"Death to the gaming industry! Long live games." The Scratchware Manifesto.

silly

Paul Boutin says in wired: p2p 'grand theft audio' is dead—long live the sneakernet! Excerpt:

A free utility called iPod2iTunes makes cloning my friends’ iPods a plug-and-play operation. ... If the Slashdot.org zealots really want information to be free, they should stop beta testing the latest Linux-powered, all-XML version of GPLster and build a poor man’s iPod instead. With open source software and a $99 drive from Fry’s, Sneakernet 2.0 would be a lot tougher to kill than Napster was.

while many may not realise what a treat i have for you today, those who were forced to write Pascal programs in school might actually find this interesting: in 1981, Brian W. Kernihan's essay Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language was turned down by the technical journals, but xeroxes circulated widely. especially if you progressed to othe rlanguages after leaning the basics with pascal, you will understand---and might be surprised---that you can't do anything serious in this language. you just never recognised its limitations while you didn't know anything else you could have compared it to. everything seemed just so natural.

one of the best answers to a completely idiotic "Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto" would be an "Anti-rhetoric non-manifesto", containing:

"An undeservedly rational and argumented response to an hilarious product of ignorance, slander and belligerant fanaticism ... . "

There are books coming out that you can read on-line, free of charge, and you may even correct errors and redistribute them because they are published under the OpenContent License (OPL) or the Open Publication License. Once you stopped wondering why the former is abbreviated 'OPL' and the latter has no abbreviation, you may be pleased to find out that some sites even let you fix mistakes and extract proper references for citations right there on the website where the book is available for on-line reading.

today i called chris cunningham, the guy who did those great aphex twin and björk videos. yupp, he said, he's gonna do it. he'll film neuromancer. i couldn't believe it, i mean, twenty years after the book came out, after all what happened since then, the only sensible thing you could make would be a parody. but he was very serious about it. it's gonna be cool, he said.

emmet plant from xiph sent an open letter to the nice people who now charge money for every mp3-player sold or downloaded. emmet demonstrates how open standards and free software are better than patented alternatvies and that the nice people at thomson multimedia maybe aren't that nice.