Slashdot Mirror

Hugh Pickens writes "Lisa Miller writes in Newsweek about the thesis that heaven is not a real place, or even a process or a supernatural event, but rather something that happens in your brain as you die. The thesis is based, in part, on a growing body of research around near-death experience. According to a 2000 article by Bruce Greyson in The Lancet, between 9 and 18 percent of people who have been demonstrably near death report having had an NDE. Surveys of NDE accounts show great similarities in the details, describing: a tunnel, a light, a gate or a door, a sense of being out of the body, meeting people they know or have heard about, finding themselves in the presence of God, and then returning, changed. Scientists have theorized that NDEs occur as a kind of physiological self-defense mechanism when, in order to guard against damage during trauma, the brain releases protective chemicals that also happen to trigger intense hallucinations. This theory has gained traction after scientists realized that virtually all the features of an NDE can be reproduced with a stiff dose of ketamine, a short-acting, hallucinogenic, dissociative anesthetic. 'I came out into a golden Light. I rose into the Light and found myself having an unspoken interchange with the Light, which I believed to be God,' wrote one user of his experience under ketamine. 'Dante said it better,' writes Miller, 'but the vision is astonishingly the same.'"

kamlapati writes in with a followup from the news last month that Microsoft and Intel are funding a laboratory for research into parallel computing at UC Berkeley. The new development is the imminent delivery of the FPGA-based Berkeley Emulation Engine version 3 (BEE3) that will allow researchers to emulate systems with up to 1,000 cores in order to explore approaches to parallel programming. A Microsoft researcher called BEE3 "a Swiss Army knife of computer research tools."

Waqas writes "Apple has placed an order for 12 million iPhones to be built by a Taiwanese contract manufacturer, according to an analyst citing reports from Asia. The Chinese-language Commercial Times on Wednesday cited Taiwan-based sources within Apple's iPod component supply chain as saying the phone is due to arrive during the first half of next year."

miazmatic asks: "I am one of the tech managers for my high school's FM radio station. We have been using Rhythmbox on Debian to play music after hours when no one is broadcasting. However, it took some pretty ugly hacks to get it to transmit the station ID every hour. We are adding a 600GB RAID 0 VG to our PC (P4 2.4/512MB), to which we plan to encode all our CDs losslessly. Along with this upgrade I would also like to find a permanent solution for broadcasting the station ID hourly. Has anyone used Linux to run a radio station before? Can anyone suggest a F/OSS software package or solution? Any help is appreciated."

tres3 writes "Wired magazine has an excellent four page article discussing Brazil's new approach to Intellectual Property rights. It discusses everything from battling with the international pharmaceutical industries, to song sampling, to the national adoption of Linux. Richard Stallman stated that India's political commitment to free software is second only to Brazil's after attending a weeklong free software teach-in for members of the Brazilian national congress, where 161 out of 594 members of congress, from a broad range of parties, had signed up with the free software caucus - making it one of the largest caucuses in the Brazilian government."

antispam_ben writes "CNN is reporting the upcoming Messenger mission to Mercury is set to launch August 2. The spacecraft uses a combination of technologies (insulation, Peltier devices, careful design and orbit, always keeping the shield side toward the Sun) to keep its electronics at room temperature."

Paul Slocum writes "Just when you thought the music industry couldn't get any worse, Sony and BMG are merging. Now there will only be 4 major labels, and they estimate that 2000 jobs (25% of combined workforce) will be cut." An anonymous reader points to Reuters' report on the planned merger, which points out that "Vivendi-owned Universal and Sony BMG, as the new company is to be called, account for about 46 percent of music sold worldwide."

zratchet writes "The IGDA Independent Game Development Special Interest Group is just getting started - this group is for game developers interested in pursuing game development and distribution outside the standard channels as presented by the mainstream industry today. For purposes of this SIG, the definition of 'indie' is: 'Not having any formal relationship with a publisher.' The purpose of this SIG is to provide information and resources to help build the community of indie developers and support their efforts, and we're currently identifying 3 types of Indie Game Developers: Commercial (small self-publishing companies and those using small publishers - for example Sunspire Studios of Tux Racer fame) and GarageGames), Open Source, Shareware, Freeware, and Public Domain (including OSI and Creative Commons licensed games) such as those listed at Sourceforge, and 'mods', such as those hosted at PlanetQuake."

John Miles writes "It's been almost thirty years since young Laura and Sandy Crowther sat down at a Teletype and took their first steps into the mysterious subterranean world their father, Will, created for them. Now, if Nick Montfort's Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction is any indication, Crowther and Woods's pioneering computer game Adventure and its descendants are finally beginning to garner the critical recognition they deserve. At only 286 pages, Twisty Little Passages is a small, accessible book that addresses a deep and complex subject. The author's stated intention is to bring us the first book-length consideration of interactive fiction (IF) as a legitimate literary field, and he has certainly succeeded." Read on for the rest of Miles' review. Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction author Nick Montfort pages 286 publisher The MIT Press rating 4 out of 5 grues agree: Montfort's one of them! reviewer John Miles ISBN 0262134365 summary The definitive survey of interactive fiction for the literati... and the rest of us

Eight chapters, arranged in roughly-chronological order, detail the lineage of interactive fiction from its origins in Delphic riddles to its newest and most intriguing forms.

Passion and precision Among Montfort's first statements is one that demonstrates a commitment to careful scholarship that recurs throughout the book: "Text adventure and interactive fiction do not mean exactly the same thing." Infocom's Deadline and Emily Short's Galatea are cited as examples of IF that are not "adventures" in the pop-fiction tradition of exotic settings and perilous situations. These titles, among others, demonstrate that IF isn't just a delivery vehicle for the stereotyped themes of juvenile fiction with which it's often associated. Montfort proceeds to explain why he found it necessary to write Twisty Little Passages:

To see why a solid treatment of (IF) needs to be written, one need only consider this selection from the single page that mentions IF in Ilana Snyder's Hypertext: The Electronic Labyrinth (1996):

The precedent was Adventure, developed in the 1960s at Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL). The program was conceived of as an experimental game. A computerised version of role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, Adventure comprises a series of descriptions of fictional locations inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien's fantasy The Lord of the Rings (1954), and set in the surrounding Californian mountains.

