Salon.COM has now partnered up with Francis Ford Coppolla's ZOETROPE magazine and is publishing one story per quarter for two weeks. This is a good read, catch it while you can!

excerpt:
Bart and the team he now worked with -— whom he carefully avoided naming -— had a very early alpha version for a piece of software that implemented the concept of "story actants," active story parts whose data structures determined not only how they would react to manipulation by other agents -— including a story's reader -— but also how these parts themselves moved through the story space, signaling to each other and operating actively upon the unfolding sum of resources that composed the story. The environment in which his story actants ran, a system called DIALOGOS, sounded to me like a whole ecosystem of digital objects updating and informing each other as if they were simultaneously all characters, readers, and authors of their own tales. Here was a true Bakhtinian carnival landscape whose sole interest lay in keeping itself in perpetual motion. The code for the alpha version of DIALOGOS was still rough, unstable, and far from the finished product that Bart and his team envisioned. But Bart asked if I'd like to help road test it. I wasn't doing anything but working on a novel. I said I'd be happy to.

Enjoy,
Dolemite

Literary Devices

The software king has big plans for making the world of mobile phones safe for Windows. Can phone makers, and a little Norwegian company called Opera, stop the onslaught?

This is an interesting article on how Microsoft's restrictions both on licensing and the customizability of their cellphone OS are (for now) keeping them out of the beds of the big handset manufacturers. It's also good news for fans of the little guy, open source and Opera.

"No," von Tetzchner says pragmatically, "I don't believe that the best technology always wins."

Microsoft wants your cellphone

A case of the law of large numbers coming into play? Hardly. In a neighborhood of 200 homes, only one on average has a TiVo. More U.S. homes have outhouses, 671,000, than TiVos, 514,000." Microsoft seems to think TiVo's business model is broken, after it tried to adopt the same model for itself. But oddly they continue with their Xbox.

Shit More Popular Than Technology

Fearing the Taiwanese flag would irk China, Red Hat yanked it from its version of Linux -- and started an international geek uproar.

An interesting op-ed piece about how Open Source Software has slipped into the politics between Peoples Republic of China and Taiwan.

Flag of inconvenience

An interview with Scott Adams, author of the Dilbert books.

Dilbert's a weasel and so are you

Anti-globalization activists in Oakland, Calif., are recycling old machines, loading them with free software and shipping them off to Ecuador.

Neat story and a good illustration of how techno anarchists can chip in and help.

Building the underground computer railroad