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.

Wednesday we requested questions for Jonathan Zdziarski, an open source contributor and author of the recently reviewed book "Ending Spam." Jonathan seems to have taken great care in answering your questions, which you will find published below. We have also invited Jonathan to take part in the discussion if he has time so if your question didn't make the cut perhaps there is still hope.

Every year, the pilgrimage to Gen Con brings tabletop roleplayers, wargamers, boardgame enthusiasts, and LARPers together for four days of unbridled nerdery. Besides participating in games, some of which have been around for decades, there are always new releases and previews to tantalize the gaming public. Gen Con is the tabletop industry's version of E3, where the year ahead is laid out by the big names. Read on for a taste of what your Friendly Local Gaming Store will have to offer in the near future.

Neo writes "The handover of The Matrix Online to SOE has finally begun with users given 45 days to convert their accounts over to SOE's Station system." Star Wars Galaxies, TMO's sister game, has been having its own troubles. A recent patch had to be removed from the live game because of overwhelming, crushing player protest. Another "Star" MMOG has new help this week, with none other than Michael Okuda signing on to work on the Star Trek Online Massive game. From the article: " A technical designer and all-around Star Trek guru, Okuda has worked as a technical consultant to the writers of The Next Generation, Voyager, and Deep Space Nine television series, as well as seven Star Trek films. He will primarily design the game's interface, along with serving as a more general Star Trek universe consultant."

ipapusha writes "TI Calculator enthusiasts rejoice. A few weeks ago, Dan Englender released a new flash application usb8x. Usb8x is a driver that interfaces with the On-the-Go USB port in the TI-84 Plus and TI-84 Plus Silver Edition. It is designed to be used by other programmers to create drivers for a variety of USB peripherals, including a keyboard and mouse. Already, ticalc.org's own Michael Vincent has interfaced his Lexar JumpDrive to play The Matrix's famous lobby scene. (mirror) ."

datemenatalie writes "According to Sci Fi Wire, V for Vendetta, originally slated to open on Nov. 4, has been pushed back to next March. The film stars Natalie Portman and was written by Matrix creators Andy and Larry Wachowski. This delay comes as quite a blow not only to expectant fans, but also to the marketing campaign of the film, as the clever tagline tie-in 'Remember, remember the 5th of November' is decidedly weaker when you attempt to rhyme it with March 17th."

This summer it seems like Massive games are the only good news going, and this week has been busy. R. Spencer writes "1UP explores MMO addiction and, in true confessional style, opens the floor to heavy users and recovered junkies. It's especially interesting how much the mechanisms of MMO addiction have in common with other forms of addiction. The primary source of addiction nowadays seems to be World of Warcraft. If you're jonesing right now, you might want to check out this Guide to the Creation of the Scarlet Monastery on the official site. Additionally, Mogg writes "For new players, GamerGod has a up part one of a guide to the game World of Warcraft." This is Tobold's first writerly foray at the new site. Luck to him. For something a little different, 1up explores the world of Sociolotron...a Sex MMOG. Speaking of sex, SOE has been busy lately. The end to the Quest for Antonia search is almost here. They've put up new details on future EQ2 content, and announced a dramatic downsizing of The Matrix Online. See, when no one plays, you don't need as many servers. The new content mob is rearing his head all over with Secrets of the Syren in the works on Star Wars Galaxies, CoH Issue 5 coming up soon, and screenshots from the next Guild Wars update available. MMORPG.com continues to put out interesting editorials, with a look at the stories in Massive Games. Finally, the highly respectable Nick Yee has published a new edition of The Daedalus Project. The seminal source of MMOG statistics on the web has articles on participation in games at the level cap, introductions to the genre, and the stress of loot. As always, participation in the survey helps ensure future issues have good data.

An anonymous reader writes "The V For Vendetta trailer has been posted on the film's official site. The film is written by Matrix creators Andy and Larry Wachowski and stars Hugo Weaving and fan favorite Star Wars star Natalie Portman."

gcnaddict writes "Creating a slowdown in time on one end of an online game while maintaining normal speed on another was once one of those impossibilities which should never have happened. However, Finnish researchers have successfully invented a way to replicate a bullet-time-esque scene on one end of a real time multiplayer game without affecting the play speed on the other end(s). Of course, there are some slight issues which may never be resolved, such as when a player may occasionally think they have shot an opponent in a game and is surprised when his target refuses to die..."

feller writes "IGN FilmForce has posted an interview with Natalie Portman from yesterday's Comic Con regarding her new film, V For Vendetta (written by Andy and Larry Wachowski, creators of The Matrix trilogy) and also covering everything from misguided fans, to what merits the use of violence, to Portman's own opinions about graphic novels. From the interview: 'Most of the Q&A session was dominated with questions for Natalie Portman, the star of the film. While the questions leveled at her ranged from weird to repetitive, one confused young man asked if starring in movies like Mighty Ducks was different than starring in films like V for Vendetta. Problem is, Ms. Portman never starred in Mighty Ducks. '"

prostoalex writes "The Ray Kurzweil Reader is a collection of essays by Ray Kurzweil on virtual reality, artificial intelligence, radical life extension, conscious machines, the promise and peril of technology, and other aspects of our future world. These essays, all published on KurzweilAI.net from 2001 to 2003, are now available as a PDF document for convenient downloading and offline reading. The 30 essays, organized in seven memes (such as "How to Build a Brain"), cover subjects ranging from a review of Matrix Reloaded to "The Coming Merging of Mind and Machine" and "Human Body Version 2.0.""

You may recall that sometime last November we put up a request for questions to be passed on to author, voice actor, comedian, and card shark Wil Wheaton. Seven months and many adventures later, Wil has responded in depth to the excellent queries Slashdot users put to him. If you're curious about what's kept him, what it's like to be a Teen Titan, or how to use the LCARS User Interface, read on for his responses.

Spencerian writes "Roz Kaveney's From Alien to the Matrix is definitely a love-to-hate book for me, and probably for most fanboys who've forgotten more than the author knows about the meanings, philosophy, and humor found in many popular SF films of the last 35 years. If you love to argue and curse when you read something that's so way off base in interpretation or appears to lack any research in even the basic meanings that most Americans found in a SF film, then this is your book. But if you hate arguing with your non-fannish significant other on why you really liked a particular movie, save your money by not buying this book. Oh, and dump your boy/girlfriend, too." Read on for the rest of Spencerian's review.