These three sentences state six specific things about Adventure - when, where, and why it was developed, that it is a computerized version of Dungeons and Dragons, that its fictional locations are inspired by Tolkien, and that it is set in California. At least four of these six statements are clearly false, and the remaining two are misleading. (pages 9-10)

Essentially, previous authors and critics writing about interactive fiction just didn't care. In Chapter 1, "The Pleasures of the Text Adventure," Montfort shows that he does. Here, and in the following chapter ("Riddles"), he suggests that the IF art form has a much deeper history than we might think:

... the combination of an explicit challenge and a verbal literary work has a clear precedent (:) the riddle. By presenting a metaphorical system that the listener or reader must inhabit and figure out in order to fully experience, and in order to answer correctly, the riddle offers its way of thinking and engages its audience as no other work of literature does. (pages 3-4)

Recognizing that his audience is likely to include technical geeks as well as literary theorists, Montfort defines some lit-crit terms as they apply to interactive-fiction analysis. Towards the end of the first chapter, we're presented with terminology like "story," "narrative," and "plot," but the definitions Montfort offers could have been fleshed out without sending us to the library to brush up on our Russian formalism. The distinction between "diegetic" and "extradiegetic" exchanges (communication with the game world and the game engine, respectively) appears next, illustrated by Zork 's first few interactions with the user. "Metalepsis" comes next, defined as an intrusion or transgression between levels of story and narration -- sometimes unintentional, sometimes with fatal results. (Portions of Floyd's commentary in Planetfall are cited as an example of the former; the protagonist's robot-assisted suicide in Suspended exemplifies the latter). Happily, none of these intimidating-looking terms are prerequisites to an understanding of the book as a whole.

Naming the game Assuming the art of interactive fiction began with the riddle, what constitutes a work of IF today? After a brief excerpt from LookingGlass Technologies veteran Dan Schmidt's For A Change gives us an example of description, interaction and puzzle-solving, Montfort goes on to establish four requisite aspects of IF:

• A text-accepting, text-generating computer program;
• A potential narrative (a system that produces narrative during interaction);
• A simulation of an environment or world; and
• A structure of rules within which an outcome is sought, also known as a game.

Works which do not include each of these elements are deliberately excluded, among them "hypertext fiction," most graphical computer games, and numerous experimental titles. In this respect, Montfort perhaps misses an opportunity to reflect upon the true extent of IF's influence over the rest of the entertainment software world. With a reported 30,000 lines of text in Deus Ex 2 - more than any Infocom game ever boasted - I'd argue that the historical text-only criterion is becoming more questionable all the time.

The rise of the smart machines Much more than a theoretical treatise on IF, Twisty Little Passages is also the most complete chronicle of important IF titles, authors, and publishers assembled to date. Its middle four chapters focus largely on academic and commercial efforts at crafting and publishing interactive fiction. Chapter 3 begins with an introduction of the concept of generative literary machines ("ergodic literature"). Montfort cites the Turing machine-like nature of the I Ching , followed by a mention of Jonathan Swift's satirical machine from Gulliver's Travels, "made of equal parts of irony, sarcasm, and mockery, that would automatically write books on all the arts and sciences." Advancing to the modern era, we encounter Theodor Nelson's early hypertext experiments in 1970; the "Choose Your Own Adventure" books that appeared near the close of the decade; and the Dungeons and Dragons phenomenon that introduced a generation to the idea of participative fiction and inspired more IF and computer-game authors than even the most dedicated scholar could count.

The mother of all computer games, in Montfort's view, was Spanish engineer Leonardo Quevedo's 1912 chess-playing robot. Devised to attack a particular endgame problem on a vertically-oriented chessboard, Quevedo's machine was unique in that it represented the first so-called "chess automaton" that operated by legitimate electromechanical means rather than by fraudulently-concealed midgets. A subsequent refinement of Quevedo's machine would later catch the eye of famed computer scientist and AI researcher Norbert Wiener, achieving recognition as the first genuine attempt at artificial intelligence.

Mechanical curiosities aside, no discussion of human-computer interaction would be complete without inviting Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA (1966) to the party. As the first convincing conversation "bot", ELIZA accepted plain-English input from a human interlocutor, transforming it (albeit with no semantic understanding) into a sympathetic textual murmur geared to elicit further input:

Person: Men are all alike.
Computer: IN WHAT WAY?
Person: They're always bugging us about something or other.
Computer: CAN YOU THINK OF A SPECIFIC EXAMPLE?
Person: Well, my boyfriend made me come here.
Computer: YOUR BOYFRIEND MADE YOU COME HERE
Person: He says I'm depressed much of the time.
Computer: I AM SORRY TO HEAR YOU ARE DEPRESSED. (page 82)

Even more impressive than ELIZA was fellow MIT researcher Terry Winograd's SHRDLU, the first computer program capable of modelling, rendering, and allowing a human to interact verbally with objects in a virtual world:

Person: WHAT DID THE RED CUBE SUPPORT BEFORE YOU STARTED TO CLEAN IT OFF?
Computer: THE GREEN PYRAMID.
Person: THERE WERE FIVE BLOCKS TO THE LEFT OF THE BOX THEN.
Computer: NO, ONLY FOUR OF THEM: THE RED CUBE, TWO LARGE GREEN CUBES, AND A LARGE RED BLOCK.
Person: PUT THE BLUE PYRAMID ON THE BLOCK IN THE BOX.
Computer: OK (does it)
Person: IS THERE ANYTHING WHICH IS BIGGER THAN EVERY PYRAMID BUT IS NOT AS WIDE AS THE THING THAT SUPPORTS IT?
Computer: YES, THE BLUE BLOCK. (page 84)

Prior to reading the transcript above in Montfort's book, I'd heard of SHRDLU only in passing. It deserves a lot more attention than it's received. SHRDLU was one hell of an impressive hack in 1970, and it wouldn't be trivial today, judging by the capabilities suggested. Like the incredulous audiences that must have attended the early chess robot demonstrations, I'd have been prying panels off Winograd's PDP-6 with a screwdriver, looking for midgets ex machina.

