Need To Know 1998-02-06

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"Capitalism is not merely the practical, but the only *moral* system in history." - THE COMMITTEE FOR THE MORAL DEFENSE OF MICROSOFT, quoting Ayn Rand, http://www.capitalism.org/microsoft Yeah? So what's with the ".org" charity domain, ya freeloaders? >> HARD NEWS << slightly bemused Yet another glorious week for BILL GATES. Taking a break from the trouble in his home country, he visited the Swiss skiing resort of DAVOS (site of the World Economic Summit, and home of the Creator of the Daleks), where he was feted as a leading entrepreneur. His company was voted "Most Respected Company Operating In Europe Irrespective Of Country Of Origin" by the FT and Price Waterhouse. His lawyers managed to get Special Master (and Mac lover) Lawrence Lessig thrown off the DOJ case. Rumours that Netscape were about to bought up were rife. Internet Explorer overtook Navigator in Japan. What, he thought, as he strode breezily into yet another high-powered meeting with Belgian business leaders, could possibly go wrong now? http://www.cinenet.net/users/jaybab/noel.html - L'Entarteur: "If things go wrong, we eat them." http://www.xs4all.nl/~ranx/gates - launch of Entarta '98 : the *real* footage http://www.xsite.ltd.uk/pj/pi.htm - Oops, sorry. Wrong Pi Man. Last week, the US government released a report on domain names that indicated that the plans made by leading Net founding fathers to move the domain name servers from InterNIC to Switzerland might not happen. This pleased groups who thought that these Net elders - principally the old hands at the Internet Society - might have too much power if they could control where the servers were put. Meanwhile, the day before, one of said elders, Jon Postel, went a little, er, "postal" and moved the servers anyway - over to his home machines at the University of Southern California. Postel said later he had wanted to see what problems would arise from such a move, and anyway, he put the servers straight back, so what's the problem? Ira Magaziner, the government figure in charge of the new proposals, was quick to forgive Postel, asking critics to cut him "some slack". Reports that Postel had suggested that he might "accidentally misplace" the Net next time remain unconfirmed. http://www.isi.edu/div7/people/postel.home/pictures.html - Jon, put that Internet down. Jon? JON! How much would *you* pay for one and a half million badly HTMLed home pages? LYCOS (the George Harrison of search engines) bought up TRIPOD (the Ringo Starr of Geocities clones) for $58 million this week - about forty dollars for every slacker ass the GenX community hosts. A quick search on AltaVista reveals "58 million" to be the predicted value of the entire Java market in 1997, the loss made by Compuserve in the last quarter of 96, and the total number of Americans who are now officially overweight. Do you think this is some kind of hint? http://www.lycos.com/ - same search on Lycos shows.. um, a trivia page... a bakery... damn, how do you get decent results out of this thing? http://www.tripod.com/tripod/letters/.index_cache/content.chtml - Say! I can look up my own name in AltaV- uhh... in Lycos! >> ANTI-NEWS << berating the obvious www.nma.co.uk enters beta-testing, 3 weeks *after* official launch date... hard-hitting John Romero interview on MSN UK News reveals Daikatana "launched last year", at the same time as John "Carnack"'s Quake II... ISP churn very high, uncovers in-depth study... gullible US TV networks buy appalling Granada sitcom "Holding the Baby" as well as "Faith In The Future"... THRESH thrashes www.pgl.net ... bits of International Space Station nicked by Russian workers - selling them for scrap... Mark Thomas bleeps 23 "fucks" from his latest show... www.whitehouse.com porn site upsets Clinton: can't imagine Mary W is too happy either... not all free e-mail accounts are used, Internet World discerns... Jamiroquai describe contribution to GODZILLA soundtrack as having "a synthesized bass line, electronic drums, and a bit of guitar"... >> EVENT QUEUE << external interface adaptors MILIA '98, the "International Content Market for Interactive Media", starts in Cannes from Sun 08/02/98 - 11/02/98, and, for two reasons, may not be the usual lame multimedia crowd backslapping each other over art-wank CDROMs that then go on to sell *no copies at all*. For the first time, they're officially recognising the games sector (aka the multimedia that sometimes even makes money), with noted has-beens like Sid Meier, John Romero, Richard Garriott and (yawn) Peter Molyneux. And second, they claim to be running a Scandinavian-style Demo Party, with cash contests for teen-hacker teams and their "Mixed Demos" (includes PC 4K executables), "Musical Scores", "Bitmap