"Everything that we have seen over the last 10 days
[concerning communication problems with Pathfinder probe]
is like a twisty little maze with passages all the same."
- Jennifer Harris, NASA mission manager (and current NTK obsession)
> TALK TO PROBE
Nothing happens.
> EXAMINE PROBE
You see nothing special.
> HIT PROBE WITH STICK
>> HARD NEWS <<
same old feuds
NASA's Cassini probe failed to deliver its expected payload
of 72 pounds of plutonium to the people of Florida on
Wednesday. Embarrassed officials admitted that the probe,
which cost $1.2 billion dollars, is now instead en route to
irradiate evolving lifeforms on the moons of Saturn, some
2 billion miles off the predicted course. Cassini, one of
NASA's last "large, slow, and please God not out of
control" projects, has only one more chance to devastate
Earth when it returns for a final swingby of America in
August 1999. It will then be travelling at 43,000 miles an
hour, at a distance of about 500 miles above the planet's
surface - coincidentally about the same distance as Bill
Gate's Teledesic satellites (let's hope he's contracted out
the navigation software). Apart from the lethally toxic
isotope, the satellite also carries a CD-ROM with 600,000
signatures from well-wishers, although NASA look unlikely
to refer to it as "the probe that has your name on it"
until way past Mars.
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/cassini/
- includes unfortunate use of the phrase "What's Hot"
http://www.animatedsoftware.com/cassini/index.htm
- in the interest of balance
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/cassini/model/
- in the interest of fun
Those loony Eurocrats have done it again! In another insane
set of inpenetrable and imperious directives, they've
announced that restricting strong encryption "could well
prevent law-abiding companies and citizens from protecting
themselves against criminal attacks", and that the US's
favoured key escrow system would give criminals "additional
ways to break into a cryptographic system." Also, they're
looking at investigating Bill Gates for monopoly practices.
Once again, big government has shown itself to be out of
step with the fast-moving world of the Net and ... hold on.
Those are both really good moves. What's going on?
http://www.ispo.cec.be/eif/policy/97503.html
- you can't even trust the government to be wrong these days
http://www.yahoo.com/headlines/971016/tech/stories/ms_1.html
- next step: a pan-european ban on Macromedia Director
Record-breaking sales of FORMULA 1 '97 swerved for an
unscheduled pit-stop when Formula One Administration Ltd
(FOA) took cheeky Scouse joyriders Psygnosis to the High
Court and asked to see their license (specifically, the
license Psygnosis thought they had from FOA to use F1
logos, teams, cars, tracks and drivers in the game).
According to COMPUTER TRADE WEEKLY, FOA dispute this,
especially since the rights may not be FOA's to sell - many
teams, drivers and circuits now prefer to do their own
deals (Jacques Villeneuve wasn't in F197 for this very
reason). Currently, F197's main problem may be just one
unauthorised logo; Psygnosis hope to start re-supplying the
game with just this changed in a week or so. But if your
copy invites you to go for a spin round "Bronds Hotch" as
"Damien Hull" or something, now you know why.
http://www.psygnosis.com/
- apparently got their track info "by watching F1 on the telly"
http://cygnus.uwa.edu.au/~snowmanf/pages/slotcircuits.html
- can you really copyright a big wiggly oval shape?
The MIT Media Lab put on a show for the luminaries of the
stick-machines-on-your-head world this week, at the FIRST
INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON WEARABLE COMPUTERS. Beta test
cyborgs got to rub enhanced shoulders with Leonard Nimoy,
author Frederick Pohl and whale pal Sylvia Earle (what were
they planning - an "unplugged" rendition of Star Trek IV?).
The usual demos were shown, including Steve Mann's ongoing
headcam experiment (plus his recent foray into what is best
described as "underwearables"), and presumably BT's rubbish
"office on your wrist" mockup. Best paper by far sounds to
have been "Stochasticks", a "Billiards augmentation system"
that provides you with a heads-up set of strategic shots in
the game. As if no-one would notice.
http://mime1.marc.gatech.edu/wearcon/call/
- please drag your visitor pass around at all times
http://www.computer.org/conferen/proceed/8192abs.htm#E37E2
- I think the guy in the crash helmet might be a hustler
Bunch of ex-students with nothing better to do set up a
shoestring company, call themselves a Net consultancy and
sit around all day reserving plush sounding domains like
"bt.org" and "virgin.org". It's the start of that multi-
million pound Web design industry all over again, isn't it?