Worlds from Adventure to Zork After bestowing the title "the first work of interactive fiction" upon a deserving SHRDLU, Montfort summons the spiritual grandfather of them all: William Crowther's Adventure . Released in 1975 for the benefit of his five- and seven-year-old daughters and any interested lurkers on the nascent ARPANet, Adventure combined ELIZA and SHRDLU's human-interaction capabilities with a primitive fictional setting:

YOU ARE AT A COMPLEX JUNCTION. A LOW HANDS AND KNEES PASSAGE FROM THE NORTH JOINS A HIGHER CRAWL FROM THE EAST TO MAKE A WALKING PASSAGE GOING WEST. THERE IS ALSO A LARGE ROOM ABOVE. THE AIR IS DAMP HERE. (page 88)

Crowther is a contemporary of Zork co-author Dave Lebling, who, coincidentally, was a member of the same Dungeons and Dragons group in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In one of Montfort's many personal communications with IF luminaries, Lebling says:

Eric Roberts . . . started running a D&D group a year or so before Adventure was written. Eric had his own ideas about how D&D should be done, emphasizing storytelling and de-emphasizing the mechanical aspects of the game such as die- rolling. He tried to create a Tolkien-inspired world that was fun and consistent with Middle Earth... I think one strong component that carried over into Zork was to try to keep the mechanical workings of the game as hidden as possible, which to me enhanced the fun and immersiveness of the experience. (page 86)

With such similar roots, it's no surprise that Zork and Adventure play like long-lost brothers. In Chapter 4, Montfort details the evolution of Zork and other important IF titles that were created by multitalented college students with free mainframe access and seemingly-limitless time on their hands. Much has been written about Zork and its legendary Implementers, but seldom have we been given such a well-documented survey of the personalities and motivations behind the game's creation. One tongue-in-cheek room description from the mainframe version of Zork didn't make the cut for the commercial releases:

Tomb of the Unknown Implementer
This is the Tomb of the Unknown Implementer. A hollow voice says: "That's not a bug, it's a feature!"
In the north wall of the room is the Crypt of the Implementers. It is made of the finest marble, and apparently large enough for four headless corpses.
The crypt is closed.
There are four heads here, mounted securely on poles.
There is a large pile of empty Coke bottles here, evidently produced by the implementers during their long struggle to win totality.
There is a gigantic pile of line-printer output here. Although the paper once contained useful information, almost nothing can be distinguished now. (pages 102-103)

Zork accepted complex sentences with indirect-object phrases, offered a much-larger vocabulary than its predecessors, and broke significant new ground in multiplatform software development, predating UCSD Pascal as the first commercial application for virtual-machine technology. But it also advanced at least one purely-literary aspect of computer gaming by introducing its first complex interactive character: the wily Thief. One of Montfort's references offers an insightful Joseph Campbell-esque definition of "villain": "the symbolic representation of forces working to seemingly hinder, but actually promoting, the hero's or heroine's development." (pages 112-113) Since Adventure's dwarves and pirate are not representations of anything else ("parental figures or psychological drives"), their deeds are destructive without being truly "wicked." Zork's thief, on the other hand, serves as a foil for the player character's combat skills, as a reflection of the player's own rapacious treasure-lust, and, ultimately, as an unwitting assistant in the quest.

Zork's innovations over the state of the art established by Adventure are too numerous to count, although Montfort explicitly avoids the common mistake of canonizing Zork and Infocom games in general while giving short shrift to other important IF efforts. In Chapter 5, we learn what became of the Zork implementers in their post-MIT lives at Infocom.

Alas, poor Infocom. . . In Montfort's words, Infocom, which was founded June 22, 1979 by Lebling, Blank, Anderson, and seven other MIT alumni, "began work on the foundation of IF while the plot of ground that it was to be built upon had not been completely surveyed." Chapter 5's opening paragraph is revealing:

Adventure is considered the great original epic of interactive fiction. Infocom's works call for a grandiose comparison made on a slightly-different metaphorical ground. Whoever the "Shakespeare" playwright actually was - common or noble, working largely alone or in close collaboration with a theater company - Shakespeare wrote, remarkably, not just the greatest English-language play, by critical consensus, but almost all of the great English-language plays. Similarly, the interactive fiction creators at Infocom devised practically all of the best-loved IF works in the history of the form. (page 119)

Although Scott Adams (no relation to Dilbert's creator) and his company, Adventure International , were the first to sell IF commercially in 1978, Infocom was the most successful IF publisher of its era. The company reached US $10 million in sales in 1985 with over 100 employees on the payroll. A quoted excerpt from the New Zork Times , the company's newsletter, illustrates how Infocom's marketing focused on their games' puzzle-centric design:

Although our games are interactive fiction, they are more than just stories: they are also a series of puzzles. It is these puzzles that transform our text from an hour's worth of reading to many, many hours' worth of thinking. . . . The value of our games is that they will provide many hours of stimulating mental exercise. (page 120)

Montfort subsequently comments:

The company's ... belief in the centrality of problem solving should explain ... why Infocom did not focus on creating what might more easily be seen as artistic and literary works that favored exploration, communication with characters, or alternate plot progressions. Yet Infocom did make some progress along these lines, and advanced the state of the literary art by coupling the textually described worlds and situations with carefully crafted puzzles in ways that great riddlers might, in provocative and affecting ways. (page 120)

Of the thirty-five games that Infocom published before its US $7.5 million sale to Activision in 1986, their earlier releases receive some of the most detailed analyses in Twisty Little Passages. In addition to discussion of the Zork and Enchanter trilogies, Montfort offers us insights on the unconventional, revelation-driven structure of Deadline, the Reagan-era sociopolitical commentary found in Infidel , and the tragic end of Floyd the Robot in Planetfall:

As a character who is also a technological artifact, Floyd is more important than his immediate function in the IF world suggests. He is a figure for the sometimes emotional relationships that people have with computers, or that are mediated through computers. (page 150)

