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Are you storing your movies in .bmp format?

No, he is probably storing them in DV format which, IIRC, generates something like 3.6 MByte / s. The DV format is an adaption of the MPEG format, creating a constant byte-flow. I suspect that storing in bitmapped format would increase the size even more.

Well lets do the math:
(Assume bitmap)
4.7GByte / (22 minutes * 60 seconds * 24 frames/s) = 154 KByte / frame
This is true-colour, so divide by 4 to get the number of pixels: 39321 pixels / frame
Let's get a reasonable size e.g. 512 pixels by x pixels. To get an almost square picture, the resolution must be something like 200x197. The DV-standard is more like 780x560 (IIRC).

So the answer to your question is a definite No.

For more info on DV-Editing, one could start at http://www.well.com/user /ri chardl/SilverListFrameSet.html

---

There is an interesting article by Bruce Sterling about Stanislaw Lem at http://www.well.com:70/0/Publications/authors/Ster ling/Catscan_Stuff/catscan_two.txt& lt;/a> . It is trenchant in just the manner that Sterling's catscan columns and "Cheap Truth" newsletters were.

I love Lem's work. It derives from such a completely different tradition from Anglo SF and remains so beautifully written. Only Phillip K Dick wrote anything like it in Enlgish. My only criticism is the English translation, which wasn't from the Polish, but translated from the French translation.

I read it in French, and for those capable of doing so, I recommend it over the English version.

One of the things I see in this book is the question of whether we could ever identify a non-human intelligence if we found one. Just how alien is alien? Is Solaris intelligent? It certainly isn't human. This question is never answered, and it remains an open question today. Can we build an artificial intelligence without basically building an artificial human? Is any definition of intelligence possible without making reference to purely human abilities?

You won't find the answers in Lem's work, but you will find the question repeated over and over.

po_boy wrote: I refuse to believe that in the few thousand years since humans started being "civilized" that we have caused more animal species to become extinct than in the few million years before that. Unless species are becoming extinct at several thousand times the previous rates of extinctions, this is pretty much impossible.

well, If you "refuse to believe" then you are mindlessly dogmatic and debate with you is pointless... but, on the offchance that you were just being melodramatic when you employed that damning phrase, I'll present an argument here. Even if you refuse to believe what you don't like to hear, others who have been misled by your dogma may ne more open minded.

Widley accepted figures indicate that current rates of extinction are 100 times the "natural" rate and climbing to something between 1,000 and 10,000 times the natural rate of extinction. According to an article in the Washington Post:

"The speed at which species are being lost is much faster than any we've seen in the past -- including those [extinctions] related to meteor collisions," said Daniel Simberloff, a University of Tennessee ecologist and prominent expert in biological diversity who participated in the museum's survey. [Note: the last mass extinction caused by a meteor collision was that of the dinosaurs, 65 million years ago.]

Most of his peers apparently agree. Nearly seven out of 10 of the biologists polled said they believed a "mass extinction" was underway, and an equal number predicted that up to one-fifth of all living species could disappear within 30 years. Nearly all attributed the losses to human activity, especially the destruction of plant and animal habitats.

Other sources of depressing news you won't want to believe:

According to scientists at the American Museum of Natural History:"This mass extinction is the fastest in Earth's 4.5-billion-year history and, unlike prior extinctions, is mainly the result of human activity and not of natural phenomena." The same scientists note that "In strong contrast to the fears expressed by scientists, the general public is relatively unaware of the loss of species and the threats that it poses." I guess they've been talking to po_boy...

http://www.greenpeace.org/majordomo/index-press-re leases/1997/msg00184.html

http://beacon-www. asa .utk.edu/issues/v78/n2/asteroids.2n.html

http://www.mapcruzin.com/ scr uztri/docs/news0922991.htm

http://www.well.com/user/davidu/ fie ldguide.html

http://www.pupress.princeton.e du/ titles/6276.html

http://www.well.com/user/davidu/ ext inction.html

po_boy wrote: I refuse to believe that in the few thousand years since humans started being "civilized" that we have caused more animal species to become extinct than in the few million years before that. Unless species are becoming extinct at several thousand times the previous rates of extinctions, this is pretty much impossible.

well, If you "refuse to believe" then you are mindlessly dogmatic and debate with you is pointless... but, on the offchance that you were just being melodramatic when you employed that damning phrase, I'll present an argument here. Even if you refuse to believe what you don't like to hear, others who have been misled by your dogma may ne more open minded.