Not this year it isn't. BT, MARKS & SPARKS, LADBROKES,
SAINSBURYS, VIRGIN and SECURICOR took the founders of One
In A Million, Richard Conway and Julian Nicholson, not out
for lunch, but out to court, accusing them of trademark
infringement and "passing off". Fair cop? Well, maybe "the-
spice-girls.com" (one of the registrations) *was* pushing
it. But these days, even the gentlest of registration
intention could land you in court. For instance, Compassion
Net, a consultancy who help charities go online, are
currently suing Compassion International, another charity,
over who has the rights to compassion.com. And if *they*
can't get along...
http://www.gina.com/wire/tn/tn970663.htx
- one day those N2K people are gonna come after us big time
http://www.mercurycenter.com/news/compassion101497.htm
- "We are the owners of Compassion.com and we don't like to be
bullied."
http://www.nocompassion.com/ ...no mercy
>> ANTI-NEWS <<
berating the obvious
APPLE posts losses... MICROSOFT buy popular festival;
rename it "E-Christmas" (no, for once, we're not
kidding)... GEOCITIES gets more visitors than MSN...
www.bookshop.co.uk has new sections just for erotic fiction
and comic strips... PSION MD Peter Norman "retires" at
39... PBS snaps up TELETUBBIES... ACORN posts losses... Net
full of "unsavoury losers who warp young minds", discovers
NATIONAL ENQUIRER... Spam cites Neiman-Marcus cookie urban
legend, offers to sell recipe for $5... BT Wireplay
relaunching... MIT MEDIA LAB to diversify into toys - you
mean that billiards stuff had serious applications?...
much-plugged subscription-only Net Soap "Londoners" runs
off free Webspace account, is shockingly dull... Steve Jobs
"may stay on as CEO"... study shows ergonomic keyboards to
be bad for you... same study shows there's a "rise in
tension level whenever a computer user approaches a
keyboard"... EDGE reports development budget for Fin Fin
cyberpet as a "ludicrous" $70bn - maybe they mean yen, as
$70bn is approx the gross national product of Portugal...
>> EVENT QUEUE <<
your personal cronjob
You'll wish that the world *would* end, when Guardian
columnist DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF parks his latest bandwagon to
discuss all things millennial at tonight's inaugural
CYBERIA LIVE chat/channel/live-link up thing. Supposed
cyber-dude author of Media Virus, The Ecstacy Club etc,
Doug will no doubt be wowing the crowd with side-splitting
observations like "the saddest thing is for the so-called
counter-culture and pagan culture to put so much faith in
the notion of an apocalyptic discontinuity". Translation:
Doug says everything's going to be fine - though would you
believe a man who thinks that British people refer to the
security services as "the MI5" (page 132 of The Ecstacy
Club) or that Public Enemy are "gangsta rap" (page 261)?
http://www.cyberialive.com/
- biggest debate so far: millennium - one 'n' or two?
http://www.users.interport.net/~rushkoff/
- "social theorist, journalist and software developer". Riight.
MARK PAULINE, by contrast, will be using his chat/ channel/
live-link up thing to remotely operate SURVIVAL RESEARCH
LABORATORY'S Air Launcher - a high pressure teleoperable
gas launcher "capable of automatically loading and firing
26 beer can sized projectiles weighing 2 lbs each at 500
feet per second." Even better, he's then going to pass the
remote control of this "lethal mechanical device" to ZKM,
The Art and Media Technology Centre, in Karlsruhe, where
native Germans will have the opportunity to redefine chunks
of the Californian landscape for themselves. Full
audio/video feeds are available, although only on CUSeeMe.
