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theodp writes "Don't tell Business Insider's Nicholas Carlson about Santa and the Easter Bunny just yet. He's still reeling after learning that Larry Page and Sergy Brin are actually pretty lousy coders. That's according to I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59, a book about the company's startup days by Douglas Edwards. 'I didn't trust Larry and Sergey as coders,' Google engineering boss Craig Silverstein recalls in the book. 'I had to deal with their legacy code from the Stanford days and it had a lot of problems. They're research coders: more interested in writing code that works than code that's maintainable.' But don't cry for Larry and Sergey, Argentina — even if the pair won't be taking home any Top Coder prizes, they can at least take solace in their combined $50+ billion fortune. And, according to Woz, they certainly could have kicked Steve Jobs' butt in a coding contest!"

tgbrittai asks: "According to Paul Boutin they are merely an obstacle to be manipulated or outmaneuvered. According to Steve Wozniak they are pimps. I've known my share of good and bad sysadmins, programmers and every other professional role out there, and I have to wonder: are sysadmins really THAT bad?" Most times sys-admins are overworked and underpaid and have to deal with users who take advantage of their local IT person, tasking them to fix systems that they callously break. Others are truly worth the name "Bastard Operators from Hell". How would you rate your sys-admin and what things did you have to do to make things run smoothly (or not)?

zimage writes to tell us that Andrew Carol has designed and built a working Babbage Difference Engine out of LEGO. From the article: "Before the day of computers and pocket calculators, all mathematics was done by hand. Great effort was expended to compose trigonometric and logarithmic tables for navigation, scientific investigation, and engineering purposes. In the mid-19th century, people began to design machines to automate this error prone process. Many machines of various designs were eventually built. The most famous of these machines is the Babbage Difference Engine. [...] Babbage's design could evaluate 7th order polynomials to 31 digits of accuracy. I set out to build a working Difference Engine using LEGO parts which could compute 2nd or 3rd order polynomials to 3 or 4 digits." In related, but not quite as functional, news DigitalDame2 writes to tell us that PC Magazine has an interview with LEGO "brick-artist" Nathan Sawaya, creator of their commissioned LEGO PC. There are also several pictures of the creation in addition to a contest to win the snap-together sculpture.

jgoeres writes "June 5th is the 26th Anniversary of my first favorite fruit-flavored computer. In honor of this, the Baltimore Sun is running Part One of a two-part interview with Steve Wozniak. When The Woz speaks, I listen. Perhaps it's blind hero-worship, but he seem to embody everything good & stable that his partner lacks. Don't forget to give the man props for his mad Tetris sk1llz, too."

jgoeres writes "June 5th is the 26th Anniversary of my first favorite fruit-flavored computer. In honor of this, the Baltimore Sun is running Part One of a two-part interview with Steve Wozniak. When The Woz speaks, I listen. Perhaps it's blind hero-worship, but he seem to embody everything good & stable that his partner lacks. Don't forget to give the man props for his mad Tetris sk1llz, too."

Greg Costikyan has penned a Snood screed that bears reading for anyone into game design. I gave Snood a try a couple of years ago when I read that Woz was hooked on it. Fun. I've played it on and off since then. But the ninth most popular game in 2001? That's nuts. Is Snood part of a series of tiny puzzley games, like Tetris and Bejeweled, that can still do well in a world of Counterstrikes and Unreal Tournaments? Is there still the chance for an individual or small team to strike it rich writing a game like this (maybe for cell phones)? Or is the engagingly simple game doomed to extinction? M : The Snood-equivalent for Linux is Frozen Bubble.

EccentricAnomaly writes "Steve Wozniak (co-founder of the Wheels of Zeus start-up) is coming back to MacWorld after a six-year absence, and will be speaking as part of a panel discussion of Mac OS X. This is Woz's first speaking engagement at MacWorld in 10 years."