Many other games, from Trinity to A Mind Forever Voyaging and the Douglas Adams- assisted adaptation of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy are discussed extensively in Chapters 5 and 6. Private communications between Montfort and Adams's collaborator at Infocom, Steve Meretzky, lend a glimpse of what it was like to work with the late, lamented author:

Adams's "world-class procrastination abilities," as Meretzky called them, did cause some problems for the ( Hitchhiker's Guide) project, which began in February 1984 and was slated (ambitiously) to be completed by the following Christmas. Meretzky said of Adams that "being a successful person with tons of interesting acquaintances, he had an extremely distracting life. Plus, he wasn't fond of the actual task of writing. He loved coming up with ideas, but hated wrestling them into a properly-formed work." (page 173)

Montfort's 35-page bibliography is a treasure trove in its own right, with online and printed references given equal weight. Academic grognards may question the long-term utility of online citations, but the omission of sources such as Briceno et al.'s comprehensive Down from the Top of its Game: The Story of Infocom would have been a serious shortcoming. Throughout the book, Montfort's goal of preserving and documenting the great IF works remains clear, with a scholarly ethos that's just as relevant to fans of today's games. He praises Infocom's relatively-lax copy protection schemes, compared to those used by other game publishers whose heavily-protected works may be lost to posterity:

If any examples of heavily-copy-protected computer games survive through another two decades for study and discussion, it will be thanks to the loose, widespread network of teenagers and college students who assiduously cracked these programs, allowing the crippled disks to run freely both on systems at the time and on compatible computers today. (page 159)

Activision, in particular, earns well-deserved props in the book for opening earlier Infocom works and encouraging independent development.

... and other commercial efforts Although Infocom's oeuvre receives the lion's share of attention in Twisty Little Passages, the book does not neglect the many other commercial IF publishing efforts on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1980s and 1990s. Chapter 6 ("Different Visions Worldwide") opens with a quick drive-by tour of Roberta Williams's 1980 Mystery House , recognized as the first graphical adventure game. A number of IF book adaptations were undertaken in the early 1980s as well, among them The Hobbit from Melbourne House and the classics Fahrenheit 451, Rendezvous with Rama, and Nine Princes in Amber from Tellarium. Along with the aforementioned Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy released by Infocom in 1984, Montfort gives favorable attention to US Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky's Mindwheel , published in the same year by Synapse Software.

Brief histories of British IF publishers Level 9 and Magnetic Scrolls round out the chapter, along with an even-briefer mention of Legend Entertainment, written before Legend's shutdown in early 2004. The latter constitutes one of the few weak spots in Twisty Little Passages's coverage of the classics. Legend's integration of music, artwork, graphical navigation, and other interface enhancements in the Spellcasting 101 series went far beyond Infocom's efforts to modernize their own IF engines, and the company deserves more than a single paragraph.

At the end of Chapter 6, Montfort recounts the 2000 failure of former Infocom author Mike Berlyn's Cascade Mountain Publishing, one of the last commercial publishers of pure text-based IF. He proceeds to draw a sheet over the commercial market for interactive fiction in general, pronouncing it as dead as Graham Chapman's parrot:

A few individuals have since sought to sell their IF works, and the occasional company like Activision has re-released older works. The main market for interactive fiction today, however, is on eBay and other auction sites, where packaged disks from the 1980s are bought and sold by collectors and IF enthusiasts. Fortunately, the end of the interactive fiction market is not the end of the story for this form. (page 191)

I don't agree with this proclamation of commercial doom, which is a recurring theme in Twisty Little Passages. It's unreasonable to look at the failure of a single company which released two IF products in two years -- one of them a recycled effort from the mid-1980s -- and draw the conclusion that future IF games will only be offered for sale alongside Beanie Babies, assorted stolen laptops, and someone's spare kidney. Unlike modern PC and console games with multimillion-dollar budgets, a killer IF title can still be written by one guy or girl working the graveyard shift at home. Success is arguably a matter of recalibrating one's expectations -- and business model -- to match contemporary market conditions. (Did it ever make sense for Infocom to employ 100 people in some of the most expensive commercial real estate in Boston, working on a handful of all-text games that fit on 140KB floppies? Montfort stops short of considering this question, but in the post-Ion Storm era we live in, the answer should be pretty obvious.)

Fortunately, as the last two chapters reveal, a healthy independent IF community has sprung up to take the place of the commercial publishers who are no longer with us.

IF's independent authors: the once and future scene In April 1993, at the culmination of a long reverse-engineering effort by "a group of programmers called the InfoTaskForce" (page 202), Graham Nelson released an object-oriented programming language capable of creating story files for the Infocom Z-machine interpreter. Along with a commercially-available text-adventure authoring system known as TADS, Nelson's language, Inform, sparked an indy IF revolution.

The (growing) community of IF authors really began to demonstrate the vitality of the form in the 1990s, innovating in ways that early hackers and later game companies did not. Their IF works are usually even more widely available today than the most successful commercial software of the 1980s, since they are typically free for download and, thanks to the Internet, widely available. ... A relevant FAQ notes that ... there were five IF games in the 1996 Year-End Download Top 40, making these games some of the most popular non-commercial computer games in the world. (page 193)

As Montfort writes, Nelson also fired the first shot of that revolution:

Nelson's most famous piece of interactive fiction - and likely the most well-known IF work since the demise of Infocom - is the first fruit of Inform, the 1993 Curses . This large, complex, and difficult adventure is set in an English country home and in certain other spaces that are linked in fantastic ways to it. Nelson (2002) said he "consciously wrote it in an Infocom-esque spirit, aiming at the same epigrammatic style of wit." (page 203)

Ten years after the first release of Inform, hundreds of independent IF authors and fans congregate on Web boards and Usenet newsgroups to discuss new titles released using Inform, TADS, and a host of other IF platforms. In particular, the annual Interactive Fiction Competition, begun by the denizens of rec.arts.int-fiction and rec.games.int-fiction, celebrates its own tenth anniversary in 2004. Past Competitions have spawned groundbreaking titles like Adam Cadre's Photopia , released in 1998 and still much-discussed today, and Andrew Plotkin's unsettling Shade . These, and many other indy releases, are reviewed extensively in Chapter 7. It would have been good to see more pointers toward longstanding IF fan sites such as Eileen Mullin's XYZZYNews in this chapter, but for the most part, Montfort's latter two chapters do a great job of summarizing the state of interactive fiction's art and culture. His enthusiasm as an observer of the modern IF scene is infectious.

