LifesBlood writes to mention the news that Foundation 9, one of the largest independent game development firms, has acquired the non-game assets of Shiny Entertainment. You may recall Shiny as the makers of titles like Earthworm Jim, Enter the Matrix, and (though I'm the only one who ever played it) the unusual strategy title Sacrifice. From the article: "Shiny was originally purchased by Atari in 2002 for an estimated $47 million, but financial terms of the sale to F9E were not disclosed. F9E did reveal that the acquisition was funded by Foundation 9's recent investment from Francisco Partners, which gave F9E a capital infusion of $150 million over the next few years. Under the terms of the transaction, F9E will acquire all the non-game assets from Shiny, while Atari will retain its current project planning formerly developed by Shiny, including Earthworm Jim."

Martin Ecker writes "Until now, if you were looking for an introduction to the OpenGL graphics API, the "OpenGL Programming Guide" (also known as the Red Book) was your best bet. Now Addison Wesley Publishing provides a new alternative that is easier to digest than the all-encompassing Red Book with its more than 800 pages. Paul Martz's "OpenGL Distilled" concentrates on discussing only the important fundamentals you need to program 3D graphics using OpenGL 2.0 and provides a concise introduction to the most important cross-platform graphics API currently available." Read the rest of Martin's review.

javathut writes "Perhaps an alternate title for this book could have been "understanding your audience." For any Sony PS3 execs out there wondering why their technological masterpiece is being ridiculed by customers months before it's even released, or what the long-term repercussions of their DRM policies will be, Convergence Culture is a must read. Drawing upon case examples of how a variety of user communities adopt digital technologies, sometimes in ways completely opposite from what the designers intended, Jenkins offers numerous insights on how technology and media professionals can forge better relationships with their customers." Read the rest of Ravi's review.

Tyler Too writes "With six different versions of Vista due once it ships, figuring out an upgrade path can be confusing. Microsoft has tried to clear things up with a 4x6 matrix laying out your options. 'In short, users of XP Home can do an upgrade install to any of the four Vista versions. However, XP Pro users can only perform upgrade installs to Business or Ultimate.' And if you're not running a 32-bit version Windows XP, there's no upgrade path for you at all."

Roland Piquepaille writes "Engineers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have isolated a single-crystal film of semiconductor from the substrate on which it is built. Then they transferred this very thin film — 200 nanometers thick — on plastic. Both sides of the film can host active components and several layers can be stacked, opening the way to very powerful 3-D flexible computer chips. Besides computer chips, this technique could be used for solar cells, smart cards, RFID tags or active-matrix flat panel displays."

dougman writes "Today James Lileks mentioned his 'friend and all-around comic genius/good egg Michael J. Nelson' called, to tell him about his brilliant new project, RiffTrax. Here's the pitch: '...free-lance commentary tracks. Bottom line: Mystery Science Theater 3000-style commentary for big famous beloved movies like Titanic or The Matrix. The hitch: you have to provide the movie. It's genius: no worries about copyright. You buy the commentary tracks for $1.99, rent the movie or get it out of your collection, load the commentary on your iPod or burn it to a disk, then watch them together in true you-got-peanut-butter-in-my-chocolate bliss. ... The first movie is Roadhouse." Cool! I voted for The Matrix as the next one to be riffed." While I (and many others I know) preferred Joel, Mike was not without his share of funny moments too. Without Crow and Servo it just might not be the same, though.

There have been many analyst predictions in the early days of the next-gen consoles, but rarely have they been so direct. DFC Intelligence President David Cole has gone on record saying there's a very real possibility Sony could lose this leg of the race to Microsoft and Nintendo. From the article: "Sony's clear strength is the first factor: brand strength and current market position. The glaring weakness of the PlayStation 3 is price, especially when compared to the competition. However, it is more than just an issue of whether the PlayStation brand strength can justify a premium price. Of course, Sony would like to point to the hardware horsepower and extra features like Blu-ray. The problem is that is only one factor in our forecasting matrix. Furthermore, with the competition having features like Xbox Live and the Nintendo Wii controller, the PS3 may not have that much of an advantage in the elusive 'Wow Factor.'" 1up Editor Sam Kennedy has further musings on this subject, with Next Generation reporting that there may be a problem getting high yields in the PS3 production process.

holy_calamity writes "NewScientist is reporting on a new robot modeled on a worm to crawl through your intestines made by European researchers. The plan is to replace endoscopes, but from the look of the videos these things are too scary to ever be allowed into hospitals."

SirBruce writes "Mmogchart.com has been updated to Version 20.0! This is a major update, with updated numbers for many games, most notably World of Warcraft, Eve Online, RuneScape, and most of NCSoft's titles. I've also added three new MMOGs to the tracking data: Tibia, The Matrix Online, and Dungeons & Dragons Online. I've also removed the old subscriber data for Ragnarok Online in Japan, and unified the various total subscriptions charts. Also new to this update is preliminary market data for Asian MMOGs (including Ragnarok Online) that are commonly reported in terms of Peak Concurrent Users and Average Concurrent Users. Given the differences in pricing models, many of these games are not subscription-based, so a direct comparison with subscription MMOGs cannot be made. My thanks to everyone who helped with this update, and thanks to those of you who waited patiently for this update!"

KantIsDead writes "MIT's Tech Review is running an interview with Boston University Bioengineer Tim Gardner about the possibility of using bacteria to produce electricity. If fuel cells running off sugar are nearly here, alcohol-powered robots cannot be far." From the article: "While typical fuel cells use hydrogen as fuel, separating out electrons to create electricity, bacteria can use a wide variety of nutrients as fuel. Some species, such as Shewanella oneidensis and Rhodoferax ferrireducens, turn these nutrients directly into electrons. Indeed, scientists have already created experimental microbial fuel cells that can run off glucose and sewage. Although these microscopic organisms are remarkably efficient at producing energy, they don't make enough of it for practical applications."

Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "WSJ.com has compiled clips from a dozen movies over the past 23 years that depict the internet, with varying degrees of accuracy. Among the selections: WarGames, Sneakers, .com for Murder, and Mr. & Mrs. Smith. The Matrix Reloaded used real Linux code, while Mission: Impossible had the improbable email addresses Job@Book of Job and Max@Job 3:14. In a related article, WSJ.com reviews some of the more-absurd Hollywood conventions when it comes to the web. Harry Knowles, of Ain't It Cool News, says, 'The thing that always gets me is watching people send emails. You click "send" and the entire document begins to fold into an envelope and disappear into the screen. I tend to send around 300 to 400 emails a day, and that would drive me insane.'"

jsuda writes "The authors of Inescapable Data share their excitement about what they see as a rapidly-developing convergence of digital technologies having enormous significance for business and culture. This convergence, in their view, is inescapable, life-altering for both good and bad, and presents a frame-shattering paradigm-shift which is mostly unrecognized, and much less examined critically. Inescapable Data is a thought-provoking book meant to describe the new technologies and to examine the special values which arguably will emerge from the convergence." Read the rest of John's review.

Gamasutra reports that Dave Perry, the founder of Shiny Entertainment, quit his role with the company to aid its sale from floundering Atari. From the article: "Shiny Entertainment was founded in 1993 by Dave Perry, and produced the hit Earthworm Jim series, as well as the financially successful Enter The Matrix. It is also noted for more esoteric titles such as MDK, Messiah and Sacrifice. The studio was sold to French publisher Infogrames by Interplay in 2002 for an estimated $47 million, before the company bought the rights to the Atari name and logo." Sacrifice was a unique and under-rated strategy title. It was flawed, to be sure, but the immediacy of summoning your troops in the field was a lot of fun.

gila_monster writes "Juice Enews Daily is reporting that the Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information at the University of Innsbruck in Austria has created an entanglement of eight quantum particles, yielding a quantum byte or 'qubyte,' or eight qubits. The formal paper was published in the December 1 issue of Nature. A qubyte with eight ions provides a computing matrix of 65536 mostly independent elements. No word in the article about whether they were able to actually use the qubyte for computing."

That the Internet is a big, scary place is hardly worth mentioning. For every respectable site, there are three or four seedy places that you wouldn't want to be seen surfing by relatives. While LiveJournal has a reputation as an angst-fest, there are many individuals using the power of self-publishing to impressive ends. Every once in a while, one of those self-publishers even moves beyond the confines of the electronic medium to the world of dead-tree publishing. Movies in Fifteen Minutes (M15M) is just such a project, born on the Internet to high acclaim, with the core idea transferred extremely successfully to a traditional book format. Read on for my impressions of the only book on the market today to feature a hilarious version of Braveheart's evisceration scene. Good times.

Gamespot has the word that ads from Massive, Inc. will now be incorporated into The Matrix Online. The ads, like those in sister-MMOG Planetside, will be in the form of billboards and signage. From the article: "One big difference that players will notice is that the Massive ads will be refreshed and updated with greater frequency. Sony notes that current ads in the game for fictional products and services will continue to remain a part of the game. Sony has also said that the ads will not be animated, and will not affect the game's performance. Another effect of the inclusion of Massive ads into The Matrix Online is that player advertising in Mega City will be possible, and Sony might run contests in the future to select player-generated ads and incorporate them in the game. "

Table-top Roleplaying has had a big year. There have been a number of important releases from several of the well-known product lines. Sales and turnout from August's Gen Con Indianapolis event would tend to suggest that the downturn the industry has experienced recently is a temporary problem. That's good news for Wizards of the Coast's well known Dungeons and Dragons line and the FanPro published Shadowrun campaign setting. Both are heavy hitters in the world of Table-top gaming, and today I have details and opinions on what you can expect in your Friendly Local Gaming Store from the latter half of the year. Read on for a hardcore dose of nerd.

coolphysco1010 wrote to discuss the possible development of a direct neural interface, ala 'The Matrix', that could eventually allow for instant object recognition. From the article: "Now, neuroscientists in the McGovern Institute at MIT have been able to decipher a part of the code involved in recognizing visual objects. Practically speaking, computer algorithms used in artificial vision systems might benefit from mimicking these newly uncovered codes ... In a fraction of a second, visual input about an object runs from the retina through increasingly higher levels of the visual stream, continuously reformatting the information until it reaches the highest purely visual level, the inferotemporal (IT) cortex. The IT cortex identifies and categorizes the object and sends that information to other brain regions."

fistfullast33l writes "Dystopia, a Matrix meets TRON mod for Half Life 2, has finally been released to the public today. This has been one of the more beautiful and original mods under development for HL2 so far. Files are available all over the place but check out their homepage for more details." From the article: "After 9 long months of heavy development and another year of planning and designing before that, it has been a long and challenging road to this point. We're extremely excited to let the public see what we've been so busy working on all this time and hope that you enjoy it as much as we do. This demo version is limited to only 1 map; Vaccine, but features all of our high powered weapons and extensive range of implants."

Martin Ecker writes "The Red Book, also known as the OpenGL Programming Guide, is back in its fifth edition. It received the name Red Book because of the nice red book cover, and possibly also because it has remained the standard introductory text on the OpenGL graphics API for years, and always referring to it as "OpenGL Programming Guide" is too long. This fifth edition now also covers new features introduced with versions 1.5 and 2.0 of the OpenGL standard. So let me take you on a tour through the pages of this book to see what it has to offer." Ecker's review continues below.