Dearly Departed: Computer companies that didn't deserve to die

Well, arguably didn't deserve to die. I remember (and worked with) a lot of these technologies, it's really a shame how many were bought out just to kill them to prevent a competitor from getting them.

I particularly miss Borland. Their Turbo series of compilers for $50 a pop was an unbeatable deal and literally an industry standard. They also had a killer spreadsheet called Quattro and a very slick word processor that was the first, AFAIK, to offer real-time spell check.

http://www.cio.com/article/print/125263

See statistics and graphs as data is stolen from companies!

TJ Maxx still is Top of the Pops with 45.7 MILLION records stolen.

http://etiolated.org/

Great Tom Lehrer quote!

He's one of my fav musical/political comedians, and he hasn't record anything in decades.

"I don't want to satirize George Bush and his puppeteers, I want to vaporise them."

Using Doom to monitor your Unix processes

This is cool. The code to Doom was released as open source, these people modified it so that you can partially manage a Unix system with it! Shoot a monster (process) to reduce the priority that it was executing at, kill it to kill the process. Lower level admins get small guns with limited ammo, senior admins get big guns.

Very interesting concept. It is also somewhat dated, the original was written back in 2000. There's a link in the article for a lava lamp-like process monitor, and I'm going to see if I can make it work on my Mac! They say it runs on a Mac, so we'll see if I'm smart enough to make it work (probably not).

http://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/chi/chi.html

'True Names' by Vernor Vinge, in HTML format

The story was written by Vinge back in '81 and is considered seminal in concepts of cyberspace.

The story of the story: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Names

The story: http://home.comcast.net/~kngjon/truename/truename.html

Warren Ellis interviews William Gibson

Authors interviewing authors are frequently good things. Sadly, it's only three questions. One of these days I'll read more Gibson.

http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/15-08/pl_print

Writing plots for first-person shooters

Back lots of years ago, you had Doom. Zero story. Move from room to room and shoot things. Then came Quake. Sort of a story, nothing to brag about. Quake begat Half-Life. Quite a story! And it apparently continues into subsequent releases. The Half-Life spin-offs, Code Blue and whatever the Marine one was, didn't have much in the way of story as they presupposed that you were familiar with it from HL.

Here, an extensive interview with a script writer for a FPS game company! The Slashdot thread has some interesting comments, including something that I probably will steal if I ever run a SF RPG campaign.

http://www.bit-tech.net/gaming/2007/07/23/writing_for_the_lcd__fps_games/1

http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/24/1319256

A list of all of the Executive Orders put in place by Presidents

Friends sent this to me (thanks, Rich & Karyn!), it's something that I've wanted to see for a long time.

http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/eo/index.html

Earthquake sets Japan back to 2147

Another great article from The Onion, I just wish I knew most of the anime and gaming references, I've been gone from anime for too long.

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/64145