Two tentacles up I can wholeheartedly recommend Twisty Little Passages not only to IF fans and amateur historians, but to anyone serious about the foundations and culture of computer gaming. Infocom and Legend Entertainment auteur Steve Meretzky's back-cover blurb says it all: "(Twisty Little Passages) is a thoroughly-researched history of interactive fiction, as well as a brilliant analysis of the genre. Reading it makes me itch to fire up that old DEC-20 and start writing interactive fiction again!" As a fan of Meretzky's many IF works, I should be so lucky. As a fan of the IF art form as a whole, I'm indeed lucky to have run across Nick Montfort's excellent book.

You can purchase Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page

lightwaveman writes "Developed for astronauts, a small device called 'the CPOD' does for people what black boxes do for airplanes. It's a compact, portable, wearable device -- a single piece of equipment that gathers a wide variety of vital signs. About the size of a computer mouse, a CPOD is worn around the waist. It's comfortable enough to be worn while sleeping. It's non-invasive. It takes only minutes to don. Importantly, it can track a person's physiologic functioning as they go about their normal routine -- they don't have to be tethered to some stationary device. It can store data for eight-hour periods for later downloading; alternatively, it can send it wirelessly, in real time, to some other device."

Iphtashu Fitz writes "As was reported last week, the first Mars rover Spirit had some communications problems that the folks at the JPL have finally managed to trace to problems with its flash memory. Reuters is reporting that Opportunity seems to be having some power-related problems, too. It appears a faulty thermostat is turning a heater on overnight without being told to do so. While NASA isn't concerned about the rover overheating, they're exploring the long-term effects of continued power drain on the second rover." The article also notes: "The first three-dimensional, panoramic images beamed back from Opportunity showed an intriguing outcrop of exposed bedrock" - there's now a color version of the same image. Finally, lightwaveman points to the Spaceflight Now status page regarding new priorities for the Mars mission: "The airing of today's Mars rover news conference is being delayed on NASA TV to show the band Aerosmith touring International Space Station Mission Control at Houston's Johnson Space Center."

Thanks to GrandTextAuto for pointing to the newly-released multi-author text adventure called Narcolepsy, spearheaded by multi-XYZZY Award winner Adam Cadre, and featuring contributions from IF luminaries such as Emily Short, Andrew Plotkin, and Stephen Granade. The fairly mysterious readme file promises: "Narcolepsy has several very different plot threads, so even if you get to an ending, you may have only seen a small fraction of what's possible", and the graphics-enabled Blorb-format game should work on a variety of platforms using the correct interpreters.

Brian Stretch writes " According to the National Review: 'When President Bush delivers a speech recognizing the centenary of heavier-than-air-powered flight December 17, it is expected that he will proffer a bold vision of renewed space flight, with at its center a return to the moon, perhaps even establishment of a permanent presence there. If he does, it will mean that he has decided the United States should once again become a space-faring nation.' Here's hoping. The article also includes talk of nuclear engines and using the moon as a testbed for going to Mars."

hajo asks: "I am in need of a Large (60" plus) printer which can print onto any thickness material for a specific art/robotics project. I loved the earlier Slashdot story where the two students used two motors and an inkjet can for large mural prints; but I need a higher quality end result. I can build a plotter mechanism with two PC controlled stepper motors; But I would like to find out how to use head the parts from a cheap inkjet printer. Where can I find info on the hardware and drivers for such a project. I have a hard time believing that I'm the first who wants to use the ink jet head parts of a printer to do something with them. Any hints, tips and URLs deeply appreciated. I believe this project will make for an interesting read and as thanks for any help I will keep the Slashdot community informed of any results."

Chris Curtin writes "My daughters' school is having a Career Education Day next month and I'd like to do a presentation. My kids are in Kindergarten and Third Grade, but I could present to Fifth Graders, as well. How do I explain what a programmer does to the kids? I was thinking about building a web page for the little ones, maybe show the older ones some visual logic with VB, where I change a basic program and run it from my laptop, showing keyboard and mouse inputs, music, and so forth. I have VB6, Java, HTML and Windows 2k on the laptop I'll be bringing. Any thoughts on how to 'wow' the little ones and make the older ones want to learn more about programming?" If you were going to make a computer presentation to a class full of children, what kind of things would you talk about?

An anonymous reader writes "Dennis Ritchie has acknowledged he with Ken Thompson wrote the code cited as 'proof' by SCO. This seems to fit perfectly with Bruce Perens' Analysis of SCO's Las Vegas Slide Show, and undermine Blake Stowell's claim 'At this point it's going to be his word against ours." Andreas Spengler writes "In the ongoing battle between SCO and the Linux community, German publisher Heise has shown that not only was the Linux implementation of the Berkeley Packet filter written outside of Caldera (now SCO), but that it was common practice there and at other companies to remove the BSD copyright notices from the internally used source code. In effect, SCO has proven publicly that they violated the BSD license." (Warning, article is in German.) Finally, a semi-anonymous reader writes "Learn all about how IBM's stomach will be roasted on a pyre of CDs at WeLovetheSCOInformationMinister."

ninthwave writes "The Guardian is running an article on research into the visible effects of entropy in the Universe. Alan Heavens of The University of Edinburgh did the research also posted at The Royal Astronomical Society with this article" I dunno - expansion, heat death - it all reminds me of a teacher who said "I'm not a premillenialist, postmillenialist - I'm a pan-millenialist, as in it's all going to pan out in the end." Update: 08/18 16:36 GMT by S : Headline fixed.

Mark Leighton Fisher writes "Some readers might be interested in Outstanding Objects (Developed Dirt Cheap); or "Why Don't Developers Search the Literature?" It seems like I still see a lot of wheel reinvention going on, even with the wealth of code and information now available on the Net."

