AMD has announced the acquisition of ATI for US$5.4 billion.

• Engadget: AMD buying ATI for $5.4 billion
• Slashdot: It’s Official – AMD Buys ATI

Pre-production on the animated Dragonlance film is continuing apace, and the voice casting for the Companions has been completed. Kiefer Sutherland will be headlining as the voice of Raistlin Majere. Other case members will include Michael Rosenbaum (Justice League’s Flash) as Tanis Half-Elven, Lucy Lawless as Goldmoon, Michelle Trachtenberg at Tika Waylan, and Jason Marsden as Tasslehoff Burrfoot. From the site: “The film is based on the first book in the Chronicles series, “Dragons of Autumn Twilight”. The director is comics and TV animation veteran, Will Meugniot, and the screenplay has been adapted by George Strayton with plenty of involvement from Margaret and Tracy.”

• Slashdot.org: Kiefer Sutherland Headlines Dragonlance Movie

I have owned a Philips 29 inch CRT Television (Model: 29PT5515 – Firmware: A10EP1-1.3) for about 5-7 years and for the last many months it has been acting very crazy, like bugs in software. For example sometimes the TV will take 30 secs to change the channels, which is very annoying, but I always keep the faith because it always returns to normal after a while (within an hour to a week!!).
The last week it began to act really strange and act like I’ve never seen before. Colours disappeared, image got distorted and other weird stuff. And the total collaps came two days ago when I was trying to fix the TV’s black/white bug by unplugging the power, when I turned it back on it was completely reset and it was running it’s auto channel setup. — Which at first I was happy about, since I had wanted try the ‘factory reset fix’ on the TV for quite some time. Unfortunately my happy face quickly got sour at the point I realized my TV had a personality issue!!
The TV acted completely like a different model, and to makes things better it was now a 16:9 widescreen TV I was in posession of, which was really “great” on my 4:3 screen, and menus suddenly featured Superwide mode and other strange modes, many of which I had seen before or really fit my TV screen given it’s wrong aspect settings. After two days, I was ready to send it to it’s grave at the local dump. But this evening I tried to search the net for some solutions and possible service menus, that would hopefully allow me to fix the TV.
So I googled 29PT5515 and I googled some more, and I finally found a way to access a service menu, and I managed to get it working straight ahead, and boy was I delightfully surprised!! The service menu had everything I needed, and I jumped into the very long option list and found an options called WSCR which I disabled and suddenly my TV was no longer a 16:9 television no more! I then went on to calibrate the screens viewfield and enable pretty much everything and except one annoying feature I had to locate and disable it seems to work very very well now, with added features such as a better support for channel titles which they had for some unknown reason decided against using on this model.

Instructions for accessing the Philips service menu on my (and perhaps your?) TV:
Use the remote and quicky type 06 25 96 and hit either Menu for Service Default Mode (SDM) or the OSD button for Service Alignment Mode (SAM). I don’t know what the SDM actually does but I guess it resets some settings. However using the OSD button (the button you can toggle onscreen clock with) I got into the service menu. NOTE: I take absolutely no responsibility for your TV or anything relating to the service menu

So now I can postpone my HDTV shopping for a little while longer! Good luck hacking your TV!
Elektroda.pl : Philips 29PT5515/58

UPDATE: Well it seems the “Painterchip” is still crapped out on the TV and it keeps slowing down and even spontanious reset again, so my hunt for HDTV is on again…

UPDATE 2: Well here goes… I got a HDTV!!! Read more about it!

Firefox 2 Beta 1 is now available for download. This is the fourth developer milestone focused on testing the core functionality provided by many new features and changes to the platform scheduled for Firefox 2. Ongoing planning for Firefox 2 can be followed at the Firefox 2 Planning Center, as well as in mozilla.dev.planning and on irc.mozilla.org in #bonecho.

Please note: It is not recommended that anyone other than developers and testers download the Firefox 2 Beta 1 milestone release. It is intended for testing purposes only, normal users are encouraged to get the latest public release of Firefox.

New features and changes in this milestone that require feedback include:

• Built in Phishing Protection
• Search suggestions now appear with search history in the search box for Google, Yahoo! and Answers.com
• Changes to tabbed browsing behavior
• Ability to re-open accidentally closed tabs
• Better support for previewing and subscribing to web feeds
• Inline spell checking in text boxes
• Search plugin manager for removing and re-ordering search engines
• New microsummaries feature for bookmarks
• Automatic restoration of your browsing session if there is a crash
• New combined and improved Add-Ons manager for extensions and themes
• New Windows installer based on Nullsoft Scriptable Install System
• Support for JavaScript 1.7
• Support for client-side session and persistent storage
• Extended search plugin format
• Updates to the extension system to provide enhanced security and to allow for easier localization of extensions
• Support for SVG text using svg:textPath

• Firefox 2 Beta 1 milestone released

Håkon Wium Lie (the honored father of Cascading Stylesheets [CSS]) has some really interesting answers to slashdot readers questions about CSS, W3C, Microsoft, IE7 and the rest of the Web…

• Slashdot.org: Håkon Responds to Questions About CSS and…