steveb3210 writes "It seems that what was once a 5-acre glacial lake in the Andes has mysteriously disappeared. 'In March we patrolled the area and everything was normal,' Juan Jose Romero from Chile's National Forestry Corporation, Conaf, said. 'We went again in May and to our surprise we found that the lake had completely disappeared. All that was left were chunks of ice and an enormous fissure.'" The current theory is that an earthquake opened the ground and allowed the lake to drain. Looks like global warming is off the hook this time around.

akkarin writes "Following Google's complaint to Microsoft regarding Vista's 'desktop search,' Google claims that Vista's search has not changed enough: 'Google said yesterday that the remedies don't go far enough. Google chief legal officer David Drummond said in a statement, "We are pleased that as a result of Google's request that the consent decree be enforced, the Department of Justice and state attorneys general have required Microsoft to make changes to Vista."'"

Mz6 wrote with a link to an article on The Independent site about a most unusual scientific theory. "Some scientists suggest that our love of the mobile phone could cause massive food shortages, as the world's harvests fail. They are putting forward the theory that radiation given off by mobile phones and other hi-tech gadgets is a possible answer to one of the more bizarre mysteries ever to happen in the natural world — the abrupt disappearance of the bees that pollinate crops."

SlashRating©
42
slashdottit! tm

Bill Stubbs writes "NVIDIA has admitted to a killer bug in all GeForce 8800GTX/GTS cards, and will recall all affected cards and replace them. 'An NVIDIA engineer, who wishes to remain anonymous, has just clued us in on the whole deal. This engineer claims that while allegations of poor gaming performance are correct, the reason is not really poor drivers. Brace yourself for the truth: Right after the G80 was taped out, NVIDIA discovered a bug in the vertex shader that causes the GPU to generate slightly incorrect geometry transformation data. The difference was minimal enough to escape attention but it was significant enough to render a scene incorrectly.' The article also links to a secret website which will allow gamers to purchase Nvidia cards at cost."

Sarah Giannantonio writes "AtomFilms and LucasFilms launched today the 2007 Star Wars Fan Movie Challenge. This is a yearly competition where the Star Wars community send in their fan films to be judged by George Lucas. Award recipients will have their film shown during Celebration IV and also on Spike TV. New for 2007 is the fan fiction category."

Verunks writes "Microsoft Word users now can easily import and export to the OpenDocument Format. The StarOffice 8 Conversion Technology Preview, a plug-in for Microsoft Word 2003 that allows users of Microsoft Word 2003 to read, edit and save to the OpenDocument Format (ODF) is now available"

Vista's User Account Control, love it or hate it, represents a barrier against unwanted software getting run on users' computers. A Symantec researcher has found a simple way to spoof UAC and says that it shouldn't be completely trusted. The trick is to disguise the UAC warning dialog in the color associated with alerts generated by Windows itself.