TimButterfield writes "PUBLIC HEARING SCHEDULE AMENDED (68 FR 19966) The Copyright Office of the Library of Congress is scheduling two new days of public hearings in Washington, D.C., on the possible exemptions to the prohibition against circumvention of technological measures that control access to copyrighted works. In addition, the Copyright Office has cancelled two previously scheduled dates. Public hearings will now be held in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, May 1, 2003, beginning at 2:00 p.m. and on Friday, May 9, 2003, beginning at 9:30 a.m. The Washington, D.C., public hearings will be held at the Postal Rate Commission, 1333 H Street, N.W., Third Floor, Washington, D.C. The public hearings previously scheduled for April 15 and April 30, 2003, have been cancelled. The public hearing scheduled for May 2, 2003, will be conducted at the Postal Rate Commission at 9:30 a.m. As previously announced, hearings will also take place on May 14 and 15 at the UCLA Law School in Los Angeles, Calif. For more information, see the Copyright Office website."

Chris Curtin writes "Looks like SciFi channel is redoing the classic series! I don't know about a female Starbuck but it might be interesting." I can't picture a Galactica without Lorne Green. So long as they don't bring back that stupid robot dog, it might be okay.

ninthwave writes "The Guardian has this article on the adventures of piano tuners in the Amazon. I think it is a nice lesson in the age of technology to see the perceived hardships of using technology in areas where the natives are quite happy without. More impressive is the old wooden piano seems to survive better than the new synth but that is horse of a different colour."

Brian Stretch writes "nVidia posted the first publically available Linux graphics drivers for the Athlon 64 (aka Hammer series) on their website today. There are updates for the lesser x86 and IA64 architectures as well. Now, if only the Athlon 64 and Opteron boards and CPUs themselves were publically available, or is AMD's developer program sending out more of these things than I know? (If so, gimme!) I guess I'll have to tough it out with my mere dual Athlon 2400+ workstation for now (heh heh heh)." In related news, an anonymous reader writes "The new AMD Opteron servers designed by Newisys are using embedded Linux for system management. This allows remote management via web browser or ssh to examine processor state, switch power on/off, regulate processor power states and fan speeds, update BIOS firmware, etc. See the docs for more info!"

PinchDuck writes "Check out this site to get a tour of London Underground stations that have been abandoned during the century+ history of the commuter system. You can apparently still get to some of them! (though not by taking the Tube, obviously). I wish I had found this site 2 weeks ago, when I went to London, but now my geeky explorations must wait until my next visit (having just flown back in to Detroit today)."

PureFiction writes "Peer networks are gaining some attention these days given advances in much more decentralized search architectures and swarming distribution networks. Research has indicated that these decentralized networks are resistant to legal and technological attacks. The continued proliferation of broadband and wireless networking will ensure pervasive deployment of distributed peer networking infrastructure that will drive significant innovations in personal and community digital communications services."

Doug Bostrom writes "Over at FlightGear.org, Andy Ross describes how ATI's new Linux drivers only seem to work with "official" ATI cards (made by ATI), why that does not make sense, and a possible fix that unfortunately would mean booting Windows, if only for a few minutes."

jallen02 asks: "CNN has a quick little piece in their technology section about the electronic voting systems and their security. They ask, 'What about security?' with regards to the electronic voting systems. And then a researcher from AT&T labs is quoted in the article. Basically, saying the systems should be open sourced, and he quotes the party line for open source regarding security: more eyeballs means more flaws are found and fixed. The big question raised here is ripe for debate.. should electronic voting systems software be opened for the public to see?"

ninthwave writes "After previous discussions on global warning, I thought I would post some interesting research in the affects of forest fires and drought in Asia on carbon output. The Guardian has this article. More detailed information can be found in these articles from Leicester University and the BBC"

GusherJizmac writes "Looks like Warner Bros. is looking to remake classic anime, Akira, as a live action feature-length film. Will current computer generated special effects be enough to bring this masterpiece to life?" We touched on this earlier, but now it looks closer to production, since Norrington has finished shooting for The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

Krelnik writes "Reuters is reporting that the music industry is paying a $67.4 Million settlement to end a lawsuit where they were accused of artificially inflating CD prices at retail. Yeah, P2P is causing their problems. Sure, sure it is. Here's the story at Reuters UK."

qaffle asks: "Being a commuting college student I've been putting many hours on the road recently and have gotten sick of the repetition of regular radio and music in general. I've been trying to listen to talk radio but all that is ever talked about is sports and I can only listen to Bears updates for so long. I'm curious if anyone knows of any sites online where I can find good science, computer related, or physics audio discussions online that I could listen to on the drive. This should give me a good variety and the ability to listen to something interesting during mid-late morning and early afternoon drives."

cconnell writes "The Handbook of Applied Cryptography is now available free (for personal use) on the Internet. This is a $100 book. Note also the companion C source code for most of the crypto algorithms, written by James Pate Williams. There is some very cool code here!"

ceswiedler writes "Salon is running a story about Mozilla's potential dominance as a platform for application development. They discuss the community development centering around Mozilla, and point out that its cross-plaform GUI environment is 'exactly the kind of thing Microsoft was trying to prevent when it launched its war against Netscape. It didn't want Netscape around, because Netscape was becoming a platform.' In what might be a Salon first, they even include a reference to a Slashdot comment by SkyShadow."

olclops writes "Check out this guy's projects. He's an Atari 2600 programmer who's created, among other things, a cartridge that uses the 2600's sound generators to turn your atari into a full polyphonic synthesizer! The demos sound insane. Imagine being able to play console-perfect pitfall music from an atari hooked up to an amp. His other games look cool, too. Apparently, he'll be at the Classic Gaming Expo next weekend."

olclops writes "Check out this guy's projects. He's an Atari 2600 programmer who's created, among other things, a cartridge that uses the 2600's sound generators to turn your atari into a full polyphonic synthesizer! The demos sound insane. Imagine being able to play console-perfect pitfall music from an atari hooked up to an amp. His other games look cool, too. Apparently, he'll be at the Classic Gaming Expo next weekend."

