http://www.hotwired.com/Piazza/Rants/index.html (The Risc Disc Volume 2, 10/1995)
The right form for the medium?
Ron Hogan (grifter) on Fri, 13 Jan 95 23:52 PSTThanks for clarifying my question about the deadline.
In answer to your comment about whether or not this might be the "right form" for the medium -- I think it's a very workable form. I think the idea of keeping the chapters short but full of meaning is important; it all comes back to what Rudy Rucker was saying so long ago...
How fast are you? How dense?Speed and density are two of the most important elements. One of the mistakes I think other online magazines, particularly VIBE, are making is to try to reproduce the traditional page structure in their electronic versions. Unh Unh.But neither of those things will do any good if the work isn't coherent and believable -- so far, Quiet Americans is believable -- and though I don't know how it all ties together, I'm interested in finding out, because I can sense an underlying... not exactly theme, not exactly consciousness...but I have a sense that it will all come together.
In this respect, it's much better than Rim, the SF novel that HotWired will be showcasing in the Twain section next week; I read the novel a couple months ago, when it first came out, and it's too much of a mishmash...but I'll save most of my comments on Rim for that section of Rants...
In praise of deadlines
Robert Rossney (rbr) on Thu, 12 Jan 95 23:30 PSTDeadlines are great. If it weren't for deadlines nothing would ever get done. We hate them deeply.
Before we went live, we had weeks 1-3 written, plus good drafts of weeks 4 and 7 and an outline of the rest of the first 12 weeks. Enough to give us the confidence that we could actually carry it off. What fools.
It's probably possible to serialize an existing novel on the Web successfully, but most novels haven't adopted the kind of constraints that we have: every chapter in the 1300-1500 word range, a nice break in the middle of the chapter, a cliffhanger at the end of each if possible, a readily-illustratable household object in each chapter, etc.
Whether or not this is the right form for the medium (or even a right form) is anybody's guess.
Eric Richards (ejr) on Thu, 12 Jan 95 12:30 PSTUSA-DOM (apnews.com) -- Across the United States, mouse-potatos emphatically click on hypertext links. Links that are now dead. The fad known as the world wide web ( WWW) has come to its knees due to a subpoena carrying worm flooding its own brand of enforcement upon the net.
The worm, written by a cracker known as Phiber Optik, was unleashed from cyber.sell.com, the home of lawyer duo Canter and Seigel. "We were retained by UNISYS in order to enforce the new GIF picture encoding license," said Laurence Canter. "Mr. Optik was employed by us, on a work release, to find those web sites employing GIF pictures not created by licensed GIF programs." Mr. Canter pauses. "And to take them down," he adds, with a certain gleam in his eyes.
The worm visits web sites, retrieving all GIF graphics and looking for comments inserted into the graphic by licensed GIF development applications. Sites without properly commented GIFs become flooded by requests from the worm, which rotates its domain identification such that the web site operators cannot easily filter the worm's requests out The targeted web site becomes unusable.
Meanwhile, copies of the worm continue on their travel.
"This comment," reports Canter, "is a heavily encoded crypto-key that can only be generated from licensed, proprietary code."
"Bullshit," retorts John Lee, a cracker recently profiled in Wired magazine. "All their encoding is a checksum modulo 255. I can write a three line perl script to add the comment to any GIF file..." And he does, posting it to several USENET news groups.
Readers may never see the fix, however. Due to a bug in the worm (shades of the Robert T. Morris internet worm), the worm does not restrict itself to the machines within the confines of the United States (the only country in which the UNISYS patent can be enforced). Furthermore, worms do not recognize a site that is already being hammered by a worm already and the new worm begins its terroristic attack against the site as well.
"The web portion of the internet ," says Vint Cerf, "is dead. All sites have to disconnect, power down, and wait for the worm code to be flushed. Those damn green card lawyers have done it again and should be arrested immediately."
Don't expect that to happen anytime soon. According to court records, Canter and Siegel procured all proper documents to unleash their worm. U.S. district attorney Dick Gammel confirmed this and expects no state or federal action against the legal firm.
"There's a new marshal in town," says a smiling Canter, "and anarchists will no longer be tolerated." Canter pulls back the lapel of his overcoat, revealing a silver badge encrusted with word 'Cyberspace.'
FLUX wins Peter Lewis Prize
Jerry Whelan (jerryw) on Wed, 11 Jan 95 09:28 PSTTalk about sad, first Brainard does the oh-so-typical move that the mainstream media has about the Moose and then follows it up with a flame about some other reporter's internet stupidity.
"Get a clue" is right, I think you've won this week's, if not this month's Peter Lewis Prize for Bad Internet Reporting. The newsgroup news.admin.misc has had the scoop on the Moose's motives in canceling spam for quite some time now.
No wonder people make fun of HotWired.
A voice from the dirt road
Debora Weber-Wulff (wisewoman) on Tue, 10 Jan 95 06:52 PST
So I understand the Wired-Ones don't like the Information- Superhighway metaphor, but it so fits my circumstances. Over here in Germany, telecommunications are extremely expensive. We have 1 (ONE) ISDN-Line (that's 64 KILObit 'case y'all are interested) for all our netgames. And then there's the time needed to transport all the picture stuff across the Atlantic... so we are situated in the backwoods up an information dirt road and we only have roller skates and the monsoon season is in progress... PLEASE put texts under the fancy buttons! I had to fetch 5 of the icons before I could add this post. And even then I haven't the foggiest notion what two of the icons mean! And I must second the motion that graphics are not per se informative. Some are nice patterns but pretty content-free.
Eric Stephan (drop) on Thu, 5 Jan 95 09:55 PST
Big place.
There should be a law in 95
Jerry Bono (jbono) on Mon, 26 Dec 94 07:57 PST
Starting in 1995 people giving away t-shirts can legally be shot for instigating such a thing. Bono