The SRL guys promise better compression next time: though
whether that's compression of video, air, or innocent
bystanders they don't specify. The show starts at 19:00 BST
on Saturday 18/10/97, and lasts approx 30 minutes "or until
all rounds have been detonated".
http://www.srl.org/
- when SRL played Austria, they thought Serbia was invading
http://www.srl.org/shows/austin/show/airlauncher1.JPEG
- now THAT, Mr Rushkoff, is a software developer
>> TRACKING <<
obey the bot
After months of rank staleness, the search engines are
trying to get their acts together. Altavista announced a
new 100 million page index, three times larger than before,
with "virtually no duplicate pages". Wired recently
revamped Hotbot, and has re-introduced its topical search
engine Newsbot onto the Web after an ill-fated flirtation
with an ActiveX-only service. You'd have trouble finding
much to get excited about there, though: certainly compared
to AskJeeves, the first "natural language" engine that we
haven't want to punch in its natural gob. It stomps on
Newsbot's "intelligent filtering", which last time we
looked had managed to file a Disney Halloween press release
under News/Entertainment/Net.Sex.
http://www.altavista.digital.com
- about the only thing Digital does these days
http://www.askjeeves.com
- even tries to solve personal problems
http://www.newsbot.com
- more like the butler in "The Missionary"
It's not free local calls - strictly speaking, it's the
exact opposite - but for most Net users with cable, this is
just as good. If you get your telephone line from CABLE &
WIRELESS (that is, if you used to get your line from
Mercury, NYNEX CableComms, Bell Cablemedia or Videotron
before they all got sucked up), you can phone any national
number for any length of time on Saturdays for only 50p. So
from now until the end of December, you'll be paying only
2p an hour for a day's permanent Net connection - if you
can get one. The catch is that your ISP must have at least
one dial-up line that you can call that *isn't* local to
you. Check your ISP for details of faraway POPs.
http://www.cwcom.co.uk/ oddly quiet about this
Is the fast Net connection criminally underused at your
company? Then you might like to waste both your time and
bandwidth on NBC TV's well-hidden but smart PRETENDER
ADVENTURE. I know what you're thinking: It's an "online
mystery adventure" produced by a US TV company about a TV
show we'll never see. It's also image intensive and uses
Java and Javascript and, you know, we think it might not
even *exist* via a Lynx text browser. All reasons why we'd
never let it get anywhere near this section unless it was
very, very good indeed.
http://www.nbc.com/thrillogy/pretender/adventure/
- we're going to do a Great Pretender joke, aren't we?
>> MEMEPOOL <<
hasta la altavista
New biography of Oracle CEO titled "The Difference Between
God And Larry Ellison"... Windows NT 5.0, beta one, is now
up to 27 million lines of code... Star Trek, Las Vegas
style... www.theobvious.com RIP ... what's the editor of
SFX doing on "Style Challenge"?... the "real" Lara Croft
sacked, then instantly re-instated?... monitor Andreessen
replacement Eric Hahn's workload with his winebottlecam,
hosted by www.hahnfamily.com ... baby boom to follows
recent Diana trauma... Poet Laureate Ted Hughes was obliged
to excise anti-tech verses from recent work in praise of
literacy... "Do you know why we stopped the car?"...
Tomorrow's World Magazine to launch... does the CIA troll
soc.culture.*?... LOST IN SPACE'S Jupiter 2 launched
yesterday... BBC to unveil own US cable channel... If
they're not being sold, why are MSN freezing so many
external projects? Huh? Huh?... And did Steve Bowbrick cut
back Webmedia to pay for his wedding?... ICQ: the fastest
chain letter conduit existent... Playstation skipping?
Either pay for the 60UKP fix or alternatively - turn it
upside down... And the difference? God doesn't think He's
Larry Ellison...
>> GEEK MEDIA <<
why don't you turn in and do something less interesting?
TV >> Stephen Fry rounds off 7 days of trying to appear on
*everything*, but can even he can get a plug for Wilde into
the ill-fitting socket of SHOOTING STARS (9.30pm, Fri,
BBC2)?... this week, Andi Peters' PR-puff piece is called
STAR WARS, THE MAGIC AND THE MYSTERY (5.20pm, Sat, ITV) -
apparently to commemorate the special editions' recent
release on video earlier this month... mad IRA bomber Tommy
Lee Jones seems chiefly inspired by kids' board game
Mousetrap in BLOWN AWAY (9pm, Sat, ITV), while ROCKY III
(11.15pm, Sat, ITV) faces his most terrifying opponent ever
- Mr T, from The A-Team... Donna MacPhail no longer shouts
through every episode, but THE SUNDAY SHOW (12.15pm, Sun,
BBC2) is still evil itself; hold out for Lee & Herring's
triumphant shift to this prestigious slot soon... gun porn
docu DECISIVE WEAPONS (8pm, Mon, BBC2) was only
*pretending* to be dead (hoping to catch the enemy off
guard!), and resumes with a repeat about the UK's "novelty"
Harrier jump-jets winning the Falklands... how dull is the
"revised" EQUINOX (9pm, Mon, C4) about the "world's biggest
cybercrime"? Let us count the ways... one of the more
light-hearted X FILES (9.30pm, Wed, BBC1) recounts the
story of Cancer Man, and may even be a spoof of Dark Skies
(itself surely just a spoof of The X Files)... the usual
cliches ("eugenics", "master race", "playing God") pop up
on the HORIZON (9.25pm, Thu, BBC2) about Dolly the sheep.