olclops writes "Check out this guy's projects. He's an Atari 2600 programmer who's created, among other things, a cartridge that uses the 2600's sound generators to turn your atari into a full polyphonic synthesizer! The demos sound insane. Imagine being able to play console-perfect pitfall music from an atari hooked up to an amp. His other games look cool, too. Apparently, he'll be at the Classic Gaming Expo next weekend."

olclops writes "Check out this guy's projects. He's an Atari 2600 programmer who's created, among other things, a cartridge that uses the 2600's sound generators to turn your atari into a full polyphonic synthesizer! The demos sound insane. Imagine being able to play console-perfect pitfall music from an atari hooked up to an amp. His other games look cool, too. Apparently, he'll be at the Classic Gaming Expo next weekend."

olclops writes "Check out this guy's projects. He's an Atari 2600 programmer who's created, among other things, a cartridge that uses the 2600's sound generators to turn your atari into a full polyphonic synthesizer! The demos sound insane. Imagine being able to play console-perfect pitfall music from an atari hooked up to an amp. His other games look cool, too. Apparently, he'll be at the Classic Gaming Expo next weekend."

Aetius writes "The Center for Internet Security has released a set of security standards and tools for several operating systems. Here's the ZDNet story. I checked out the Linux standard and it is a pretty good coverage of the basics; about the only thing missing was a simple firewall treatment. I installed it on my wide-open desktop system (RH 7.3) and scored a 6.61 out of 10, which doesn't seem too bad. The scanner code isn't open source, but it's perl so you can at least look at it. You have to register to download it. If nothing else, the PDF of the standards is a good read. Enjoy."

Slashback tonight with word on what you can use instead of JPEG, the return of AdCritic.com as payware, NCR vs. Handspring, and more. Read on for the details.

Prepare the JPEG bonfire. Moderator writes: "Here is an open alternative to the JPEG file format. I tried posting it in the JPEG patent article but it got buried under all the comments about "THEY CAN'T DO THIS!" and stuff."

This project is called DjVuLibre and encompasses "a set of compression technologies, a file format, and a software platform for the delivery over the Web of digital documents, scanned documents, and high resolution images."

I hope the judge has a big "WITHOUT MERIT" stamp. theodp writes "A U.S. District Court has issued a summary judgement in the patent infringement lawsuit filed against Palm and Handspring by NCR, dismissing NCR's suit as having no merit. Praising the decision, Handspring's CEO said 'Settlement of this case was never an option,' while Palm's CEO remarked 'We refuse to succumb to intimidation by companies that use charges of patent infringement to bully others.' One of the NCR patents in question was for 'a portable terminal small enough to fit in the user's hand,' and the complaint went on to claim that NCR's researchers, 'recognized an unsatisfied need for a portable, handheld device which would allow the user to information such as appointments, to-do lists, and addresses, and execute financial and shopping transactions by connecting to networks using an interface module.'"

This is sure to bring out the AdCritic critics. thebus writes: "The good news. AdCritic is Alive! The bad news. You gotta pay!"

An annual subscription for $69.95 looks like something worth paying for if you're in the advertising industry, but it would be nice to get a less expensive "interested viewer" option as well. Oh well.

Oh Steve, ya big tease! Maïdjeurtam writes: "In this Yahoo finance article, Reuters asked Apple's CEO Steve Jobs about the possible abandonment by Apple of Motorola and IBM's processors (PowerPC G3's & G4's), and the possibility of Intel processor-equipped Macs. Steve Jobs didn't exclude the possibility. He noticed that, during the year 2002, Apple had to finish the OS X transition and, this done, there would be a lot of amazing possibilities, which he finds exciting."

Most of the content of this article was covered in yesterday's coverage of Jobs' keynote, and the bit at the end about other processors may be only a throwaway line, but it certainly is intriguing.

fixion writes "This article in the Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the House Judiciary Committee unanimously approved bill S.487, the Technology, Education, and Copyright Harmonization (TEACH) Act of 2001 yesterday. The TEACH Act updates the Copyright Act to make it easier for educators involved in online distance education to use copyrighted materials without violating fair use guidelines. The Senate passed it well over a year ago, but it has been languishing in the House Judiciary Committee eve since, held up by Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI). Since the Senate and House Committee passed identical bills, getting it through the full House and to the President to sign should happen fairly quickly now."

Jwfulcher asks: "This is kind of backwards from what normal people do, which is why i'm having problems finding any documentation on it, but I have around 150 users on exchange, with distribution lists and a few custom recipients as well. The CEO wants to switch to a Unix based POP/IMAP mail solution for licensing reasons (we don't use the groupware functions anyway), I was wondering if anyone knew of a method to convert the exchange userbase and add the users on a FreeBSD system and possibly point to our Radius server (which is capable of doing NT authentication) for authentication on those accounts."

wdb writes: "A NY Times article (free subscription required) describes the competition surrounding control of the .org domain, which Verisign coughed up in order to keep .com and .net from going to the highest bidder. Open source and Internet pioneers Paul Vixie and Carl Malamud have entered the fray; central to their bid is their announced intent to place all the software necessary to manage a TLD in the public domain. 'This shouldn't be a dot-com opportunity,' Mr. Malamud said. 'There has been a lot of smoke and mirrors, but what we need is actually a public utility that is well managed in the public interest.'"

AmyZ writes "The new Nokia 9290 Communicator has finally become available for US residents. Europe has had the 9210 for over a year now. Its a GSM based phone and well as a PDA that uses Symbian as its OS." I still don't quite feel that the PDA/Cellphone combo has come of age, but its nice to see another entry. That machine does looks to be sufficient for basic web tasks.

Reverend Raven writes "This is from Security Focus and deals with how some people believe a group of uber-hackers controls the Vegas telecom system. Interesting read, indeed." A follow-up to this old story. The case seems to be still winding its way through the bureaucracy.

Slashback with a weekend worth of updates on Wal-Mart's OS-free PC, the End of the Simpsons, Harlan Ellison v. AOL, wireless goodies and more. Read on below for the goods.