Graphiques" and, er, "Navigation Interfaces". Sadly, the compos start and end with a "cocktail party", kind of missing the spirit of every real demo event we've been to: turn up, code non-stop for 48 hours, fall asleep on your souped-up Amiga. http://www.milia.com - reads like a babelfish.altavista job http://www.wanadoo.fr/animation/demo-milia - "all drugs are illegal and software pirating is a crime" The South Bank Centre has a series of speakers lined up this month on the theme of "Miracles and Machines". Coming up are talks by Brian Aldiss, Bruce Sterling, Melanie "Hard, Soft and Wet" McGrath (assisted by the preternaturally young Daniel Pemberton), and John Browning, ex-editor of Wire-ptthhhh. Excuse me. Wired UK Maga-spptth- *TWITCH*-hhakakakkaKAKKAKA-zine. First up, though, as sacrificial as they come, is NTK Editor DANNY O'BRIEN, who'll be acting out at least one half of the MIT Media Lab motto "Demo or Die!" next Wednesday at 7.30pm. Danny writes, exclusively for NTK: "This is a bloody nightmare. I thought I'd have worked out something for this by now. I've had 6 months to think about it, and now it's Friday, and I've still got no clue. If you could ask your readers to possibly click on the link below, they'd make me very happy. Otherwise, it's going to be catastrophic. And I may have to take a few others with me when I go." http://www.ntk.net/sbchorror/ - he also promises to buy you all a pint >> TRACKING << catches for your batchftps Dave "Not Winder" Winer shipped Frontier 5.0, the latest version of his scripting language for Macs and PCs this week. Simultaneously his Web site vanished off the Net. He says that was due to a "storms", and a "flood in the basement". We think it's an act of God. Winer took one of those "organise your life" 32KB 1980s outliners and turned it into a universal, platform-independent programming language. That can't be right, can it? http://www.scripting.com/frontier5/ - a language you click with a mouse to use. Not RIGHT! Adobe Pagemill 3.0 is available for a preview playaround. Pagemill was one of the first Web page editors, back before everyone went back to doing it in Notepad or BBEdit. New features include DHTML support, an "advanced search and replace" (wooo!) and "dozens" more improvements (that'll be bug fixes, then). Despite its origin, this preview is only available for PCs. Nothing for those Photoshop-loving Macs. http://www.adobe.com/prodindex/pagemill/main.html - Et tu, Adobe? >> MEMEPOOL << hasta la altavista TANDY closing 69 UK stores - hey, that asking for postcodes thing must really scare the straights... Leisure Suit Larry to host YOU DON'T KNOW DICK... www.freedomship.com... Mike McShane, Dennis Leary and Miles off of Frasier in new PIXAR movie... Y2K movie optioned... Resident Evil 2 tops Japanese PSX chart; hotly tipped Gran Turismo slips to number 3, beaten by CHOCOBO'S MYSTERIOUS DUNGEON... www.fork.de/games/diana/play.htm ... after the Spanish Lady Di, comes French memorial "Enfin la paix" Excel virus... US Congressman believes Net could make women pregnant: http://rs9.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?r105:H04FE8-30: - does the President know? ... topical user interface widget o' the week: http://catalog.com/hopkins/piemenus/ >> GEEK MEDIA << what's on the other side? TV>> the weekend starts here, chortles ex-Tomorrow's- Worldlie Howard Stableford in the 100-minute mathfest of OPEN SATURDAY (9am, Sat, BBC2), with the Morlock-like Professor Ian Stewart setting puzzles for the unwary... cameoing Bob Monkhouse puts on a few pounds - presumably just to keep up with the other characters - in JONATHAN CREEK (9pm, Sat, BBC1)... classical music series YO-YO MA: INSPIRED BY BACH (6.05pm, Sun, BBC2; also 8.05pm, Sat) sticks the international violinist among 3D-rendered 18th century architecture - intriguing competition for MICHAEL BARRYMORE'S MY KIND OF MUSIC (6.30pm, Sun, ITV)... and we still think the Sega light-gun coin-op is substantially more fun than Spielberg's plodding JURASSIC PARK (7pm, Sun, BBC1)... a "mirror writer" (Mon) and rocket builder (Thu) are the non-sporting prodigies paraded as RAW TALENT (7.55pm, Mon-Thu, C4)... it's no interviewers, no voice- over, no kidding in the (As-Seen-On-TV-style?) accounts of CHILDREN OF DIVORCE (9.30pm, Mon, BBC2)... Claire Grogan spoofs Sinead O'Connor while the priests judge the "Lovely Girls" contest in funny-as-ever repeated FATHER TED (10.55pm, Mon, C4)... building their strength up for their TV return next week, old pals Lee and Herring tuck into Mel and Sue's LIGHT LUNCH (12.30pm, Tue, C4)... schoolyard "internet problems" hit HEARTBREAK HIGH (6.15pm, Tue, BBC2)... the 15 minutes of futuristic penal colony performance art in EXPANDING PICTURES (11.45pm, Tue, BBC2) sound like a very long sentence