QueTechNews

Two weeks before the US space shuttle Endeavour is scheduled to lift-off, the US space agency NASA says a piece of equipment that was to fly on the mission was deliberately sabotaged. And as if that weren’t enough, there were reports Thursday that astronauts flew while drunk. VOA’s Jessica Berman reports.

During a briefing on launch preparations for space shuttle Endeavour, NASA officials revealed that a space program worker deliberately damaged a piece of equipment that is scheduled to fly aboard the space craft.

The tampered device was due to be delivered to the International Space Station by Endeavour. It measures strain on a space station beam and relays the information to controllers on the ground.

NASA’s chief of space operations, Bill Gersteinmaier, says the space agency was notified of the sabotage by the company servicing the mission.

MICROSOFT HAS decided that the best way to get punters buying its Xbox 360 machines and boost the HD-DVD format is to cut the price of its HD-DVD player accessory.
Both the format and the player have been in the wars lately with people largely stopping buying the console at least until its overheating problems are fixed.

HD-DVD is not doing as well in the US, particularly since blockbuster opted for the rival Blu-ray. It seems that the Vole has decided to have a fire sale on its products of doom by cutting the price of its Xbox 360 game console in the United States to $179 from $199, and giving away five free movies to anyone who buys the machine in August or September.

Of course this deal does not apply to the EU, where HD-DVD is doing quiet well.

“The Middle East isn’t going to miss out on the launch of the PS3. Sony Gulf have announced that the region is going to be receiving units on March 22, which for some reason is a day earlier than in Europe or Australia.

The same Casino Royale deal applies as elsewhere in PAL regions, the launch lineup looks the same and…you guessed it…no 20GB models either. The prices are so far only available in UAE Dirhams, where Sony first-party games will be 229 AED (USD$62) and the console itself will be 2499 AED (USD$680).

Wish we had Dirhams. Sounds a lot more exotic than “dollar”.”

[Via Zawya]

The PlayStation® Campus Cup is a university and college gaming tournament that visits schools across the nation looking for the best gamers.

Play MotorStorm™ on PLAYSTATION® 3 at The PlayStation® Campus Cup. Post your school’s fastest lap time, and you could represent your school in a head-to-head competition in the interschool finals in Toronto.

The player with the fastest lap time wins a FREE year’s tuition and a PLAYSTATION® 3 computer entertainment system.

Plus there is great regional prizing and giveaways at each school, so be sure to stop by to see if you make the grade. Free for all students to enter.

Check when they’re coming to your university.

[Check details after jump]

We all know how many keys the 103 key keyboard has, but it looks like Lebedev’s long-awaited Optimus has been undergoing some serious retooling for its CeBIT coming out, and from the sound of it they may have dropped some keys from the board. We won’t be sure until later this month when the Optimus takes home a new name and shows off its latest layout, but for $1200 we sure as hell hope they’ve managed to add some more of those sweet, sweet 2 x 2cm OLED keys — or subtract some hard currency from the working MSRP. Oh yeah, and in case you hadn’t noticed, they’ve got yet another mouth-watering photo of some yet-untainted shapeshifting keys.

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Citing concerns over cost and compatibility, the top technology official at the federal Department of Transportation has placed a moratorium on all in-house computer upgrades to Microsoft’s new Windows Vista operating system, as well as Internet Explorer 7 and Office 2007, according to a memo obtained Friday by InformationWeek.

In a memo to his staff, the DOT’s CIO Daniel Mintz says he has placed “an indefinite moratorium” on the upgrades as “there appears to be no compelling technical or business case for upgrading to these new Microsoft software products. Furthermore, there appears to be specific reasons not to upgrade.”

Among the concerns cited by Mintz are compatibility with software applications currently in use at the department, the cost of an upgrade, and DOT’s move to a new headquarters in Washington later this year. “Microsoft Vista, Office 2007, and Internet Explorer [7] may be acquired for testing purposes only, though only on approval by the DOT chief information officer,” Mintz writes.

The memo is dated Jan. 19. In an interview Friday, DOT chief technology officer Tim Schmidt confirmed that the ban is still in effect. “We’re analyzing different client software options and also integration issues,” says Schmidt. Among the options the Transportation Department is weighing as a possible alternative or complement to Windows Vista are Novell’s Suse Linux and, for a limited group of users, Apple’s Macintosh hardware and software, he says.

[Via InformationWeek]

NOKIA RE-LAUNCED N-GAGE at GDC today, but not in a way that people were expecting. The new N-Gage is not a black taco Mk III but a concept, not a phone but a program. The devil lies in the details.
One has to wonder why Nokia used the N-Gage name, recently polled to rank above dhengi fever but below open sore in the likability scale. No matter, this new version has a good chance of succeeding because it has the weight of Nokia fully behind it.

What N-Gage is this time is a platform that will be on the segment of the market called ‘converged devices’ by Nokia, a rather broad set of parameters that roughly equate to what the rest of the world calls smart phones.

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A researcher at Stanford has created an alternative to the mouse that allows a person using a computer to click links, highlight text, and scroll simply by looking at the screen and tapping a key on the keyboard. By using standard eye-tracking hardware–a specialized computer screen with a high-definition camera and infrared lights–Manu Kumar, a doctoral student who works with computer-science professor Terry Winograd, has developed a novel user interface that is easy to operate.

“Eye-tracking technology was developed for disabled users,” Kumar explains, “but the work that we’re doing here is trying to get it to a point where it becomes more useful for able-bodied users.” He says that nondisabled users tend to have a higher standard for easy-to-use interfaces, and previously, eye-tracking technology that disabled people use hasn’t appealed to them.

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When I was in first grade there was a solar eclipse that we could see here in the States. I recall to this day my teacher shrieking “Don’t Look at it or you’ll go blind!”, which is ironically very similar to another threat I heard frequently that had to do with going blind, but I digress.

If you have always harbored a inner need to stare at an eclipse without going blind Mathmos has a pair of Eclipse Lights that won’t fry your retinas. Each light uses LEDs to create the effects you see and the lights will come in and out of view as you move around the globe.

Two colors are available a red called solar and a blue called Lunar. Each light sells for $69.99 and measures 5” x 5” x 5” and includes the 120V power adapter. There is no pesky switch to mess with to turn these on and off, you simply press down on the globe. That should be a nice touch for those of you who remember the 60’s a bit too much.

[via ThinkGeek]

NVIDIA may be best known for its consumer-level graphics cards, which are impressive enough in their own right, but the company of course also caters to some users even more demanding than gamers (rare as they are), who look to be in for a treat with its latest high-end offerings. According to NVIDIA, its new QuadroFX 4600 and QuadroFX 5600 graphics cards represent the company’s biggest generational leap evar, bringing hereto unheard of GPU power and up to 1.5GB of frame buffers to tasks like automotive design, medical imaging, scientific research, and visual effects. If that’s not enough, you can also double ‘em up for some SLI action. Of course, the cards also come with some equally jaw-dropping price tags, with the QuadroFX 5600 demanding a cool $3,000 and the slightly lower-powered QuadroFX 4600 a comparative bargain at an even $2,000.

[More on the card]