Widley accepted figures indicate that current rates of extinction are 100 times the "natural" rate and climbing to something between 1,000 and 10,000 times the natural rate of extinction. According to an article in the Washington Post:

"The speed at which species are being lost is much faster than any we've seen in the past -- including those [extinctions] related to meteor collisions," said Daniel Simberloff, a University of Tennessee ecologist and prominent expert in biological diversity who participated in the museum's survey. [Note: the last mass extinction caused by a meteor collision was that of the dinosaurs, 65 million years ago.]

Most of his peers apparently agree. Nearly seven out of 10 of the biologists polled said they believed a "mass extinction" was underway, and an equal number predicted that up to one-fifth of all living species could disappear within 30 years. Nearly all attributed the losses to human activity, especially the destruction of plant and animal habitats.

Other sources of depressing news you won't want to believe:

According to scientists at the American Museum of Natural History:"This mass extinction is the fastest in Earth's 4.5-billion-year history and, unlike prior extinctions, is mainly the result of human activity and not of natural phenomena." The same scientists note that "In strong contrast to the fears expressed by scientists, the general public is relatively unaware of the loss of species and the threats that it poses." I guess they've been talking to po_boy...

http://www.greenpeace.org/majordomo/index-press-re leases/1997/msg00184.html

http://beacon-www. asa .utk.edu/issues/v78/n2/asteroids.2n.html

http://www.mapcruzin.com/ scr uztri/docs/news0922991.htm

http://www.well.com/user/davidu/ fie ldguide.html

http://www.pupress.princeton.e du/ titles/6276.html

http://www.well.com/user/davidu/ ext inction.html

This is a copy of the email I sent to the author, I thought it could generate some insightful discussion here.

About your latest article, a few things didn't fit right for me, and seem to need a little clarifying.

You state "it will liberate gamers from the PC and the crack-addict lure of endless new peripherals and CPUs." First off - from my understanding - the X-Box is designed to be easily upgradeable. Secondly, many of us don't want to be 'liberated,' upgrading our machines is all part of the fun. I know, most people find it infuriating, others find it boring, but it's like tweaking out a hot car - it's just great.

Next, I thought I'd just point out a big glaring hole in your article. For about the past five years the gaming community has been inundated with 'casual' gamers. Before hand the PC Gaming world was much more of a niche industry, very few people even new such a thing existed. Most PC Gamers were sysops, cubicle slaves, and students. We didn't have the mentality in place to let us play the usually somewhat childish console games, and instead pushed for other, more enduring games on the PCs we already had.

You see, the industry never would have been flooded with the endless C&C, Quake, and Baldur's Gate clones if the market didn't have the multitude of Casual Gamers. Sure, there would have been a few, but they would have had to have been different enough to be noticed, some examples would be Z and Incubation (not really a clone, more of a mix of genres).

If what you say is true, and a large portion of the PC Gaming market switches over to the X-Box, then we'll possibly be left where we began, the true, original 'PC Gamers.' Don't forget us - this industry wouldn't be here if it weren't for our boredom.

I say bring on the X-Box, I've had enough of these newbies.

-Medgur

hmm, sounds like someone was reading Snow Crash (like I am right now) or someone was use ZOC(?)

meme virus indeed.
--

I've got one of those Intellimouse Explorers (the huge silver ones with the superfluous tail light and like three extra buttons; well, what the hell, here's a http://www.microsoft.com/Mouse/explorer.htm link) and sites that won't let you back out are an incredible annoyance. See, two of the buttons on there serve as Forward/Back (respectively) while browsing the web, and after about 20 minutes of using them, I was hooked. You wouldn't believe how simple (and remarkably intuitive) to navigate with your thumb. Now if I could just find a good use for those buttons in Half-Life... I mean, sure, it's easy enough to hold down the back button and select the page before the offending site, but that would require moving my cursor over six or so linear inches of desktop space. Isn't that just a little bit unreasonable? No? Ah well.

I've got one of those Intellimouse Explorers (the huge silver ones with the superfluous tail light and like three extra buttons; well, what the hell, here's a http://www.microsoft.com/Mouse/explorer.htm link) and sites that won't let you back out are an incredible annoyance. See, two of the buttons on there serve as Forward/Back (respectively) while browsing the web, and after about 20 minutes of using them, I was hooked. You wouldn't believe how simple (and remarkably intuitive) to navigate with your thumb. Now if I could just find a good use for those buttons in Half-Life... I mean, sure, it's easy enough to hold down the back button and select the page before the offending site, but that would require moving my cursor over six or so linear inches of desktop space. Isn't that just a little bit unreasonable? No? Ah well.