Shawn King of The Mac Show Live talked a few days ago with Apple co-founder and knowledge-omnivore Steve (The Woz) Wozniak. Shawn graciously agreed to post the interview, formerly Quicktime only (downloadable or streaming), as an MP3 file -- so now most anyone can listen. This is an interview worth listening to: Woz talks about his lifelong motivations, his years with Apple (up to the present), OS X, the Newton, and what the future holds for him. He also talks about building TV jammers and the only prank he got caught for in high school, one which might not fly so well right now. (The interview starts about 55 minutes into the show, and lasts for nearly an hour.) What's this got to do with typing madly? Well, since Shawn's program is all-audio (no pictures, and only the barest explanitory text), it's a lot less useful to those on text-only or just-plain-slow links than it could be. Read on below for your chance to change that with just a few minutes of your time. Update: 10/20 20:43 GMT by T : Thanks to everyone who's volunteered to transcribe, and to the several alternates who are already in line! No need for more voluneers right now :)

Transcribing an hour of text takes a long time. But if you (yes, you!) are willing to transcribe a 3-minute (well. 3:15) chunk of this interview, I will spend my putative day off gluing chunks of interview together. Shoot me an email with "WozScript" in the subject if you'd like to participate, and I'll give the first volunteers (it shouldn't take that many) a randomly-drawn three-minute segment to type up, as well as more instructions on how to format it. No compensation except your name in lights, and the knowledge that lynx users everywhere appreciate your efforts. I'll update this story if and when the transcription is complete. (And if anyone can suggest a good Quicktime audio --> .ogg converter, Shawn and I would both appreciate it.)

Updates on Tom's detective work, Kevin's touchy look-but-don't touch semi-citizen status, and last but not least a word from the elusive printman, here folded, spindled and mutilated for your edification.

Danke sehr, Herr Doktor Pabst! The sighs -- nay, screams! -- of disappointment rose like the wail of a cat in heat following the announcement that AMD's new chips would be clock-locked, nullifying the advantages of Abit's ultra-overclockable motherboard. Jonathan Dabian writes: "This is probably a little late for me to get the name postage on the front page, but Tom's Hardware posted a new story that is an update to the Monday Blurb where they revealed that the new AMD processors would be multiplier locked. In this new story, Tom Pabst reveals the information he has since pieced together about the connections on the top of the processor, and ideas on how to alter those laser etched connections. Overclocking on the Duron and Thunderbird isn't dead. All that's needed is an easy way to alter those connections."

How do you like your quasi-futuristic clothing, Mr. Mitnick? One of the many following the bizarre turns of the Kevin Mitnick saga, RadarRider writes: "According to the following article on MSNBC:' Reversing a previous decision, Kevin Mitnick?s probation officer has given the notorious computer intruder permission to lecture on hacking and cracking, work as a security consultant and write a column for a soon-to-be-launched e-commerce site.'"

Disallowing use of computers unless specially granted seems a fairly over-the-top punishment -- everything has embedded processors. I wonder if Kevin has to ask permission to use an infrared-type automatic toilet, or a programmable thermostat. Where's King Solomon when you need him?

Unca Steve, Unca Steve! Tell us a bedtime story, OK? Speaking of *ashback, gwernol writes: "There's a fascinating letter from Woz - one of the co-founders of Apple on his web page at woz.org. Its a candid glimpse into the early days of the computer world, including tales of hacking the world's first video games -Pong and Breakout - at Atari. See inside the mind of one of the truly great ones. Some interesting perspective on Steve Jobs, too."

(Hint: some of the same words you can't say on television are off-limits to mass-market video games, too!)

Now I can print up dozens of tasty eclaires under Linux! If you followed the recent story about modernizing UNIX printing standards, you may have caught the news that CUPS 1.1 has been released. Here's some more information from the horse's mouth. printman writes: "Nine months after the CUPS 1.0 release, we are proud the announce the birth of CUPS 1.1, with documentation nearly 500 pages long and distributions weighing in at around 4MB.

"What is CUPS", you ask? The Common UNIX Printing System ("CUPS") is an IPP-based printing system developed by Easy Software Products as a replacement for the aging and clunky Berkeley (LPD) and System V printing systems. CUPS provides all of the modern printing ammenities, including support for user-defined printers and options, non-PostScript printers, color management, and page accounting.

CUPS 1.1 continues our commitment to an open-sourced, IPP-based printing system for all UNIX's. The new release contains many of the functional enhancements that have been requested by our users, including:

1. New USB backend and backend device discovery.
2. Banner page support
3. Digest authentication
4. Directory service enhancements, including polling, relaying, and access control
5. Directory structure changes to conform to the FHS 2.0 standard used by most Linux distributions.
6. Documentation improvements and additions
7. Drivers for EPSON printers
8. Filters - new PostScript RIP based on GNU Ghostscript 5.50 core, new PDF filter based on Xpdf, new text filter supporting Unicode and bidirectional text
9. IPP/1.1 support
10. Job persistence & history
11. Licensing change - the CUPS API is now provided under the GNU LGPL
12. LPD client support
13. User-defined printers and options
14. Web administration interface

In addition we have contributed more new code to the SAMBA team to support CUPS printing "natively" via IPP, providing a faster, more reliable Windows printing experience.