There must be some mistake; this is what I wanted. Masem writes: "The review of the OS-less PCs sold through Wal-Mart brought out a lot of comments on the inclusion of a WinModem, effectively requiring Windows to make the computer work correctly. However, NewsForge reports that shortly after that posting, Microtel, the makers of these computers, wrote back to the reviewer and indicated that new versions of the systems will ship with Linux-friendly modems from now on. Nice to see a company that knows its target audience and how to make them happy."

Thanks, Microtel!

Next: ethernet cable manufacturers. cpt kangarooski writes: "For those tuning in late, Harlan Ellison sued AOL (among others) for having the temerity to permit users to upload copies of his copyrighted works across their networks on the Usenet. As it turns out, AOL was in the right, and got a summary judgment against Ellison.

The opinion by Judge Cooper is located here in PDF format Given his reputation, Ellison will likely appeal."

Welcome to Ix, please take off your shoes. cayle clark writes "A few months back I asked slashdot about shopping in the Akihabara, Tokyo's famous "electric town," and got lots of good advice. Well, now I been and went there, took some pictures, and posted an illustrated account here. Netting it out, it's a keen place to wander, and prices are in some (but only some) cases lower than in the USA."

Hacking at the ties that bind Following up on the new venture in wireless from the LinuxCare crew, Dave Sifry writes "802.11b Networking News wrote up a summary of the new Sputnik Gateway release today, codenamed Stagecoach. The Community Gateway code runs from CD and turns a computer with an ethernet card and Prism 802.11b card into a secure authenticating firewalled 802.11b Access Point. New features of this release include support for desktop cards, like the Linksys WMP11 PCI card, which means that you can turn your old 486 in a closet into a cheap secure wireless router."

I'd rather they save Futurama, but gift horse, teeth, etc. Remik writes "Yahoo News is carrying this story letting Simpsons creator Matt Groening set the record straight that the Simpsons isn't winding down and that it isn't on the ropes. He claims he was misquoted and misunderstood in a Financial Times of London article that came out earlier this week and that he does indeed has stories for years and years. What if Marge became a robot? Hmm..."

Has anyone detected the envelope with the winner's name yet? SoundGuy666 writes "Looks like SETI made it past that 500 million milestone - wonder who won the $500 prize..."

Brian Stretch writes "This looks like a really neat toy. Internet (PPPoE), CATV, DBS, telephone over one fiber optic cable to the converter box that breaks it down into 10BaseT Ethernet, coax, coax, and three POTS lines. I'd prefer more Internet bandwidth, and DBS and HDTV (from over-the-air broadcast) instead of DBS and CATV... but hey, these things could whack both Ameritech and Comcast in one shot. Is anyone familiar with these or any competing devices?"

Brian Stretch was among several who sent in this story about Merrill Lynch switching to Linux, this is interesting because it's actually companywide. Talks about Red Hat, Linux threatening Unix and so on.

Anml4ixoye asks: "I currently work for a county government as their senior webmaster. Before that, I oversaw the internet development for a large credit union. In both places I ran into the same issues. What should compose a web services team, and where does it belong within an organization? I notice that larger companies such as IBM have separate departments for their web sites (VP of Web Site Operations). So my question is, should the team that handles the organization's web site be its own entity, being solely responsible for the hardware, programming and implementation of the web site, or can those tasks be effectively split between several sections and still work? Can anyone give some insight into how it works within your organization?"

"For example, at the credit union, the position I was hired into was brand new. They wanted to bring their web site in house. Their solution was to hire a Manager of Internet Development (me) who was responsible for determining the needs of the credit union, setting up the servers, doing the development and programming, and maintaining the site. No staff, and they wanted the site up as quickly as possible. I spent most of my time reporting back and forth between the VP of marketing and the Director of IT. When they finally figured that wasn't going to work and tried to have me report to one department, they couldn't figure out which one it should be so they eliminated the position and outsourced the web site again.

I am running into the same thing at the county. I came on about a year ago to a web site in shambles. The previous 'web team' consisted of an Internet Administrator, a team leader, a webmaster, a web data specialist, and a web temp. The team leader wanted them to be their own section, but unfortunately, he did it by power-playing and burning bridges. The Director of IT came through and broke the team apart, firing the team leader and the web data specialist, releasing the temp, and splitting the remaining team between the Distributed Processing Management (DPM) and the Network Administration sections. The other webmaster left about two months after I came on, leaving me as the sole webmaster for 3 sites of around 80-100 thousand webpages. We are finally back up to staff (another webmaster and a web-data specialist). The challenge we are running into is that in order for items to get on the site, they are designed by the departments, approved through our communications department, then passed on to us to integrate into the site. If we have a server problem, we have to contact Network Administration, even if it is something like having a Data Source Name set up.

To further challenge matters, the manager we report to has 28 people who directly report to him, including us.

With the size of the sites being what they are, it wouldn't take much for the whole thing to fall apart, and I am trying desperately to prevent that from happening. I envision an Information Architecture being put into place which would allow us to work on content management, instead of building these pages by hand. But I seem to run into obstacles every where I turn."

snowphoton writes: "Slant-Six magazine has an article about Cesium, a fascinating (and soon public) operating system from the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science. A virtual machine, an object-oriented database-driven filesystem, and a 3D GUI mean that this isn't your father's operating system." This article doesn't address licensing, except to say that it "is due to be released by the end of the year for free," so it will be interesting to see just what "free" means here. Update: Yep, it's a hoax. Fun! Tricks are neat!

FredThompson asks: "I'm looking for information about using those cheap universal replacement IR remote controls with PCs. You know, the kind you get to work with a VCR. The unit I bought says it works with other things like VCRs, CD players, etc. I'd like to use it to control a Book PC which is part of my entertainment center. I'm running WIndows 2000 Pro and would like to make a front end for MP3,VCD,AVI, etc. It also occurred to me these remotes might be usable as gamepads which could be really cool because they work at a farther range than most game pads. That might mean moving the LED but it's still an idea. Do any of you have suggestions of where I can find information about making this work?" For Linux users, you may want to check out the LIRC Project. Is there equivalent software for Windows?