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the digital dark age is an old but still good article..

Back in the 80s and early 90s, it was primarily pen-and-paper and board games that made the leap to the computer game arena (and not the other way around). These include the obvious Dungeons&Dragons games, but also one or two Games Workshop titles and a couple of offerings by Steve Jackson games-- Ogre and Car Wars ("Autoduel").

Later on we started to see conversions go the other way (as a previous poster pointed out).

In this millenium, Steve Jackson games created a board game based on the FPS *genre* (not a specific computer game). The game is called "Frag" and has a number of expansions. There's more on Frag in an article I wrote for Shift.com last year and of course, at Steve Jackson Games' Frag page.

> I worry that MS will 'embed' pocketed developers into the OSS movement to 'leak' MS code into core OSS software.

It stops being MS code once it goes into a Free project. Submitting a patch implicitly places your code under the license of the project. e.g. if you code up a new feature for xterm, and submit the code to XFree86, then it becomes part of XFree86, and thus covered by the X license. If the code was originally part of MS software, that doesn't change anything. The copyright owner can give their code to anyone they want, under any license they want. The only way for the code to remain MS proprietary would be if it still include such copyright and license conditions in the submitted code. This would be noticed and rejected.

It's not MS code and copyright one has to worry about, it's patents. If anyone (MS) submitted code that does things covered by patents, and the code makes it into a project, then the patent holders can come after the project. Patents really are that insidious, AFAIK (IANAL).

Go read this article about commercialization of everything. It's good.

Shift did a story on my MP3 software Andromeda>. Derek Martin, the reporter, spent a huge amount of time back-and-forthing with me via email. Nice guys, too bad...

i have/had a subscription.
and they threw really kickass parties in Toronto.
their website is still up -- check it out at shift.com

Even in Canada, the magazine was never as important or well-read as Wired, or Business 2.0, so why the closing of this magazine rates a story on Slashdot is beyond me.

Jon Katz was an occasionally contributor to the magazine. I always thought the mag was pretty stupid, and this was confirmed once by him having his name hilighted in big letters on the front page for some dumbass "internet generation geek gen x blah blah blah" story.

Ah, here it is:
The Rise and Fall of the Geek

He also has some other articles about being a "rock star" on the net (right...) and even about Slashdot.

keep overhead to a minimum and provide content that isn't availabile elsewhere

Tough to do if you're not "created" by motivated volunteers or unaccountable flights of fancy (drudge). One would hope to see Internet journals that compete with conventional ones in every way but on paper. I do see quite a few /. cites to their exclusive content, as well as their AP clipping service. As for /. itself, I don't envision an IPO anytime soon, though it it is reasonably likely to be commercially viable. This is the period of shake-outs in the industry, we'll see.

Salon is a good deal more liberal than the "main course" press, so the more apt comparison is to other "second course" small-audience publications, which by definition have a tougher time surviving on the crumbs after we've paid for our NYT subscription and the like. I held out on subscribing to Salon for a long time, until I started to feel guilty and worried about losing the resource. As I mentioned earlier, I think it's stunning the stories Salon has broken (e.g., here; some argue Salon has lost its touch; another naysayer), and this distinguishes it from an also-ran journalistically if not economically.

But I concede I may be overcome by wishful thinking; Salon perhaps has permanently lost its edge and is headed for that place old CPU's go to die.

One other tip I'd like to toss into the soup: remote desktop software (VNC, XP's Remote Desktop, pcAnywhere, etc...) can be quite handy for remotely controlling audio on a server. For instance, I keep a spare PC running Andromeda in the corner, wired to my stereo, and I remotely control it with my laptop over wi-fi. One neat thing about that approach is that it'll work with any audio source (such as other web sites, Rhapsody, internet radio, etc).

-Scott

I'd love to see my two ancestral clans finally reunite - seems the obvious route to entertainment industry destabilization.

BTW, Andromeda just got a cool writeup on Shift.com

-Scott

Under the guise of 'preserving America's intellectual capital' and supported by the funding of the entertainment industry cartels, the US is seeking to sustain the entertainment industry's Industrial Age business model (and monopolies) in the modern Information Age - where such models are rendered obsolete by emerging technology. By doing so, the elected puppets of Hollywood will continue earning campaign contributions and ensure their job security.

And, like the lap dogs our government is, we'll get the same law over here (or, at least, people will be extridated without evidence or trial )[1].

It's so obvious that the RIAA are just pissed that they completly missed the whole music download boat. So what do they do ? Bring out their own, cripiled 'download' services that are completly useless compared to (say) Kazaa or Gnucleus. And then, when no one uses their systems, they lobby the govt. to produce a law that is wrong (want to read a book in a library ? Fine, but you can't buy it and then read it at work. And you can only own 5 books at a time.).

