the Empire and the Sith. That's about 300 years after the events of KotOR, a time frame that, according to Zeschuk, 'is completely unexplored in the lore.' Players can take the role of either a Jedi, a Sith or other classic Star Wars characters -- and, as perhaps can be expected from BioWare, Muzyka says story will be a major component, underlying and driving all of the player's actions."

couchslug writes in with a Reuters account of a Federal raid on a California-based motorcycle club, the Mongols, on charges "ranging from murder and robbery to extortion, money laundering, gun trafficking and drug dealing." The interesting twist is that the authorities are asking the courts to seize the IP of the biker club — specifically, their trademarked name "Mongols." "Federal agents and police in seven states arrested more than 60 members of the Mongols motorcycle gang on Tuesday in a sweep that also targeted for the first time an outlaw group's 'intellectual property,' prosecutors said. The arrests cap a three-year undercover investigation in which US agents posed as gang members and their girlfriends to infiltrate the group, even submitting to polygraph tests administered by the bikers ... [T]he name 'Mongols,' which appears on the gang's arm patch insignia, was trademarked by the group. The indictment seeks a court order outlawing further use of the name, which would allow any police officer 'who sees a Mongol wearing this patch ... to stop that gang member and literally take the jacket right off his back' ..."

arashtamere writes "Red Hat president and CEO Jim Whitehurst predicts the enterprise open source software business will emerge from the economic crisis stronger than the proprietary market. 'I've had a couple of conversations with CIOs who said, "We're a Microsoft shop and we don't use any open source whatsoever, but we're already getting pressure to reduce our operating costs and we need you to help put together a plan for us to... use open source to reduce our costs." And we've had other customers literally looking at ripping and replacing WebLogic or WebSphere for JBoss ... I think we'll know in about six to nine months but there is no question that open source will come out of this in relatively better shape than our proprietary competitors,' he told Computerworld."

Colz Grigor writes "It appears that CBS and Fox have submitted DMCA takedown notices to YouTube for videos from the McCain campaign. The campaign is now complaining about YouTube's DMCA policy making it too easy for copyright holders to remove fair-use videos. I hope they pursue this by addressing flaws in the DMCA."

coondoggie writes "It's not like he needs it to beef up his résumé, but the world's richest college dropout finally is getting his degree. Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft, will speak at Harvard University's commencement ceremony in June and, like all commencement speakers, will receive an honorary degree from the institution. It's hard to guess if Gates, the wealthiest person in the world and co-founder of a company that brought in $44 billion in revenue last year, cares. But the programming whiz who once dropped out of Harvard will likely feel some sense of satisfaction."

Anonymous Coward writes "The discovery of a new monkey species that's found only in Uganda is being overshadowed by the imminent destruction of much of the animal's habitat."

SeaDour writes "The Pluto-bound New Horizons space probe, launched a little over a year ago, recently succeeded in passing through a narrow navigational keyhole by Jupiter. Using the gas giant's tremendous gravity, the craft now has a significant boost toward its final destination, shaving three years off the time it would otherwise spend en-route. As it passed through the Jovian system, the probe took some fantastic images of the neighborhood, including detailed observations of erupting volcanoes on Io, time-lapse photography of Jupiter's tumultuous atmosphere, and the faint ring system that was first discovered in Voyager photography. These new images prove the capabilities of the small probe, which is set to reach Pluto in 2015."

Jerry Beth writes "IBM is working with European astronomy organization Astron to design a chip that will be used to help gather billions-of-years-old radio signals from deep space in the hopes of learning more about the origins of the universe. From the article: 'It's part of Astron's Square Kilometer Array (SKA) radio telescope project. The SKA will be linked to millions of antennas collecting radio signals from space. The antennas will be spread over a large surface area of the globe but, in the aggregate, they will form a square kilometer's worth of collection area. [...] The microprocessors will essentially help the antennas capture the signals, filter out extraneous data and then convert the signals into data. Astrophysicists will then analyze the data to look for patterns. The weakest signals are the prize in this project, because they will be the oldest.'"

El Lobo writes "Looks like things are heating up again in the browser wars. Google has been openly supporting Firefox, so now Yahoo is displaying a new feature on search results pages for FireFox users. It appears that Yahoo is pushing downloads of IE7 from Microsoft and including itself as the default search engine installed in the file menu area." I got the invitation to download IE7 when running Firefox on a Mac, and even when running IE5 under CrossOver; but not when running IE7 under Parallels.

thefickler sends in an article comparing Windows Vista and Windows XP in the areas of security, home entertainment, GUI, parental controls, and networking. The author clearly believes that Vista wins across these categories.

Via GameSetWatch, 1up's look at recent virtual console releases on the Wii. The hub site's weekly retro roundup is going to make it a point to talk about Wii, 360, and PS3 downloadable games, with a focus on the old skool become new. They also will touch on old games rereleased on handheld systems, such as the fantastic FFIII. From the article: "Ecco the Dolphin - A curiously tranquil game that sees a normal dolphin embark on a quest to save his pod pals from a giant space vacuum, Ecco's nevertheless challenging -- besides oceanic hazards, our hero constantly faces the threat of suffocation should he stay underwater for too long. The idiosyncratic (read: sort of awkward) controls certainly don't make things any easier. All told, they make Ecco an acquired taste, and at the eight dollar standard rate for Genesis games this might be a tough sell. But we'll go ahead and give it the nod just for its boldness in straying from the beaten path. "

pipingguy writes "Now that 'thumb drives' are so inexpensive (a 1-GB SD card with USB housing/adapter costs about $25), which programs does Slashdot recommend for system recovery? What is the need-to-have software? Additionally, I'd like to get some input on the durability of the newish card reader / adapter devices, as some of them seem to be pretty flimsy (but very useful/flexible as opposed to the old fixed-capacity NAND devices)."

The Opposable Thumbs blog mentions a surprising twist from the world of Sony products; Gran Turismo HD will now be a free download. The realistic racing title was slated to be released as a full game, but the word is now that Polyphony will be releasing what they have, via e-Distribution, in Japan and the U.S.. Instead of continuing work on GT HD, they'll focus on Gran Turismo 5, the next 'full' game in the series. From the article: "In Japan there will be a free download that includes ten cars and two layouts of a single track. Not exactly an embarrassment of riches, but hey, free is free. There is no hint at when we'll see this download in the US, but I don't think it will be too long. Gran Turismo isn't exactly a small property here, and a free taste of the game in full 1080p will give gamers something to show off to other car buffs on their shiny HDTVs."