Others have also been busy at work adding to CUPS. Besides our ESP Print Pro software, two new graphical interfaces have appeared for CUPS - KUPS is a KDE-based interface for CUPS, and XPP is a FLTK-based interface for CUPS.

On the driver front, Grant Taylor has come up with CUPS-o-matic, a PPD file generator and filter script for existing Ghostscript printer drivers, and the GIMP print plug-in developers are working towards "universal" drivers for GIMP, Ghostscript, and CUPS.

Finally, many Linux distributions are including (or planning to include) CUPS or ESP Print Pro. This should provide the final push to get printer manufacturers to support their printers under Linux and *BSD.

For more information on CUPS, go to: www.cups.org

And for bonus points ... Katsu Jin Ken writes: "Indrema has posted a new picture of their upcoming console on their front page." It's looking a lot svelter and sleeker than the old look, and like the finest computers everywhere, features a blue LED. (On the other hand, beware the rude no-exit site design.) Please, Indrema, make it so!

The great thing about new media is the ability to bend the rules. Hundreds of movies that have been around for years are being released on DVD with new material. So, we get to take some of our favorite movies and 'review' them in their new format. This particular film is a wonderful excuse. 'Read More' for a review of Terry Gilliam's Brazil by Jamie and Emmett.

Brazil is a beautiful picture about the hacker ethic.

The protagonist, Sam Lowry, is trapped in an evil system, a world of senseless, crushing bureaucracy interrupted only by human vanity, sloth, impatience, and idiocy. The plot is too convoluted to explain (and a lot more fun to watch) -- it'll suffice to say that Sam's life is turned upside-down when a bug in the system brings him to meet a woman he falls obsessively in love with.

One of the genius visions of this film is its depiction of the crazy patchwork of technology that runs our civilization. Ducts are everywhere; wires and cables lurk behind every wall and make frequent appearances. The incongruous combination of bizarrely unusable computers, pneumatic tubes, and even the retro-style elevators is a modernized version of a Kafka fever-dream.

This system, presumably built by Central Services (a government or a corporation? it could be either), is constantly on the verge of falling apart. Nobody but the competent but unambitious Sam seems to know how to operate a computer. The breakfast machine pours the coffee onto the burnt toast. And the telephones should be Exhibit A in a gallery of poor user-interface design. Meanwhile, Central Services runs ads telling us to upgrade our "out of date ducts" with new designer colors. It's a hilarious parody of the situation that most of us find ourselves in today, with our Rube Goldberg, barely-functioning technology constructed by colossal, faceless bureaucracies -- moreso now than in 1985 when the film was made.

But it's not just forms, malfunction, and evil. The one hero of the film is the hacker. Robert de Niro plays the untouchable outlaw Harry Tuttle, who intercepts Sam's call for help with his broken air conditioner, and comes to fix it. He used to work with Central Services but now works freelance, for the love of the job.

This is a real hacker, even the archetype of the hacker. I'm not sure how it happened -- the writer/director, TerryGilliam, wasn't in tune with the computer underground that I know of -- but the character, in a few short minutes onscreen, captures the universal essence of hacking.

Tuttle isn't the dangerous criminal that the media wants to pin the word "hacker" on even to this day; he doesn't break things or work to disable the system. Much like the real-world media demonization of "hackers" as electronic graffiti-artists and ping-flooders, the movie's Central Services blames terrorists for the bombings which recur throughout the film. We're led to believe these may be staged incidents, or at least unorganized -- one character asks another near the end: "have you ever seen a real terrorist?"

But neither is Tuttle a squeaky-clean navel-gazer. Some people want to sanitize the word "hacker" (usually the same people who noisily point out the distinction between "hacker" and "cracker"). Tuttle's work is illegal; he wears black, defends himself with a gun, and escapes under cover of darkness.