What they need to do instead is produce a service that provides high quality, unlimited use (>190bps MP3/Ogg would be good) music tracks of their whole catalog for a small per-track fee (50p ?). I'd pay that. But unless they offer a service better than the free systems they can't control [2], no one will pay.
Common sense, innit ? Someone should tell them.

Land of the free ? Nope.
Home of the brave ? Yup.

[1] Don't be silly. Never happen. Hasn't happened in the post Sept. 11th era at all. Nope. Never. USA good. Must follow. Baaaa.
[2] Napster may be gone, long live really decentralized systems like Gnucleus.

( from my site )

name: Rob Malda
age: 24
habitat: Cyberspace -- in the early days of Slashdot he stayed online up to 15 hours a day, seven days a week. Now he's cut it down to 12 hours a day, and he tries to take weekends off.
residence: A yellow condo in the tulip capital of the U.S.A. -- Holland, Mich.
nom de plume: CmdrTaco
--snip--
RIDE: A shiny-blue BMW, leased.

Source

Sorry people , you really know nothing about webdesign and being clever when according to this article , the best webdeveloper is right here and you should all look and learn

Hey Anonymous Coward, You're right, P2P is more than just bashing the RIAA etc... it is a whole way of thinking, beyond "information should be free"... It's almost like an addition to the saying... Information wants to be free, BUT In order for information systems to work at all, we must tend to their problems and optimize the 'bad code'. I just finished an article, which happens to be on a related train of thought at Shift.com called "P2P Terror: The People Are The Network" and the subheading is "Although the RIAA won the war on Napster, peer-to-peer file sharing survives. Now the U.S. is going to war against a decentralized terrorist threat. Can they win?" I'd really appreciate some feedback, so Checker oot if you can at P2P Terror thanks :)

Jon has already started "moonlighting" with Shift Magazine. Good magazine, regardless of feelings about Katz.

The reason I don't buy PC World, or any of those mags is usually because looking at the front cover, it seems that it's filled with articles about stuff I already know about... that they're made for "newbies"

Another reason is that even the most interesting of articles seems to take a real "media" approach to stories... for example.. if there was an article on mp3s. It wouldn't just speak in geek terms. I want a mag thats full of techno babble and written by geeks that doesnt take such a media view on issues. I'd rather read something I can relate to than something objective.

Shift is an excellent mag. It's made by our generation.. for our generation. This is the one I spend my money on. Not sure if ya americans have the privalege or not but if it's on your stands, give it a try.

• Thompson seems to think bugginess is new.

  The software industry's response to this crisis is to concede defeat-to shoot for software that's "good enough." What "good enough" means is, of course, a matter of some debate, but critics say it is quickly becoming a euphemism for "riddled with errors"-particularly in the overheated, rush-to-market realm of net apps.

  Software has been rushed to market ever since there has been software. Net distribution has reduced the friction of putting out a new version and made it practical to have a massive public beta or to cheaply distribute a patch to new customers. But good enough software goes back decades earlier. Unix was developed as "good enough" for cryin out loud.

• Thompson seems to think that released bug fixes are a measure of bugginess.

  Windows NT, hyped endlessly as a way to revitalize computing, was shipped in such a state that this year Microsoft released its fifth-fifth-"service pack," designed partly to patch the latest swarm of bugs.

  That's just stupid. True, if a package were bug-free, no bug fixes would ever need to go out. But everyone who uses software seriously has understood for a long time that large software products all have lots of bugs. The fact that MS sends out bug fixes only means that they have the same feet of clay as everyone else.

• Thompson uses some phrases without identifying where they come from.

  ..."good enough"... ..."death march"...

  AFAIK those phrases were defined in the context of software development by James Bach and Ed Yourdon, respectively. They should be credited.

As I understand it, though, it looked a lot like Shift does now. Shift has all of the examinations of pop-tech culture and edgy stuff that people are lamenting not finding in Wired.

Just my two cents, but I wait with baited breath for the new Shift to appear in my mailbox.

Greg

In part of his article, he mentions that Wired has gone from covering the culture and politics of the net to covering the business aspects of it. This is so sadly true.

Most new issues of Wired that I buy are filled with stories about business: interviews with people who made it big; features on companies that made it big; stories about companies that might make it big.

I started reading Wired mainly for the cultural aspect of it, not business. I personally dislike the whole business world, it bores me beyond comparison.

There used to be a time when I wouldn't miss a single issue of Wired, but nowadays I have to try to convince myself to buy it at the newsstand because nothing inside really grabs at my attention and catches it.

I can make a personal recommendation for those who have been driven away: a little magazine based out of Toronto called Shift. It's been around for 7 years, mainly underground, but it's received a bit of a push this year. It's difficult to find outside of Canada, but look at the website anyway. It's become my new "must read" magazine.

- Jacob Rens