With this in mind, I suggest reading Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age", since the "primer" in the novel represents probably the ultimate teaching tool - one that takes Nell from first words to computer programming and martial arts without needing adult intervention!

Actually, there is a port for MacOS. You can find it at http://www.well.com/user/random/MacLame/. Or rather, you would be able to find it there, but the porter's been evicted and you won't be able to download the stuff until he gets set up again, whenever that is.

What's your PGP key?

Don't use 'em. I never knew a real-life computer crime cop or investigator who paid any attention to deciphering encryption. I regard this as a 99% theoretical form of "security." Using big number-crunching high-tech to protect the brief transmission of Internet email gives people a false sense of security. If you get in trouble, it won't be because you were tapped and cracked by the NSA. It'll be because somebody you trusted ratted on you (or because you bragged). Trust me on this. If you're really worried about your privacy, stop using credit cards and shred your trash.

Bruce Sterling has lots of neat ideas. Not only was he one of the starters of the Dead Media Project and Mirrorshades creator, he's started/is pretty involved in Viridian.

Bruce Sterling has lots of neat ideas. Not only was he one of the starters of the Dead Media Project and Mirrorshades creator, he's started/is pretty involved in Viridian.

Ditto! Pokkecons! Sterling! A good Old Fashioned Future! Seriously, folks, Sterling already covered the overly wired, the scared-to-be-wired, and the why-wired. This is the guy who in 1993, issued The Hacker Crackdown on the net! In order to talk intelligently about this issue without repeating ourselves, do us all a favor, and read the book first!

of Bruce Sterling's right here.

Saw a funny referance recently, Dave Barry? Steve Martin? Anyway, about how email, where messages are sent across great distances at the speed of light, has largely replaced smoke signals, where messages are send across great distances at the speed of light.

Fact is, the internet as it stands evolved from the ARPAnet. As a military network, this was designed with security and resilience in mind. No military funded project can avoid the obsession with security and secrecy.

If you don't agree, can you tell me then, what the security bits in the IP header are there for ?

Please read RFC 1108 and think about what it says before replying.

Is it to promote openness ? Or could it be that TCP/IP was designed for military application, and therefore has a form of security built in from the start.

Are you prepared to read what you wrote, and re-evaluate the statement you made ?

The RFCs are out there and available to anyone with an internet connection.

Extract from RFC 1108

9.3.15.3.2 Classification Protection Level.

This field specifies the U.S. classification level to which the datagram should be protected.

The information in the datagram should be assumed to be at this level until and unless it is

regraded in accordance with the procedures of all indicated protecting authorities. This field specifies one of the

four U.S. classification levels, and is encoded as follows:

11011110 - Top Secret

10101101 - Secret

01111010 - Confidential

01010101 - Unclassified

Or have I missed the point here ? Would you care to explain exactly how a classification of "Top Secret" makes a protocol "open and accessible" ?

The process of developing the protocols may well be open, but the fact remains that the protocols from very early on had a military security classification tag in the header, which persists to this day.

If you still disagree in the face of cold hard facts, it is safe to assume you do not wish to be held to the same standards of journalistic integrity that you would be held to in conventional media, and if that is the case, its not hard to see why you attract so many flames when posting to Slashdot posing as a serious journalist.

Five years later, both the WELL and the River continue to operate. The WELL is larger than the River, but the River keeps the WELL honest; if the WELL's management gets out of hand, its members can move to the River, which, by design, offers very similar services.

This strategy could work on Slashdot and Sourceforge. In fact, since the software behind both is open-source, cloning them would be easy. (The WELL ran a proprietary conferencing system, which made starting the River much tougher.) And the hardware is cheaper today.

So I suggest that someone who's into running servers look into bringing up the Slashdot and Sourceforge software, as an alternative to this new media conglomerate. A modest-size but stable operation would be enough to keep this new open-source media conglomerate honest. Take a look at the River and the Well, and see they did it.

A troll?