It's too easy to forget that, back in the day, the only way for a brilliant, motivated computer geek to learn about computers was to work the system at a more or less unauthorized level. To name just one example, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, the founders of the personal computer revolution, built illegal blue boxes and sold them. I wish someone had had a camera at the moment when the phone system first shed its secrets to them -- when they first got a taste of look at this huge computer system. Look what it can do.

The hacker ethic that played such a large part in advancing computer science, building gcc, building Linux, indeed building the world's computer systems and engineering the biggest peaceful economic boom in history, is more than just a thirst for knowledge about computers. It's the obsessive belief that knowledge exists to be shared, that helping someone by making their computer run better (or their air conditioner) is one of life's joys, and that the rules that prevent sharing and helping exist to be broken.

And poor Sam Lowry pays the price for the hacker's work, for his fixing something without authorization. When I see this movie, I can't help but think of Randal Schwartz, prosecuted vigorously by Intel for running a diagnostic with the best of intentions, but without the proper paperwork. We live in a world where insane things like that can and do happen.

Somehow, 15 years ago, Terry Gilliam got in his head the same glimpse of underlying reality that Woz got when he learned about how the phone system works -- and it's all on film. The hero is the one who repeats the Central Services slogan, "We're all in this together," and makes it unironic (or at least differently ironic). The hero is the one who knows how to fix things, and fixes them -- despite not being "authorized." The evil is the paperwork we construct around ourselves, the forms and regulations that take the place of people freely helping each other. Everyone into open source should see this film.

Poor Sam Lowry's plight becomes a real-life horror for Brazil director Terry Gilliam, who faced red tape and monolithic Hollywood studios to release his picture. In addition to the full-length film with director's commentary, the three-DVD set of Brazil also includes the short film The Battle of Brazil, which chronicles Gilliam's fight to release the film he created. The third DVD consists of the 'Love Conquers All' version of Brazil, a 90-minute version that was edited down from the original picture by Sid Sheinberg and his team of hack-and-slash artists at Universal. Terry Gilliam refers to this movie as 'Sid Sheinberg's Brazil,' and it's just plain horrible. The 'Love Conquers All' version is a standing memorial to all films that have been cut to pieces by the studios. This version of Brazil was only released to the television market, and was previously unavailable to the public on VHS.

Terry Gilliam was a hacker in his own right. After a long, involved battle over release rights, he promised Universal that he would only show clips of the film to film students in California, and they capitulated and let him show brief passages from the film. In the end, he only showed one clip. It was only two hours and twenty minutes long. In other words, the whole thing.

The full DVD set of Brazil is a massive package of content, from film commentary to press photos to trailers to alternate versions of the film. Surprise, surprise, it's part of the Criterion Collection of films, which also gave us fantastic DVD versions of Robocop, Time Bandits, and Monty Python's Life of Brian. Here are the contents (as listed by the film packaging):

Disc One
New pristine widescreen transfer of Terry Gilliam's 142-minute final cut
Remastered Dolby stereo surround soundtrack
Audio commentary by Terry Gilliam
English subtitles for the deaf and hearing impaired

Disc Two
What is Brazil?, Rob Hedden's 30-minute on-set documentary
The Battle of Brazil: A Video History, an original 60-minute Criterion documentary by Jack Mathews
Screenwriters Tom Stoppard and Charles McKeown on the script
Production designer Norman Garwood on the look of Brazil
Costume designer James Acheson on the couture of fantasy and fascism
Storyboards for Gilliam's original dream sequences, many of which didn't make it into the film
Composer Michael Kamen unveils the sources of his score
A study of the special effects includes raw footage of unfinished effects
Theatrical trailer, plus publicity and production stills

Disc Three
The 94-minute cut of Brazil includes all of the changes that Gilliam refused to make, from the alternate opening to the controversial happy ending
Audio commentary by Gilliam expert David Morgan.

This three-DVD set is a lot of material. I ended up taking two days to get through all of it, and every second of it is worth it. From the beautiful new transfer of Brazil to the interviews and specials to the hacked-up 90-minute version of the film, the set stays consistent in packaging and iconography, and you'll be humming the main theme for a week. Brazil is a fantastic film, and the Criterion Collection DVD set does it justice.

jamie dyer wrote of Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, a book that I can remember reading years ago. The book does an excellent job of getting to the roots of said computer revolution, but also shows the human side to things. Read more about it below. Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution author Steven Levy pages Delt publisher 448 rating 9/10 reviewer jamiedyer ISBN 0385312105 summary Learn the roots of the revolution The Book A disclaimer. I love this book. It has its flaws, but it's an important piece of storytelling and history. It came out in 1984, back before the word "hacker" could start a flame war, and was re-issued in 1994. The people in the book are brilliant; some are dreamy-eyed utopians, some are pragmatic robber barons and some just want to hack. If nothing else, it illustrates that the current dramas being played out on slashdot, linuxtoday.com, USENET, etc. are not new ones. They go back to the beginnings of the computer industry, with many of the same personalities still involved.