But will they also question those hideous, supposedly
natural "clones" - identical twins?...
MOVIES >> Eric Bogosian wrote Talk Radio, Richard Linklater
made Slacker, so no surprise that their collaboration on
SUBURBIA (imdb: comedy / drama / racism / generation-x /
suburban) consists of twentynothings sitting round talking
in a grim, but entertaining, way... official site for WILDE
(imdb: biographical / drama / playwright / poetry / rights
/ gay / historical / homosexuality / love / obsession) must
be the first for months without a Shockwave game (not even
a CGI that produces witty epigrams). Still, it does quote
reviews like "an upfront portrayal of the scribe's gayness"
(Variety)... sadly, SHOOTING FISH (imdb: romance / comedy)
isn't a dramatised history of www.suck.com, but a daft
kiddie caper whose neatest con is getting any over-5s to go
see it in the first place...
SLASH >> Fresh from FrisCon, the private convention for fan
writers who enjoy the premise of their two favourite male
TV or movie heroes getting into bed together: The location
was a smart hotel near San Francisco airport, where staff
are more used to professional travellers than Professionals
fans... 90 women checked in plus the cousin of one of the
con committee and his lover - they went down well, or so it
was claimed... At the con party, most turned up wearing
this year's theme of cowboys and indians. Winners were the
boys, one wearing just a fur skirt and the other a
transparent cowboy outfit, his modesty hidden beneath a
very tight pair of cycling shorts - yum, yum... The latest
slash zines were available in the dealers rooms, and the
art show revealed recognisable characters in some very
interesting positions together... The music video comp on
Sunday had those magic moments set to popular songs... Top
new slash show this year was US TV cop series The Sentinel,
although Kirk and Spock, Starsky and Hutch, and Bodie and
Doyle remain long-time favourites... The con raised over
$1600 for a local AIDS charity, with my contribution for
some raffle tickets winning me a set of spurs and handcuffs
- wonder what I'll do with them?
- slashfan@spesh.com
>> KWIZ <<
win UKP UKP UKP
Congrats to Dave Phelan, who tracked down last week's
elusive link, and thus wins a REBOOT fun pack, a copy of
C&C-in-space clone CONQUEST EARTH for the PC, the new
Sleeper album (which isn't nearly as bad as everyone's
making out), and an elusive ticket to the prestigious .NOT
awards. Calm down, Dave. You can collect them after class.
Here's this week's link:
Vector then digit
Combine like a telco
with aussie, tight.
(the format is http://www.xxxxxxx.net/now.fhtml )
( and it's a haiku, you idiot )
First correct entry randomly clicked open on Monday AM
gets next week's prize. And remember, the grand prize for
best site to carry a now.html is still anybody's game.
Although we have to say, this week's URL is a contender.
Details for the confused on http://www.ntk.net/compo/
Still time to join in the morally ambiguous fun!
>> CORRIGENDA <<
for when we're extra "special"
The meme titled "the best error message put out by IE4.0"
unexpectedly quit last week, so here it is again: "We need
your fax number so that we can respect your wish not to
receive unwanted faxes". And, no, we didn't hear anything
back from the Website we gave for games-coder conference
Develop '97, so here's the phone number for registrations:
0181 742 2828. But be as swift and smooth as the scrolling
in Defender, for it starts tomorrow (18/10/97).
>> SMALL PRINT <<
Need to Know Now 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 "Tourbus roadkill".
NEED TO KNOW
THEY STOLE OUR REVOLUTION. NOW WE'RE STEALING IT BACK.
Archive - http://www.ntk.net/
Excuses - http://www.spesh.com/ntk/
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