Netflix fans, your streaming video service is just about to accommodate higher HDTV resolution in glorious 1080p. It's unclear exactly when this 1080p streaming with 5.1 surround sound will be rolled out — Netflix says it will be sometime "later this year."

You'll need more bandwidth to handle the higher resolution, probably exceeding the 7 to 10 Mbps required to stream the company's 720p HD content on the Roku box, TiVo, the Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3. Let's hope Netflix has a better compression scheme up its sleeve for this 1080p trick, supported by Microsoft Silverlight 1080p streaming introduced last March.

All that additional resolution won't mean much unless Netflix can stream more than just a measly 6% of its movies in HD, as it does now. That's lame — even Netflix's own PR flack calls it "underwhelming." Beyond that, there's the problem of bandwidth-stingy Internet service providers, many of whom also sell pay-per-view movies on cable, balking at opening up their pipes for a competitor's 1080p content.

1080p streaming video coming to Netflix, but will it matter? | DVICE

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – NASA's space shuttle Endeavour is ready for its Sunday launch to the International Space Station – a planned predawn liftoff that is expected to be the last time an orbiter lifts off in darkness.

The weather forecast is pristine for Endeavour's upcoming launch from a seaside pad here at NASA's Kennedy Space Center. Liftoff is set for 4:39 a.m. EST (0939 GMT), with an 80 percent chance of good weather.

"We're in really good shape," said Mike Moses, NASA's shuttle integration manager, in a morning briefing. "Everybody is ready to go."

Endeavour's launch is the first of NASA's five

The shuttle will launch six astronauts on a 13-day mission to deliver a new room and observation portal to the International Space Station.  It is the last major assembly job for the $100 billion space station, which has been under construction since 1998.

"Every launch is a little bittersweet because it's one closer to the end," Moses said. 

The new room, called Tranquility, will house station robotic arm controls, life support systems and exercise gear. It will also include the Cupola, a new seven-window observation portal launching on Endeavour that promises to give astronauts stunning views of the Earth and space.

Sunday's predawn launch is also expected to be the last time a space shuttle will blast off in darkness. Weather permitting, it is expected to be visible from much of the eastern United States.

The Microsoft SideWinder X4 gaming keyboard was announced today, and it includes a host of gamer-friendly features. The press release touts the device's "anti-ghosting" technology as its primary selling-point.

"We know that ghosting can be a problem for gamers, so we wanted to develop a way to eliminate this issue and improve the overall gaming experience," explained Steven Bathiche, research manager of the Applied Sciences Group at Microsoft. The SideWinder X4 also has some other gamer-centric functionality, such as macro recording, mode and profile switching, and adjustable backlighting.

Microsoft's SideWinder X4 Keyboard

In a common phenomenon called "ghosting," standard keyboard architecture typically records keystrokes in such a way that not all of the keys will always register properly when certain groups of them are pressed simultaneously. The SideWinder X4 reportedly eliminates this problem by giving each button a dedicated input. The X4 "ain't afraid of no ghost," allowing gamers to press up to twenty-six buttons at a time.

The SideWinder X4 Keyboard will be available for pre-order on Amazon.com later this week, and launches in March for the estimated retail price of $59.95.

Microsoft's SideWinder X4 Keyboard is a Ghostbuster - Shacknews

Last October, NASA received a committee report that called existing planning "unsustainable." The agency couldn't even budget the money to deorbit the International Space Station as planned in 2016—itself a waste of the construction costs—and the vehicles needed for its planned return to the moon wouldn't be ready by the 2030s... "if ever," in the committee's words. So today, NASA administrator Charles Bolden announced a new five-year budget plan that significantly changes the nation's spaceflight priorities.

A completely revamped human program

The biggest decision in the new budget is the end of the Constellation program, which included the Orion crew vehicle and Ares launch vehicles, which merged the Apollo approach to orbit with technology developed for the shuttle. At current budget levels, the full development of these systems would take us well into the 2020s even if completed on schedule, and arrive after the planned appearance of private-sector equivalents. Political opposition to this decision, which will mean the loss of jobs in a number of states, is already present, and many questions in the press conference that accompanied the announcement focused on this issue.

NASA staff members defended the decision when questioned about the development money already spent. "The fact that we poured $9 billion into an unexecutable program does not mean that we should pour another $50 billion after it," said one, "that's what i'd tell taxpayers." Another argued that this did not mean a fundamental change for NASA, saying "We're not canceling our commitment to explore space; we're canceling Constellation."

Part of that commitment will involve a reprieve for the International Space Station. Instead of being deorbited in the middle of this decade, the ISS will be treated like a national laboratory, and used to pursue research on materials and long-term human habitation in space through at least

The roving days are over for NASA's Mars rover Spirit after more than six years rolling across the Martian surface, the space agency announced Tuesday.

NASA engineers have decided to abandon efforts to rescue the

"This is not a day to mourn Spirit. This is not a day of loss," said Doug McCuistion, director of NASA's Mars exploration program, in a teleconference. "Its driving days are likely over, however its contribution will continue."

Spirit is stuck up to its wheel tops in Martian sand and slightly tilted back in a spot on Mars that scientists have named "Troy." The rover got stuck on May 6, when its wheels broke through a hard crust covering the soft sand and sunk into the sand trap.

"Spirit has encountered a golfer's worse nightmare," McCuistion said.

Engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., spent months working on ways to extract Spirit from its sandy predicament. Those efforts - which began in November - have been unsuccessful. Making matters worse, two of the rover's six wheels are broken, hampering its escape attempts.

Spirit and its robotic twin Opportunity have been exploring different parts of Mars since they landed in January 2004. Since then, the long-lived rovers have far outlasted their initial 90-day mission plans and discovered new insights into the history of water on Mars. Opportunity is currently working fine and is studying an odd rock called "Marquette Island" – which appears to have been ejected from deep

iPhone/Palm Pre: Apple and/or AT&T don't want the Google Voice service to have its own iPhone app, and we think that stinks. Google is finally releasing the next best thing: a mobile site that basically replicates a dedicated Google Voice app.

The big advantage of Google's new Voice app (which is already showing up for Voice users at Lifehacker HQ) is the direct contact access. Rather than having to store secondary numbers or use the somewhat old-school-looking Voice mobile site to pull up your contacts, Google Voice's new webapp provides super-quick, as-you-type access to your Google Contacts. The interface is similar to what you see when you visit Voice in a full browser, with the same mobile look and feel as Gmail, Reader, and other products have recently received.

When you dial, it's not the familiar experience of having Google Voice call you, then call the other person—it's a direct dial to that person, probably using those same secondary numbers Google seems to have stockpiles of.

You'll want to make sure your phone's contacts are synced up with Google if you're keen on using Google's Voice app. It's a free service, and requires a Google Voice account (which we hear they're giving out more regularly).

Google Voice

Google Reader is really dominating in the world of RSS readers, but if you're looking for a desktop experience that has the best of what Google Reader offers, but a faster and more desktop-like experience on Windows, you definitely need to check out FeedDemon.

The latest version of FeedDemon, newly release 3.1 offers some serious performance improvements from 3.0, which was a feature release that included Google Reader synchronization as its major point of interest. FeedDemon 3.1 also includes a new Shared By People I Follow feature, which brings Google Reader's shared items functionality into FeedDemon.

You can now also filter the posts in the feeds that you are subscribed to based on keywords. You can show posts only if they include certain keywords, or filter out posts if they include certain keywords. This can make subscribing to a very busy feed more manageable because you can completely hide the content you are not interested in seeing.

FeedDemon 3.1 brings serious performance and social improvements