A warning. I'm going to use the word "hacker" as it was originally used, i.e. NOT as the picture of a greasy haired little dope smoker trying to break into Spacely's Sprockets web server. It's a word that's sadly fallen out of favor, mostly due to lack of clue in the media.

"Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution" is broken into four parts. It starts with The Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT in the late 50's and chronicles Samson, Gosper, Deutsch, Greenblatt and company as they discover the IBM 704, the TX-0 and the PDP-*, moves to Northern California in the early 70's and the rise of Apple, zeroes in on Sierra On-Line and the increasing market share of game software in the third part and ends with a view of RMS in the epilogue. But all the parts are woven together to give a cogent overview of not only the building of the computer industry, but also demonstrates that the personalities and philosophies of the hackers involved are inextricably tied to their programs and the companies they founded and/or worked for. This book also chronicles something that's important and often lost in the shuffle as of late, The Hacker Ethic. It's defined thusly in the Jargon Dictionary:

Hacker Ethic, the n. 1. The belief that information-sharing is a powerful positive good, and that it is an ethical duty of hackers to share their expertise by writing free software and facilitating access to information and to computing resources wherever possible.

And laid out as such the in the book:

1. Access to computers should be unlimited and total.

2. Always yield to the Hands-On Imperative

   All information should be free.

   Mistrust authority--promote decentralization.

   Hackers should be judged by their hacking.

   You can create art and beauty on a computer.

   Computers can change your life for the better.

The Hacker Ethic abounds in this book, on both sides of the issue. When it comes down to it, the Hacker Ethic is what this book is about, and what all the sound and the fury currently sturming and dranging comes down to, in relation to software. What kills the ethic, it seems, is lots and lots of money and the corporate superstructure. The Homebrew Computer Club, which gave rise to many companies (biggest of the lot was Apple) is a perfect example of this. The freeflow of information was hampered when that information became a company secret. Regardless of what you think of him, Woz still pays lip service to the free exchange of information at the top of www.woz.org.

The beginning of the Greek melodrama that is now the Open/Closed Source debate is detailed quite well in this book. Some of the people in it have become more rich and famous, and some have become future Trivial Pursuit answers. But every single one helped shaped the modern computing experience to some extent.

Two little pieces of trivia from the book:

1. The original Ultima (for the Apple) was written by Lord British, real name Richard Garriot, whose father was Owen Garriot, one of the Skylab astronauts.

2. It's rumored that Gates and Allen wrote their first moneymaker, Altair BASIC, on a government funded computer ( and according to Bill Gates' Open Letter to Computer Hobbyists, it cost $40K. Wonder if they ever paid us back?:) ).

Why Should You Read This Book? Those that don't learn from history are condemned to repeat it, and each other.

I think Bob Young, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Linus Torvalds and YOU should read this book for one very good reason. Software and hardware make up a major part of many of our lives nowadays, and to just blunder along with no sense of the past is not only foolish, it's not very graceful. Those that have made the history need to remember it, and those that are just now coming up need to learn it. If the names Ted Nelson, Adam Osborne, LISP, Greenblatt, Gosper or Slug Russell mean anything to you, you'll dig this book. Hell, even if the names mean nothing to you, and you hang out on this website, you'd probably dig it anyway. This book details the beginnings of the coder/hacker culture that is coming to fruition now. The Linux community, and the Open Source/Free Software/Whatever The Hell It's Called This Week Movement can learn a lot from it.

Also, it's just a hell of a fun read.

Purchase this book at Amazon.

webslacker wrote in to tell us that Steve Wozniak has posted his commnts on the TNT Movie, Pirates of the Silicon Valley. He notes several things and clarifies other things. As many of you noted, the movie made him out to be one of the coolest guys ever to live. I'd say thats very deserved. And I'm not saying that just because we had an Apple ][ (on a cart wheeled from class to class!) in my elementary school.