You should know that it's a 'This Modern World' parody (though I am a fan of the strip).

http://www.well.com/~tomorrow/


~~~~~~~~~
auntfloyd

There is a significant problem with this assertion that information will devour us all. The model is wrong. Katz contends that information on modern and future networks can promulgate itself, that computers can copy and spew information ad infinitum, without regard to a selection for quality.

The problem is, that the worries in the article are about humans being overwhelmed with this spew of information. But human minds are the medium for information, and are a limiting resource to exponentiation. The regulon, in Katz-speak. The dead information is just that, dead, and will be ignored by everyone but the computer it resides on. The information codfish that no one looks at are dead.

The new economy business model that has driven the proliferation of corporate web information cannot continue indefinitely. Companies that do not derive a profit from the information they put out will eventually be selected against. Money is the regulon of corporations, and will apply to corporate information.

"We have no way to keep CNN, weatherman, flamers, spammers, Web site designers, e-do gooders and nit-picking coders, pundits, zealots, smart-asses and grumps in check" As many previous posters point out, we do have a way to keep these in check, and our defences are evolving. Witness email filters, recent suits against spammers, the de-spamming of my address above, choosing the URLs you visit and no others, Refusing to buy from advertisements pushed upon you. I, as a reasonably intelligent modern person, can keep all this in check and more. Perhaps John Katz, as a public person, has more trouble than most in filtering his information, as so many desire to push theirs onto him. But there are options for public people. Witness Neal Stephenson's method of filtering.

The real problem is in the human capacity to understand and process. In the current state of the world, we have not yet reached this carrying capacity, and so the growth continues. The real problem is human. Are we intelligent enough to filter our information for the useful bits and keep the spew out? Are we intelligent enough to create tools to do this effectively for us? I would argue that we are.

BMagneton

"Care for a little Spin?"

There is a significant problem with this assertion that information will devour us all. The model is wrong. Katz contends that information on modern and future networks can promulgate itself, that computers can copy and spew information ad infinitum, without regard to a selection for quality.

The problem is, that the worries in the article are about humans being overwhelmed with this spew of information. But human minds are the medium for information, and are a limiting resource to exponentiation. The regulon, in Katz-speak. The dead information is just that, dead, and will be ignored by everyone but the computer it resides on. The information codfish that no one looks at are dead.

The new economy business model that has driven the proliferation of corporate web information cannot continue indefinitely. Companies that do not derive a profit from the information they put out will eventually be selected against. Money is the regulon of corporations, and will apply to corporate information.

"We have no way to keep CNN, weatherman, flamers, spammers, Web site designers, e-do gooders and nit-picking coders, pundits, zealots, smart-asses and grumps in check" As many previous posters point out, we do have a way to keep these in check, and our defences are evolving. Witness email filters, recent suits against spammers, the de-spamming of my address above, choosing the URLs you visit and no others, Refusing to buy from advertisements pushed upon you. I, as a reasonably intelligent modern person, can keep all this in check and more. Perhaps John Katz, as a public person, has more trouble than most in filtering his information, as so many desire to push theirs onto him. But there are options for public people. Witness Neal Stephenson's method of filtering.

The real problem is in the human capacity to understand and process. In the current state of the world, we have not yet reached this carrying capacity, and so the growth continues. The real problem is human. Are we intelligent enough to filter our information for the useful bits and keep the spew out? Are we intelligent enough to create tools to do this effectively for us? I would argue that we are.

BMagneton

"Care for a little Spin?"

The Libertarian baiting is getting rather tacky, so let's review: which statement(s) below do you agree with:
A) The government has a duty to protect consumers from the malice and evil designs of others (online pharmacists in today's case).
B) The government has a duty to protect consumers from their own stupidity.

Answers:
Agrees with A and B: You are a Democrat.
Agrees with A only: You are a libertarian.
Agrees with B only: You are a Republican.
Disagree with both: You are in a cabin in Montana with far too many guns in your immediate vicinity.

The government's obsession with situation B is to me the root cause of most people's dissatisfaction with government. Not to mention it's depriving me of the schadenfreude which is my right as an American.
[/OFFTOPIC]
The federal government can and should regulate online pharmacists, tainted food and bad drugs is why the FDA was created in the first place. OTOH, if someone feels that six-inch vitamin C suppositories will keep them from getting cancer, I've got to say that's none of the government's business (except to ensure the purity if the vitamin C). I reserve the right to view the Xrays of the aftermath.