indeed... oddly, Abel Ferrara's BODY SNATCHERS (10pm, Tue, C4) is but a pale imitation of the '70s remake, despite Gabrielle "Press Gang" Anwar and borrowing the squealing pig noise... for some reason (upcoming censorship?), they're now reshowing REBOOT (4.45pm, Thu, ITV) from the end of series 2... and the best line in the Forrest-Gumpy Trials And Tribble- ations timewarp episode of STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE (6pm, Thu, BBC2) goes to Geordi LaForge: "Those are *Klingons*?" MOVIES>> cinema's first "gay comedy" (unlike, say, The Birdcage), IN AND OUT was last-minute postponed last week - to avoid facing the still-massive Titanic, and not because the idea of a gay Kevin Kline would have confused audiences for the Sigourney Weaver/ Christina Ricci supercooled pot- boiler THE ICE STORM (imdb: drama / marital-crisis / dysfunction / drugs / adultery / based-on-novel / affair- extramarital / sexuality / sexual / storm / 1970s / waterbed / alcohol / electrocution / family / key-party)... Disney remade The Absent Minded Professor as FLUBBER (imdb: comedy / based-on-adaptation), yet weirdly forget to put any decent gags in, or not to cast Robin Williams... another laugh-a-minute Thomas Hardy adaptation in THE WOODLANDERS (imdb: drama / based-on-novel / costume), with Emily Woof - the pregnant girl off the cellphone ad - tragically falling for bloke with a 1970s footballers' perm... and a typically dark Gallic soiree in CLUBBED TO DEATH (LOLA) (imdb: French) - Beatrice Dalle? Beatrice *Dull*, more like... GLOSS>> the semi-Australian "21st Century culture" mag 21C was shaping up to be the legible Mondo 2000, but now it's taken its emulation perhaps a step too far and ceased publication altogether... still, arguably a better fate than actually being taken over by RU Sirius, as seems to have befallen music-and-fashion cyber-nonsense AXCESS... other recent casualties include the second incarnation of the frankly hilarious SPY, a closure ominously presaged by regular readers' letters bemoaning their inability to understand its urbane New York witticisms... on a more upbeat note (just), aspiring Net journo Garret Keogh informs us that Flamingo ("VNU's answer to Stuff magazine") is the code name for new launch COMPUTER ACTIVE, due out any day now and apparently helmed by Jan Howells, formerly of Ziff-Davis's doomed Computer Life... new cover of SPIN features South Park's Eric Cartman, Janet Jackson-style, and hopefully gives info on the filthy animators' upcoming feature film... back over here, .NET has caught up with South Park (p21), but then goes and spoils it all with a profile of its 3 top female Quake players, all from the US (p74), and an insufficiently detailed apology about the "barrage of offensive email" sent to subscribers of the hacked netmag-news mailing list (p90)... and finally, RADIO TIMES continues its very public struggle with font substitution errors - that is, unless they *want* those subheads printed in tightly tracked Courier (p8, p133)... and this week runs a complaint from one of Britain's biggest slash fans - www.hermit.org/Blakes7/ - about "plot holes" in the recent Blake's 7 radio play (p128); presumably not enough "Beat Up And Rape Avon" scenes for their liking... ---- Nicholas Saunders, the entrepreneur behind Alternative London, numerous Neal's Yard companies (including one of the first DTP one-stop-shops in the UK), the author of "E for Ecstasy", "Ecstasy Reconsidered", and most recently the man behind www.ecstasy.com, was killed in a car accident on Tuesday. He was 60. There is a Web site for those wishing to offer their memories of him at www.stain.org/nicholas/ The Ecstasy Website will continue: to continue Nicholas' work, you could buy a Ecstasy testing kit, and pass your results on to the rest of the world. Basic Ecstasy test kits are available from the Green Party Drugs Group on 0171 737 0100. >> SMALL PRINT << Need to Know is a useful and interesting UK digest of things that happened last week or might happen next week. You can read it on Friday afternoon or print it out then take it home if you have nothing better to do. It is compiled by NTK from stuff they get sent. It is registered at the Post Office as "slashdot mutual fanclub". NEED TO KNOW THEY STOLE OUR REVOLUTION. NOW WE'RE STEALING IT BACK. Archive - http://www.ntk.net/ Excuses - http://www.spesh.com/ntk/ Unsubscribe? Mail majordomo@unfortu.net with 'unsubscribe ntknow'. Subscribe? Mail majordomo@unfortu.net with 'subscribe ntknow'. NTK now is helped by VIRGIN NET, VENUS INTERNET and UNFORTU.NET. They worry about us, but we don't worry about them. (K) 1998 Special Projects. Non-business copying is fine, but retain SMALL PRINT. Contact terry@spesh.com for commercial license details. Tips, news and gossip to tips@spesh.com.