As fast as the chess possiblities rise, they are constrained by the possible movements of the pieces, the smaller board size, etc. Go rises orders of magnitude faster, and no computer program has to date (to my knowledge, mostly parrotting things I've skimmed here) been able to play even on a beginner's level. Fascinating stuff.

Not that this helps solve the Fermat's theorem of chess or anything.

I'm not sure what a good 3D visual programming environment would look like, but Jaron Lanier makes some interesting claims about the Body Electric 3D visual programming environment .

I'm not sure what a good 3D visual programming environment would look like, but Jaron Lanier makes some interesting claims about the Body Electric 3D visual programming environment .

I think the whole point of the Viridian movement is to hack the "culture industry." The idea being that what most people would consider "real art" has been relegated to the province of a rich, intellectually elite minority. What "real art" passed for in previous historical periods is now what we generally refer to as "popular culture" and is increasingly dominated by the huge corporate culture conglomerates, i.e. Sony, Time-Warner, CNN, yadda, yadda.
The key is that the culture industry does not have any native artistic sensibilities. They merely pile onto, absorb and regurgitate the zeitgiest. So, if one can introduce into the zeitgeist a "viridian" chic (see Viridian Note 001 and the The Viridian Manifesto as to what are the criteria of being viridian) that makes it incredibly desireable to reject carbon-consumer culture then one should be able to effect a change in attitude among the general public.
You need to check out those two links as they really flesh out the Viridian Pope-Emperor's (a.k.a Bruce's) ideas regarding viridianism.
Connor Anderson (who forgot his /. login)

I'm the co-host of the News conference on the Well, where Jim's mass-scribble was discussed and John Schwartz picked up on it and wrote the WPost article. I've known Jim since he started on the Well a decade ago, and think it's perfectly fine for him to do this, and said so at the time. At my request and others, though he was under no obligation to do so, he briefly mentioned his viewpoint on this. Frankly, it's his own damn business as it should be for anyone on the Well. That's the way it has to be if you really "own your own words."

bandy, booter, blair and now jimrutt are not the only ones to do this over the years, and the reasons and context have been discussed extensively. My guess is that many Well members are uneasy about cases like this but support the right of anyone to do so. On the other side, a few have been vehement about the damage to the flow of discussion (and by inference, to the sense of community) that wholesale removal of postings causes, particularly in topics where the person has been quite active. But my feeling has always been, if you can scribble one posting for whatever reason (and nobody I know of questions that feature), then why shouldn't you be able to do that to all of your postings if you so desire?

jef deserves credit for providing a tool that both makes this more convenient to the user and diminishes the impact on other users.

As for jimrutt, alert Slashdot readers know that I have been quite critical of NSI both before and since he came on board. We've tangled over a number of issues over the years on the Well, but once you look at how he thinks and acts and presents his views (modulo the obvious shit-disturbing comments!), he has genuine integrity. I was not happy with the tripartite agreements announced last week between NSI, ICANN and the Department of Commerce: I think Commerce gave away the store to NSI. But I can't fault Jim for reaching an agreement that is as favorable as he could get for his company. When he first took the job I urged him to focus on dropping the whois database intellectual property claims, and instead get with fixing NSI's obviously broken customer service. To a large degree he is doing that; I'm still not happy with NSI but we have what we have. If the ongoing NSI/ICANN/open registry system can sustain Jon Postel's vision of the net as a resource freely and fairly available to all people, then Jim's professional activities will be vindicated.

But regardless of that, he had the perfect right to scribble his stuff on the Well. Or not.

If y'all are interested in checking out the rather unique place known as the Well, please come check it out. There are both graphical (Engaged) and command-line (picospan) user interfaces, and a lot of ferment in our conferences, and though it's not quite the hotbed of whatever that we used to be, it's still something of a lab of social online interaction.

--------

In case anyone's interested, there's a Sterling FAQ.

My question? Would you reconsider revisting the world of systems crackers and the like? The Hacker Crackdown was a damn good book.

I don't understand why some people were so shocked after Deep Blue's victory over Kasparov. The real miracle is that men are still able to compete with computers today ! This is merely a matter of time before we can get machines powerful enough to calculate and try the entire tree of a game (or, for more complex games, significant parts of it) and be almost sure to win.

By design, machines are better than human at mathematical games. Chess are a mathematical game.

What about the Chinese and Japanese game of Go? So far, Go has been entirely too complex for a computer to be any good at beating anyone but a novice player. Hell, I'm still trying to figure out the most basic rules. There's still a level of complexity and intutition to this very mathematical game that computer progammers can't replicate or overcome. This suggests to me that there's more to programming a computer to be unbeatable at a game than just entering all possible variations. With Go, that number is humungous. There's a saying that Go is so complex, no two identical games have ever been played. You can't say that about Chess.

Instead of just computing likely outcomes, true AI is going to have to have emotional understanding and a real level of intuition. That's going to be the difficult part.

Try to look at the actions of antionline.com from the point of view someone not familiar with technology has (to get an idea about the readers, who believe the stuff written there, look at the awards the site displays).
The ./ readers (meant to include all with at least a basic knowledge of how the net works), are no more the majority amomg the people using services the net offers. There's so many J. Does out there by now, who like their point&click-apps, that allow them to get a stock quote, to send e-mail to a friend across half the globe in a second. And they are easy victims to things like antionline.com, in electronic form or not. They represent the "public opinion", they also are considered experts among their family, their friends. They might never know, that antionline's theories are, at least, controversial.
Disclaimer: yes, I did simplify matters. On purpose.
fl

While this more or less answers my question about restricting Linux -- which will probably be the first operating system to be rated MA for coarse language [...]

The US ratings system and the Aussie system are not exactly comparable. Aus-MA is *roughly* like the US-R, except that it's 15 and up (US=17/18 and up), and US-R can include harder stuff than it sounds like Aus-MA can. The US doesn't have an M rating, but it does have a PG13 rating, which seems to be a little more restrictive than an Aus-M.

The Australian R is the weird one, because -- as I point out in the article (yeah, I'm the one who wrote it) -- it's so ambiguously broad. The entire legal description of the Australian R rating for film is:

Film (other than X or RC) containing material that is unsuitable for minors.

How does that apply to web content? What is "unsuitable", and who decides? My article was really just an attempt, in a semi-humorous way, to show how ridiculous censorship laws are.

--Jamais Cascio
My home page, with links to other articles

Take a look at the Cryptonomicon FAQ - he mentions that it's essentially just a case of parallel thinking. There's also an interesting link to a page describing Solitaire on the Counterpane Systems site. -Samrobb

I've been on the Well since January 1987, and it changed my life, simple as that. Been a consultant there, still co-host of the News conference and a couple others, including the renowned zipper.ind discussion on all the Clinton hoo-hah over the last year and more.

The Well has always been a place where ideas and opinions get a real airing; it's also a place where people have grudges and get off track and make mistakes. In other words, it's a lively and real "place" that for all its faults is essential to many of its users' lives.

It's also staggered through a rather odd history as an organization, but still has managed to survive. Bruce Katz, the outgoing owner, took an equity position early in the 1990s when a cash infusion was desperately needed. He then took over ownership and had big ideas, unfortunately I'd have to say "pipe dreams," at a time when the net was starting to grow rapidly and the Web was just taking off. I first saw Mosaic on a machine in the Well office in June 1993. It's not like we didn't see what was coming, but adapting to it was a real challenge.

Fortunately, Bruce was smart enough to back off his big plans and just let the Well be what it was best at. In the meantime he tried to rationalize the business structure, merging the struggling proto-ISP part of the Well (oh, that modem rack, you don't even want to know!) with the newly acquired Hooked to create WENET, Whole Earth Networks. At the same time he spun off Well Engaged as a Web-based analogue to the conversation model of the command-line Picospan program (which is still used on the Well).

None of these ventures have exactly been wildly successful. The Well has been more or less stable, though membership has been stagnant. Engaged made some early sales but is hampered by the same problem as every other Web-based discussion system, namely the stateless nature of http. In addition there is a ton of commercial competition in that "space," not to mention things like, uh, Slash. And after Bruce fired David Holub, founder of Hooked and WENET's manager, over David's refusal to knuckle under to UUnet's bullying tactics, WENET kind of floundered and he sold it off to GST, another falling-apart operation (at least he got good money for the sale, though).

Many buyers have sniffed around the Well over the last couple of years, so I'm quite happy that Salon gave the nod. I knew David Talbot in DC two decades ago, and his integrity and smarts show in how Salon has developed and survived. It's too early to say we have a happy ending, but I'm hopeful.

I hope some of you will come by and check out both the Well and Salon, if you're not familiar with them. In their own ways they have the same distinctive character that /. does. (No ACs on the Well, though; no anonymous accounts there though we did try a no-holds-barred anonymous 'conference' once!)

You can get a look at the Well (using the Engaged GUI system) here, this is the inkwell.vue 'conference' or discussion area focusing on book authors.

phred@well.sf.ca.us

-------